The killing of John F. Kennedy was not just the defining event of its time. It was the fulcrum that the Cold War teetered across. On one side there were Jack and Bobby Kennedy, avatars of American privilege and hope of a generation. On the other were Fidel and Raúl Castro, reformers whose utopian experiment was slumping into violence and betrayal. And racing madly from side to side was Lee Harvey Oswald, a small and disappointed man who would change history with three shots in Dallas. These five men, linked in profound and sometimes bizarre ways, came together to write of one of modern history’s most dangerous and tragic chapters. Using breakthrough reporting and interviews with long-silent sources, Gus Russo and Stephen Molton have crafted a dramatic new telling of the Kennedy killing, its deep roots, and its long aftereffects. The narrative follows Oswald intimately from his youth through his time in Russia and his gradual unraveling in Louisiana and Texas; the Castros from oppressed intellectuals to aging tyrants; Jack Kennedy from the beginning of his run for the presidency to his final moments; and Bobby from his early career as his brother’s enforcer to his eventual redemption as a chastened humanist. Built on thirty years of intense research – including discoveries so significant that they have rekindled CIA and State Department interest in the Kennedy assassination – Brothers in Arms is a vivid, character-driven narration of a singularly fascinating time, revealing stunning new information about Oswald’s motivations, the clash of international spy apparatuses, and the secrets kept by Cuba, the USSR, and the CIA for forty-five years. For neophytes, it is the most accessible and informed single volume on the assassination. For the many readers fascinated by this story, it provides extraordinary new facts that will force a reconsideration of how and why the Kennedy murder came to pass.