How Kooky was Vincent Bugliosi ?

[Tom Gram]

49 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

Personally I don't care about a researchers private life because whether they are a saint or a sinner, it does add to any hard facts they might present in a book.

I only care about the facts they present in a non-fiction book like Reclaiming History. I don't agree with everything in that book but he does present some parts of the case well. 

This whole thread seems like a pointless ad hominem attack on Bugliosi. Even if Bugliosi was Hitler it doesn't make any facts he presents less factual.

If someone has an established history of distorting facts for personal gain and to advance a specific position, especially if that history extends to the point of suborning perjury and suppressing evidence in the pursuit of fame, anything that person writes should at least be subjected to an enhanced level of scrutiny. 

As demonstrated by Pat Speer in the article linked above, Reclaiming History follows the exact same pattern of evidence distortion and gross misrepresentation of the facts that Bugliosi committed throughout his career. So yes, if someone has proven themselves to be a polemicist, and their selective presentation of the evidence is structured to give the illusion of authority and support a specific position at the expense of objective analysis, those so-called facts are not actually facts at all. 

[Gil Jesus]

43 minutes ago, Tom Gram said:

So yes, if ....... their selective presentation of the evidence is structured to give the illusion of .... a specific position.......those so-called facts are not actually facts at all. 

Sounds like the Warren Commission.

[Gerry Down]

I'm not trying to justify any wrongs that Bugliosi has done. I wouldn't do that. Just personally I try to separate the author from the facts they present. I've been studying the case for many years so I feel I'm qualified to be able to do that.

[Joe Bauer]

Bugliosi was weird.

A nervously fast talking little guy. Almost manic.

He would have made a good Barney Fife type character in film and TV.

I started to read his anchor weight JFKA book "Reclaiming History" but my arms couldn't hold it up and I also lost interest after his non-stop, never ending and almost obsessive derogatory references ( dozens ) toward conspiracy view holders as loons, kooks, crazies, losers, weak minded fools and on and on... just way too personally attacking.

I realized his book was more a hyped up gas lighting effort than a seriously balanced evidence one and that it was intended to be so to sell copies.

And so much of the book was simply hundreds of pages of already recorded documentation minutiae that he probably had aides find and use as filler.

A 30 pound sleeping pill.

His titanic weight tome did however, provide months of torn out pages kindling fire starter material.

It's advertising should have promoted it's dual function use as such imo.

Yet,  Bugliosi was also weirdly contradictive.

He makes fun of JFKA conspiracy believers, but also tears apart our Supreme Court in their nullifying the Florida Supreme Court decision to keep counting their state's 2,000 presidential election votes when Gore was gaining to within just a few hundreds votes, with the pattern showing he would have defeated Bush if the count was kept going just one more day.

Bugliosi also writes he believed RFK's murder was a conspiracy.

What to make of this guy?

Maybe he just put out contrarily controversial view points in his books to sell more of them?

 

 

Edited March 23, 2023 by Joe Bauer

[Benjamin Cole]

6 hours ago, Joe Bauer said:

Bugliosi was weird.

A nervously fast talking little guy. Almost manic.

He would have made a good Barney Fife type character in film and TV.

I started to read his anchor weight JFKA book "Reclaiming History" but my arms couldn't hold it up and I also lost interest after his non-stop, never ending and almost obsessive derogatory references ( dozens ) toward conspiracy view holders as loons, kooks, crazies, losers, weak minded fools and on and on... just way too personally attacking.

I realized his book was more a hyped up gas lighting effort than a seriously balanced evidence one and that it was intended to be so to sell copies.

And so much of the book was simply hundreds of pages of already recorded documentation minutiae that he probably had aides find and use as filler.

A 30 pound sleeping pill.

His titanic weight tome did however, provide months of torn out pages kindling fire starter material.

It's advertising should have promoted it's dual function use as such imo.

Yet,  Bugliosi was also weirdly contradictive.

He makes fun of JFKA conspiracy believers, but also tears apart our Supreme Court in their nullifying the Florida Supreme Court decision to keep counting their state's 2,000 presidential election votes when Gore was gaining to within just a few hundreds votes, with the pattern showing he would have defeated Bush if the count was kept going just one more day.

Bugliosi also writes he believed RFK's murder was a conspiracy.

What to make of this guy?

Maybe he just put out contrarily controversial view points in his books to sell more of them?

 

 

You mean Bugliosi was a JFK researcher who was very opinionated on many issues and spoke derogatorily of others with different viewpoints? 

What a rare bird. 

 

[Ron Bulman]

I remember the song from the White Album, which I still have.  I also remember going to the drive in to see the movie.

 

[Ron Bulman]

I also remember going to the drive in to see the movie.

 

 

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Joe Bauer writes:

Quote

Maybe he just put out contrarily controversial view points in his books to sell more of them?

I'd be surprised if Bugliosi or his publishers ever expected Reclaiming History to sell enough copies to recover the huge advance Bugliosi was apparently awarded.

The book's main purpose was surely the same as that of the officially promoted books that came before it.

The main purpose of the Warren Report was to solidify the claim that Oswald did it all by himself, so that journalists and other opinion-formers would have a holy book to which they could refer without having to look too deeply themselves into the facts of the assassination.

The HSCA investigation was slightly different, having been forced into existence to placate public pressure for a genuine investigation. But the HSCA Report was put to the same use as the Warren Report, once the earlier report's lack of credibility with the public had undermined its status as a source of infallible doctrine.

Posner's Case Closed was commissioned and promoted for the same reason as Reclaiming History, in this case specifically to counteract Oliver Stone's JFK. Again, journalists and establishment-minded academics were provided with something they could cite as authoritative without having to know very much themselves about the facts of the assassination.

Once Case Closed became widely known to be an unreliable source, Reclaiming History was commissioned. It's a very long book, so it must be comprehensive, mustn't it? The book came from a mainstream publisher, so it must be reliable. Comprehensive and reliable: what more could a journalist or historian require from a holy book? From their point of view, it had to be the final word on the assassination. They could cite it without having to do more than glance at it, if that.

Even the absurd length of the book served a purpose. How many journalists are going to wade through 2,500 pages of fiddly details on a subject they probably don't care much about?

Bugliosi's descriptions of lone-nut critics as kooks and crackpots appear to have served an ideological purpose too: the kooks and crackpots who unfortunately do infest the case were made to represent lone-nut critics in general.

There's no reason to suppose that Reclaiming History was intended to be a commercial success. It was pure propaganda. In fact, the fewer copies it would sell, the more effective it would be as propaganda, since fewer people would be able to examine the claims it made. It went out of print pretty quickly, as I recall.

Over the years, the plebs were given a diet of TV specials supporting the lone-nut case, while the opinion-formers were given a series of books, culminating in Reclaiming History.