[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

The men and women who had surrounded President Kennedy…were
unacquainted with the maggoty half-world of dockets and flesh-peddlers, of
furtive men with mud-colored faces and bottle blondes whose high-arched
overplucked eyebrows give their flat glittering eyes a perpetually startled
expression, of sordid walkup hotels with unread Gideon Bibles and tumbled
bedclothes and rank animal odors, of police connivance in petty crime, of a way
of life in which lawbreakers, law enforcement officers, and those who totter on
the law’s edge meet socially and even intermarry. There is no mystery about Jack
Ruby’s relationship with the Dallas Cops. His type is depressingly familiar in
American police stations. 130
In the end, time has shown that Manchester’s depiction of President Kennedy, of
Dallas, and Lee Harvey Oswald were simplistic perhaps to the point of absurdity. The
popular historian began work on his book shortly after the assassination, and his work
reflected the national distress over the assassination.
Some of the same criticisms can be leveled at Jim Bishop’s The Day Kennedy
Was Shot, published in 1968 by an author who had already reached a large audience with
his earlier work The Day Lincoln Was Shot, as well as A Day in the Life of President
Kennedy. Once again, the reader finds a contrast between the vibrant, handsome,
powerful Kennedy and a cipher who failed at everything. Here’s how Bishop introduced
Oswald to the reader: “He talked big but couldn’t hold onto a job...He brooded sullenly
and appeared to have trouble making love to his wife…Sometimes, in his frustration, he
beat her with his fists…To a young man whose father had died two months before he was
born; to a boy who had slept with his mother until he was eleven years of age; to one who
130 Manchester, 334.
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