Portrait of an Assassin.

FORD, Gerald R. and John R. Stiles.

$1,250.00

Item Number: 125682

New York : Simon and Schuster, 1965.

First edition of the first book about the Kennedy assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald to be authored by a member of the Warren Commission, boldly signed by Ford. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Bob O’Connor with warmest personal regards and very best wishes. Gerald R. Ford.” The recipient, Bob O’Connor was the mayor of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and a close personal friend of Ford. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Carl Smith. Photograph on the front of jacket by James Murray. Housed in a custom half morocco chemise and clamshell box. An exceptional association.

Just one week after the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, President Johnson appointed a commission, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the tragic events. Then Representative Ford’s seat on the panel put the Michigan Congressman in the national spotlight. In this volume, the first such book written by a member of the Commission, Ford and co-author John Stiles (Ford’s personal assistant during the Commission’s work) reconstruct, in a novel-like format, the path that led Oswald to the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963, from his sojourn in the Soviet Union to his frustrated defection to Cuba. Strikingly sympathetic to the closure sought by innumerable conspiracy theorists, the authors nevertheless discern in these events “no meaning beyond the will of the killer to pull the trigger”—save the philosophical conclusion “that meaningful personal relationships are still the most important elements in any society… We do not live alone, and neither a Lee Oswald nor anyone else can succeed in so doing.”