In this year of 2025, we celebrate the centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I have recorded the first three chapters of the heartbreaking novel, and the latest chapter is out today! I have links to all three chapters below should you wish to listen to them in order. Perhaps you, too, admire the green light on the far horizon. Watch out, because it may be the chimera of the “American Dream,” an apparition best left in quotation marks as airy as the cocktails on Gatsby’s West Egg veranda.
Continuing the series of JFK assassination episodes in this, the 60th year since the assassination, we look not at the thinking of the CIA, FBI, Warren Commission, Mob, Cuba, Russia or any of the other institutions that have been falsely imagined as being behind it, but inside the mind of the man who actually did it, and did it alone: Lee Harvey Oswald. It may not be the most popular theory, but facts don’t have to be popular. They only need to be true. This is an essay by myself, Rick Reiman, and narrated by myself, in response to the excellent insights of Burt Griffin, who wrote the new book, JFK, Oswald, Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth. A staff member on the Warren Commission (1963-1964). Griffin challenges historians to take the assassination seriously as history, something that is simple to understand once contextualized in history. Frankly, historians have not recognized their responsibility in this regard. Historians, when are you going to do your jobs, and take this intersection of the Cold War and cvil rights, which is what the assassination was, seriously as history? Until they do, this will continue to be a blot, a stain and a disgrace for the historical profession, as it has been for sixty years.
Rick Reiman reviews “King Richard,” Michael Dobbs’s just-published micro-history of a selected phase of the Watergate scandal, now approaching its Fiftieth anniversary.
