by G. Jack Urso
Any effort to explain what happened in
Dallas must explain Lee Harvey Oswald, and Lee Harvey Oswald is a mystery
wrapped up in an enigma, hidden behind a riddle. – G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel to the 1977 House Select Committee on
Assassinations.
On November 16, 1993, I tuned
into my local PBS station to see the PBS Frontline special Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? (see below). For the two
years prior to that date, as the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy approached, I began researching the event. Like many Americans,
I believed that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and that Lee
Harvey Oswald was either not responsible or just a peripheral figure set up as
a patsy. My own research, however, led me to conclude that Oswald acted wholly on his own and without assistance to assassinate the president of the United States. Though this documentary came after I reached that conclusion, it was reassuring to learn I was not alone in standing against the conspiratorial tides.
Working at a college gave me
access to a multitude of research sources, books, and magazines. Before the
Internet, research was not a casual sit-at-home activity. One actually had to
go to libraries, make interlibrary loan requests, and pour through thousands of
pages without the benefit of search engines and keywords. Eventually, I compiled a timeline of Oswald's life based on the best available evidence that accounted for his whereabouts on most days of his life. This alone helped me to eliminate nearly all of the fantastic conspiracy theories.
As I got deeper into my research,
I realized the key to the mystery was Oswald himself, described by G. Robert
Blakey, chief counsel to the 1977 House Select Committee on Assassinations, as “a mystery wrapped up in an
enigma, hidden behind a riddle.” Indeed, Oswald made purposeful efforts to
exaggerate, lie, obfuscate, or otherwise mislead people about who he was and
his real agenda. My own personal conclusion is that Oswald felt rejected by
both the Capitalist and Communist political systems and knew that an
assassination of a U.S. president by a former Soviet defector would likely lead
to a war, or that the resulting trial would somehow aggrandize him as a cause
célèbre, much as
what happened to Adolf Hitler during his trial following the failed Beer Hall Putsch.
Nevertheless, we’ll never truly
know Oswald’s motivations as his life intersected with that of another sociopath
seeking notoriety, Jack Ruby. My own conclusions are detailed in my essay, The
Assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald. A 1 hour 53 minute version of the original 2 hour 56
minute film is available below from the PBS America YouTube channel:
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