Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
by David Talbot
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Book Summary Information
Author: David TalbotEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2007-05-08
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Free Press
Book Reviews of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
Book Review: Problems with the CIA, FBI, and Military . . . and a Call for an Unlimited Inquiry into the JFK Assassination
Summary: 4 Stars
If you think you know all there is to know about the Kennedy presidency, you will learn more than you expect from reading the new material in Brothers. If you don't think you know enough yet to satisfy you, Brothers is a must read.
The title of the book is a little misleading. Brothers is really focused on RFK and a few of his most loyal lieutenants. The lieutenants were so close to the Kennedys that they felt like and were treated like brothers.
As time passes, historical events become clearer. But if you wait too long to render judgment, you lose the testimony of those who participated in the events. Brothers is unusual in that sense: It adds the views from 150 new interviews, but unavoidably loses some perspective as many witnesses are no longer available and many important documents remain classified.
Here are some of the new perspectives Brothers brought to my attention:
1. JFK wasn't really in control of the CIA and military while he was president. The CIA was off running anti-Castro operations in violation of direct presidential orders. The Bay of Pigs invasion was planned by the CIA from the beginning as a ploy to trigger an American military invasion of Cuba which the Joint Chiefs supported.
2. Some in the Pentagon were pushing for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union in 1961.
3. JFK and RFK had so little confidence in the Secret Service that they were planning to put presidential protection under the attorney general's office.
4. The Cuban missile crisis was more dangerous than I believed. The Soviets had many more troops than the CIA believed and those troops were equipped with tactical nuclear weapons and permission to use them against an American invasion of Cuba.
5. JFK planned to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 election.
6. RFK began his own private investigation of JFK's assassination and concluded that he needed to dismantle the CIA if elected in 1968.
7. Those who were in the best position to judge in Dallas thought that there was more than one gunman.
8. Some of those with RFK in Los Angeles thought that there was more than one gunman there.
9. A group of CIA dirty tricksters were present in both Dallas and Los Angeles when the assassinations occurred. You are left to draw the inference that the CIA assassinated JFK and RFK, but there's no direct evidence to sustain the point.
I found that the book tended to try to cover too much ground. As a result, any particular set of evidence was covered quite quickly. In light of the many books that have been written on these subjects, it would have been useful to address those books and try to straighten out incorrect viewpoints from at least the most influential of those books. For example, the cases for and against multiple gunmen in Dallas and Los Angeles receive relatively little attention, even though much has been written on this subject.
Ultimately, the book raises a fundamental point: We have experienced some national tragedies beginning in 1963 which include these assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Isn't it time that we made it a priority to understand what happened and what went wrong, so we can avoid repeating the mistakes? If we let sleeping dogs lie, they may awake and bite us again.
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