Preface

It is customary to address the reader in a preface by some kind of epithet. “Gentle reader” is the one used by Cervantes in his introduction to the first volume of Don Quixote. I shall address you as curious and attentive reader, for attention and curiosity will be required of you to do justice to the book you now hold in your hands.

Post-structural literary criticism has taken the emphasis away from the author and placed it on the text. A work of literature is a system of signs and the intellectual job commended to the reader is to interpret them. The quality of the deciphered result will depend on the reader’s aptitude to capture those signs and to understand their meaning. Never has the idea been more apt as in the present case.

The author/editor presents you with an anthology of documents that deal directly or indirectly with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963. He introduces this anthology with a letter addressed to Vincent J. Salandria, one of the first, of many, who detected flaws in the versions, officially presented, of this magnicide and who later criticized the findings of the Warren Commission after examining carefully the twenty-six volumes of its proceedings.

But make no mistake. This is not one more book presenting a theory over the “mystery” of President Kennedy’s assassination. There is no mystery involved. This book presents no new “theory.” What Dr. Schotz does is something that you should do yourself: analyze carefully and logically the anthology of documents and put them together, for this book is what Julio Cortazar would have called “A Model Kit.” Cortazar wrote a novel, which he called 62 Model Kit; in it he presented the reader with snatches of narrative in no particular sequential order which the reader was supposed to assemble into a narrative. Here, of course, we are not dealing with fiction but with history. The documents presented are realities behind a national tragedy and lead to an inescapable conclusion. If we are shocked at what we find in the end, perhaps this shock will help to open our eyes to what really happened in Dallas on that fateful day and to its aftermath.

R. Cardona
Boston, MA