Leopold and Loeb · Andrew Johnson · Newtown
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Another odd-lot day today, somewhat, as East Coast HQ’s boiler adventure continues. To stay on topic, it is…criminal how stinky I am. I’m told The Shower Of Righteousness is a possibility today, however! In the meantime, clip your noses with a clothespin and enjoy a few archival pieces. — SDB
I have mentioned Bonar Menninger’s Mortal Error many many times here, but it doesn’t look like my actual review ever made it over from the old blog. If it did, I apologize for not unearthing it (Substack, pleeeeeease upgrade your search. Please!), and if it didn’t, here it is at last.
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Like a Magic Eye puzzle, once you see Howard Donahue's explanation of JFK's death, you can't unsee it.
The crime
The murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas.
The story
Amateur gunsmith Howard Donahue was asked to take part in a televised recreation of JFK's assassination. His job: to demonstrate whether or not Oswald really could have gotten the three shots off, accurately, in the timeframe described in the Warren Report. It was possible, though it took him a few tries -- but the Warren Report got Donahue thinking. Were all of Kennedy's injuries consistent with the gun, and ammunition, Oswald used? Were the witnesses reporting gunfire from the grassy knoll, or the smell of gunpowder at ground level in Dealey Plaza, onto something -- even if it wasn't quite the right thing?
Had Oswald shot the president, but not killed him?
Donahue's conclusion, as related by Bonar Menninger's Mortal Error: the shots fired by Oswald would almost certainly have killed Kennedy, but the shot that caused the ghastly head wound came from elsewhere. I won't spoil the source of the shot for you, although this information is and has been out there for 20 years, and another book about Menninger's book -- with an accompanying NatGeo special -- came out around the half-century anniversary of Kennedy's murder last year, because one of the pleasures of Menninger's book is following along with Donahue's science and having your own "oh! ...OHHHHHH" moment.
The other is how direct and determined to stick to provable facts it is. Menninger's prose is unobtrusive, which may sound like faint praise, but in this genre is a rare gift, and a pleasant break from the usual "HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE, O SHEEPLE" histrionics. As such, it reflects Donahue's steady, unflappable search for the ballistic truth of the events in Dealey Plaza. Donahue wanted to believe the Warren Report. He wanted to prove that what it said was true; he was asked, in fact, to double-check exactly that.
But he couldn't -- and once he realized what hadn't happened, what couldn't have happened, he just kept grinding away at it. He made models of skulls. He pored over aerial photos. He read the cut testimony. He talked to reporters and politely called his congressman over and over.
And the government did what it does best -- nothing -- and waited for him to go away, probably because it knew he was onto something with his conclusions. It's rather shocking, at least to me, that Donahue's explanation of what happened that day hasn't become the conventional wisdom; once it becomes clear (which is fairly early on, but don't worry; the rest of the book isn't repetitive), you probably won't be able to unsee what he's showed you.
The explanation holds up; so does the book. Menninger is deceptively skilled, not overwriting but untangling the many contradictory threads of testimony deftly and showing Donahue's math and methods to their best and clearest advantage. The publisher does take the stage in the last bit of the book, to explain the measures taken to avoid getting run off the libel road by various people or government agencies, and that too is brisk and helpful.
A solid read even if you don't buy into Donahue's theory (or have much background in the case), Mortal Error is the unicorn of JFK books: believable and calm. — SDB, 5/25/14
I reviewed a Leopold and Loeb book a bit more recently, and didn’t think as well of it as I thought of Mortal Error. (Bookseller-intel side note: any copy I get in of Mortal Error goes right back out the door again with a week. Leopold/Loeb material? Just sits. Just one of those things.) If you’ve had For The Thrill Of It on your TBR list, you may want to let it sit a bit longer, as I noted in 2017.
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Simon Baatz's book on Leopold and Loeb is very good, not quite great.
The crime
Per the back of the book, "the brutal murder in Chicago in 1924 of a child by two wealthy college students who killed solely for the thrill of the experience." Said students, Richard Loeb and Nathan "The One With The Unibrow" Leopold, decided to kidnap and murder Loeb's cousin, Bobby Franks, in an effort to perpetrate the perfect crime. Their confidence that they were far too smart to be caught was misplaced, but if your definition of a perfect murder is one still under discussion nearly a century later, Nathan and "Dickie" -- sometime lovers, full-time sociopaths -- nailed it. The killing of a boy in gangster-Wild-West Chicago on its own likely wouldn't guarantee the alliterative pair enduring infamy, but the then-scandalous relationship between them, and the entrance of Clarence Darrow into the case to keep them off the gallows, means we still know their names today.
The story
As I said, For The Thrill Of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago is very good: smoothly written, without pearl-clutching, and as meticulously researched as the blurbs promise. Baatz's careful survey of the murderer's families, childhoods, and relationship and motivations for killing Franks once they'd met is done particularly well. The fact is, much of what draws us to true crime is that need to know why, when often there is no why; that tension can put true-crime writers in a strange position, when however much information and evidence available to them can still only fail to satisfy the reader on a visceral level. "The rest is just gossip," as an FBI agent once put it on some newsmag I was watching, but the first half of Baatz's narrative expertly shapes that gossip and gives you an excellent snapshot of 1920s Chicago, without overdoing it.
It gets a bit dry in the middle, though; that there is an entire section titled "PART TWO / THE ATTORNEYS" suggests that Baatz had done years plural of research on Darrow and his opposite number, prosecutor Robert Crowe, and was damned if he wasn't going to include the fullness of his conclusions in For The Thrill Of It. I absolutely sympathize, and Baatz is far from the only author whose final product suffered somewhat from refusing to kill any of his Post-It-tabbed babies -- not to mention that Baatz is a good enough proseman to pull it off, mostly. The deep background on Darrow, why this case appealed to him (as it were), and the placement of these men (and the defendants' psychiatric "team," another section that could have done with some slenderizing) in the context of their time isn't uninteresting per se. It's just not necessarily why we're here.
The American Experience episode on Leopold and Loeb is a more efficient use of your time if you don't want to spend a whole book's worth on the case -- but Baatz's book is no doubt the best in that medium on the topic, a bit overlong in spots but easy to pick up and put down and chock-full of illustrations. Recommended. — SDB, 10/25/17
And if you’d like a couple of “recommendations” for coming in under budget on true crime this year, hey, I’ve got those! Start with an annual subscription to this very newsletter — it’s just $51 for the year, all week! Treat yourself, or
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On this day in 1868, Andrew Johnson was acquitted in his Senate impeachment trial. It seems based on that History.com link that, while Johnson wasn’t great on the merits, the impeachment was motivated primarily by Congress not liking that Johnson wouldn’t bend to its will.
Isaac Chotiner interviewed Brenda Wineapple in 2019 for The New Yorker about Wineapple’s book on Johnson’s trial, The Impeachers, and what we’re usually taught about the proceedings. A couple years before that in TNY, Cass Sunstein’s “Impeachment, American Style” looked back at various impeachments, the role of impeachment in getting the Constitution ratified at all, and whether impeaching a president is ever “correctly” motivated.
I’ve avoided bringing the horror in Uvalde in here up to this point, but it occurs to me that to hear and share difficult testimonies like this is part of the point — of true crime as a genre, and of reviewing it as a vocation. Eli Saslow’s 2013 WaPo piece will not “help” in most of the senses of that word: it won’t create legislation, it won’t change any GOP bootlickers’ minds, it won’t bring children back. But the beautiful, horrible bearing of witness isn’t nothing.
The Bardens had already tried to change America’s gun laws by studying the Second Amendment and meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office. They had spoken at tea party rallies, posed for People magazine and grieved on TV with Katie Couric. They had taken advice from a public relations firm, learning to say “magazine limits” and not “magazine bans,” to say “gun responsibility” and never “gun control.” When none of that worked, they had walked the halls of Congress with a bag of 200 glossy pictures and beseeched lawmakers to look at their son: his auburn hair curling at the ears, his front teeth sacrificed to a soccer collision, his arms wrapped around Ninja Cat, the stuffed animal that had traveled with him everywhere, including into the hearse and underground.
Almost six months now, and so little had gotten through. So maybe a Mother’s Day card. Maybe that.
“Including into the hearse and underground.” Right up there with “baby shoes, never worn,” I’d say.
Friday on Best Evidence: Photographer Theo Wenner embeds with NYPD; Oklahoma is not okay.
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