The American Spectator

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A good thing, too. The authors intriguingly suggest that Torresola and Collazo were in fact a last-minute desperate stand-in force. Five assassins might have been supposed to reconnoiter in New York, then go to D.C. Five men armed with automatic pistols would have created the Alben Barkley administration.

p> HOW THIS BOOK DOES SHINE. I mentioned "New Journalism." Dig this, as Hunter (this is Hunter) describes the Puerto Ricans' emigration from "splendor to squalor," from the verdant green of their homeland to the Big Apple: br> /p>

The New York, New York that's a hell of a town, where the Bronx was up and the Battery down, eluded them, except via the bitter low rungs of the service economy. The town where Fred and Ginger tripped the light fantastic: they swept up the garbage after the shoot. The Algonquin Circle, where wits and wags threw pearls of polished venom at each other: no Puerto Ricans invited, except for the busboy who policed the martini glasses with Dorothy Parker's smeared-lipstick cigarette butts in them. The New York Athletic Club, where the old Irish Catholic politicos who ran the city took their steam baths: the Puerto Ricans gathered the sweat-soaked towels.

br> There is more, a whole book full of more, of personal sketches of the assassins and the officers they confronted, of the President in his band-box neat clothing taking his morning walks and a tot of bourbon to start the day, of an Edenic village called Jayuya in a Puerto Rican mountain valley where the nationalist revolution was born, most of all of the way things were one hot day in 1950 on a Washington, D.C. street when pistol shots crackled and men bled and fought and died, and one more American President came within an eyelash of being cut down, too.

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