by Paris Flam­monde
2007, Paris Flam­monde
Four Vol­umes
1820 pages

From Press Release
The Assas­si­na­tion of Amer­ica, is not an “assas­si­na­tion book,” but a mas­sive and com­pre­hen­sive his­tory of the period pre­ced­ing, sur­round­ing, and fol­low­ing the mur­der of the 35th Pres­i­dent of the United States, John F. Kennedy. More, is it not a “book” but, rather, a set of three books: The Deaths in Dal­las, The Masques of New Orleans, and Bar­ren Har­vest. The fourth, the indices con­sist­ing of the Drama­tis Per­sonae, the Sub­ject Index, and the Graph­ics Index, to be issued before the end of the year. Addi­tion­ally, the work of over fif­teen hun­dred pages includes more than four hun­dred frames of pho­tographs and illus­tra­tions and thirty appen­dices the first two of which are more than sixty por­traits of the most noted “crit­ics” and about thirty biogra­phies of them.

While the author’s ini­tial inter­est in the sub­ject began more than four decades ago when, as he worked on an ear­lier book in his Green­wich Vil­lage stu­dio he heard the announce­ment of the Texas tragedy come over the radio of a taxi parked just out­side his open case­ment win­dow, it was much inten­si­fied when he was asked to do a book on the event. This com­mit­ment led to vis­its to New Orleans, doing some inves­tiga­tive work for the leg­endary Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­ri­son, inter­view­ing per­sons involved in the inquiry and din­ing at Antoines and Brennan’s with the six foot six Big Easy personality.

The author’s par­tic­u­lar con­tri­bu­tion to the Gar­ri­son inquiries, the only offi­cial inves­ti­ga­tion of the mur­der ever con­ducted, was mainly in the areas of the involve­ment of cer­tain related indi­vid­u­als to the Old Catholic Church, and sim­i­lar or par­al­lel insti­tu­tions, pos­si­ble ele­ments in Canada, and the inter­na­tional espi­onage oper­a­tion of the Cen­tro Mon­di­ale Com­mer­ciale and Per­min­dex in Switzer­land, Italy, and else­where. These efforts were con­ducted as he was writ­ing The Kennedy Con­spir­acy, the first seri­ous book on Jim Gar­ri­son, which was brought out by Mered­ith Press in 1969.

After a con­tin­u­ing inter­est in the sub­ject of a decade or so, Flam­monde turned to other fields, While con­tin­u­ing to keep abreast of the devel­op­ments of the case and the activ­i­ties of the numer­ous crit­ics from the ini­tial group, includ­ing Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher, Josiah Thomp­son, Edward J. Epstein, Harold Weis­berg, Bernard J. Fen­ster­wald, Jr., William Turner, Joachim Joesten, Richard Sprague, Eric Nor­den, and a dozen oth­ers, he main­tain con­tact with the sec­ond, third, fourth, and fifth gen­er­a­tion of per­sons devoted to a study of the count­less aspects of the assassination.

Then, in 2003, a friend sug­gested that he up-date the work as so much had been revealed over the many years since The Kennedy Con­spir­acy appeared, even within the frame­work of Jim Garrison’s inves­ti­ga­tion and the trial of his accused, Clay Shaw, (Flammonde’s pub­lisher had insisted that, for com­mer­cial rea­sons, he com­plete the book in time for it to issued before that legal facet came to a con­clu­sion.) The author agreed to elab­o­rate it to the extent of adding a new sixty or sev­enty pages, and elim­i­nat­ing the more obvi­ous anachronisms.

How­ever, the project, like Topsy, “jes’ growed,” and over the ensu­ing years was aban­doned as an “assas­si­na­tion book,” and became a his­tory of the event, the period, the count­less pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tions and inter­minable the­o­ries and eval­u­a­tions thereof, depic­tions of all the cast of many hun­dreds of indi­vid­u­als, and a review of all of the ele­ments sur­round­ing the slay­ing and every­thing per­ti­nent to it.

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT. Avail­able for direct sale from Paris Flam­monde.