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a footnote, or afterthought if it is addressed at all.” 6 Holland places the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy in the context of the Cold War and the Kennedy
administration’s efforts to kill Cuba’s Communist leader Fidel Castro. Holland argues
that Oswald was motivated by the Administration’s anti-Castro policies, which he
followed closely in the press, and that the Kennedy assassination was an unintended
consequence of the Administration’s hard-line policies toward Cuba. Oswald acted
alone, according to Holland, and hatched the plot to assassinate Kennedy on his own.
In his discussion of the literature of the critics of the Warren Commission,
Holland deplores what he calls “books that conjure up fantastic conspiracies through
innuendo, presumption, and pseudo-scholarship while ignoring provable but inconvenient
facts.” 7 He criticizes historians for not paying enough attention to the assassination, and
leaving the field to conspiracy theorists. He is critical of the Warren Commission for
failing to examine the CIA plots to kill Castro, which President Kennedy had his brother,
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, oversee from the Justice Department. For Holland,
efforts to kill Castro and undermine the Cuban Revolution provided the motivation for
Oswald. Holland notes that Castro himself spoke about U.S. plots to assassinate him in
an interview with the Associated Press shortly before the JFK assassination and
threatened retaliation. Holland speculates Oswald read the interview in newspapers while
in New Orleans. In Holland’s view, the missing link in the chain of evidence tying
Oswald to the crime is the lack of an appropriate motive for Oswald to kill the President.
6
Max Holland, “After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination,” Reviews in
American History, Vol, 22 No. 2 (June 1994, ) 191.
7
Holland, 191.
7