Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

The Hollywood Cookbook: The Gift That Keeps on Giving!

Looking for a modestly priced gift for a special friend?  Want it to make them think of you over and over?  Would you like it to help make the world a better place. Well, that would be The Hollywood Cookbook. Every copy of it sends $5 straight off to a group of twenty charities, hand-chosen by each of the participating celebrities. It was just written up in this week's TV Guide article "The Goods: Gifts That Give Back." They ask the question: "Doing some last-minute holiday shopping? Consider a present that will make everyone happy."

If you click on the above image, it'll take you straight to the Amazon page where you can order the "Gourmand Award" edition of The Hollywood Cookbook.

If you want to really get into it, see the celebs and the recipes, etc., click here for a great website that has all things Hollywood Cookbook.  

The Book Is Dead. Not!

Rumors of Death...

This essay was originally published in Etude magazine.

The Book Is Dead.

That’s the title of the book I’m currently reading.  Of course the fact that this book was written and published, that I bought it and am reading it would seem a powerful argument against its main premise.

In fact, 172,000 books were published in the U.S. last year.  If you count vanity press and print-on-demand, a new book of fiction is right now being published every 30 minutes in America.  How can the book be dead?

There are several good answers to this.  First of all, most of those hundred thousand-plus books are essentially moribund, gathering dust on the acres of bookcases installed in megastores to lend them gravitas.  Actually, as a Viking publisher remarked a while ago, “everyone is reading the same 20 books.”  The miles of aisles at B&N and Borders are just, in the words of a B&N honcho, “wallpaper” – background decoration so that the place feels literary. The people coming in to buy one of those 20 anointed books want to browse for a while, sit in an armchair, sip a latte and feel ensconced in the world of books – of which eight out of ten flop in the marketplace. They die – mostly swiftly – moved from the front of the store “new” table to back shelf in three weeks, from shelf to return carton in two months and from there to $1.95 online sellers and Costco remainder bins.

Conspiracy? JFK's Got Nothin' on Jim Morrison

Oliver Stone has made one movie about a conspiracy, "JFK," that probably isn't true at all, and another supposedly true story, "The Doors," which isn't about a conspiracy but should have been because that, in fact, is what really happened.

Ah, the irony...

Regular readers know I'm something of a conspiracy buff. I once called the Warren Commission Report "the greatest work of fiction that American literature has ever produced." Then I proceded to create a TV series, "Dark Skies," that had, as its basis, that President Kennedy was assassinated because he knew the truth about Roswell and was going to come clean with the American people in his second term (and, no, I never actually believed that -- it was a TV series!). We even did an episode of that series, by the way, where Jim Morrison was a character.

Now we have two news stories that are upending what people believe about JFK's assassination and about Jim Morrison's death.

Former LA prosecutor Vincent Buglioisi has a new book out, "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy."  It's over 16-hundred pages and I'm not done but it make a very persuasive case that Lee Harvey Oswald was, indeed, a lone nut-case who acted alone. Just like the Warren Commission said.

Then there's Time magazine which has a new article, "How Jim Morrison Died" by Vivienne Walt that says the idea he died in his bathtub in Paris is a complete fabrication. The truth, according to Walt, is that Morrison overdosed in a Paris nightclub and that about five or six people participated in taking his body back to his apartment and putting it in that bathtub and that Paris authorities just looked the other way and never did an autopsy.

Imagine how that would have energized the ending of Oliver Stone's movie. Could have happened, too. Sam Bernett who ran the Paris nightclub was described by Time this way.

Bernett says he once met Oliver Stone's mother, and told her: "Tell your son to call me and I'll tell him how his movie should end." Stone never called.

And, yet, just as I'm accepting these new facts, there's something from each story that keeps me guessing.

First, Bugliosi, also writing in an earlier issue of Time about "What We Can Learn From JFK" had this to say about the subject of the vast conspiracy it would have taken to bring down JFK:

"Three people can keep a secret but only if two of them are dead."

Bugliosi has used this line in the famous mock-trial of Oswald he participated in for the BBC, in his book and in most interviews. It's his standard-issue one-liner and it works because, well, it generally is true.

Now let's go to the article about Jim Morrison's death.

"We carried him in a blanket and got him the hell out of there," recalls Chauvel, who was a friend of Morrison. Explaining the cover-up, Chauvel says: "I guess if you have a nightclub and Jim Morrison dies in your toilet, it is not good p.r. The five or six people who knew, who were there that night, agreed to just forget about it."

So, let's see. These six people kept this secret for 36 years now and it only broke because one of them, who's getting on in years, decided to write a book and the others have confirmed it. And they joined the conspiracy because Morrison's drug dealers didn't want their product tied to the rock star in a nightclub. Bad for business.

Maybe Bugliosi's wrong. Maybe even six people can keep a secret, provided nobody thinks there is one in the first place.

Time's New Man-of-the-Year: Still JFK After All These Years

Last month, President John F. Kennedy would have turned 90 years old, had he lived. Even so, JFK is enjoying a banner year of publicity, especially for a dead man.

This week, it's Time magazine joining the fray, giving Kennedy the cover ("What We Can Learn from JFK") and a whopping 18 full pages of print and photo space. He gets a mostly adoring view from the writers who call him "A Warrior for Peace" and an "Icon of American Elegance."

Time joins a veritable publishing bonanza trading on the fascination with JFK-ness. There's Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History which argues the most sensational assassination story you can imagine: namely that Oswald, in fact, acted alone. This book is being made into an HBO mini-series by Tom Hanks & Co. Before Bugliosi, it was Salon's editor David Talbot's Brothers which argued that Bobby Kennedy intended to win the presidency first and then investigate for a conspiracy which he believed in. And, before that, it was E. Howard Hunt who, basically on his death-bed, claimed in American Spy that it was Lyndon Johnson who conspired to see Kennedy shot.

Maybe that's what makes Time so unique with its latest issue. The assassination only gets two pages. One is devoted to Bugliosi's Oswald-acted-alone case and the other to Talbot's Bobby-suspected-conspiracy case. Everything else dissects what made JFK such a great president.

In fact, he was. His speeches were perfect pitch in confronting the Soviet menace and the Cold War, telling the enemy that we would "bear any burden" to oppose tyranny but also extending the olive branch of peace if they wished to be our partners. He was inspirational in other areas from race relations to volunteerism. He literally was of the new generation. He gave Americans hope and he gave people from around the world reason to like Americans.

Amazingly, one of the associated Time articles called "The Swingingest President Ever" is not about the hundreds, if not thousands, of women besides Jackie Kennedy that JFK bedded. It is about his golf game. The closest the writers come to analyzing his personal fall from grace is this single passage from the cover story's introduction:

"In more recent years, he has suffered from a revisionist backlash, portrayed in books and the media as a decadent prince who put the nation at risk with is reckless personal behavior. Journalist Christopher Hitchens has gone so far as to dismiss him as a "vulgar hoodlum." While Kennedy's private life would certainly not pass today's public scrutiny, this pathological interpretation misses the essential story of his presidency."

At the risk of sounding like I'm full of "revisionist backlash," I'm not certain I fully agree.

First, however, as I've said many, many times, I loved JFK and his death made a mark on me like everyone else of my generation. Second, I'm a life-long Democrat.

Still, I'm not inclined to accept Time's analysis that all would have been wonderful if only he'd lived. He lived a life of lies from his medical condition to his now-legendary affairs. He tried to kill foreign leaders. He had friends in the mob who did him favors. And, at the time of his assassination, he was not as universally liked as he was when he became a martyr.

Co-author Harry Turtledove and I have worked through the "if Kennedy lived" scenario and come up with a fairly controversial new conclusion. If JFK survived Dallas, we believe the resulting investigation would have exposed in a very short period of time all the unsavory things that have instead taken over four decades to come out. The backwash would have crippled his presidency and his reputation would be quite different today. It's an alt-history book which we invite you to check out by clicking on the image below.

Books, Books, Books

Sitting here at Book Expo 2007 at the Javits Convention Center in New York with about a minute until my internet buy runs out on me. I'm in the support role here as my wife, Jackie Zabel, has the big-shot book out. It's The Hollywood Cookbook which has been extremely well-received in its short life. Now the plan is to take it international and this is the place to start. My own interest is in talking to people about The Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy, an alt-history book I'm co-authoring with Harry Turtledove.

The Mother of All JFK Books: Oswald Acted... Alone?

After forty-plus years and a thousand books about John F. Kennedy and his assassination, it has become an accepted article of faith to most Americans (75% or more) that JFK was killed by the actions of a conspiracy. The debate has centered only on who was in on the murder plot: the CIA, the mob, Cubans, Castro, even LBJ. The most radical thing anybody can possibly say in this situation is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and was the only gunman who took at shot on November 22, 1963.

Vincent Bugliosi is that kind of radical. He's perhaps our country's foremost prosecutor. You know him because he's the man who put that evil bastard Charles Manson behind bars for life and, later, made the case against O.J. Simpson so convincingly in his book Outrage. He also prosecuted Lee Harvey Oswald (in absentia) during a 21-hour British television production in the mid-80s where he actually convinced a jury of Dallas citizens who had served on federal trials to return a guilty verdict. Buglioisi has the steely intellect to see through bullshit and the guts to call it the way he sees it.

Bugliosi's new book, Reclaiming History, has been nearly twenty years in the making. It's over 1600 pages (not a typo). For the past four days, I've been reading it like the obsessed Kennedy reader I am. I do not have eye-strain but I do have a strain in my right forearm from balancing this book. It is literally too big to hold comfortably.

I'm betting, also, that it is also metaphorically too big for many people to hold comfortably in their minds because it will challenge their current mind-sets. But, as Bugliosi points out, the JFK assassination is "the most consequential murder case in American history." Therefore, he argues, he has written these 1,612 pages because he wants it to be the definitive piece on the assassination. As a former investigative reporter myself, I am duly impressed by how much work has gone into this.

Personally, like a lot of Americans, I've followed quite a path on the JFK story. As a child, I mourned with everyone else when Kennedy was murdered. And, like most everyone else at the time, I hated Lee Harvey Oswald (who we all assumed did the deed). I hated the fact that my middle name was "Harvey" from that day forward.

Then, like a lot of Americans, I began to have doubts. The conspiracy books started to make their cases. As historians turned up the truth about a lot of Kennedy's personal conduct, and his relations with Castro, and the CIA, and the mob, well, it seemed like there were lots of suspects for a conspiracy. By the mid-90s, in fact, I even turned the JFK conspiracy into an NBC primetime television series, "Dark Skies," which bizarrely welded the two great conspiracies of our time together into a plot-line that had JFK being killed because he was about to tell the truth about UFOs in his second term.

Even before Bugliosi's heavyweight indictment (it's 5.3 pounds), however, I'd begun to have doubts about my doubts. Gerald Posner wrote Case Closed which, also, argued that Oswald acted alone. I wasn't completely swayed, but my mind was open. One thing I learned as an investigative reporter is that in most instances the simplest explanation, even if it is emotionally unsatisfying, is often the right one.

The thing is Bugliosi's book is excellent and he is a powerfully assured organizer and interpreter of facts, particularly in complex cases like this one. Plus, and this is what sets his book apart, he takes the various conspiracy theories to task one-by-one and literally shreds them.

I'm a nut for detail, too. I actually collect Time and Newsweek magazines from the 1960s. Reading the issues about JFK leading up to the assassination and after is so much different than reading what you can find today.

Now I have a confession to make. I am the same man who once described the Warren Commission Report as "the greatest work of fiction ever produced by Americans." And yet I am close to believing that the Warren Commission got it more or less right.

I can't believe I just wrote that.

• Sidebar: Oddly, I've been working on a JFK book for a few years now that, while it is not the centerpiece, also assumes that Oswald probably was the lone gunman after all. My book is an alt-history novel, co-written with prolific author Harry Turtledove, called Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy. It's our contention (at least for novelistic purposes) that if Oswald had shot at JFK in Dallas and missed, the resulting investigation would have exposed JFK's secret life as collateral damage and he would have been impeached a decade before Nixon for crimes large and small.

Articles of Impeachment: If Nixon and Clinton, Why Not Bush and JFK?

After Senator Chuck Hagel let loose the "I" word on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, people are buzzing about the possible impeachment of that other George, George Bush. After Andrew Johnson actually got himself impeached back in 1868, it took another century before Richard Nixon resigned to avoid the same fate in 1974. These days it seems we look at it as just another political weapon to use against a vulnerable incumbent -- going after Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2007.

As you know as a reader of FWIW, Harry Turtledove and I are working on a novel that says impeachment would have been used in 1965-1966 against John F. Kennedy if he'd survived the assassination attempt in Dallas. Our alternative-history book, Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy, has its own site dedicated to stating the case.

There's no question impeachment would have been a very steep hill to climb in the case of John Kennedy. He was still quite popular and he had a large Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. But coming up with possible "Articles of Impeachment" wouldn't have been that difficult. We know, because we've actually done it.

In both the Nixon and Clinton cases, the "Articles of Impeachment" were drawn up in a way where there is a lot of overlap and similarity in form. Like filling in a contract template, we've used those examples to write the "Articles of Impeachment" for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. We plan to modify and finalize them as the novel is completed, but you're welcome to read our working draft by clicking on the link below and downloading the PDF.

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT, JFK.pdf 

CLICK BANNER to visit this site

Because many people still think of impeachment as the end result and not part of the process, a basic fact set is probably in order whether you're talking about Bush in today's reality or JFK in our alt-reality.

Impeachment is the expressed power of the legislature which allows for formal charges to be brought against a high official of government for conduct committed in office. The actual trial on those charges, and subsequent removal of an official on conviction on those charges, is separate from the act of impeachment itself.

When it comes to removing a president, the House of Representatives acts as a grand jury bringing an indictment and the Senate acts as the court conducting the trial itself. The Senators themselves vote as a jury would on guilt or innocence. Therefore, Richard Nixon, who resigned before a final vote in the House of Representatives, was not actually impeached, although he was the first president to resign. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was most definitely impeached, but he was not convicted and thus not removed from office.

The people who want to impeach Bush now, or the people who seek the impeachment of JFK in our novel, all had to start with the U.S. Constitution. Article II, Section 4 states:

“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Interestingly enough, a minority view on this comes from the man who most directly benefited from the near-impeachment of Nixon. Four years before he became president, back In 1970, then-Representative Gerald R. Ford defined the criteria for impeachment as he saw it then:

"An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." 

Could Bush be impeached now? No doubt. Could JFK have been? Of course. Bottom line: it's politics.

Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy
Written by Harry Turtledove & Bryce Zabel

The Hollywood Cookbook: Win/Win for Charity

Okay, it's officially two weeks until Christmas. If you are still stuck on some gift ideas, looking in the $25 range, and want to do a good deed at the same time, you just have to think of The Hollywood Cookbook.

I've written a lot about it, but the essence is this. 20 different celebrities from film, TV and cooking each contributed an entire meal's worth of recipes to the book in honor of their favorite charity and -- this is the great part -- $5 FROM EACH BOOK GOES TO CHARITY. You can check out the celebs by clicking on the book cover to the left and seeing the larger version. All kinds of people have supported this cause: Bob Saget, Ron Howard, Anne Hathaway, Michael Chiklis, Eric Close, Thora Birch, James Denton, Brendan Fraser, Paige Hemmis, Greg Grunberg, Scott Wolf, Kerry Washington, Mark Dacascos, Treat Williams, Esai Morales, Jane Kaczmarek, Bradley Whitford, etc. and chefs like Wolfgang Puck, Nick Stellino and Mario Batali.

The book is just rolling out for the 2007 sales season, so it's not in every Barnes & Noble (although they just had a successful book signing at The Grove here in Los Angeles), but it is available for order on-line.

If you go to The Hollywood Cookbook web-site, there's an Amazon button that you click on, then search for "The Hollywood Cookbook" and you can buy the book. It is in stock now through Amazon, and they can have it delivered to you in days, plenty of time to make it your Christmas gift.

Let's say you give ten books. You know people will be thinking of you throughout the next year as they read the book and cook the recipes. But you will also know that you made a gift of $50 to charity.

Thanksgiving the Saget Way

People who only know Bob Saget for playing clean-freak dad Danny Tanner on the sitcom "Full House" or as the charming host of "America's Funniest Home Videos" really have not experienced the man as he really sees himself.

I got that chance last Friday night in Las Vegas, catching his live comedy act as part of HBO's "Comedy Festival" just wrapping up. We went with friends who work with co-sponsor AEG (Anchutz Entertainment Group) and ended up in the front row. Fortunately, we were just far enough to the side that we didn't end up getting picked from the crowd for some of his material. I'm talking about a running joke that had to do with shaving a certain body part. Other than that close call, it was a good night, starting with Jamie Kennedy opening for his friend and a really funny bit about hitting turbulance on a plane bound for Tokyo. Maybe you've seen their hip-hop video on YouTube, "Rollin' with Saget." I'm not gonna lie to you -- I thought his contribution to "The Aristocrats" documentary about the dirtiest joke ever was just gross -- I mean the First Amendment certainly gives a comic the right to talk about whatever he wants, but it doesn't compel me to like it or to like him for doing it. I just wondered "Why?"

So I guess this means that Bob Saget's a complicated man, working on the dirty side of stand-up comedy, starring in the clean side of TV sit-comedy, telling jokes that would offend practically everybody, now developing an HBO series which will fuse the two worlds. The thing is -- with the exception of "The Aristocrats" joke -- I find him enormously likeable no matter what he does and, he'll probably hate hearing this, but I really, really liked his TV persona, even if he wasn't so wild about it. His comedy act seems carefully constructed to seem like stream-of-consciousness, delivered fast, a lot of sex jokes (a LOT), plenty of mocking of his public image and more sex jokes. Plus, a healthy lack of respect for Smiegel from "Lord of the Rings" who he repeatedly suggested should be killed.

Besides assassinating literary figures, we were there for another reason. Bob is one of 20 stars in The Hollywood Cookbook (launch party on Sunday, November 19, out in stores and on Amazon for the holidays). The charity he supports in the book is the Scleroderma Research Foundation (his sister Gay died of the disease). Anyway, my wife Jackie wrote that book with her friend Morgan Most and we were able to present Bob with a copy after the show, his first look at the finished product. I honestly think he was really moved by how it all came together. If you're a Saget fan, honestly, you probably do want to buy a copy of this book because A) he's a big part of it and B) you'll be supporting his favorite charity since $5 per book goes to the fund. Here's Saget's own endorsement that is on the back jacket of the book itself:

"This cookbook's a wonderful way to help great non-profits raise money and awareness, and at the same time, feed great recipes to the people we enjoy fattening up."

Bob's literary and culinary contribution is also timely in that he presents an entire Thanksgiving menu. And he talks about a special Thanksgiving where Rodney Dangerfield came to his house shortly before his death and was discovered by Saget's daughter smoking pot. Whatever you think of Saget's stand-up act, he probably could have made a fortune selling tickets to that meal!

Something else I learned while writing this post: he and I share the same birthday, May 17.

Finally, Bob is the November "Spotlight" celebrity on "The Hollywood Cookbook" website. You can check that page out by CLICKING HERE.

The Season of Giving

The Hollywood Cookbook is starting to break nationwide. Look to see and hear more about it from sources other than yours truly soon. It's back from the printers, moving through warehouses and landing in bookstores as of this very moment.

Today it was featured prominently in an MSNBC article about holiday giving. It's called "Shop and Do Good."

This weekend there's a launch party here in Hollywood at the Kitchen Academy (one of the book's official sponsors) where the food being served is straight from the book itself.

The party's kind of like the opening shot being fired to start the holiday season. It brings together booksellers, the charities, sponsors, chefs and media. Of course, that includes my wife, Jackie, who co-wrote the book with her friend Morgan Most.

They got all kinds of celebs to take part -- names like Ron Howard, Michael Chiklis, Esai Morales, Bob Saget, Ann Hathaway, Thora Birch, James Denton, Treat Williams, Brad Whitford, Jane Kaczmarek, Mark Dacascos, Michael J. Fox, etc. And some celeb chefs like Wolfgang Puck and Mario Batali. Okay, I left people out and their reps will probably be mad at me. Point is, that's why you buy the book, right?

Anyway, back to the party. Even Greg Grunberg from ABC's "Heroes" will be there demonstrating his famous (or soon-to-be) "Grun-a-Mole" with a "secret ingredient" to go with his secret identity.

I can't say this often enough. $5 from each book goes straight to a fund to be divided among the 20 charities that have been highlighted by the 20 celebrities. It's a way to give a gift at the same time you make the world a better place. That's a great way to celebrate the holidays.

You can check out the web-site here.