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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"He's a very responsible researcher," says Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University history professor and author of several books about the 1960s.

"The ultimate painstaking research person and serious writer," says McMillan.

"He's an excellent reporter . . . honest and objective," says Al Goldberg, the historian on the Warren Commission.

"Transparently and pathetically irresponsible."

Whoa! This last is from Dale Myers, who won an Emmy for his computer animation work on the Zapruder film. He studied the assassination for 35 years and developed a computer-generated, three-dimensional model of the assassination sequence. He thinks Oswald did it, too.

But he ridicules Holland's analysis of an early first shot. He goes into great detail about the position of the car, the traffic mast on Elm Street, and Oswald's perch above it all.

"He's out to lunch, to put it kindly," Myers says.

None of this really matters. What matters is the American belief in the paranoid.

"People want to believe there must be some momentous history behind this momentous event, that there was some group that really wanted to turn the page rather than just one lone, crazy assassin," says Kazin, the history professor. "The thing that's great about Max is that he doesn't go for that."

Thomas Mallon, a novelist who spent about a year on a nonfiction book about Oswald's landlord, didn't think his project would be too hard. Then he found himself in Parkland Hospital (where Kennedy and Oswald were taken after they were shot) after his neck and shoulders seized with tension from the stress of it all. He says now that he had been sucked into the "space-time wormhole" of the assassination. He was amazed by the whole subculture of the self-appointed Kennedy researchers and by "the pedantry you fall into, the obsessiveness that really does come with the territory."

A few miles away but still inside the Beltway, Max Holland is still deep in Nov. 22, 1963, looking for answers to mysteries that are never going to be solved. He turns back to his computer, pulls out one of his thousands of files, and settles in for another day's work.

The sun is glinting off Oswald's rifle. America. Paranoia. There's something out there.