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

"Secrets of the Secret Service" (12/09) Discovery Channel-VINDICATION

This official Secret Service documentary, produced by the very same
network that is coming out with "The Kennedy Detail", endorses my view
on the Love Field recall agent video...gee, along with former JFK
agent Larry Newman, The History Channel, THE RYBKA FAMILY, millions of
You Tube viewers, the ARRB, and many authors and researchers, guess
they were "fooled", as well...not! Whether Lawton or Rybka, both
agents were "ostensibly" assigned to Love Field. As a fellow
researcher said, "Vince, Blaine seizing on the wrong agent identity is
like saying 'it wasn't Heinrich Hoffmeister of the SS that killed those
prisoners, it was Heinrich Hoffman of the SS: same diff!!!!"

Vince Palamara

THESE Kennedy Detail agents WEREN'T interviewed for Gerald Blaine's book -I WONDER WHY?

THESE Kennedy Detail agents WEREN'T interviewed for Gerald Blaine's book -I WONDER WHY?

Blaine's nonsense will be overshadowed by THIS major 50th anniversary movie!

Blaine's nonsense will be overshadowed by THIS major 50th anniversary movie!

http://www.myfoxla.com/dpps/entertainment/leonardo-dicaprio-to-make-movie-about-jfk-assassination-dpgoh-20101122-fc_10736961
Leonardo DiCaprio to Make Movie About JFK Assassination
Updated: Monday, 22 Nov 2010, 7:45 AM PST
Published : Monday, 22 Nov 2010, 7:45 AM PST
(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - Leonardo DiCaprio will star in and produce "Legacy of Secrecy," a new movie based on the John F. Kennedy assassination, according to Variety .
The website reported that DiCaprio and his father George, who brought the book "Legacy of Secrecy" to his attention, will produce the movie adaptation of the book through his Warner Bros.-based Appian Way.
He will play FBI informant Jack Van Laningham, who allegedly was an FBI informant who infiltrated Mafia godfather Carlos Marcello's inner circle. The book claims that Marcello confessed to Van Laningham that he ordered Kennedy's assassination.
Kennedy was shot in 1963 while riding in a motorcade through Dallas with his wife Jackie. The Toronto Sun said the movie may be released in 2013 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the assassination.
Variety said the book includes information from declassified FBI files from the National Archives. It also includes information from FBI and Secret Service files that show more than a dozen of the crime boss's associates and family members were questioned or arrested by authorities in connection with the murder.
Variety said this will be the first time that Marcello was the subject of a feature film. While he was not included in the 1964 Warren Report, a 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations said he and mobster Santo Trafficante "had the motive, means and opportunity" to commit the act.
The book was written by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann. Waldron will retain documentary film and TV rights to the book, which also connects the Mafia with Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and Watergate.
DiCaprio, who last starred in "Inception," is preparing to play the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in a biography directed by Clint Eastwood, Movies Online reported.
see also
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/movies/news/article_1600273.php/DiCaprio-engaged-in-JFK-Secrecy
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118027763?refCatId=13
http://www.moviesonline.ca/2010/11/dicaprio-to-investigate-jfk-assassination/

EXCELLENT review of "The Kennedy Detail": no one is buying it, Blaine...but they're sure BUYING ($$) it!

1 star out of 5 Disappointed, November 22, 2010
By FIJake - See all my reviewsThis review is from: The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence (Hardcover)
I was very disappointed in this book. I bought the book based on the tag line "agents break their silence". The author writes in a creepy third-person vernacular. I thought the author's condescending and dismissive tone toward the various alternate conspiracy theories (including the House Subcomittee on Assasinations which found a conspiracy was 'probable') was very self-serving. The author appears to not grasp that the 'Oswald as lone gunman' and its attendant 'magic bullet' and inability for anyone to duplicate Oswald's alledged markmanship is also just a 'theory'. Of course, any viable conspiracy account would compound the degree of failure of the Secret Service to not identify the threat.

I was particularly disappointed with the lack of detail regarding witness testimony in Dealey Plaza, detail surrounding the autopsy, the custody chain and evidence collected from the limosine and follow car after they left Parkland Hospital.

Maybe most troubling for me was the authors admission that agents originally lied about the President demanding that they not ride on the limo which may hae protected him from the line of fire. The author's apparent 'justification' for the lying was that the agents didn't want any blame put on Kennedy himself for their failure to protect him. But if the SS agents lied about that, IMO, it begs the question about what else they may have lied about. The author repeats testimony that Kennedy said, "get those charlatan ivy leaguers off the car"... If true, that is a puzzling statement. Could his use of the term 'charlatan' mean that he questioned their credentials???

The bottom line for me is that I wanted much more detail and just don't feel I got it.

"The Kennedy Detail" 'documentary' rescheduled for 12/2/10

Oh, boy...

Vince Palamara mentioned in major Vancouver Sun review of The Kennedy Detail!

http://www.vancouversun.com/Kennedy+keepers+reveal/3858819/story.html

Kennedy's keepers reveal all

Retired U.S. Secret Service agents tell tales of protecting JFK's family

By Melanie Jackson, Special to the Sun November 20, 2010

The Kenedy Detail

By Gerald Blaine with Lisa McCubbin

Simon and Schuster, 448 pages, $32

The U.S. Secret Service agents saw right away that their new president was going to be trouble. His predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had acknowledged crowds with a mere nod. John F. Kennedy waded right into them.

After the 1960 U.S. election, an agent urged Kennedy to come away from an impromptu crush of well-wishers.

"Either Kennedy didn't hear him over the noise of the crowd or he was choosing to ignore his strong suggestion . . . Kennedy seemed as if he truly wanted to meet the people and greet each one of them directly."

As retired agent Gerald Blaine recounts in The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence, the charismatic, outgoing president was particularly eager to be accessible in 1963, with a close election looming the next year. "If I don't mingle with people, I couldn't get elected dogcatcher," he told the U.S. Secret Service a week before the fatal trip to Dallas. During motorcades, JFK became impatient with agents' practice of standing on the running boards and on specially attached steps at the back of his limo. In a much-quoted directive, he ordered the "Ivy League charlatans" to drop back to the car behind.

Clint Hill was the agent of Zapruder-video fame who jumped on the presidential limo after JFK was shot on Nov. 22, 1963. Jacqueline Kennedy was crawling over the trunk, dazedly trying to retrieve part of her husband's skull. Hill pushed Jackie back into the seat and shielded both her and the dying president -- admittedly after the fact, and this is what haunts him. "If I had reacted just a little bit quicker," he agonized in a 1975 interview with 60 Minutes.

But, as anyone reading The Kennedy Detail can't help thinking, there was little Hill or anyone else could have done, given JFK's instructions. Blaine relates how Hill, assigned to protect Jackie, felt uneasy being stuck in the car behind:

"He moved his head constantly: his eyes scanning along the left side of the road, up ahead, and then back again, the pink hat always within his gaze. She was no more than five yards ahead of him, but she might as well have been on the other side of Dallas. I shouldn't be this far away. I should be on the back of that limousine."

The conspiracy theorists, or CTs as they refer to themselves online, have seized on the revelation about JFK's keep-your-distance directive. Blaine is lying, they claim. The agents were in on the assassination! It's all part of the decades-long coverup by: the Central Intelligence Agency; Lyndon Johnson, JFK's vice-president who succeeded him; or any number of other evil plotters. If you're of a masochistic bent, Google the name "Vince Palamara" and be blog-hectored on the "deceit" contained in The Kennedy Detail.

If you're interested in John F. Kennedy and his family, though, read Blaine's engagingly written book for the agents' memories. Jackie, for example, loved smoking, but felt it inappropriate for the public to see her puffing away. So, when she and Hill were driving somewhere, she would hand him the cigarette as soon as they reached their destination. And she was not amused the day loud crunching sounds reached her ears: Hill had run over a turtle.

Another time, an agent let young Caroline and her buddies wander away from a park playground. The kids thought it'd be fun to overturn a rock -- only to discover a diamondback rattlesnake coiling for a strike. The agent briskly shot it.

The children were thrilled, but the agent was convinced Jackie would have him fired. Enter Caroline's nanny. Maud Shaw quietly convinced Caroline it would be better not to upset her parents by telling them. The little girl stayed mum -- one can only wish the CTs would do the same.

Melanie Jackson keeps her own evil plotters fictional. Her latest novel, for young adults, is Fast Slide, published by Orca.