The Toronto Star November 20, 1993, Saturday, FINAL EDITION SECTION: ARTS; Pg. J16 HEADLINE: Dallas: myth and memory Some 2,500 books have appeared about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy since Nov. 22, 1963. To mark the 30th anniversary Monday of that fatal day, Douglas Fetherling reviews the latest crop BYLINE: BY DOUGLAS FETHERLING SUCH WAS the polarizing effect of Oliver Stone's film JFK when it first came out two years ago that the highly respected movie critic of one American magazine got fired for giving it a favorable review. Bucking what polls told them the majority of Americans believe, the mainstream U.S. media seemed to stand as one against Stone and his fellow conspiracy theorists. That usually meant lining up squarely behind the Warren Commission's version of the truth: that President John F. Kennedy was killed by a single gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted alone, not as part of a conspiracy. The pending 30th anniversary of the murder on the 22nd of this month has only revived intense feelings on both sides. Not, mind you, that the emotions had shown much sign of subsiding in the interim. Once again, the U.S. corporate media are calling for a return to a long-discredited status quo. They've done so by boosting Gerald Posner's book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald And The Assassination Of JFK, whose enthusiastic reception has included everything from a virtually unprecedented special double issue of U.S. News & World Report (the newsmagazine with the best sources inside the intelligence community) to a long excerpt in Penthouse. By comparison, hardly any hoopla has attended publication of Deep Politics And The Death Of JFK by the distinguished Canadian poet and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott, though Scott's may well be the most thoughtful and serious-minded of the 2,500 or so titles on the subject published over the years. Posner resists the temptation to play up some of the loonier work of assassination researchers, such as the idea that Oswald was Ruby's illegitimate son. Instead, he wanders through the supermarket of evidence, picking and choosing what suits his argument, disputing the eyewitnesses and "ear-witnesses" who disagree with him while supporting those who don't. He condemns photo-enhancement techniques when it suits his purpose but not when it doesn't. He criticizes the 1970s House Select Committee on Assassinations except when he agrees with its findings, and he takes every opportunity to slam those who have written books which suggest or endorse conclusions contrary to his own. These literary victims run from the pioneering Mark Lane, down through Edward Jay Epstein, and most of all Anthony Summers, the British journalist whose book Conspiracy is probably the most important and well-argued account of what might have happened on Nov. 22, 1963. -- But these are parenthetical concerns to Scott, who believes people "must strive to bring light, not so much on the gunmen of Dealey Plaza, but on the hidden powers which on that day were successful in their struggle for political dominance." To go wider, he says, is to go deeper, and to encounter the "deep politics" of his title, by which he means "all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged" and are dedicated to putting down dissent and maintaining the business establishment. Scott writes, "that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead, not to a 'few bad people,' but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the ways we are systematically governed."