This is how history gets distorted— unintentionally. David Frum tells a powerful story about JFK’s assassination and Jacqueline Kennedy’s empathy for the wife of another victim that day. There’s just one problem. He says Lee Harvey Oswald killed a Secret Service agent. He didn’t. Oswald killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit about 45 minutes after the assassination. Tippit left behind a wife and three children. And yes—Jacqueline Kennedy did reach out. She sent Tippit’s widow a handwritten note, saying the eternal flame at Arlington would burn for her husband as well. The humanity of that gesture is real. The details, as Frum told them, are not. This isn’t about bad faith. It’s about memory—how even well-informed people can reshape events over time without realizing it. And how audiences, hearing it confidently retold, absorb it as fact. That’s how the record gets blurred. A reminder of something I’ve learned after years of reporting and writing history: Listener beware. Not everything you hear—even from influential voices—is true.

33 years after publication, Case Closed is #1 in 1960s U.S. History on Amazon Kindle. Not something I take for granted. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and continuing to engage with the facts.