HBO's "John Adams," inspired by David McCullough's biography of the Founding Father, is built from the significant events in the life of the new nation. But, it's not really history in the truest sense.

Watching a scene where Adams, as vice president, casts the "tie-breaking" vote in the Senate ratifying the controversial Jay Treaty, I thought, "That's not right. Doesn't the vote have to be two-thirds of the majority?"

I grabbed my copy of "Adams," and sure enough, McCullough wrote that the Jay Treaty sailed through with a comfortable margin of more than the required two-thirds. No vote was needed from the VP.

There's no drama in those facts, though, so the filmmakers made it up and presented it as real.

History, then, is like clay to be formed into whatever shape fits the purpose of the writer. In fact, fiction based on real people and events has become mainstay of novelists from Gore Vidal to first-timer Nancy Horan, who found drama in the life of Frank Lloyd Wright.

For the nonfiction writer, history also comes in handy for twisting into just the proper shape to fit a conclusion or make a point.

Consider "The Road to Dallas," another stop on the endless journey in search of the answers to Nov. 22, 1963.

Says David Kaiser: "... this is the first book written by a professional historian who has researched the available archives."

A professor at the Naval War College, he dove into the millions of new documents released after passage of the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. Add those millions to the mountain of paper already released and the result is a fertile breeding ground for the conspiracy-minded.

While Kaiser is a dogged researcher, his conclusion that a cabal of mobsters and anti-Castro Cubans hired Lee Oswald to kill JFK, then Jack Ruby to plug Oswald, is not new nor proven substantially.

It's a sordid, twisted tale involving the president, his brother Robert, the CIA and its collection of "good fellas" and their mistresses, and a rag-tag assortment of Cuban exile groups aiming to topple Castro.

Then there's the curious Oswald, ex-Marine, former defector to the Soviet Union, husband of a Russian national, outspoken Marxist and Castro supporter who led a shiftless life in New Orleans and Dallas.

Assembling this well-worn jigsaw puzzle using newly released documents, Kaiser builds a comprehensive account of the countless plots and actors plotting to oust Castro in the early 1960s. The Kennedys encouraged these efforts, Kaiser shows.

He then argues that Oswald was recruited by these groups allied with gangsters to kill Castro, but then the target was shifted to JFK.

Despite Kaiser's carefully drawn lines connecting a cast of thousands to a conspiracy, he never addresses the one weakness of the theory:

Why would these professional killers hire a drifter armed with a $22 war surplus rifle and a well-documented suspect past to kill the president of the United States?

Kaiser believes Oswald was the only shooter, again another unlikely setup in light of who his employers allegedly were.

Logic, for me, trumps conjecture, despite the well-plotted schematic. Kaiser is forced to bend history to fit a conclusion that still depends on several connections that remain speculative.

Nicholson Baker is both a novelist and a pacifist. In "Human Smoke," he challenges the conventional assumption that World War II was "the good war," with its heroes -- the United States and Britain -- and villains -- Germany and Japan.

In 474 pages of letters, diaries and news accounts ending in December 1941, Baker assembles a blanket indictment of both sides in a war notable for its wholesale slaughter of civilians.

Baker targets Winston Churchill and, to a lesser degree, Franklin Roosevelt as warmongers in the same league as Hitler, leaders who avoided ways to stop the conflict.

His book is the molding of history in its most obvious form. The selection of excerpts is carefully built to make his case, including the spurious charges made by FDR's opponents that he encouraged Japan to attack, even knowing about Pearl Harbor, in order to get the United States into the war.

By suggesting through others that World War II was preventable, Baker skirts the obvious question: How could America justify neutrality in the face of the facts?

War, as we have known since the Greeks and the Trojans, brings out the worst and the best in humanity. "Human Smoke" honors the best, yet insists that the worst triumphed in World War II, despite the necessity to defend the best.