Portrait of an Assassin.

FORD, Gerald R. and John R. Stiles.

Item Number: 140459

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. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed and signed by both authors on the front free endpaper, “To Mort Ostrander, with warmest personal regards. Gerald R. Ford” and signed in the year of publication “Best from John R. Stiles 6/7/65.” Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Carl Smith. Photograph on the front of jacket by James Murray.

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.”