One of the reasons I wrote Green in Judgment, Cold in Blood was because I had always been
fascinated with the multiple conspiracy theories that constantly swirled around
the corpus of JFK. Multiple shooters, CIA, FBI, Military Brass, Secret Service,
Mafia, Lyndon Johnson, Castro, Jack Ruby, and Lee Harvey Oswald all contributed
to the mystique surrounding the death of the president. A writer can make a
certifiably accurate description of the assassination by extrapolating one or
more of the above suspects, plug them into a November 22nd scenario,
and voila, you have a non-fiction
account of the most talked about and written about event since the crucifixion
of Christ.
I have a personal reason for wanting to know what
happened that fateful day in Dallas. I voted for John Fitzgerald Kennedy on
November 8, 1960, and I don’t want my vote to be wasted. So I set about
constructing my own skewed view of the facts and fictionalized a result based
on an exhaustive research of the Kennedy years in office. I purposefully
highlighted the frailties of JFK in order to best lend a modicum of credence to
my protagonists desire to murder him.
The dialogue between the many non-fiction characters
were, for the most part, a figment of my imagination. It isn’t often one gets
to put words in great men’s mouths and I enjoyed the hell out of doing it. In
the last fifty years, everyone has died who could reconstruct the events of
that bleak November day in Dealey Plaza, so we will never know the true story.
As memories fade about a young president and only Hollywood’s
mischaracterizations remain, we will never know the accuracy of JFK’s
contemporary’s opinions; nor will we ever know the true nature of our heroes
and villains in that storybook ending. I like to think my fictional version is
as accurate as the pundits like to think theirs are.
