Stanley J. Marks authored one of the earliest and most prescient books about President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Murder Most Foul! (1967).Coup d'Etat! is his third work of nonfiction about the JFK case. Originally published in 1970, it includes original and insightful commentary on the trials of Clay Shaw, Sirhan B. Sirhan, and James Earl Ray. Marks describes the work as "A true detective story that reveals the prostitution of the 'basic principles of American justice' as practiced by the Warren Commission." He also examines the interrelated conspiracies that killed JFK, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Senator Robert Kennedy. In discussing the nefarious role of the mass media in spreading disinformation about the presidents murder, he writes: "The responsibility for the 'success' of the Warren Commission and its 'Report' must rest solely upon the mass communication media, which went out of its way to protect the duplicity, deceit, and deception practiced by the Commission upon the American citizen. Why the 'lords' of the press decided to uphold such fraud can only be answered by them.... Whatever the reason, the 'lords' acquiesced in the 'Report' and, in the long run, the 'lords' and their 'peasant' readers will pay the price with the gradual erosion of freedom of the press. The rise of fascism in the United States is proceeding on the same ground, and in the same manner, that the press lords of Germany paved the way for Hitler; those same 'lords' in Italy for the Mussolini; those same 'lords' who preferred Hitler to Blum; and the same 'lords' who exalted at the demise of democracy in Greece in 1967-68."
