COME RETRIBUTION
The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln
William A. Tidwell, with James O. Hall and David Winfred Gaddy
Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1988
510 pp., $15 (paperback), $35 (hardcover)
FINAL DISCLOSURE
The Full Truth About the Assassination of President Kennedy
David W. Belin
New York: Scribner's, 1988
249 pages, $19.95
Our American presidents have died at the hands of assassins; two of them (Garfield and McKinley) are barely remembered, but Abraham Lincoln (d. 1865) and John F. Kennedy (d. 1963) have been enshrined in the highest pantheon of martyrdom by most of an adoring nation.
Most Americans have accepted, beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt, that both were victims of deranged men who acted essentially alone, men who were destroyed soon after they performed their acts of destruction. Yet the very nature of their acts has spawned a vast number of conspiracy theories, subscribed to by small armies of devotees, that attempt to prove that these assassins' hands were guided by sinister forces that have escaped both scrutiny and retribution.
Two new books deal with this fascinating gray area in very different ways. Come Retribution builds a compelling case of circumstantial evidence to prove that John Wilkes Booth's act was the end product of a sophisticated network of secret agents directed by no less than the top leadership of the Confederacy. Final Disclosure, in contrast, is its author's attempt to draw the curtain, firmly and finally, over every suspicion that the Warren Commission white-washed the Kennedy affair.
William A. Tidwell, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general, brings the experience and enthusiasm of a lifetime of intelligence work to his task. He begins by describing the formation of the Confederate Signal Corps as the genesis of Southern intelligence operations, showing its activities to have been initially nothing more than those normally expected of a sovereign state at war. Slowly, painstakingly, however, he brings into a view a picture of something far more--an effective covert operations establishment whose duties encompassed not only information gathering and analysis, but carefully orchestrated disinformation campaigns, political dirty tricks, blockade-running, mine laying, bank robberies, attempts to free prisoners, and ultimately a plot to kidnap the enemy president and to hold him hostage against the achievement of certain political and military objectives.
Clearly, it is this last activity that most absorbs Tidwell and his colleagues, not to mention his readers, although an extraordinarily long time is spent in laying the groundwork for the denouement.
The state of the war in 1864
Before proceeding with the narrative, it may be useful to look at conditions in mid-1864, the
...
Read Full Article
|
