Nov. 22, 1963

Holland has a publisher, payment and even an award for his work in progress, "A Need to Know: Inside the Warren Commission." (By Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)
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Pause. Gulp.

Yes, kids, 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. Nah. 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 politicians, lawyers and Washington heavyweights who conducted the official inquiry into the assassination and whose 888-page report later became mocked as a hastily done coverup.

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 catalogue obscure 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.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who knew both Kennedy and Oswald, spent 13 years working on "Marina and Lee," a book that sought to be the definitive word on the assassin. It was published in 1977. Gerald Posner's years-in-the-making 624-page "Case Closed," which sought to be the last word on the case, was published in 1994. Vincent Bugliosi spent 20 years on "Reclaiming History," his 1,648-page tome that sought to settle everything, once and for all.

That was last year.

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 University.