Where exactly? The area near the corner of Houston and Elm was crowded with people. The grassy infield is in plain view in the Zapruder film. The railroad bridge couldn’t have had a shot because of the limo’s windshield. The famous grassy knoll was small, was immediately next to Zapruder who didn’t notice anything, and was in view of other photos taken from across the street. Someone would have seen or heard a shooter on a surrounding building. So where do you think these multiple other shooters were?
How do you figure? It’s been replicated several times over the years.
The fact that we can’t prove the bullets came from the same batch, in no way proves that they came from different batches. Please understand this point. Not that it matters in the face of the mountain of other evidence implicating LHO alone, but it’s simply a logic error you keep making that’s driving me crazy.
Whether the bullets came from one batch or three, so what?
Oy. We’re back to the realm of wild speculation. Indeed, there were people who had grudges against JFK. I suspect we can say that of any President. But motive alone, without accompanying evidence of actually doing anything, does not make for a compelling argument.
We seem to be running in circles here, but I’ll try and bring us back to the main issue: what evidence is there that anybody else committed this crime? Where were they positioned, and how did they escape? Merely raising questions about LHO’s conduct does not amount to evidence of additional assassins. We need some sort of identifiable proof of additional shooters (as opposed to vague suggestions of improbabilities and motivations).
I don’t know. How many do you think? It is noteworthy to point out that LHO was the only employee of the depository to leave. He also didn’t exactly go anywhere (except for home, that is, to get a gun)…just seemed to be wandering, as if trying to be evasive.
And, if I may be purely speculative, it seems highly odd to me that someone would leave the scene of all that pandemonium immediately after the shooting; if human nature is any indication, people are naturally interested in calamity. Yes, the normal reaction would not be to go back to work. But, I believe, it would be to mill around outside, talking to other bystanders as you try and piece together what just happened. Leaving the scene right away strikes me as highly unusual for an innocent man.
I didn’t ask why LHO owned a gun. I asked why he had it with him when he was arrested. Why, in your opinion, would a man go home and get a gun if he hadn’t done anything wrong? Was it just his habit to be armed whenever he wasn’t at work? If so, I suspect we’ve just contributed to the mountain of evidence that LHO was unstable and capable of shooting JFK.
Regarding Ozzie the Slacker: first, you should pare your list of examples down to three since he quit the Fort Worth job because he was moving to Dallas. He might have been a goof-off there, but since he had a legit reason to leave, it hardly seems fair to hold it against him. . . .
Now it is certainly possible that he simply left work on a whim. No denying that. But, as has been pointed out in this thread so often that the hamsters are ready to puke, possibilities don’t mean diddly. We’re still obliged to look at real evidence and see where it leads. Sure he may have been on a lark. But how many guys enjoying an unexpected afternoon off kill a cop just 45 minutes later? (There can be no doubt of Oswald’s guilt in the Tippit slaying.)
I just saw Atomicktom’s post while previewing this one and it reminds me of an argument that has been made: given Oswald’s fixation on political matters (take away politics and Oswald doesn’t have a life), it seems damned strange that when a president and a governor were shot outside his place of employment, he just shrugged his shoulders and wandered off. Seems to me it’d be more likely that he’d be spouting off his opinion to anyone within earshot. You can probably think of some Dopers who act this way. (Of course, establishing someone else’s state of mind is risky business, so you can take this or leave this and it just won’t matter. It’s just a wild guess. But then, why should the CTs be the only ones allowed to speculate??)
I’ll help you on the LHO on JFK thing. Basically, he’s on record as thinking well of the president and his family, even lauded him for his stance on civil rights. On the other hand, he told the cops that he disagreed with some of Kennedy’s policies. And inferentially (this is somewhat weaker) since Oswald loathed the American system, he would be obliged logically to loathe its head honcho. But as near as I can tell from what is known of Oswald, he didn’t shoot Kennedy because he hated him; he shot Kennedy so that he, Lee Harvey Oswald, could achieve his rightful place in history. If you milage should vary on this point it won’t bother me a bit. State of mind is a terribly difficult thing to nail down.
As to the question, How many guys does it take to kill a President, the obvious answer is, “Just one, so long as he has a weapon and a chance to do so.”
(Hope your Friday night was pleasant. I spent mine with a houseful of in-laws. . . .)
So what are you saying exactly? That the hundreds of people who wanted to kill Kennedy all decided that one time and place was their moment? That CIA agents and Mob hitmen and KGB assassins and anti-Castro Cuban death squads and pro-Castro Cuban death squads and Johnson-for-President campaign workers and homosexual thrill-killers and Nazi astronauts and the Marilyn Monroe fanclub all showed up at Dealey Plaza on November 22 and started shooting? And apparently Lee Oswald was the only person in Dallas who wasn’t able to kill the President?
It would be one hell of a coincidence that they independently selected the same day, the same plaza, the same city, the same window of opportunity to shoot, and to shoot with the same rifle as Oswald who, at the time, was a nobody. A conspiracy theorist might take this as evidence that this theoretical second shooter must therefore have been in league with Oswald, because it would be too great a coincidence otherwise. And I say yes: IF there were a second shooter, using the same rifle in the same city and firing at the very same instant as Oswald, conspiracy trumps coincidence. But first we must prove the existence of a second shooter.
Not according to the Secret Service – they were more concerned about the next event, at the Dallas Trade Mart, where there would be lots of people in a crowded area, close to the President.
(Remember that every prior assassination attempt (and every one since then*) have involved handguns, close-in to the President. This was the first (and only) one that used a sniper rifle.)
Also, what’s this about ‘slowing down to a crawl’? The motorcade traveled at a very slow pace all the way thru downtown Dallas, so that people could see the President. That’s rather the point of a parade. They never move fast.
And why would the ‘sharp left turn’ force the car to ‘slow to a crawl’? I make left turns nearly every day, and I don’t have to slow down to a crawl. And that’s in regular traffic, not a completely cleared 3-lane road. And I’m not a trained, professional driver. This seems a bit exaggerated.
Except the rather farcical attempt on Bill Clinton in 1994, when an assassin on the sidewalk outside the White House sprayed 29 shots from a semi-automatic rifle at people on the White House lawn, without hitting anyone. Clinton was on the other side of the White House, 3 floors up, watching a football game at the time, and wasn’t even aware of the attempt until told about it later.
The perfect place to shoot JFK would be in a room with no witnesses, preferably with JFK tied to something so he wouldn’t wiggle. Let’s not over-exaggerate how ideal Oswald’s choice of location was.
If someone were seeking a perfect location to shoot the President, a distant shot with a sniper rifle at a moving target through trees wouldn’t be it.
Yes, and there was also an attempt on Bush with gernades in Russia. And in 1974, a guy planned to get Nixon by crashing a commercial airliner into the White House (27 years before 9/11).
I should have been more specific and said all assassination attempts with guns used handguns, other than Oswald’s.
I had never noticed this before but you’re right. Here’s the assassins’ choices of weapons:
John Wilkes Booth - Derringer .44 caliber pistol
Oscar Collazo - Walther P38
Leon Czolgosz - Iver-Johnson “Safety Automatic” .32 revolver
Francisco Duran - Chinese SKS semiautomatic rifle
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme - Colt .45
Charles Guiteau - Webley British Bulldog .44 revolver
John Hinckley, Jr. - Röhm RG-14 .22
Richard Lawrence - two derringers
Sara Jane Moore - 38-caliber revolver
John Schrank - Smith & Wesson .38 revolver
Griselio Torresola - Luger P08 9mm
Giuseppe Zangara - .32 caliber pistol
Well, at least you are admitting to one of your presuppositions. If one starts from the premise that Oswald could not have been involved, it’s not surprising that the only evidence that registers is stuff that seems to support one’s position. Try this some time (think of it as an interlectual exercise): what evidence is there that Oswald was involved? If you’re honest with yourself, you will find there is a pile of evidence pointing towards Oswald’s guilt and nothing strong enough to exonerate him.
Regarding Oswald’s Marxism: you’re not alone in doubting that Oswald’s grasp of Marxist theory was not as good as he fancied it was. For example, William Manchester said something along the lines of “Oswald hadn’t the political sophistication of a goldfish.” But so what? Since when is the pool of assassins limited to guys who have passed the exam for Marxist First Class?
Regarding Marina: you really should ponder the fact that for more than two decades following the assassination, Oswald’s wife thought that he did do it. Usually the initial reaction of the accused’s kin is “Surely he didn’t do this. Did he?” The first thing Marina thought upon hearing of the shooting in front of the TSBD was, Oh, God, it must be Lee. By the end of the day she was convinced. Who knows a man better than his wife? Certainly, no one knew more about Lee’s capacity for violence than Marina, who sometimes had the bruises to prove it.
By the way: the term is Lone Nut, not Lone Neut. As someone said about Norman Mailer’s use of the euphemism “fug” in an early novel, “If you can’t spell the word, don’t use it.” [Explanation for the Teeming Millions: in some circles the sides of this debate are denoted by the terms CTs (Conspiracy Theorists) and LNs (Lone Nuts, i.e., folks who think the assassination was the work of a lone nut [Oswald]).
Please, please explain to us how, with a plaza full of highly skilled snipers, the only one to score any hits was the poor SOB who got stuck with a lousy war surplus Italian carbine?
Your paragraph beginning “When I read . . .” is hard to respond to because, from this side of the tracks, it appears to be as genuinely irrational as you claim the other side to be. One huge error of fact: there isn’t a lick of evidence one way or the other about Oswald purchase of ammunition.
Well, let’s see if you really believe Oswald behaved in normal, predictable ways:
Immediately after the shooting, he assumes he has the rest of the day off. No one told him that. [By the way, how’d he figure out so quickly that his building was part of the crime scene. I mean, the shooting happened outside, down the block; no reason that should effect his building, right?]
He walks a few blocks and boards a bus. Not the bus that would drop him off right across the street from his boarding house, but some other bus. Why didn’t he wait for the right bus? What was his hurry?
The bus soon becomes stuck in traffic. Right after a motorist tells the driver and all passengers within earshot, “The President’s been shot!”, Oswald leaves the bus.
He walks a few blocks, comes upon a taxi stand, and hires a cab. During his interrogation Will Fritz asks him if he’s ever ridden a cab before. Oswald: “No.” Why was this occasion so special?
So anyway, he takes the cab to his rooming house. Well, not exactly. He actually tells the cab driver to take him to a location a few blocks beyond the house, but then asks to be let out a block before his announced destination (and after passing the rooming house). That’s odd.
(Incidentally, he told his interrogators the took the bus home. After the cab driver came forward Oswald changed his story.)
Oswald walks back up the street to the rooming house where he changes clothes and stuffs his gun in his pants. Says the housekeeper, “My, you are in a hurry!” Oswald ignores her.
About a dozen minutes later Oswald shoots and kills a Dallas policeman.
About a half hour after that a disheveled Oswald enters a movie theater without paying the price of admission. When police approach him a few minutes later he says, “Well, it’s all over now,” slugs the nearest cop, and pulls out his weapon. He is quickly subdued.
So tell us, what does your sense of normal behavior tell you about Oswald’s behavior that afternoon?
Take a moment and read this thread. Three pages of people arguing over the lyrics of the Kinks song Lola. A song most of us have heard about 1.2 jillion times. Even with all that repetition people still can’t agree on the lyrics. Now compare that to what happened in Dallas. Three gunshots, something most of the assembled spectators were not used to hearing or identifying. Large building that create echoes. It it at all surprising that some people mis identified where the gun shots came from? And yet even with those distractions, most people correctly IDed where the gunfire came from.
Actually, Marina Oswald was already very worried even before she heard about Kennedy being shot. When she got up for breakfast, she found that her husband had left his wedding ring, various documents like bank statements and life insurance forms, and a note saying he loved her on the kitchen table before he went to work that day.
It’s almost as if Lee Oswald was expecting something unusual to happen at work that day.
Well, there wasn’t that much disorientation.
Of the witnesses interviewed, 104 said the shots came from the TSBD building, 5 gave other locations. And the police that were there went running toward the building immediately – within 90 seconds, there were police inside the building talking to the people there (including Oswald himself).
It’s just that stories afterwards gave so much credence to the few witnesses who gave other locations. They say that witnesses don’t agree on where the shots came from. Which is technically true, but rather misleading. If you say 96% of the witnesses agreed, but less than 4% gave another location, it sounds much different.
That’s often a big “if.” The numbers you cite were footnoted in Wikipedia, and the footnote leads to this page.
If you follow the link you’ll see that Wikipedia is quoting the first few paragraphs of an entire page that ultimately paints a very different picture than what you imply.
