The JFK files

The murder of President John F. Kennedy has provoked by far more suspicion, argument, obsession, and especially book-publishing than any similar event in American history. Now famed lawyer and true-crime writer Vincent Bugliosi has produced what he hopes will be the book to exceed all others.

"Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" may do that, in weight (5.3 pounds) as well as content, but it's clear that if his editor hadn't insisted he turn over the manuscript after 21 years of labor, the almost-superhuman effort might have wrecked his health.

In 1,612 pages and 1.5 million words, plus a CD-ROM with 10,000 footnotes in 954 pages, Bugliosi came to a conclusion that will outrage some and surprise many: that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, that he acted alone, that there was no conspiracy. Bugliosi finds there was never a speck of credible evidence of any conspiracy. Not only did the Warren Commission get it right, Bugliosi said in an interview, but within hours of the shooting, "all of Dallas law enforcement knew it was obvious that Oswald had killed Kennedy, and when they found out what an incredible kook he was, they said he had to have acted alone."

Thousands of conspiracy believers beg to differ. Convinced that an unsolved plot took the president's life Nov. 22, 1963, over the past 40 years they have created a vast cottage industry of research, newsletters, websites, conventions, and almost a thousand books. And it's not only the conspiracy legions -- a 2003 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans believed there was a conspiracy, and only 19 percent believed that Oswald had acted alone.

"I wrote this book for rational people," Bugliosi said, "including conspiracy theorists who are rational." As for the others, "I'm telling them they have wasted the last 10 or 15 years of their lives."

Though he left the courtroom 21 years ago, Bugliosi, 72, still has a prosecutor's belief that undeniable facts and evidence prove a case. He writes and speaks with deliberate intensity, as though he were addressing a jury and a life were at stake. Over two decades in the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, that intensity led to 105 convictions in 106 felony jury trials, the most famous of which was that of Charles Manson and others for the 1969 Sharon Tate murders. Bugliosi's 1974 book about that case, "Helter Skelter," was a bestseller and became a true-crime classic. Seven others have followed, including the 1996 bestseller "Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder."

"Reclaiming History" has two exhaustive parts, "Matters of Fact: What Happened" and "Delusions of Conspiracy: What Did Not Happen." Of the 14 chapters in part one, the first alone, "Four Days in November," runs 319 pages. The second half has 18 chapters, each directed at a conspiracy theory or theorist, with such titles as "Mark Lane," "Ruby and the Mob," "CIA," "FBI," "KGB," and "Cuba."

Like "Helter Skelter," the book grew out of a court case. Bugliosi went before a jury and prosecuted Lee Harvey Oswald for murder in 1986, in a British docudrama produced in London, before a real Texas judge in a replica Texas courtroom (built in London) before a jury of Texans. The witnesses were real, and the defense attorney was prominent defender Gerry Spence. There were no actors and no script. Bugliosi prosecuted the case as he would any other, and Oswald was convicted.

The "trial" was over, but Bugliosi was hooked.

"It's an incredibly fascinating story," he said. "Take 10 of the best novelists, put them in a room and give them time, and they could not come up with anything close to what happened in this case. It rivals Shakespeare. The characters alone: Jack and Jackie, this glamorous couple; Jack Ruby [Oswald's killer] and Oswald are like fictional characters; then larger-than-life figures like J. Edgar Hoover, Earl Warren, and Lyndon Johnson. It is unbelievable."

In 1986 he signed a contract with W.W. Norton to write a book. He started slowly, stopped to write others, but eventually cleared the decks. "In 1999, I said, 'I can't let anything else interfere with this,' and I started working seven days a week, 60, sometimes 90 hours a week," he said.

He plowed into the evidentiary record, as well as the mountains of conspiracy literature, and interviewed or communicated with many living players, including former President Gerald Ford, who was a member of the Warren Commission; Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) , who served on the commission staff; Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald's widow; and William Alexander, the prosecutor of Jack Ruby who had been scheduled to prosecute Oswald. He conducted hundreds of interviews.

As he proceeded, his prosecutorial ire was roused, especially at prominent conspiracy authors like Mark Lane and Harold Weisberg, and "JFK" filmmaker Oliver Stone. "The authors have the [26 Warren Commission supporting] volumes and are absolutely distorting the written record," he said. "I have never seen a case in history so intentionally shrouded in misinformation."

He also slams other famous figures whom he thinks distort the truth, such as historian Michael Beschloss, who wrote that US leaders after the assassination were more interested in reassuring the country than in finding the truth.

Like a medieval Bible scholar, Bugliosi carried off the whole project by himself, without typewriter, computer, BlackBerry, cellphone, or research assistant. He drafted the book on yellow legal pads, then dictated much of it onto 72 one-hour and eight 90-minute audio tapes. A secretary transcribed the tapes and sent him the transcripts, which he then revised extensively with long, yellow-pad inserts, producing 8 to 10 drafts of each chapter.

The strain began to tell. He had always been an indefatigable worker, he said, but as he got deeper into the arcana of various allegations and theories, and the book got longer and longer, he began to feel overwhelmed -- an experience he can't quite put into words but which sounds like overwork and data overload.

"All I can say is there were times when my body felt different," he said. "We know that anything we undertake in life, if we work hard enough, sooner or later we will come to the bottom of the pile. But there is no bottom to the pile in the Kennedy case. I would think I had covered all the issues, but then I would have to get 20 more documents from the National Archives and make 15 more phone calls. I got sucked into this abyss and couldn't get out, until my publisher said, 'Vince, we're going to press.' "

His publisher is Starling Lawrence, a novelist and editor in chief of W.W. Norton. "Pretty early, I realized that this was something nobody else could do," Lawrence said by phone. "I've known him a long time, but it's amazing to me that any one man had all this in his head. He worried about the toll it was taking on him, and I couldn't disagree with him. This is a job that could kill somebody."

Bugliosi is very much alive, and even thinking about his next book. He knows "Reclaiming History" will not change the minds of many people who cannot believe that a great man could be cut down by a lone psychopath with a $12.95 mail-order rifle.

"I wanted to write a book for the ages," he said. "As long as people are interested in this case, whether 100 or 1,000 years from now, this is a book they will have to read."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.