New Twist on JFK Book: Downplay Conspiracy
By Michael Coffey and Dermot McEvoy -- Publishers Weekly, 5/2/2007 2:26:00 PM
This morning Salon.com will run an excerpt from Salon founder David Talbot’s forthcoming book about Jack and Bobby Kennedy. What’s notable is that the book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, is being pitched by both the author and the publisher, Free Press, as the story of "two brothers determined to change the way Washington worked," while the book itself assumes that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone, and that a Mafia/CIA conspiracy brought about JFK’s death.
Perhaps the idea of a conspiracy is not news anymore; or perhaps it's bad news, publishing-wise.
"This is not a conspiracy book," Talbot insisted during a phone interview. "What this is is the great love affair between these two men and the men who served them very devotedly." Think Band of Brothers meets Team of Rivals. No doubt, Free Press, which has announced an 80,000-copy first printing and has loaded up on publicity (Charlie Rose, Tavis Smiley, 10-city tour), is thinking bestseller, along the lines of the aforementioned bestsellers by Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. The Free Press is not likely to be interested in following the path of 2005’s Carroll & Graf entry, The Ultimate Sacrifice, by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, which meticulously laid out the case for the CIA/Mafia hit on Kennedy, but which met with the conspiracy-wearied public and press, and left much of the publisher’s 60,000 first printing unsold.
Talbot has long been sympathetic to the conspiracy angle on the assassination; he contributed a long review, on Salon, of the Waldron/Hartmann effort, and has published a list of the "five best books" on the event, all of which denounce the findings of the Warren Commission. Despite the doomed siblings angle for his new book, Talbot has chosen to excerpt in Salon a 3200-word piece that focuses exclusively on Bobby’s obsession with uncovering the real story behind the November day in Dallas. Talbot told PW that among the things that are new in his book are revelations about an audiotape given by the late E. Howard Hunt (who died in January) to his son, in which he admitted to being in a CIA meeting that discussed a plan to kill the president. "I don’t really come out myself and say, ‘I think there was a conspiracy.’ "
Free Press senior editor Martin Beiser bought the book from agent Sloan Harris, based on Talbot’s "excellent proposal to do a narrative political history of a crucial part of the Cold War." Beiser, too, insists that "the point of the book is not conspiracy," but rather a dramatic view, "through Bobby Kennedy’s eyes," of a government "divided against itself."
The book has advanced "very well," says Beiser, and he thinks it will resonate strongly in today’s sensitive political climate. "There is a lot of talk today about how the government is not responsive; but these times are much less dangerous than the time depicted in the book, when foreign policy was out of control, the CIA was not a civilian agency and the military was contemptuous of the president."
