Reclaiming History - Research

Research

Much of the book was based on Bugliosi's preparation for a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald staged by British television, in which he acted as the prosecutor of Oswald, and obtained a verdict of "guilty":

My professional interest in the Kennedy assassination dates back to March 1986 when I was approached by a British production company, London Weekend Television (LWT) to "prosecute" Lee Harvey Oswald as the alleged assassin of President Kennedy in a proposed twenty-one hour television trial to be shown in England and several other countries, including the United States. I immediately had misgivings. Up to then, I had consistently turned down offers to appear on television in artificial courtroom settings. But when I heard more of what LWT was contemplating, my misgivings quickly dissolved. Although this could not be the real trial of Oswald...LWT, working with a large budget, had conceived and was putting together the closest thing to a real trial of Oswald that there would likely ever be, the trial in London being the only "prosecution" of Oswald ever conducted with the real witnesses in the Kennedy assassination. Through painstaking and dogged effort, LWT had managed to locate and persuade most of these original key lay witnesses, many of whom had refused to even talk to the media for years, to testify...There would be absolutely no script...and no actors would be used.

In 2007, Bugliosi told Cynthia McFadden of ABC News that in the preceding seven years he had devoted 80 to 100 hours per week working on the book. In a 2009 interview with Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times, Bugliosi described Reclaiming History as his magnus opus and said it was the work he was most proud of. Comparing its sales with his 1974 bestseller Helter Skelter, he told Morrison "if you want to make money, you don't put out a book that weighs 7 1⁄₂ pounds and costs $57 and has over 10,000 citations and a million and a half words."