The President And The Provocateur: Alex Cox Takes Aim At The Kennedy Assassination
Fifty years on from the killing of JFK, the Repo Man director joined the great conspiracy debate...
Since the original nightmare on Elm Street, over a thousand books have been published about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Even today upwards of 30 new volumes on the topic are released annually.
Since 2013 was a landmark anniversary, it was no great shock that new books on the assassination were as common as Gemma Collins. What was surprising, however, was that the pick of the bunch was written not by a historian or a journalist but by the guy who made Sid And Nancy.
Alex Cox – director, screenwriter, editor, children’s book illustrator, volunteer fireman and host of the BBC’s much missed Moviedrome – was the estimable brain behind The President And The Provocateur, a parallel study of the lives of Jack Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. While it’s not the first book to approach the events of November 22nd 1963 in such a fashion, Cox’s title impresses on account of its even handedness.
Anyone with even a passing understanding of the subject will know that attitudes towards both the victim and his alleged assassin have wavered spectacularly over the years. Cox, though, while convinced that LHO was a fall guy, doesn’t disguise the fact that the former Marine had many failings. And as for Kennedy – who’s received a helluva retrospective kicking from the likes of Noam Chomsky - the author is as keen to stress his courage in warfare as he is to dismiss some of the myths that have come to surround Camelot.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to As Luck Would Have It to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.