by Claiborne Smith
Real Answers
The obvious question to ask the author of yet another book about the JFK assassination is why the world needs yet another book about the JFK assassination. Gary Cornwell, who has been a trial lawyer for 28 years and was the Deputy Chief Counsel for the Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977, has published his book Real Answers from his own press, Paleface Press, “for a couple of reasons: One, basically everything that’s out there, and I think there’s probably over 1,000 books, is second-hand information. It’s people trying to do the best they can to fill the factual void that I believe was left by the original investigation that the Warren Commission did in 1963 and 1964. … A major component of that is that I’ve been talking to people for 20 years about this case, ever since we did the investigation. … I say I ran the investigation, and they say, ‘Oh yeah, the Warren Commission?’ I say, ‘No no no, the second one,’ they say, ‘Well, which one was that?’ and I tell them and they say, ‘Oh my goodness, well what did you guys find?'” Since there are all those 1,000 books or so out there about the case, Cornwell has written a broad, accessible account that he intends “big Middle America” to read, for people who ideologically speaking are “not on the extremes one way or the other” about the case. Real Answers is a sort of primer, by no means exhaustive or merely factual (Cornwell does think that “the Warren Commission absolutely blew the conspiracy investigation and the documentary record reflects that they made that decision before they ever started to investigate, that something was more important than the truth”). “My point is not so much that we have all of the answers but we did do a lot of really interesting and credible work,” Cornwell says. “I think that what was really needed was a book with a first-hand view that could tell that inside story about mainly the second of the two great investigations of this case.”
Gary Cornwell will read from Real Answers at Congress Avenue Booksellers on Friday, November 20, noon-1:30pm.
Events
If you missed the following panels and readings during the Texas Book Festival, CSPAN2’s Book TV will be featuring them this weekend: “Books of a Lifetime: Biographies,” “Going to Extremes: Life on the Fringes of American Culture,” “A Woman’s Touch: Their Legacy in Texas History,” and Stanley Crouch‘s reading…
In his new book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information, Eric Davis details how our highly sophisticated technological culture is rooted in decidedly non-scientific ideas. Already the book is receiving positive reviews from Publishers Weekly and Spin, and Bruce Sterling calls Techgnosis “literate, accesible and funny.” Eric Davis reads from Techgnosis at FringeWare on Friday, November 20, 8pm.
This article appears in November 20 • 1998 and November 20 • 1998 (Cover).