I had extremely high expectations for this book. Robert Anton Wilson talked it up pretty heavily in Everything is Under Control, and the book is incredibly hard to find (at least without paying through the nose). I picked up a paperback copy on ebay a while back for a semi-reasonable price, after years of having a recurring search open.
I was probably expecting too much. The book is perhaps impressive if you’ve never read a piece of Kennedy conspiracy theory and/or if you’re not familiar with Carroll Quigley’s work. Most of his central thesis is basically a rehash of Quigley’s thesis (though, I should note, I haven’t actually read Tragedy and Hope yet, but I’ve read enough summaries that Oglesby’s thesis does seem pretty much identical). The first half of the book gets incredibly bogged down in JFK assassination theory, which is fine, but I got the sense the book was written for an audience who hasn’t heard all this stuff endlessly elsewhere. The sections didn’t really present me with any new information, so I found it to be a bit of a slog.
The Watergate section was slightly more interesting. Most of his focus there is on the plane crash that killed Dorothy Hunt and on a theory that McCord was a CIA plant in the Nixon inner circle. I knew a fair bit of about the former, but the latter was one I had only heard about in passing. I read a bit about Jim Houghan’s book Secret Agenda, which goes Oglesby one further and not only says that both McCord and Hunt were working to set up Nixon, but that the bugging devices were installed months after the break-in to shore up the story.
I should also point out that Oglesby’s writing is fairly preposterous. He is prone to overly dramatic italicized statements and weird conversational insertions. I can’t remember if he actually followed up a quote from a source with an “Oh, really?” but he certainly did something close.
Some notes:
p.233-234. His description of Sherman Skolnick and his “colleague, companion, and bodyguard”, Alex Bottos, is fantastic. “Skolnick has been confined from birth to a wheelchair. He is intense, loud, overbearing, quick, suspicious, sometime merry, all upper torso and arms, boisterout, gnomic-faced. Bottos is more somber and sepulchral. He says he was at Opalaka in 1960-61 with Hunt on their Bay of Pigs campaign. He carries a pistol and is fond of flashing it. He dresses with old-fashioned nattiness and polishes to a high gloss both his black hair and his black patent leather loafers. [...] They project an ominous, swirling, shadowy atmosphere, Skolnick wheeling and challenging, Bottos in a tailored flak jacket brooding on collapse.” These two sound like they either stepped out of or were the direct inspiration for a Ross Thomas novel.
p.263. Further cementing their aura as fictional characters, Bottos apparently once infiltrated the Lansky mob and joined crew led by Joseph Sarelli that specialized in high-tech, in-flight airplane robberies. My life is clearly even more boring than I realized.