I should point out that I included Russo's book not because I agree with him that Oswald acted alone. I don't believe that, although it might be possible (despite the ballistic and autopsy evidence).
(If I were President, on Day One, I'd order JFK's body to be dug up, and given a totally modern autopsy.)
I included Russo's book because it is the handiest guide to the Kennedy brothers' attempts to have the leader of a de-facto sovereign nation murdered. They acted out of spite, because they had been stupid enough to buy into the cockamamie scheme (Bay of Pigs) that the CIA had cooked up for Eisenhower. And which Eisenhower (apparently) had Slow-Walked. Very slow.
Bottom line: 4,000 barely-trained, angry amateurs are not going to prevail against a professional military of 40,000. Especially when the pros are being backed up by Soviet jets, and perhaps Soviet pilots.
A former contract employee of the CIA told me that he had been told that the events of Dealey Plaza on 11/22/63 were a "False Flag Operation" intended to incriminate Castro in a failed attempt to kill JFK, which was expected to make the populace rise up and demand an all-out invasion of "Cuber" [phonetic spelling, in memoriam JFK].
But my source said that the FFO was "hijacked."
And guess what? In 1962 (although we did not learn about it until 1998 to 2001) the Joint Chiefs of Staff planned a series of... False Flag Operations, falsely to blame Cuber.
Looking forward to all the discussion around these books!
I would add To Loose a Battle by Alistair Horne, really I would add the trilogy but the TLB is the one the Israeli's said gave some inspiration to their 1973 counteroffensive.
Mr. Horne has fallen out of favor in the last 25 years, he is a journalist rather than an academic by trade. His writing style, but more importantly is analysis and commentary on society is not so much cross-disciplinary, and more anti-disciplinary. He is clearly a very intelligent but also self educated (in addition to his formal education) man, the sort of person who's broad experience terrifies academics. He likes a good story so they nit-pick him for it. A good example would be his narrative of the French Army Mutinies of 1917. He goes with some of the more salacious tales of it. France, or at least Gaullist France, has been suppressing that narrative with great success until recently. I think we'll see a rehabilitation of Alistair Horne's reputation in the next 20 years.
As for TLB itself, I don't recommend it as ones first introduction to the Battle of France, but it is a great way to fill in a lot of the blanks if you read more technical accounts of it, and if you come into it with an understanding of the composition and equipment of the various forces before hand the narrative of events flows better.
I'll comment a little on Victor Davis Hansen, as one of his books is mentioned in your list. I wish he stopped writing after A War Like No Other in 2005, although his 2011 novel has some charms and a fascinating writing style. I did not read The Second World Wars, I will now have to reconsider that choice based on your recommendation. My feelings on him is that he looses the perspective that makes his works on Ancient Greece so good as he gets closer to modernity. His columns also got very repetitive and he absolutely was guilty of impaling the facts of the day on his thesis in them.
I wrote this Reading List for my son, who was just named Command Master Chief and Senior Enlisted Leader (SEL) for the Navy Department of "Eurasia and Western Hemisphere" (EWH). As in, he is the one and only.
I just was emailing someone at the US Naval War College, and I wanted to share it with my Avoidable Contact Friends:
If you have not yet had the pleasure of reading Fitzroy Maclean's memoir, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's a page turner--it reads like fiction!
In the run-up to the end of WWII, Maclean was bold enough to warn Churchill that all the help that he, Maclean, personally was making sure got through to Tito, would only increase the likelihood of Yugoslavia's falling into Soviet hands.
Churchill acted surprised, and then feigned incredulity:
"Sir Fitzroy! Upon the cessation of hostilities, do I gather that you plan to relocate your family to Yugo-Slavia???"
[Quoted from memory.]
Maclean: "Of course not."
With a Cheshire-Cat smile, Churchill quietly said, "Well... neither do I."
Proiceless.
# # #
Churchill did not think that his job was to fix the world. His job was to save Britain. NB!!! I said "Britain" knowingly. I did not say "save the British Empire."
A cynic could say, "The Allies in WWII had two War Aims: to Restore the Territorial Integrity of Poland, and to Preserve the British Empire. They failed on both counts."
But a Realist might rejoin: "Churchill's No. 1 Job was to keep Big Ben from being draped with a 50 x 80 foot Nazi flag. He nailed it!"
I was a History major, and I've been in the Army for 25 years. I'm familiar with the VDH book you mention, but not the others. I'll bookmark this article for a shopping list.
I would be remiss to not suggest John Keegan's "The Face of Battle" it is quick, unflinching, digestible, and a remarkable entree into military history.
For really exciting reading on modern conflicts Mark Bowden is worth a look - Blackhawk Down was a fantastic read. He's a journalist so it's not strictly military history, but it's compelling reading. The movie is pretty decent too.
More esoteric and military specific - "The Art of Maneuver" by LTC (R) Robert Leonhard is excellent. "Fighting by Minutes" is good too!
I love taking the view in from 30,000 feet; and I am a total sucker, both for Grand Unified Theories, as well as Paradoxical Outcomes.
Who ever might have predicted (that answer is NOBODY!!!), back in 1852, that Russia's poorly-thought-out attempt at a military solution to the obscure diplomatic question as to which nation (Russia or France) was the proper Guardian and Protector of the interests of Christians in Turkey, would end up causing:
(1) Russia to decide it had to give up Alaska; and:
(2) Nearly 100 years later, Turkey's joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The history of imperial Russia is fascinating. I took a course on Imperial Russian ethnography in college. Easily one of my "most-often-thought-of" classes of my higher education career.
Well, that was the fatal flaw that led to their downfall, was it not???
I somewhat self-mockingly refer to my "John Marks's Universal Laws of History," and #69 is:
"If the Ruling Class speaks a different language than the Working Class, it will end in tears."
Corollary #1 to that is: "The same holds true, for Ethnicity and Culture."
I hope everybody knows that the King of Jordan is Half British.
BTW, his American stepmother (Lisa Halaby) was 25% Episcopalian, and 25% Swedish. Onay Itshay. The ruling class of Jordan is totally ethnically different from the proles. I can't believe they have kept that scam going for so long.
The Romanovs passively treated their subjects with silent contempt, while speaking French to each other. And hiring French-speaking tutors for their kids.
She had studied violin at the highest level in France (where else) and was the violin teacher of choice to the various tots of the extended (Dukes and Duchesses, etc.) royal family. And, Mr. G. and his mother were Jewish.
BTW, some scholars believe that the more moderate Communists would have preferred that the UK grant asylum to the Romanovs.
But Britain rejected that, because the UK Royal Family was nervous that it would be the last straw, and that their own peasants would grab their pitchforks (or, perhaps their pitch pipes?) and drive the royals out.
Face of Battle, absolute classic. I particularly enjoyed another of his works The Price of Admiralty. It is a good companion to VDHs The Western Way of War, I personally think his claims are too broad, but if you take some of Keegan's work, and others of course, you can make a case for a more narrow Anglo-American way of war going back pre 1066, if you want to stretch things.
Well, about 1066: The Normans came about when the Vikings (Norsemen) intermarried with the natives in that coastal part of future France. Which gave rise to the linguistic and class divisions in England. Peasants say "Pig;" Upper-Classers say "Pork (Porc)."
My point being that the Norman Conquest probably would not have succeeded except for the Norsemen's heritage of quick raids.
THANK YOU SO MUCH! I love doing that kind of writing, because it is multidisciplinary in the good sense.
But I strongly intuit that things like that are why many colleges would never in a million years hire me--I was SO INSENSITIVE (please cue up that song) to the poor misunderstood Muslims; and, Christianity is evil, anyway.
Note, for 26 years I was a Visiting Lecturer at Thomas More College in NH; I also organized and presented the Chamber Music Performing-Arts Series. But that was a fairly conservative place.
Great steer, thank you! I look forward to reading some of these books.
A couple of recommendations of my own:
Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan.
This is a fascinating account of the peace conference following the first world war where the three superpowers; the United Kingdom, the United States, and France carved up the planet three ways and redrew borders to their benefit. We are still living with the consequences of this conference today.
Dispatches by Michael Herr.
This is a collection of experiences that Herr reported on while covering the Vietnam war. He gets in deep choppering into remote camps and hanging with the troops. Herr doesn’t pull his punches and openly questions the sanity of the conflict.
Kotkin's "Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941" goes into great detail about his extreme distrust of Britain. In the book his willingness to deal with the Nazis is mostly framed as being a combination of Stalin's psychopathic willingness to betray allies, as with communists in Mongolia and China, and ideological, seeing the British as a capitalist/imperialist threat on par with the Germans. One wonders if memories of Crimea factored in his calculations. In Britain they called it The Great Game, I don't think they were so sanguine in Russia.
IIRC, according to Paul Johnson's "Modern Times," Stalin was so caught off guard by Hitler's invasion that he was nearly catatonic for days, and could not give any coherent orders.
I am two handshakes away from Stalin. Really.
My music-business colleague Herb Belkin went to Moscow to negotiate some recording-reissue licenses, and he negotiated with Tikhon Khrennikov.
Stalin had appointed Khrennikov General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers.
Herb told me, my then wife, and Arturo Delmoni, at dinner in Newport, RI, that Khrennikov was very proud that, although some members of his Union had been degraded in rank or imprisoned, on Khrennikov's watch, nobody who worked for him ended up dead.
Ever the smartypants, I immediately and loudly riposted, "Gee, Herb! There are members of the Kennedy family who cannot say that!"
Herb gave me a look. Arturo looked like he was trying to avoid wetting his pants.
I am "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" (at, for lack of a better word, birth, I was extracted dead, with the umbilical cord around my neck, and then resuscitated). For the next four years, I was written off as a RETARD, at a time when my parents were denizens of a Federal Housing Project. So, I know what it means to be a "Minority."
I feel so blessed by my teachers, mentors, inspirations, and contacts in music.
I am rather grateful that Stalin and Hitler never met face-to-race. That's a Handshake Chain I'd prefer not to be in.
OF COURSE, Ted Kennedy would have to wait six hours to sober up, before he called the ambulance for you.
Which is one reason that, as surely as "Arabs Lose Wars," "Democrats Lose Elections."
Pre-S.: There is actually a Strategic Studies Paper that I love entitled, "Why Arabs Lose Wars."!
NEATO
"JFK's lone assailant"
the newly released jfk files have been interesting by their content and conspicuous omissions
Thanks for reading and thanks for commenting.
I should point out that I included Russo's book not because I agree with him that Oswald acted alone. I don't believe that, although it might be possible (despite the ballistic and autopsy evidence).
(If I were President, on Day One, I'd order JFK's body to be dug up, and given a totally modern autopsy.)
I included Russo's book because it is the handiest guide to the Kennedy brothers' attempts to have the leader of a de-facto sovereign nation murdered. They acted out of spite, because they had been stupid enough to buy into the cockamamie scheme (Bay of Pigs) that the CIA had cooked up for Eisenhower. And which Eisenhower (apparently) had Slow-Walked. Very slow.
Bottom line: 4,000 barely-trained, angry amateurs are not going to prevail against a professional military of 40,000. Especially when the pros are being backed up by Soviet jets, and perhaps Soviet pilots.
A former contract employee of the CIA told me that he had been told that the events of Dealey Plaza on 11/22/63 were a "False Flag Operation" intended to incriminate Castro in a failed attempt to kill JFK, which was expected to make the populace rise up and demand an all-out invasion of "Cuber" [phonetic spelling, in memoriam JFK].
But my source said that the FFO was "hijacked."
And guess what? In 1962 (although we did not learn about it until 1998 to 2001) the Joint Chiefs of Staff planned a series of... False Flag Operations, falsely to blame Cuber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
I think that Oswald was a patsy; he aimed a shot over JFK's head, wounding James Teague via a curbstone fragment.
But I also think that one of JFK's fatal wounds was a shot from a NIMROD rookie Secret Service guy who had never handled an AR-15 before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Error
Sleep tight, America
Looking forward to all the discussion around these books!
I would add To Loose a Battle by Alistair Horne, really I would add the trilogy but the TLB is the one the Israeli's said gave some inspiration to their 1973 counteroffensive.
Mr. Horne has fallen out of favor in the last 25 years, he is a journalist rather than an academic by trade. His writing style, but more importantly is analysis and commentary on society is not so much cross-disciplinary, and more anti-disciplinary. He is clearly a very intelligent but also self educated (in addition to his formal education) man, the sort of person who's broad experience terrifies academics. He likes a good story so they nit-pick him for it. A good example would be his narrative of the French Army Mutinies of 1917. He goes with some of the more salacious tales of it. France, or at least Gaullist France, has been suppressing that narrative with great success until recently. I think we'll see a rehabilitation of Alistair Horne's reputation in the next 20 years.
As for TLB itself, I don't recommend it as ones first introduction to the Battle of France, but it is a great way to fill in a lot of the blanks if you read more technical accounts of it, and if you come into it with an understanding of the composition and equipment of the various forces before hand the narrative of events flows better.
I'll comment a little on Victor Davis Hansen, as one of his books is mentioned in your list. I wish he stopped writing after A War Like No Other in 2005, although his 2011 novel has some charms and a fascinating writing style. I did not read The Second World Wars, I will now have to reconsider that choice based on your recommendation. My feelings on him is that he looses the perspective that makes his works on Ancient Greece so good as he gets closer to modernity. His columns also got very repetitive and he absolutely was guilty of impaling the facts of the day on his thesis in them.
I have already added The Proud Tower to my cart.
Thanks for reading and thanks for writing. "The Proud Tower" is a magnificent work.
It never fails to impress me the wide knowledge of Jack's friends .
-Nate
Awww.
I wrote this Reading List for my son, who was just named Command Master Chief and Senior Enlisted Leader (SEL) for the Navy Department of "Eurasia and Western Hemisphere" (EWH). As in, he is the one and only.
Careful you don't pop any buttons into S.W.M.B.O.'s eye =8-) .
Proud papa, I can dig it .
-Nate
Congratulations to your son!
Thank you. He served six deployments to Afghanistan. Three colleagues did not survive. I pray for their loved ones, constantly.
As I’ve said here, THIS is the B&B! (Or this is where that cohort wound up!)
I just was emailing someone at the US Naval War College, and I wanted to share it with my Avoidable Contact Friends:
If you have not yet had the pleasure of reading Fitzroy Maclean's memoir, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's a page turner--it reads like fiction!
In the run-up to the end of WWII, Maclean was bold enough to warn Churchill that all the help that he, Maclean, personally was making sure got through to Tito, would only increase the likelihood of Yugoslavia's falling into Soviet hands.
Churchill acted surprised, and then feigned incredulity:
"Sir Fitzroy! Upon the cessation of hostilities, do I gather that you plan to relocate your family to Yugo-Slavia???"
[Quoted from memory.]
Maclean: "Of course not."
With a Cheshire-Cat smile, Churchill quietly said, "Well... neither do I."
Proiceless.
# # #
Churchill did not think that his job was to fix the world. His job was to save Britain. NB!!! I said "Britain" knowingly. I did not say "save the British Empire."
A cynic could say, "The Allies in WWII had two War Aims: to Restore the Territorial Integrity of Poland, and to Preserve the British Empire. They failed on both counts."
But a Realist might rejoin: "Churchill's No. 1 Job was to keep Big Ben from being draped with a 50 x 80 foot Nazi flag. He nailed it!"
I was a History major, and I've been in the Army for 25 years. I'm familiar with the VDH book you mention, but not the others. I'll bookmark this article for a shopping list.
I would be remiss to not suggest John Keegan's "The Face of Battle" it is quick, unflinching, digestible, and a remarkable entree into military history.
For really exciting reading on modern conflicts Mark Bowden is worth a look - Blackhawk Down was a fantastic read. He's a journalist so it's not strictly military history, but it's compelling reading. The movie is pretty decent too.
More esoteric and military specific - "The Art of Maneuver" by LTC (R) Robert Leonhard is excellent. "Fighting by Minutes" is good too!
Thank you!
My perspective is not military-specific.
I love taking the view in from 30,000 feet; and I am a total sucker, both for Grand Unified Theories, as well as Paradoxical Outcomes.
Who ever might have predicted (that answer is NOBODY!!!), back in 1852, that Russia's poorly-thought-out attempt at a military solution to the obscure diplomatic question as to which nation (Russia or France) was the proper Guardian and Protector of the interests of Christians in Turkey, would end up causing:
(1) Russia to decide it had to give up Alaska; and:
(2) Nearly 100 years later, Turkey's joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Ya just cain't make this stuff up!!!
all my best,
john
The history of imperial Russia is fascinating. I took a course on Imperial Russian ethnography in college. Easily one of my "most-often-thought-of" classes of my higher education career.
Who knew they were such Francophiles!?!
Well, that was the fatal flaw that led to their downfall, was it not???
I somewhat self-mockingly refer to my "John Marks's Universal Laws of History," and #69 is:
"If the Ruling Class speaks a different language than the Working Class, it will end in tears."
Corollary #1 to that is: "The same holds true, for Ethnicity and Culture."
I hope everybody knows that the King of Jordan is Half British.
BTW, his American stepmother (Lisa Halaby) was 25% Episcopalian, and 25% Swedish. Onay Itshay. The ruling class of Jordan is totally ethnically different from the proles. I can't believe they have kept that scam going for so long.
The Romanovs passively treated their subjects with silent contempt, while speaking French to each other. And hiring French-speaking tutors for their kids.
My mentor Boris Goldovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Goldovsky was born in Moscow, but his mother fled with him during the October Revolution.
She had studied violin at the highest level in France (where else) and was the violin teacher of choice to the various tots of the extended (Dukes and Duchesses, etc.) royal family. And, Mr. G. and his mother were Jewish.
BTW, some scholars believe that the more moderate Communists would have preferred that the UK grant asylum to the Romanovs.
But Britain rejected that, because the UK Royal Family was nervous that it would be the last straw, and that their own peasants would grab their pitchforks (or, perhaps their pitch pipes?) and drive the royals out.
Face of Battle, absolute classic. I particularly enjoyed another of his works The Price of Admiralty. It is a good companion to VDHs The Western Way of War, I personally think his claims are too broad, but if you take some of Keegan's work, and others of course, you can make a case for a more narrow Anglo-American way of war going back pre 1066, if you want to stretch things.
"Mask of Command" is also good Keegan.
Well, about 1066: The Normans came about when the Vikings (Norsemen) intermarried with the natives in that coastal part of future France. Which gave rise to the linguistic and class divisions in England. Peasants say "Pig;" Upper-Classers say "Pork (Porc)."
My point being that the Norman Conquest probably would not have succeeded except for the Norsemen's heritage of quick raids.
And, they were lucky.
Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer is read at West Point.
David Hackett Fischer's "The Great Wave" is the single most significant work of Econometric History I know of. Magisterial.
Albion's Seed is pretty good too, digs down on Jack's neighbors in that part of the woods.
Thanks for writing, your "Thank the Franks" post was outstanding.
THANK YOU SO MUCH! I love doing that kind of writing, because it is multidisciplinary in the good sense.
But I strongly intuit that things like that are why many colleges would never in a million years hire me--I was SO INSENSITIVE (please cue up that song) to the poor misunderstood Muslims; and, Christianity is evil, anyway.
Note, for 26 years I was a Visiting Lecturer at Thomas More College in NH; I also organized and presented the Chamber Music Performing-Arts Series. But that was a fairly conservative place.
Great steer, thank you! I look forward to reading some of these books.
A couple of recommendations of my own:
Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan.
This is a fascinating account of the peace conference following the first world war where the three superpowers; the United Kingdom, the United States, and France carved up the planet three ways and redrew borders to their benefit. We are still living with the consequences of this conference today.
Dispatches by Michael Herr.
This is a collection of experiences that Herr reported on while covering the Vietnam war. He gets in deep choppering into remote camps and hanging with the troops. Herr doesn’t pull his punches and openly questions the sanity of the conflict.
Kotkin's "Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941" goes into great detail about his extreme distrust of Britain. In the book his willingness to deal with the Nazis is mostly framed as being a combination of Stalin's psychopathic willingness to betray allies, as with communists in Mongolia and China, and ideological, seeing the British as a capitalist/imperialist threat on par with the Germans. One wonders if memories of Crimea factored in his calculations. In Britain they called it The Great Game, I don't think they were so sanguine in Russia.
Great post; Thanks!
IIRC, according to Paul Johnson's "Modern Times," Stalin was so caught off guard by Hitler's invasion that he was nearly catatonic for days, and could not give any coherent orders.
I am two handshakes away from Stalin. Really.
My music-business colleague Herb Belkin went to Moscow to negotiate some recording-reissue licenses, and he negotiated with Tikhon Khrennikov.
Stalin had appointed Khrennikov General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers.
Herb told me, my then wife, and Arturo Delmoni, at dinner in Newport, RI, that Khrennikov was very proud that, although some members of his Union had been degraded in rank or imprisoned, on Khrennikov's watch, nobody who worked for him ended up dead.
Ever the smartypants, I immediately and loudly riposted, "Gee, Herb! There are members of the Kennedy family who cannot say that!"
Herb gave me a look. Arturo looked like he was trying to avoid wetting his pants.
Wow! If I had been there I probably would have been so blue in the face from laughing so hard that even Ted Kennedy would call an ambulance for me.
I am "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" (at, for lack of a better word, birth, I was extracted dead, with the umbilical cord around my neck, and then resuscitated). For the next four years, I was written off as a RETARD, at a time when my parents were denizens of a Federal Housing Project. So, I know what it means to be a "Minority."
I feel so blessed by my teachers, mentors, inspirations, and contacts in music.
I am rather grateful that Stalin and Hitler never met face-to-race. That's a Handshake Chain I'd prefer not to be in.
OF COURSE, Ted Kennedy would have to wait six hours to sober up, before he called the ambulance for you.
Which is one reason that, as surely as "Arabs Lose Wars," "Democrats Lose Elections."
Pre-S.: There is actually a Strategic Studies Paper that I love entitled, "Why Arabs Lose Wars."!