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In 1963, McDonald was a police officer in Dallas, Texas. On November 22, President John F. Kennedy was shot near where McDonald was, and he responded to a report of a suspicious man at a movie theater. The man was pointed out to McDonald, who went in to confront the man. It was Lee Harvey Oswald, who had just shot Kennedy. "He made a fist and bam, hit me right between the eyes," McDonald said in his memoir, "The Arrest and Capture of Lee Harvey Oswald". "I came back and hit him." Then Oswald pulled a gun as McDonald wrestled with him. "I could feel the hammer glide under my hand as he pulled the trigger," McDonald recalled. "I stood rigid, waiting for the bullet to penetrate my chest." But his instinct saved him: "The returning hammer made a dull, audible snapping sound as the firing pin struck the flesh of my left hand, between the thumb and forefinger." He was able to pin Oswald until other officers could help take him into custody. "It feels good that I got the guy who got the president, really," he once said. His wife Rose said he believed Oswald acted alone that day. "He was not into conspiracies at all," she says. "He knew too much about the case." During his 25-year career with the department, he received 26 commendations. McDonald died January 27 from diabetes. He was 76. From This is True for 23 January 2005 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: James W. Douglass List Price: $30.00 Amazon Price: $19.80  By: Edward T. Haslam List Price: $19.95 Amazon Price: $13.57 Editorial Review: The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace, sweeping doctors into coverups of cancer outbreaks, contaminated polio vaccine, the arrival of the AIDS virus, and biological weapon research using infected monkeys.  By: Vincent Bugliosi List Price: $17.95 Amazon Price: $10.77 Editorial Review: "As good a second-by-second reconstruction of the assassination and its aftermath as I've read."—Bryan Burrough, New York Times Four Days in November is an extraordinarily exciting, precise, and definitive narrative of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald. It is drawn from Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a huge and historic account of the event and all the conspiracy theories it spawned, by Vincent Bugliosi, famed prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of Helter Skelter. For general readers, the carefully documented account presented in Four Days is utterly persuasive: Oswald did it and he acted alone. 81 illustrations.  By: Vincent Bugliosi List Price: $49.95 Amazon Price: $32.97 Editorial Review: For over forty years the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been obscured. This book releases us from a crippling distortion of American history. This extraordinary and historic book required twenty years to research and write. The oft-challenged findings of the Warren Commission—Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot and killed President John F. Kennedy—are here confirmed beyond all doubt. But Reclaiming History does much more than that. In addition to providing a powerful and unprecedented narrative of events and a biography of the assassin, it confronts and destroys every one of the conspiracy theories that have grown up since the assassination, exposing their selective use of evidence, flawed logic, and outright deceptions. So thoroughly documented, so compellingly lucid in its conclusions, Reclaiming History is, in a sense, the investigation that completes the work of the Warren Commission. In it, Vincent Bugliosi, the nation's foremost prosecutor, takes on the most important murder in American history. At 1:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead, the victim of a sniper attack during his motorcade through Dallas. That may be the only fact generally agreed upon in the vast literature spawned by the assassination. National polls reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans (75%) believe that there was a high-level conspiracy behind Lee Harvey Oswald. Many even believe that Oswald was entirely innocent. In this continuously absorbing, powerful, ground-breaking book, Vincent Bugliosi shows how we have come to believe such lies about an event that changed the course of history. The brilliant prosecutor of Charles Manson and the man who forged an iron-clad case of circumstantial guilt around O. J. Simpson in his best-selling Outrage, Bugliosi is perhaps the only man in America capable of writing the definitive book on the Kennedy assassination. This is an achievement that has for years seemed beyond reach. No one imagined that such a book would ever be written: a single volume that once and for all resolves, beyond any reasonable doubt, every lingering question as to what happened in Dallas and who was responsible. There have been hundreds of books about the assassination, but there has never been a book that covers the entire case, including addressing each and every conspiracy theory and the facts, or alleged facts, on which they are based. In this monumental work, the author has raised scholarship on the assassination to a new and final level, one that far surpasses all other books on the subject. It adds resonance, depth, and closure to the admirable work of the Warren Commission. Reclaiming History is a narrative compendium of fact, forensic evidence, reexamination of key witnesses, and common sense. Every detail and nuance is accounted for, every conspiracy theory revealed as a fraud on the American public. Bugliosi's irresistible logic, command of the evidence, and ability to draw startling inferences shed fresh light on this American nightmare. At last it all makes sense.  By: Shane O'Sullivan List Price: $24.95 Amazon Price: $16.47 Editorial Review: On June 5th, 1968, at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, Robert F. Kennedy celebrated his victory in the California Democratic primary with a rousing victory speech anticipating a successful run for the presidency. Moments later, gunshots shattered that dream: like his brother before him, Bobby Kennedy lay mortally wounded at the hand of an assassin. The police quickly apprehended Sirhan Sirhan, who the world believed had single-handedly masterminded the shooting. Shockingly, that may not be so, as documentary filmmaker Shane O’ Sullivan presents powerful new evidence to the contrary. In Who Killed Bobby? O’Sullivan makes a stunning case that will fundamentally alter the way the public views Bobby Kennedy’s death. Based on research he undertook for a documentary that will debut this year, O’Sullivan poses such key questions as: “Could Sirhan have fired the fatal shot?” After the autopsy LA County Coroner Thomas Noguchi concluded that the deadly shots had been fired from an inch behind Kennedy’s right ear; yet not a single witness placed Sirhan this close; most placed his gun several feet away, and in front of the senator. Who was the girl in the polka-dot dress? Vincent Di Pierro saw Sirhan with a girl in a polka-dot dress in the pantry. And Sandra Serrano described a similar woman fleeing down a fire escape, exclaiming, “We shot him! We shot him!” O’Sullivan presents new interviews with these key witnesses and details how the LAPD browbeat them into changing their stories, while investigators also insisted to the press that “no such person ever existed.” Was Sirhan an unwitting assassin operating under the direction of unseen manipulators? Sirhan repeatedly scrawled “RFK Must Die” in his notebook and recreated the same kind of automatic writing when later hypnotized by his defense team. O’Sullivan cites psychiatric evidence that Sirhan was an extremely susceptible hypnotic subject, whose behavior on the night of the shooting fit the profile of a programmed assassin. Was Sirhan programmed to be a decoy for the real killer of Bobby Kennedy?The recent release of the film Bobby, the 40th anniversary of the shooting, and O’Sullivan’s upcoming documentary have created renewed interest in the subject, and readers who accepted the conventional wisdom will have their beliefs shaken. |
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