JFK Assassination Chapter Summary

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It’s an intimidating task for an author to take on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and tell us something we don’t already know. James Swanson relies on thorough research to find evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated former president John F. Kennedy. Throughout the book, Swanson goes over in detail through Lee Harvey Oswald’s thought process with plotting out the murder of JFK. Swanson goes into detail with the aftermath of the assassination and the grief it put the country and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy through. “End of Days” offers a new way of viewing the Kennedy assassination. Swanson extracts the crime in a detailed, sometimes minute-by-minute account, and he conceives both Kennedy’s and Oswald’s thoughts and actions …show more content…

How hours after the assassination, Oswald shot and killed a Dallas police officer, 39-year-old J.D. Tippit, who had stopped him for questioning because he fit the general description of the Kennedy assassin. How after Oswald’s arrest, he was interrogated by the Dallas police for 12 hours, during which he denied murdering Kennedy and Tippit ( a Dallas police officer), but enjoyed being the center of attention and was “surly, defiant, arrogant, defensive, and self-pitying” (End of Days, p. 206) These facts give the public a look into Oswald’s character and help Swanson consider the most rousing question about the assassination: What was his motive behind killing John F. …show more content…

Swanson explains how Oswald most likely woke up in the morning and decided to murder the president. There are some examples in the book that give some reasoning on his final decision to murder the president. It may be due to his move back to Dallas from New Orleans, and seeing the newspaper three days before JFK would arrive to Texas, giving out his route around town, which happened to be going past the Texas School Book Depository, which is where Oswald worked. When Oswald saw the newspaper giving out the president’s exact driving route for November 22nd of 1963, it felt to Oswald as it was meant to be that he must kill the president. It would feel like redemption for him since he failed to assassinate Major General Edwin A. Walker. Swanson tells the truth as if it were a story, in novelistic fashion, but in a manner that feels more honest and