. . . was how Norman Mailer predicted the tumultuous period that led to President John F. Kennedy's 1963 murder on a public street and the fifty years of controversy that have followed that turning point in our nation's history. Journalist and historian Joseph McBride, a volunteer in JFK's 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign, began studying the assassination minutes after it happened. In 1982, McBride launched his own investigation. Both epic and intimately personal, Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit incorporates rare interviews with key people in Dallas, archival discoveries, and what novelist Thomas Flanagan, in The New York Review of Books, called McBride's "wide knowledge of American social history." McBride chronicles his evolving skepticism about the official story and shines a fresh, often surprising spotlight on Kennedy's murder and on one of the murkiest, most crucial aspects of the case, its "Rosetta Stone," the Tippit killing.
Joseph McBride has been a journalist since 1960, writing for such publications as Life, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and, on this subject, The Nation. An internationally renowned film biographer and historian, he has written acclaimed biographies of John Ford, Frank Capra, and Steven Spielberg. McBride lives in Berkeley and is a professor at San Francisco State University.