This fine book, expanded and updated, goes some way to prove that no story is finite, particularly when that story is the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Anthony Summers begins by posing a question: “After 50 years, does the assassination of President Kennedy still matter?” He then goes on to reveal exactly why it does, drawing on three decades of investigation to explore the tragedy. Summers also exposes the way that the US justice department “sat on its hands” in terms of pursuing prosecutions while people “who could have been involved” were still alive, a situation that the former chief counsel Robert Blakey regarded as diabolical. Blakey notes that, in the American consciousness, the assassination does not seem to matter as much any more because a new “national trauma” occurred: September 11th. Yet Summers’s book reminds us why justice should have no expiry date.
