A charismatic US president has an intimate liaison with a legendary screen icon; she dies in rather mysterious circumstances soon afterward. A year later he is gruesomely assassinated in public. two days later his alleged assassin is also publicly shot on live television in the basement of the local police station.
Add to the mix mafia dons, secret service machinations, a few shady politicians and you have a tale of sex, violence, money, power, political corruption – all the elements of a good crime thriller or block buster movie. But this recent publication is not fiction but the latest book about two of the most famous people of the last century: President John F. Kennedy (JFK) and screen goddess Marilyn Monroe. Given their immense popularity and their untimely deaths, it is not surprising that they continue to fascinate the general public.
In his latest book, Mark Shaw does not just rehash the facts and rumours of earlier works. He explores a significant link between these two luminaries of the twentieth century: Dorothy Kilgallen a dogged journalist who is largely forgotten and virtually unknown outside of her profession. She is the new element in this melange of sex, crime and shady politics.
Why this forgotten journalist is central to the book emerges through the author’s extensive investigations over many years. Basically, he reveals how she uncovered all manner of evidence contradicting the offical report on the president’s assassination, the Warren Report. Suspiciously, she died before she could reveal her findings. Unsurprisingly, (like the deaths of JFK and Marilyn) it was not the result of natural causes.
Shaw has pieced together a credible theory explaining the motives and means in the deaths of these three protagonists. There has been much theory and speculation over the decades, some of it not backed up by credible evidence. However Shaw cites many documents to support his arguments. Some of these documents have only recently been released through freedom of information regulations. Because of the size of the book these can be difficult to read but they are nevertheless still legible. And there are many photos which show connections between the principle players.
Shaw admits he is not a polished author revealing he was a college drop out and barely scrapped through his degrees. The book is not a highly polished publication: it has no index, a few typos and no list of chapters at the start of the text. However the content more than makes up for these minor flaws of the format.
Every researcher into JFK’s murder faces one major obstacle: the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald never stood trial. Therefore no motive or possible collaborators or even the actual guilt of the accused could ever be definitively established. The fact that he was himself assassinated on live television is a bizarre and still largely inexplicable event in this saga. But even here Shaw digs up a few scraps of relevant information.
It is not often that a non-fiction book reads like a murder mystery with all the elements of (if not all the answers) of a ‘whodunit’. Due to the passage of so many decades and all the cover-ups, distortions and deceptions we may never know the whole story as to the who, why and how of these untimely deaths. Furthermore, not every speculation Shaw advances can be fully supported by conclusive evidence. However, each accurately researched work adds new facts which help fill in some of the gaps. And this latest book goes a fair way in doing so.