FANTASTIC review of "The Kennedy Detail" (but what does Blaine care? He's getting very rich peddling this crap)

2.0 out of 5 stars Historically inadequate, November 22, 2010
By Michael W. Perry "Michael W. Perry, author of... (Author of Untangling Tolkien, Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME) This review is from: The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence (Hardcover)
As you may have noticed, the reviews of this book are all over the place. Some liked it, others did not. I'm in the latter category.

This problem isn't, as some have claimed, that this book was written in the third person by a first-person source, Gerald Blaine. That's explained in the Introduction. It's that the book bears little evidence of having been written by someone with Blaine's background in security and technology. It gushes, it emotes, and it burdens readers with overabundance of trivial detail like travel writers. And, judging by her website, that is precisely what the "with author," Lisa McCubbin typically does for a living. It isn't hard to conclude that she was not the person who should have written this book.

That's unfortunate, because it could have been an important resource for historians for generations to come. Numerous interviews were conducted with the agents involved, but what we learn from them is the clothes they wore, the food they ate, and their feelings at particular moments. That's the stuff of travelogues but not of serious history.

Even worse, at critical points in the narrative the author seems unaware of the historical significance of what is taking place. One example is the clash that takes place between the local medical examiner and Secret Service agents over what is to be done with the President's body. Her focus isn't on what matters, the serious blunders that were being made by removing the President's body and limousine from the scene of the crime, it's on what Jacqueline Kennedy may have been feeling at that particular moment. McCubbin, whose adoration of the Kennedy's leaves her less than objective at times, seems unaware that in every other crime the victim's family simply have to cope with what criminal investigations require. Many of the conspiracies theories, which McCubbin clumsily dismisses near the end of the book, were born out of those blunders.

Finally, like others, I feel this book reads all too much like something that might have been written for Woman's Day magazine circa 1965. This book, in which "JFK's Secret Service Agents Break their Silience" contains almost nothing that those agents needed to be silent about. No one cares what they had for breakfast on that fateful day, and the details of the motorcade in which they participated have been known for decades. Others have described how the morale of JFK's Secret Service agents were destroyed by his pathological womanizing, which required unknown women to be smuggled into the White House or his hotel room at strange hours. But you will find not a word about that here. In this bit of romantic fiction, JFK was an ideal father in a storybook marriage. Lisa McCubbin didn't have to dwell on that sordid side of the Kennedy Presidency. But she should have at least shown us she was aware of it and discussed those aspects of it that were relevant to his Secret Service protection.

In short, this book fails to deliver on its promises.

--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II