Joseph Hamilton

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Joseph is Currently Reading

Joseph Hamilton is currently reading

Chappaquiddick Speaks

by Bill Pinney

bookshelves: currently-reading, mysteries-and-controversies, scandal, true-crime

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Joseph Hamilton said: " The most obvious thing about Ted Kennedy’s automobile accident on the Chappaquiddick bridge is that the damage in the photographs does not match how the car went over the side of the bridge and came to rest on its roof on the bottom of the pond below The most obvious thing about Ted Kennedy’s automobile accident on the Chappaquiddick bridge is that the damage in the photographs does not match how the car went over the side of the bridge and came to rest on its roof on the bottom of the pond below. That discrepancy has been well known for almost six decades but for the first time, and presented in this book, an experienced accident investigator examines the photos taken at the time and determines what really happened. This information is then compared to the accident scene sketches drawn by the local police chief and the local DMV supervisor/investigator: each one in his own way misunderstands or misrepresents the photographic details to conform to Kennedy’s version of events. Were they incompetent? The author is adamant that they were dishonest. I’m not so sure.
Then there is the cause and manner of death of Mary Jo Kopeckne. It’s generally believed that she drowned in the overturned car after first Kennedy and then two of his male companions were unable to extricate her and indeed, a chief and an associate medical examiner and the local undertaker and his assistant describe the symptoms of a “dry” drowning. What is suspicious, however, is the absence of trauma on her and Kennedy’s body relative to the severity of the vehicular damage especially since the car had no seat belts.
Equally puzzling is the high level of carbon monoxide in Kopechne’s post mortem blood draw.

All of this suggests to the author that the unexplained damage to the car and a nonfatal internal injury to Kopechne resulted from a collision earlier that night and, after consulting with two of his male companions and making a number of long distance phone calls charged to his credit card, Kennedy and the others drove the damaged car with Kopechne in the trunk (hence the carbon monoxide) to the bridge, pushed it off the bridge and then placed a presumably dead Kopechne in the car. The author, in perhaps the most sordid passage in the book, speculates that after pushing the car off the bridge they realized that Kopechne was merely unconscious but with the car now in the water and Kennedy’s political career at stake, Kopechne had to be put in the car. I’m skeptical since Kennedy instead could claim to have rescued Kopechne from the submerged car.

Why not leave it as Kopechne drove off the bridge alone? Did Kennedy unnecessarily implicate himself? This is where the theory becomes tenuous but not untenable. The author believes the conspirators panicked when they realized that at least two island residents might come forward as witnesses and that their bogus timeline would come under scrutiny. As it was, the night was moonless by the time of the events and the timeline was approximate at best except where it was anchored by long distance phone calls and getting off shift work. ...more "

Jul 02, 2026 10:49AM · see review

Joseph Hamilton is currently reading

The 4 O'Clock Murders: The True Story of a Mormon Family's Vengeance

by Scott Anderson

bookshelves: currently-reading, the-virulent-and-bizarre, true-crime

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Jan 25, 2026 05:25PM

Joseph Hamilton is currently reading

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI's War on the American Indian Movement

by Peter Matthiessen

bookshelves: currently-reading, listened-to, mysteries-and-controversies, true-crime

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Joseph Hamilton said: " This book was first published in 1983 and in its current edition in 1992. At an even 600 pages of text the book covers considerably more than the subtitle's The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement, however, the This book was first published in 1983 and in its current edition in 1992. At an even 600 pages of text the book covers considerably more than the subtitle's The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement, however, the raison d’être of the book is the June 26, 1975 shooting deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation.

Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was an extremely verbose writer. For example, he subsequently wrote another true crime book, Killing Mr. Watson and then three more books about this largely unknown and scantily reported 1910 crime. What I find interesting in Matthiessen’s choice of subject is the lynch mob character of all three killings. The paucity of eyewitness accounts gives free rein to the author’s febrile imagination and in both instances his sentiments lie with the mob which is probably unique in American literature. The shamanistic American Indian belief system receives a sympathetic reception in both cases and aligns with the pantheism of his nature writings, his primary career interest.

Nowhere in the book as far as I recall did Matthiessen say he had attended Peltier’s trial in which he received a life sentence on June 11, 1977 in Fargo, North Dakota. This sentence is typical of the book’s tone:

...these very conservative rural jurors - mostly Lutherans of Scandinavian ancestry, with long faces and a long ruminative memory of the nineteenth-century massacres in Minnesota. [an apt description of Matthiessen at least] In general, the jury seemed ignorant about Indians, or prejudiced, or both; in any case, it was openly suspicious of “East Coast Jewish radical lawyers” and their “East Coast sarcasm,” [no attribution provided] which the harsh-spoken, sharp-tongued Taikeff - cool and quick as a snake with witnesses - seemed to personify.

Initially two other Indians as well as Peltier were to be tried for the killings but Peltier fled to Canada and the other two were tried in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They were represented by another East Coast Jewish radical lawyer, William Kunstler, and were acquitted.

Matthiessen has a persistent and profound distrust of the official or non-Indian version of events. This is especially evident as well as tiresome and ridiculous in his recounting of Peltier’s short-lived escape from Lompoc Prison in 1978. In the all points bulletins that followed his escape he was described as “armed and dangerous” which doesn’t strike me as especially remarkable when you consider what he was convicted of and that he was last seen fleeing the prison with Mini-14 in hand. Matthiessen believes he was so described to increase the likelihood that he would be shot and killed rather than taken alive. He was recaptured unharmed. Matthiessen then quotes several after action reports by Peltier’s captors as well as a newspaper interview with one of them. They are consistent in acknowledging Peltier’s quiet acceptance and stoic humor upon his return to captivity. Peltier, on the other hand, must have told Matthiessen well after the fact that he was mistreated.

Peltier was released from prison on February 18, 2025 and reunited with his nine children in the U.S. and Canada; the agents were twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age in 1975.

I’m not sure this should be any longer the definitive account or the final word on the killing of the FBI agents if it ever was. Outside magazine published an alternative viewpoint in its July 1995 issue; Matthiessen responded angrily in the October issue. He did acknowledge that his explanation of a government motive for persecuting the Indians, uranium deposits on the Pine Ridge reservation, was wrong. That motive was the starting point of the book and everything else followed from that.

One will find more concise and, I believe, evenhanded accounts in Wikipedia articles.

My preferred Matthiessen novel is At Play in the Fields of the Lord and African Silences for nonfiction. ...more "

Jan 13, 2026 11:13AM · see review

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Joseph’s Quotes

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

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“We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.”
― Georges Simenon

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“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

tags: goodbye

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“The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe... Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.”
― Don DeLillo

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“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

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