The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop. Funk & Wagnalls, $7.95. Billed as “an uncensored minute-by-minute account of November 22, 1963.” To Mr. Bishop’s credit, he arranges material clearly, he appears to have studied every source of information available, and he declines to make any melodramatic assumptions about missing bullets or multiple assassins. To his discredit, he sentimentalizes, he reports as fact conversations that he can have got only by thirdhand hearsay, and he writes an affected fake-clever prose in which people are referred to as the long head of Jones or the melancholy face of Smith. After a couple of chapters, one has the impression that everybody is partially disembodied. Mr. Bishop reports, moreover, what went on in Lee Oswald’s mind and indulges a grudge against Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who, it seems, presumed to doubt the necessity of Mr. Bishop’s ghoulish rummagings. She had a good point there.