The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page E2

Time: 08-06-2008 18:11 User: adavis PubDate: 08-10-2008 Zone: KY Edition: 1 Page Name: 2 Color: E2 I SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 2008 THE COURIER-JOURNAL FEATURES JFK Shooting is life's focus Max Holland, who has been working on his JFK assassination book for 12 years, says, "Everyone Kevin ClarkWashington Post has been late to the first shot." None of this really matters. What matters is the American belief in the paranoid. "People want to believe there must be some momentous history behind this momentous event, that there was some group that really wanted to turn the page rather than just one lone, crazy assassin," says Michael Ka-zin, a Georgetown University professor and author of several books about the 1960s. "The thing that's great about Max is that he doesn't go for that." Thomas Mallon, a novelist who spent about a year on a nonfiction book about Oswald's landlord, didn't think his project would be too hard. Then he found himself in Parkland Hospital (where Kennedy and Oswald were taken after they were shot) after his neck and shoulders seized with tension from the stress of it all.

He says now that he had been sucked into the "space-time wormhole" of the assassination. He was amazed by the whole subculture of the self-appointed Kennedy researchers and by "the pedantry you fall into, the obsessiveness that really does come with the territory." A few miles away but still inside the Beltway, Max Holland is still deep in Nov. 22, 1963, looking for answers to mysteries that are never going to be solved. He turns back to his computer, pulls out one of his thousands of files, and settles in for another day's work. The sun is glinting off Oswald's rifle.

America. Paranoia. There's something out there. scure CIA memos, a Bay of Pigs document, comments by FBI field agents in Dallas, Jack Ruby, the mob, Oswald saying, "I'm a patsy," the magic bullet that hit both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally and then 10 years go by, and you're looking at the same bits of homemade footage on Dealey Plaza, convinced you've just about got it nailed down.

And still, here sits Max Holland, working on a book that he says will go a good 600 pages. He has to have a draft to the publisher by October. There is still, after 12 years, no publication date. "He gets really mad when people ask what's taking so long," says his wife, Tamar Gutner, a political science professor at American This leads you to believe that he's not going to show you that the limo driver actually turned and fired the fatal third shot into Kennedy (as one popular video on YouTube has it). So, maybe against your better judgment, you lean over, and look really hard at the Za-pruder film unspooling on his screen and the Secret Service guys in the second car are reacting to something just as the film starts.

See the heads turn? Now, if you calculate that "mediated nervous reaction," and the car's position, and the memories of several witnesses and the speed of the film at 18.3 frames per second, and remember 4.9 seconds elapsed between the second and third shots then you get the revelation that Oswald's first shot, the one that missed, took place before the Zapruder film. Pause. Gulp. Yes, before. Somehow, he's saying, the most-studied 19 seconds of film in American history has consistently fooled everyone, because everyone has taken it as an article of faith that three shots were captured on the (soundless) film Naw.

Holland theorizes the first shot likely dinged off a traffic mast overhanging the street and not a tree branch, as most people have thought. This means he fired earlier than people have believed and thus had far more time a total of just over 11 seconds to fire the second and third rounds. This makes it far more understandable how he could have been the lone gunman, and thus bolsters the Warren Commission's finding on that point. "Everyone has been late to the first shot," he says, pulling back from the computer screen. This is but one tiny bit of data he says will come out in "A Need to Know," which pledges to be the definitive history of the commission, that body of seven politi- cians, lawyers and Washington heavyweights who conducted the official inquiry into the assassination and whose 888-page report later became mocked as a hastily done cover-up.

Conspiracy theories and distrust in government from later events like Vietnam and Watergate have grown like ivy over the founding documents, Holland says. They obscure the time period, the Cold War, that produced a sometimes-flawed but nonetheless accurate report. It's a time capsule from the era, after McCarthyism but before Vietnam spiraled out of control, when America was trembling, but the cultural fissures had not yet shifted. "If I restore faith in the Warren Commission, I'll put to rest some of the disturbing questions people have had," Holland says. This is the tantalizing promise the assassination makes: that you're on to something everybody has missed.

So you catalog ob MEDICAID ATTORNEY "Stop Spend-Down!" 3630 Dutchmans Lane Louisville, KY We Handle Probate Estates PICNIC- CHICKEN OR HAM DINNER Serving begins 10:00 am (EDT) Sun. August 10th (Carry Outs Available) ST. MARY'S CHURCH, Lanesville, Ind. HOT. 62 (10 Ml.

W. NEW ALBANY, 2 Ml. OFF 1-64, LANESVILLE EXIT 113) PICNIC AREA AND 3 ACRES OF PARKING LOT BLACKTOP N0000221290 Lie. 111317 Games go beyond sports Continued from El sponsible people can fall into the rabbit hole of Washington research a tumble that leads you down, down, down to the Elm Street of the mind, below the Texas School Book Depository and in front of the Grassy Knoll, a few minutes past noon, in a world where it is always Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.

And Holland, 57, isn't even a conspiracy theorist babbling about the CIA and Castro! He says Lee Harvey Oswald did it and did it alone! His goal, he says, is to heal our national paranoia about Kennedy's murder, to lay to rest the lingering belief that there was some sort of conspiracy (which most Americans believe), and to have this traumatic event finally settled in the national collective consciousness. He wants people to understand that Oliver Stone's "JFK" actively misstated events, that Don DeLillo's "Libra," which has shooters on the Grassy Knoll, was a good novel but only that. A former writer for the Nation, he has already won the prestigious J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, worth a nifty $45,000, for his book, "A Need to Know: Inside the Warren Commission." That was way back in 2001. He's gotten another $131,000 in book advances.

His publisher is Knopf, one of the most respected in the business. His research is so prodigious that it has already birthed two other books, both about tape recordings from the Johnson White House that deal with the Kennedy killing. OLYMPICS Continued from El that makes the 2008 Games all the more fascinating for people like Findling. The big picture Who won and who placed second is not something the encyclopedia gets into, said Pelle. What it does cover is where the Olympics beginning with the first modern games in Athens in 1896 and ending with the 2010 Vancouver Games are held, what the site is like, what the city does to accommodate the event and the politics that surround it.

Putting it all together took almost three years, said Pelle. Each Olympics has its own chapter, including the three Olympics that were never held because of World Wars I and II 1916, 1940 and 1944. Because the Olympiad refers not to the Olympics, but the four-year period of time between the Olympics, the 1916 Olympic Games are known as the Games of the VI Olympiad, even though they never took place, explained Findling. It is something your average enthusiast sometimes gets wrong, rankling many hard-core historians, he said. But you don't have to be a history buff to grasp the role the Olympic Games have played in history, said the former professor.

"People all over the world spend a lot of their time in leisure activities, so it helps our understanding of our own history, and the history of other counties, to know what people spend their time doing and what's important to them," he said. Among those things are sports, explained Findling, and people's participation in them and observance of them says something about their values, interests and attitudes toward everything from fitness to international relations. But until recently, there was little scholarship on the movement from a social-cultural point of view, said Robert Barney. It was to fill this void that the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario was established in A health care career when learning go will not be watching the competitors as much as the people on the street. He wants to know how China's English-language newspapers cover the event, what the level of security will be and how the populace responds.

"I'm more interested in what's happening outside the stadium than I am inside the stadium," said Barney. While it will be years before historians will be able to judge the impact of the Beijing Olympics, Findling caught a glimpse of what might be in store during trips to China in 2006 and 2007. During his first visits, he recalled looking out the window of his hotel room in downtown Beijing and seeing only a few blocks before everything disappeared into a dense gray smog. On his second trip, he found the air better but still felt gritty when he returned to his hotel room at the end of the day. Now, he has heard, the air has improved, but there are still questions about how good it really is.

Findling said he also had observed the new subway lines, roads and sports venues created in part for the games. Then there was the luxury hotel that he was told would have helicopter landing pads on its roof. Because it is hard to separate what would have been done anyway from what was done just for the games, and because the Chinese government is far from transparent, the exact cost of the preparations is not known, said Findling. But he is pretty sure the 2008 Games are "the most expensive ever." While there is no large boycott of the games that he is aware of, he said, the heads of some countries may not attend the opening ceremonies. Protests of the sort that greeted Beijing's international torch relay are also expected.

But Findling said he doesn't think that will change things much. "It seems to be universal in Olympic history: No matter how many problems there seem to be before the games, they always seem to come off well." Reporter Katya Cengel can be reached at (502) 582-4224. "This has been a longstanding difficulty of the Olympics the relationship of Olympics to international politics." JOHN FINDLING, former history professor, Indiana University Southeast 1989, said Barney, the center's founding director. The Olympics, he said, is worthy of study because it is one of the biggest meetings in a global context and has many political, economic and other problems associated with it. He is well aware of those problems, having attended every Olympic Games since 1976 except the 1980 Games.

In the three decades he has been attending Olympic events, security measures and commercialism have both increased, he said. But it is the number of people that has many worried most, said Findling. In Beijing, media and athletes alone add up to more than 30,000 people, said Findling. With numbers regularly increasing, some in the Olympic movement want to reduce the size of the Olympics or, at least, to level it off and keep it manageable, he explained. But size isn't what most people are talking about right now, said Findling.

It's politics. "This has been a longstanding difficulty of the Olympics the relationship of Olympics to international politics." Outside the stadium A lot of people thought Beijing should never have been awarded the Olympics because of its questionable human-rights record, which includes political prisoners and restrictions on the media, said Findling. Barney isn't one of them. He calls himself a "China op-timist" and believes the games will continue what he feels has already begun the rapid disintegration of communist rule. While at the Olympics, he said, he and hand in hand.

N0000221443 Are you an experienced RN looking for a rewarding new career closer to home? At Sts. Mary Elizabeth Hospital we are looking for YOU! We are opening a new 33-bed private room telemetry unit and need your experience to build the start-up team. Please join us for an open house in the Human Resources department. At the open house you can interview, tour the new unit and receive a $50 gas card just for stopping by. If you are selected to join our team, you will receive an additional $100 gas card.

For more information about this opportunity, please call (502) 540-3817. All attendees are encouraged to apply online prior to the open house at: www.jhsmh.org Sts. Mary Elizabeth Hospital A BErvicE of Jewish Hospital St. Mary's HealthCare We are an AAEOE DrugSmoke free environment.