by G. Jack Urso
“Nobody’s going to shoot at me.” — The last
words of Lee Harvey Oswald.
I was born in
November 1964, about a year after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Indeed, my middle name “Jack” is partially in tribute to the then not-so-recently-deceased late president. Kennedy’s death hung over the children of my
generation like a specter.
Like many, I too
was convinced that JFK’s death was the result of CIA machinations, or a jealous
J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, or the Mafia. Perhaps the deed was done at the
hands of pro-Castro Cubans upset over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, or maybe
it was anti-Castro Cubans upset over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, or it was
Castro himself, striking back after failed CIA assassination attempts. Maybe it
was the Soviets, angry at being bested by JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Like most, I knew few specifics, but since so many believed there was a
conspiracy I assumed where there was smoke there must also be fire.
Spurred on by what
I was convinced was the weight of evidence that favored a conspiracy, including
the 1979 United States House Select Committee on Assassinations which concluded
that there likely was a second shooter on the infamous grassy knoll and that
President was likely assassinated as the result of a conspiracy, I decided to
investigate the matter for myself. In the early 1990s, I began reading every
book or magazine article I could find on the topic. Using my access to the
library at the college I worked, I used interlibrary loan to get books I
otherwise would never have been able to read. I taped and watched a
mind-boggling number of “documentaries” which purported evidence of
conspiracies. I read the Warren Report, various autopsy reports, ballistic
studies, and investigative reports from all sides of the debate.
I admit freely,
in retrospect, that I was looking for evidence of a conspiracy. I was convinced
that President John F. Kennedy was so powerful a threat to the military-industrial
complex, or the intelligence community, or the Mafia, or disgruntled Cubans, or arch-conservatives,
or Communists that one of these groups carried out and got away with the crime
of the century.
In the end, I
came to the conclusion that while some groups had motive to kill President
Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald got there first and acted wholly of his own accord.
It is a conclusion I came to only after years of research and deliberate contemplation.
Lee
Harvey Oswald
After my first
year of research, I noticed that the one common element to every theory was Lee
Harvey Oswald. Sometimes Oswald is the hub of a theory — an agent working for
the government, or the Soviets, or on behalf of the Mafia, etc. Sometimes
Oswald is a peripheral element, a dupe, a patsy, the fall guy. I could spend an
eternity exploring the minutiae of every theory, and did for years, or I could
focus my energies on Lee Harvey Oswald.To that end, I
created a timeline of Oswald’s life. Only facts gathered from the most
verifiable and objective sources were considered for inclusion, which helped me
to determine which theories were possible within the context of the timeline.
Oswald’s
upbringing, in his own words and as verified by his brother Robert, was largely
marked by neglect. Their father, Robert Oswald Sr., died about two months
before Lee Harvey was born on October 18, 1939, leaving his upbringing in the
hands of his mother, Marguerite. Without a husband, Marguerite felt her
children were a burden and placed them in an orphanage (“Who was Lee Harvey
Oswald”). Marguerite was intensely self-centered and emotionally distant from
her children and as a result Lee Harvey Oswald grew up without making any
significant connection to a nurturing influence.
In 1952,
Marguerite and Lee moved to New York City and into her step-son John Pic’s
apartment, who was newly married with a young son. Like the mother-in-law from hell, Marguerite
planted herself in Pics’s home and showed no desire to find a place of her own.
Oswald hated the move and showed his displeasure by getting into loud arguments
with his mother and hitting her. In one incident, Oswald pulled a knife on
Pic’s wife and punched his mother in the face when she tried to interfere.
Oswald’s behavior carried over into the classroom, when he showed up, where he
got into fights, had temper tantrums, did no homework, and refused to salute
the flag (Posner 10, 13). Already, the spirit of the young Marxist was becoming
evident.
While it is
tempting to suggest that the 11 year old Oswald was acting out in response to
being uprooted from his native south, there is sufficient eyewitness testimony
to establish that Oswald’s dysfunctional, and violent, behavior had already
manifested itself in Texas prior to moving to New York. Neighbors in Fort Worth
observed Marguerite was “overbearing,” but at the same time did not discipline
Oswald, whose behaviors at this time included throwing stones at other children,
public displays of temper, and threatening older brother John Pic with a
butcher knife on one occasion, and throwing a knife at him another time (Posner
9, 10).
In 1953, Lee
Harvey Oswald was remanded to a youth detention center for his persistent truancy
and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Evelyn Siegel (née Strickman),
a social worker assigned to Oswald, noted Marguerite “never gave a damn” about
the young Lee Harvey Oswald – a
sentiment echoed by his probation officer who thought Oswald’s mother
contributed to her son’s socially maladjusted behavior (Posner 12, 14).
Siegel
remembered Oswald in an interview for the PBS documentary series Frontline:
He was just emotionally frozen. He was a kid
who never developed a trusting relationship with anybody. From what I garnered,
he really interacted with no one. He made his own meals. His mother left at
seven and came home around seven and he shifted for himself. You got the
feeling of a kid no one gave a darn about. He was just floating along in the
world with no emotional resources at all (“Who was Lee Harvey Oswald”).
As Gerald Posner
notes in his book, Case Closed, Oswald
joined the U.S. Marines very likely for the same reasons his older brother
Robert and step-brother John Pic. Pic reported Oswald joined up “to get
from out and under . . . [t]he yoke of oppression from my mother.” Robert
concurs, stating Oswald “had seen us escape from mother that way. To him,
military service meant freedom” (Posner 19).
Comrade
Oswald
Oswald’s early interest
in politics is well documented. I Led
Three Lives, a jingoistic mid-fifties television show about an FBI agent
who infiltrated the Communist Party, intrigued Oswald, noted his brother Robert
for Frontline:
. . . he became really engrossed in that
particular television show. I think he just liked the atmosphere that you could
do anything that you wanted to do, that you could imagine you could do. (“Who
was Lee Harvey Oswald”)
By the time he
was in high school, Oswald was vocalizing his Communist beliefs to classmates,
who later testified to early discussions with the budding young Marxist. At 16,
Oswald wrote the Socialist Party of America and asked about joining a local
branch of their youth league (Posner 16-18). Any theory that Oswald was not a Communist
has difficulty challenging the well-documented evidence of Oswald’s early
political leanings.
With no fellow Socialists
to mingle with, Oswald diverted himself by joining the Civil Air Patrol, the
youth auxiliary of the Air Force. Though his time with the Civil Air Patrol was
brief, it does lead us to one intriguing bit of evidence, a photograph (see
fig. 2, below) which connects conspiracy theory favorite David Ferrie with
Oswald.
David Ferrie’s
role in the conspiracy theories stems from his work as a private investigator
for a lawyer representing New Orleans Mafia head Carlos Marcello. Additionally,
Ferrie was an associate of Guy Bannister, a retired FBI agent who also worked
as a private investigator and is reported to have organized anti-Communist activities
from his office in New Orleans.
The
anti-communist activities of Guy Bannister and David Ferrie were not
isolated. Training camps for anti-Castro
Cuban forces were shut down that summer of 1963. Ferrie’s alleged activities
flying for anti-Castro Cubans was not an entirely uncommon activity. A deceased
relative of my family flew with arm shipments to anti-Castro forces to Cuba in
the early 1960s and still spoke bitterly about the U.S. “abandoning”
anti-Castro forces decades later (Sartorio).
The photograph below
(fig. 2) shows a teenaged Lee Harvey Oswald in a group picture with David
Ferrie at a 1955 Civil Air Patrol cookout (“Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald”). Ferrie
actually had been officially suspended from the Civil Air Patrol at the time,
purportedly for giving “unauthorized political lectures to the cadets” (Posner
142). One can only surmise the reaction of the budding young Socialist Lee
Harvey Oswald, who refused to salute the flag even at this young age, to the
political rantings of the anti-Communist David Ferrie.
Fig. 2: David Ferrie (circled on left) and a young Lee Harvey Oswald
(circled on right) at a Civil Air Patrol cookout in 1955. Proof of a conspiracy
or young men eat lunch?
While
intriguing, the photograph itself does not further any conspiracy theory.
Oswald’s Marxist beliefs were set during his formative teen years and there is
no evidence to suggest that he abandoned his political beliefs, even after his
failed attempt to enter Cuba via Mexico City in October 1963.
I do, however,
believe Oswald may have attempted to use his previous acquaintance with David
Ferrie during the summer of 1963 in an attempt to infiltrate anti-Castro Cuban
organizations and build up his credentials as a Communist activist prior to his
planned attempt to defect to Cuba later that fall. This is an old theory, but
one that seems to fit the facts.
It is well-known
that Oswald attempted to infiltrate anti-Castro groups in New Orleans in August
1963, when he approached lawyer Carlos Bringuier, a delegate to the anti-Castro
Cuban Student Directorate. Bringuier, at first, thought Oswald was an FBI informant,
so he was suitably surprised four days after his initial meeting with Oswald to
find him on a street corner handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets (Posner
151-152).
On those
leaflets, the address for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee’s was stamped 544
Camp Street. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee New Orlean’s chapter was
comprised of exactly one person, Oswald himself, and there is no evidence that
he ever rented an office at the Camp Street address. Guy Bannister, however,
did have an office at that address and David Ferrie was reported to have
visited there numerous times that summer of 1963 (Posner 137-138).
Interestingly, 544 Camp Street is approximately one block away from the Reilly
Coffee Company, where Oswald worked the summer of 1963.
Are such
coincidences possible? In my essay, Arthur John Shawcross: The Monster on
Alexander Street, I noted how I discovered years after the fact that my odd ball
next-door neighbor in Rochester, NY, in 1988 was a serial killer. I later found
out that in 1987 Shawcross, following a long stretch in prison, spent a brief
period of time in Delhi, NY, at the same time I was visiting my mother in the
small New York hill town. Coincidence? Yes, absolutely.
Oswald and
Ferrie were essentially two sides of the same coin. Each had political agendas
regarding Communism that were driven by deep-seated personal issues. Both lived
in New Orleans and worked within one block of each other. The possibility that
their lives intersected is not so much a coincidence as much as it was a
statistical probability.
Since both
Oswald and Ferrie were known to have worked in the same area of New Orleans, my
wholly unsubstantiated opinion is that there is a probability that Oswald may
have run into Ferrie. Could Oswald have attempted to approach Ferrie, as he did
Carlos Bringuier, with an eye towards infiltrating the anti-Communist/anti-Castro
groups with whom Ferrie was involved? Ferrie, being a rabid anti-Communist,
would very likely have remembered the one boy from his Civil Air Patrol chapter
who defected to the Soviet Union. One can only imagine what transpired when
these two borderline personalities met, if they ever did. Ferrie, however, denied
ever knowing Oswald and the trail went cold when Ferrie died in 1967.
Listing 544 Camp
Street on the Fair Play for Cuba leaflets was more likely than not Oswald
thumbing his nose at the anti-Castro movement, who he clearly saw as his
nemesis that summer of ‘63.
Video Clip 1: WDSU-TV Interview with Lee Harvey Oswald.
From the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.
Back
in the U.S.S.R.
Oswald’s study
of the Russian language in the Marines, long cited as evidence of a conspiracy,
did not raise any suspicions at the time since others, including one of his
commanding officers, studied the language as well (Posner 31). Oswald’s Russian
language skills, however, were rated poor when tested by the Marines. Oswald
did cultivate an interest in Castro while in the Marines and likely made
contact with Japanese Communists while stationed there, from whom he may have
gotten the idea to defect (Posner 24-25).
The Soviets,
however, did not need Oswald. He was a low-level radar operator and any codes
he knew were changed once it was known he had traveled to the Soviet Union
(“Who was Lee Harvey Oswald”). Indeed, Oswald had been busted to private prior
to leaving the marines and his last job was not as a radar operator, but rather
doing janitorial work (Posner 32). Higher ranking members of the U.S. military
and various intelligence agencies had defected to the Soviet Union during the
1950s and 1960s, with far more valuable secrets that the few paltry outdated
codes Oswald could offer.
Oswald defected
to the Soviet Union in October 1959 and remained through June 1962. The Soviet
government did not trust Oswald and after his initial request to stay had been
rejected, Oswald attempted a “suicide” in a thinly veiled attempt to draw on
their sympathy. Oswald slashed his wrist, but the wound was not particularly
deep, and it was planned just minutes before his Soviet “tour guide” was due to
arrive.
The doctor on
duty who examined Oswald, Dr. Lydia Mikhailina, was interviewed for Frontline and reported she thought this
was a “show suicide since he had been refused political asylum.” In short,
Oswald blackmailed the Soviet Politburo in order to avoid an international
incident by having an American citizen die under mysterious circumstances (“Who
was Lee Harvey Oswald”). It worked and Oswald was permitted to stay.
Oswald, however,
never got the appointment to Moscow University that he sought and instead was
shipped off to Minsk to build televisions and electronics. This is rather
ironic since in an interview with reporter Priscilla McMillan (née Johnson)
shortly after his arrival in Russia, Oswald stated that he defected because,
“He did not want to live like a worker under capitalism as his mother did and
be exploited all his life” (“Who was Lee Harvey Oswald”). This, of course, is
exactly what Oswald would experience in the Soviet Union.
He settled into
his job as a factory worker and enjoyed a “luxury apartment” befitting his
status as a high-profile foreign émigré (“Who was Lee Harvey Oswald”). A perk a
young man his age would not ordinarily enjoy, and no doubt helped the socially
awkward young man attract a pretty young Russian bride, despite his language
problems and general loathing of humanity.
While Oswald
“defected” to the Soviet Union, he never actually officially renounced his
citizenship. He may have been hedging his bets since the Soviets were never
completely welcoming of him. His ideal of a worker’s paradise quickly eroded
into a dull, gray existence as he discovered he was as out of place in Russia
as much as he was in the United States. The government did not trust him — the
KGB kept Oswald under surveillance, thinking that he could be a sleeper agent. In
the end, they determined they had little to fear from Oswald.
We concluded that he [Lee Harvey Oswald] was
not working for American intelligence. His intellectual training, experience,
and capabilities were such that it would not show the FBI and the CIA in a good
light if they used people like him. — Vladimir Semichastny, former head of the
KGB, who handled Oswald's case (“Who was Lee Harvey Oswald”)
Oswald, despite
his earnest claims of allegiance to Marxism, had no credentials as a Communist
activist and this, in part, was what led to his initial rejection by the Soviet
government. The lesson Oswald learned was that if he ever planned to defect again,
he should have a better resume. This, in my opinion, was the driving motive
behind Oswald for his subsequent activities in New Orleans after his return to
the United States.
Video Clip 2: Oswald arrest news and New York City street interviews.
From the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.
The
Bloody Facts
The cabal of
politicians and academics living in the bubble of the House Select Committee
who assembled the carefully constructed conclusions of its 1979 report had its
integrity successfully challenged by of all things, rock and roll and porn. Gallery magazine included a flexible
plastic recording of a police dicabelt that purportedly proved that four
gunshots took place in a six-second period, an impossibility with the Mannlicher-Carcano
rifle Oswald used. This suggested a second gunman.
Steve Barber, a
rock drummer with experience in audio production, purchased the issue and
listened to the recording. Barber discovered a faint, but discernible, “Hold
everything secure . . . ” that was attributed to Sheriff Bill Decker and known
to have been spoken by Decker approximately one minute after Kennedy was shot.
This meant that the “sound impulses” noted by House Select Committee experts
and attributed to the assassin, took place after the assassination. The sound
impulses were not gunshots and because of this, and other errors, the House
Select Committee’s report was conclusively refuted by the National Academy of
Sciences in a 1982 investigative report (Posner 241-242).
Subsequent investigations
established that Oswald had in fact approximately eight seconds to make three
shots, sufficient time to make the kill. Further, there was no fourth shot. Oswald
displayed sufficient skill in the Marines to make a head shot of man moving
slowly away from him in a straight line. The “Magic Bullet” is a red herring. Governor John Connelly’s and President Kennedy’s bodies were positioned to
permit the path the bullet followed. Reverse ballistic trajectory projection of
Connelly’s and Kennedy’s wounds leads back to the area of the sniper’s next in
the sixth floor window of the School Book Depository (“Who was Lee Harvey
Oswald”).
Video Clip 3: NBC News Break November 22, 1963, WBAP-TV. From the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.
The head shot
caught so dramatically on Abraham Zapruder’s film is misleading to the
untrained eye. The reaction backwards is the result of the “jet affect” of the
energy of the bullet being absorbed by the brain which in turn shoots out the
hole created by the exiting bullet with enough force to push the head back (an effect
which has been repeated in tests). As gunshot exit wounds are larger than entry
wounds, this also corresponds with the existing physical evidence, unless
conspiracy theorists would have us believe that basic laws of physical science
and ballistic dynamics were temporarily suspended in Dealey Plaza for about eight seconds.
Attempts to link
Oswald to the mafia via Jack Ruby have similarly fallen apart. There is no
evidence that Oswald had any underworld connections. Ruby, despite his
underworld connections, was a low-level hustler not trusted by either side of
law. Tony Zoppi, a Dallas reporter who knew Ruby, stated in an interview with
Gerald Posner in 1992:
People in Dallas, in those circles, knew
Ruby was a snitch. The word was on the street that you couldn’t trust him
because he was telling the cops everything. . . . You have to be crazy to think
anybody would have trusted Ruby to be part of the mob. He couldn’t keep a
secret for five minutes. He was just a hanger-on, somebody who would have liked
some of the action but was never going to get any. (Posner 361)
“Somebody who
would have liked some of the action but was never going to get any.” The very
same thing could be said about Lee Harvey Oswald.
According to
former Dallas Detective Jim Leavelle, who was escorting Oswald when Oswald was
shot, noted in an interview on the PBS program Frontline, the time selected to transport the prisoner where spur
of the moment. Therefore, no inside informant working for the mafia could have
contacted Ruby to “tip him off” when Oswald would be transported, a key element
for the mafia conspiracy to be true. Ruby was nowhere near a phone when the
decision to move Oswald was made.
Fig. 3: This non-descript door leads to the underground garage where Oswald was shot. It sits diagonally across from the School Book Depository.
More
significantly, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to assassinate General Edwin Walker, a
hard-right conservative leader, in April 1963. A fact attested to by his wife
Marina, who reported that Oswald admitted doing so, and saved several of the
photographs Oswald took of Walker’s residence when planning the assassination
attempt (Posner 114-116).
Oswald missed
Walker when his bullet was deflected by the window frame. Oswald aimed close
enough that Walker reported his arm bled in three places after being hit with
glass and wood from the window (“Who was Lee Harvey Oswald”).
Oswald would
have another shot that November, and at a target much bigger than even he could
have anticipated.
The
Deal with Dealey Plaza
 |
| Fig. 4: Layout of Dealey Plaza on historical marker at Dealey Plaza. |
Dealey Plaza is
flanked by two semi-circular colonnades between an overpass and two low walls
in front of reflecting pools. Three roads run through it and buildings situated
on the outskirts include the Texas School Book Depository and County Court
House and jail. Dealey Plaza is an echo chamber made of concrete, asphalt,
brick, and stone.
Fig. 5: The view of the colonnade and the grassy knoll. A similar colonnade sits opposite the plaza.
The crack of a
high-power rifle in this acoustic arena led some witnesses to claim they heard
a sound from the grassy knoll. Sound waves of the gunshot from the Depository
Building would have echoed off the semi-circular colonnade nest to the grassy
knoll. After years of my own research, I determined that so-called witness
reports were not credible. There was no second gunman on the grassy knoll.
There was no need. Oswald had the better shot from a better position. For one, the
grassy knoll is actually quite close to the colonnade and not far from the
street. Abraham Zapruder filmed the scene while standing on top of a wall about
30 feet away from the fence where the alleged second shooter stood.
 |
| Fig. 6: A view of Zapruder's position from the grassy knoll. |
I took the
picture above (fig. 6) standing from the point on the grassy knoll where the
second shooter would have stood had he actually existed. I am looking over to
the short wall by the stairway where two people are standing. Zapruder stood on
top of that wall, flanked by his secretary and stopped filming right on the
point in the fence where the second gunman should have been standing. No one is
there.
Fig. 7: A view of the grassy knoll from Zapruder's position. Despite being so close he did not identify a gunshot from this position.
Zapruder himself
is not clear on where the shots came from. Initially he reported he thought the
shots came from behind him, the location of the School Book Depository, and the
grassy knoll is to the right of Zapruder at about the 2 o’clock position.
Later, Zapruder testified before the Warren Commission, “There was too much
reverberation. There was an echo which gave a sound all over. In other words
that square [Dealy Plaza] is kind of — it
had a sound all over.”
Neither
Zapruder’s original statement nor his Warren Commission testimony supports a
conspiracy theory. Further, it confirms the “echo chamber” acoustics of Dealy
Plaza — a point often dismissed or overlooked by conspiracy theorists.
Video Clip 4: Oswald arrest and eyewitness reports.
From the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel.
My
Pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza
In April 2002, I
travelled to Dallas to do media relations for the International Reliability
Physics Symposium. This gave me the opportunity to see Dealey Plaza for myself.
I made several visits, taking photographs and retracing Oswald’s and Ruby’s
steps. Visiting the location where a historical event actually took place gives
one a sense of context that cannot be replaced by photographs, video, or the
written word.
Hawkers of cheap
tabloids purporting claims of conspiratorial cover-ups roamed the plaza. I find
this somewhat on the level of Jesus finding money-changers in the Temple, an
absolute sacrilege; however, I found it hard to get angry at them. These were
men clearly at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and trying to hustle up
enough money for their next meal.
 |
| Fig. 8: The Texas School Book Depository. The sixth floor sniper's nest window is partly opened. Two street vendors selling conspiratorial tabloids can be seen just left of the entrance. |
I was more
outraged by a woman who set up a table on the walkway between the grassy knoll
and where Abraham Zapruder stood while filming the assassination. She was
pushing a conspiratorial theory involving an elderly couple that was both
complex and breathtakingly stupid in its construction. Her display was
comprised of a poster board with photographs and notes made in marker, not much
removed in quality from a grade school project. Of course, she was selling a
vanity press publication about the “theory.”
I interrupted
her presentation to a young tourist couple and rattled off about a dozen
questions, none of which she could answer and all of which exposed her theory
as a self-serving attempt to score a buck. Deciding I made my point, I marched
off before I lost my temper on what I considered to be sacred ground.
Walking towards
the reflecting pools, I realized, here I was in my black suit and sunglasses
aggressively questioning a conspiracy nut at Dealey Plaza. I ironically had
become a “Man in Black” and rather than casting doubt in the woman’s mind about
her theory, I probably just reinforced it. I can only imagine what her reaction
would have been if she found out I was a defense information-corporate intelligence
consultant in town doing media relations for a symposium that included
scientists who worked in the defense industry.
Dealey Plaza is
a Rorschach test — we see in it what we bring there ourselves.
Parting
Shots
Lee Harvey
Oswald’s life was marked by rejection — rejected by his mother, the Marines,
the Soviet Union, and even Cuba during his failed attempt to defect to the
Caribbean Communist nation in the summer of 1963. Returning to Dallas, Oswald’s
future was bleak. He was separated from his wife, now pregnant with their
second child, due to his inability to earn a living.
Oswald ended up
at the School Book Depository with the assistance of Ruth Paine, a friend of
his wife. The president’s exact route was published just two days before the visit.
No secret agency or a conspiratorial cabal of criminals put Lee Harvey Oswald
in Dallas, at the School Book Depository, or a gun in his hand (“Who was Lee
Harvey Oswald”).
Barely a year
after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the USA and USSR stood on the brink of
nuclear war, no one knew better than Lee Harvey Oswald that the assassination
of John F. Kennedy by an ex-marine who defected to the Soviet Union could be
the trigger to finally plunge both super powers into a war of total
annihilation.
Oswald, however,
like any number of criminals I worked with during my tenure as a prison
educator, denied any involvement in the crime, even when faced with
overwhelming evidence. Indeed, Oswald even feigned surprise when informed by
the press that he was charged with the assassination; as though he fully did
not expect that any suspicion should fall on a Marxist, ex-marine, former
Soviet defector.
My purpose here is
not to discuss every detail regarding the assassination; there already are
exhaustive resources available in print, on video, and the Internet that
explore the evidence. In any event, it is not likely I could change the mind of
anyone who is committed to the conspiracy theory that the assassination is not
the result of a lone gunman. I am merely sharing my research experience and
encouraging those interested in the matter to do so themselves.
The complication
for any conspiracy theory is that the number of people involved to make them
happen is staggering. For any of these theories to be true many people would
have to be involved, yet not one credible confession, death bed or otherwise,
has come forth. Time has proven that the Mafia’s “code of silence” lasts only
until the D.A. can offer a good plea deal and witness protection. CIA agents sold
national secrets to the Soviets. Nixon, with all the power he wielded, could not
keep his attempts to subvert democracy a secret, even with a cadre of men as
loyal as G. Gordon Liddy. As a result, I am incredulous that a secret such as a
conspiracy to kill the President of the United States could be kept quiet for
50 years.
In the end, the
debate over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy reveals more about
the debaters than the debate. The truth really is out there, but sometimes it
is easier to believe that the leader of the United States of America at the
height of its power and influence during the Cold War could only be removed by
a vast conspiracy rather than a sociopathic loner with a gun and a grudge.
We could not
possibly be that vulnerable, could we?
Related Content on the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube Channel
JFK Assassination: As It Happened: A 6 1/4 hour compilation of NBC news reports.
No narration, just original unedited footage.
Related Content on the PBS America YouTube Channel
PBS Frontline Special: Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald (1993): A well-researched documentary on the life of Oswald. Its conclusion, that he acted alone, continues to stand the test of time. Only two of the three total hours are included here.
Works Cited
JFK Assassination: As It Happened: A 6 1/4 hour compilation of NBC news reports.
No narration, just original unedited footage.
Related Content on the PBS America YouTube Channel
PBS Frontline Special: Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald (1993): A well-researched documentary on the life of Oswald. Its conclusion, that he acted alone, continues to stand the test of time. Only two of the three total hours are included here.
Works Cited
“JFK Assassination: As it
Happened.” NBC News Special Coverage.
National Broadcasting Company. 1993. Television.
National Broadcasting Company. 1993. Television.
Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the
Assassination of JFK. Random House , Inc.: New
York. 1993. Print.
Assassination of JFK. Random House , Inc.: New
York. 1993. Print.
Sartorio, Donna. Personal
interview. July 2005.
“Who is Lee Harvey Oswald?” Frontline. PBS. 1993. Television.
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