This is like saying ‘barely eeked out as well above average’.
Nitpick. That may not have been true. I believe killing a Federal employee was against the law. In any case, murder is illegal in any jurisdiction.
One thing that does bother me, ignoring the ballistics of the MC rifle and firing position of Oswald, is the fact that JFK’s original motorcade route was published in the local newspapers but this route was actually changed on 18 Nov. 1963, and this change wasn’t ever published. The original route did not include the turn from Houston to Elm, where Oswald was allegedly ready and waiting to shoot from the Book Depository, so how could Oswald have known that he would be in a good position to shoot JFK if he was only able to rely on the newspaper pages for the details of the motorcade route?
A second thing that does seem unusual. From what I read and from my own research, by the latter part of 1963, JFK was pursuing foreign and national policies which were ignored or abandoned completely by LBJ. So I believe there was definitely a drastic change of government policy after Nov. 1963. Whether this represents a coup d’etat by a secretive manipulations in government circles, this can only be alluded to, based on the assumption that Oswald was a patsy and not reponsible for the assassination.
OTOH if Oswald was the actual assassin, it would seem to me that JFK’s policies would have been continued to a greater or lesser degree under Johnson. I specifically refer to the proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, the behind-the-scenes reapproachment with Cuba and also JFK’s proposal at the UN for a joint manned moon mission with the Soviet Union, all of which was suddenly abandoned or reversed course after Nov. 22, 1963. These things were not continued under Johnson. So really a number of important gov. policies were changed after JFK was gone. Even if Oswald was the lone nut after all.
Still think the OP is genuinely interested in learning?
No, let’s not “leave it aside”. You brought up some points in your original post that people have gone through the trouble of researching and answering, and your only response is to ignore those responses and bring up another set of questions?
I don’t think so.
What do you have to say about what has been brought forth in this thread so far?
Hope springs eternal.
That’s not true. The Dallas Times Herald published a map of the route on November 21, showing the motorcade turning onto Elm. The Dallas Morning News’s map on the 22nd didn’t show a turn onto Elm, but it was a very small map.
In addition on November 19th, the Dallas Morning News published the motorcade route, saying Bolding mine):
The Times Herald said:
So anyone who read the Dallas papers would have known that the motorcade would be on Houston and Elm. The route was never “changed”. It was planned by the Secret Service in coordination with the Dallas police from the 14th to the 18th, and then communicated to the White House and released to the press on the 18th.
Well, let me just say that I went through basic training in 1967. Most of the people in my company were either draftees or 6-month wonders from the reserve. There were a few volunteers, such as myself. When it came time to qualify with the M-16 you could score a maximum of 80 points if you hit every target within the time frame. We had 4-20 round clips (I think). We did not have to fire and then reload. There were several breaks in the firing and all of the targets were at different distances, but none were moving. At that time 45 out of 80 was enough to get you a sharpshooter ribbon, 60 was necessary for expert. That’s right 75% made you an expert. (I can’t remember the score necessary to pass, but I think it was either 30 or 35.) Now I don’t know what kind of test Oswald took and I am guessing that noone on here does either, but there is nothing in Oswald’s history that indicates he was a superior marksman. Of course there was the time he shot himself while in the Marines but of course we don’t know what he was aiming at.
Btw, there were far more people claiming the shots came from the grassy knoll area than who “witnessed” Oswald shooting.
It surprises you that Lyndon Johnson, who had been in Congress longer than John Kennedy, who had been majority leader in the Senate while Kennedy was a junior Senator, who ran for President in 1960 before reluctantly accepting the Vice Presidency, might have different ideas on how to run the country after he became President?
For the record, the proposed withdrawl from Vietnam was exactly that – a proposal. Johnson met with Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin for three days in 1967. As for a joint manned moon mission, it was Lyndon Johnson who said “What American wants to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon?”
All your suspicions prove is that Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy were not clones.
BTW, I also have been to Dealy Plaza. From the Depository window I could have hit Kennedy in the head with a rock. And I have a lousy arm.
All of which is completely irrelevant, because even a barely adequate marksman could have made Oswald’s shot. Quibbling over what constitutes an “expert” badge is a red herring: it establishes that Oswald was not a total incompetent with a rifle, and that’s all that we need. Whatever his extact level of expertise, he was certainly good enough to hit Kennedy from the window of the depository.
Which is why you need more than just eyewitness testimony to prove something. That’s why the Warren Comission report is more believable than any conspiracy theory you’d care to name: they have actual evidence to back up their conclusions.
Not this again. Shoot me in the head.
No, I don’t have the exact figure but it was dozens of people. There was a street and buildings across from the Texas Book Depository building and they had a clear view of the window that Oswald was shooting from. Obviously with the Presidential motorcade passing through, the street and windows were filled with people who wanted to see the President. Then Oswald stuck a gun out a window and started shooting. The first shot would have drawn attention to him and the many witnesses I spoke of looked over at him and watched him fire the second and third shots.
I’ll grant you that the majority of these people were probably not close enough to have positively ID’ed Oswald as the shooter - but they all served to prove where the shots were fired from and debunk any “grassy knoll” theories. And some of the witnesses were much closer. Two of them were Oswald’s co-workers - men who knew him well - and they were watching the motorcade from a window one floor below Oswald. When they heard the first shot they looked up and watched Oswald pulling the trigger from a distance of about ten feet away.
And again this is simply wrong. The overwhelming majority of people stated that the shots were being fired from the room were Oswald was. Anyone who claims that the majority of witnesses support the grassy knoll theory can be dismissed as somebody that doesn’t know the facts.
I for one am learning much from this thread. Really.
So are there no loose ends in the Oswald case? Do Conspiracy People lack a leg to stand on?
Like Paul in Saudi, I find this thread interesting and informative. It’s like Kennedy Assasination Conspiracy Theories Explained 101.
I remember in the William Manchester book Death of a President (which came out soon after the assassination, but is still generally well-regarded, from all I’ve read), members of the Secret Service and the Dallas police briefly quarreled about whether JFK’s body should or could be removed from Dallas. The Dallas police said the President’s death should be investigated by them as a state-law homicide (including an autopsy there) because there was no Federal law against killing the President. The Secret Service men said, in essence, to hell with you, we’re leaving with the body. And they did.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but… duh! Johnson and Kennedy were from completely different backgrounds and had many radically different ideas about domestic and foreign policy. Kennedy put Johnson on his ticket to give it balance and help carry the southern states (Texas in particular). There’s no indication they particularly liked each other or agreed on major issues. Johnson, given his chance, ran with it.
More recently, there were jokes about the difference in views between Michael Dukakis and his veep candidate Lloyd Bentsen in the election of 1988. Had Dukakis/Bentsen won and Dukakis died, we’d’ve seen at least as “drastic” a change.
I think there’s a possibility that there may have been some “cleaning up” after the assassination. I’ve heard that the FBI had enough pieces of evidence before November 22 that if they had been put together properly would have let them spot Oswald as a likely assassin. I’m not condemning the FBI for this - they have billions of pieces of information floating around and it’s incredibly difficult to make the right connections before a crime occurs. But afterwards, you can sort back through the evidence and retroactively see the pattern. And some people assume it should have been equally possible before hand (Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorists are big on this). So I’ve heard that after Kennedy’s assassination, Hoover had some of the evidence the FBI had destroyed so there would be no proof that they could have known about Oswald in advance. A cover-up of a failure after the fact.
I certainly won’t say this is a proven fact. But from what I’ve read it’s not impossible.
In one of Tom Clancey’s book’s forwords, afterwords or author’s notes, he mentions that the FBI in Quantico has a replica of Deley Plaza set up. Clancy said the shot is ridiculous easy to make.
Carlos Hathcock said he would have had trouble making the shot, and I didn’t believe Oswald could have done it. I’m not saying that Oswald didn’t make the shot, but there are a lot of people who know quite a bit about it that say it was a difficult shot.
I don’t think there was ever anyone who knew more about sniping than Carlos.
And yes, I’ve been to the site many times…
I’ll try to find the book I read this in (it was an article written by Hathcock in a book on police snipers.) and post the exact quote.