Lee Harvey Oswald: Did He Act Alone?

Nearly 45 years ago, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, the fourth president in US history to die in office in this manner. Because Oswald was assassinated himself by a lone gunman shortly after his arrest, no one will ever know for sure why he did it - or if he really did it. Due to the murky circumstances surrounding his death, most people in the United States today think that there was a conspiracy to assassinated JFK, about 75 per cent, according various polls.

The evidence supporting the conspiracy theory is the manner in which Oswald died. The Dallas police barely got to question him before Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, gunned him down as the police were leading him back to his cell after a press conference. As well, lots of people could have conceivably wanted JFK dead: the Mafia, the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, corrupt labour unionists, even the vice-president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. So if these disparate elements got together, they could eliminate the one guy that they all hated.

But let's look at the evidence against the conspiracy theory: Lee Harvey Oswald himself. Everything about this man is contradictory. A Communist who wanted to go live in Russia, he was unable or unwilling to make friends once he got there, and tried to go commit suicide to force the Soviet government to let him return to the US. In the Marine Corps, he barely made marksman on the rifle range (the lowest acceptable ranking), yet his older brother, Robert, once told the press that Lee usually shot a rabbit when he went rabbit hunting. (Perhaps the reason for his being able to shoot a rabbit but barely hit a target was that he was dyslexic.) While he was founder of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, he was the only member seen protesting outside the US embassy in Mexico City.

Lee Harvey Oswald fit the classic description of a loner: alienated, friendless, delusions of grandeur. This guy had big ideas about changing the world, but he was not a joiner, because he didn't need to be a joiner: the world would soon see his greatness and rush in droves to follow him. He didn't want others join his Fair Play For Cuba Committee because - who knows? - they might be government spies jealous of his greatness.

Sometimes you have to do things yourself, like shoot the president. The only problem was that he chose the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, an Italian World War II vintage automatic rifle - not considered a very good weapon for a sniper. If you wanted to assassinate the US president, wouldn't you choose something better, like an AK-47 or an AK-46? Why not an M-16, like the one he scored so badly with on the rifle range in the Marines?

Now if you were once an Italian soldier, maybe you would use the Mannlicher-Carcano for reasons of national pride. But if you were part of a vast conspiracy to shoot JFK, chances are that one of your co-conspirators would have said, "Hey Lee, you should try this AK-47!"

We'll never know why Oswald walked into the Dallas Book Depository Building with a Mannlicher-Carcano when any other gun nut in Texas - right-wing Christian or left-wing Fellow Traveller - would have had something different, because enough Texans like Jack Ruby didn't believe in trials back then. We'l never know why he wasn't the Man in the Grassy Knoll, where he could have had a better shot with a such a substandard rifle.

This guy was clearly a few bricks shy of a full load. It was a journalist who informed him that he was being charged with assassinating the president, though he was already under arrest for the crime. Up to that time, he thought that he was only being charged with the murder of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippett.

Now if you were part of a conspiracy to shoot the president, would you want somebody as muddled and confused as Lee Harvey Oswald to be the main triggerman? Not unless you had a few beers with your buddies beforehand, and you hadn't done a lot of planning. The problem, though, is that guys like Lee don't usually have a lot of buddies.

Now the hit on Lee Harvey Oswald was a professional job: Ruby waited until Oswald was blinded by a light, then he shot Oswald in the stomach at such an angle that the bullet entered the heart and then exited into the ceiling. It is evident to this writer that Ruby had assassinated people before. However, it is illogical to assume that Ruby couldn't have assassinated Ruby out of a misguided sense of patriotism just because he was in the Mob. Maybe Al Capone would have done the same thing, if some Communist had assassinated the president.

As Vincent Bugliosi said, one of three conspirators can keep a secret if two are already dead. Things are more likely to fall apart, if a conspiracy includes a cast of thousands. If even one conspirator is a Catholic with a guilty conscience, the rest of the them are fucked if a priest tells that conspirator in confession to turn himself in and the others.