In November 1998, Brown University's now-defunct newspaper George Street Journal ran a lengthy piece about Max Holland, who'd been at the university for a few months working on his book A Need to Know: Inside the Warren Commission. The story noted that in 1995 he began working on the book -- in which he'd prove, once and for all, that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman on November 22, 1963 -- and expected to publish his book in 1999. Riiiight.
Because on the very day former Dallas police detective Paul Bentley -- among those who arrested Oswald at the Texas Theatre -- will be laid to rest at Grove Hill Memorial Park following his death on Monday, there appears yet another story about Holland and his Oswald book. And it's in The Washington Post, which recounts the tale of a former contributing editor for The Nation obsessed with getting to the truth about what really happened in Dealey Plaza almost 45 years ago:
This is a short story about American paranoia. It is slightly scary. It is about how even good writers and responsible people can fall into the rabbit hole of Washington research -- a tumble that leads you down, down, down to the Elm Street of the mind, below the Texas School Book Depository and in front of the grassy knoll, a few minutes past noon, in a world where it is always Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.That, right there, that sounds like 28 different definitions of hell. --Robert Wilonsky
