How would the difficulty of the Book Depository shots compare with those that were definitely made by that other former Marine, Charles Whitman?
Via triangulated gunfire?
Hehe. I looked up Reclaiming History on Amazon. It’s a 1612 page book.
In the reader’s reviews section, someone said “It’s heavy enough to kill a dog if you dropped your book on it.” (Or words to that effect.)
It is common for people to retroactively paint Kennedy as the man who could have “ended” Vietnam before it became a quagmire, and they often point to his “proposed withdrawal”. The reality of his attitudes and actions, however, doesn’t support this contention, nor does it support a belief in any reconciliation with Cuba (which I had never, heretofore, heard about, and would appreciate a cite).
The fact is that JFK was an ardent cold warrior. Remember, he was the one who lied about the “missile gap” with the Soviets during the 1960 election. He was the one who initiated our involvement in Vietnam (even approving a coup of Diem shortly before his own murder). And he, along with RFK, were very interested and involved in Cold War espionage.
It may be true that his inner circle, in later years (when Vietnam had become wildly unpopular), may have floated the idea that JFK would have withdrawn troops after a re-election, but that served merely to inflate his post-mortem reputation. There is not, however, any evidence during JFK’s life to support this contention.
Nor do I think it is realistic that JFK would have accepted anything less then Castro’s overthrow in Cuba. Cuba was a huge dissapointment for JFK, who hated communism and who’s biggest political tribulations were the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many of the U.S.'s secret plots to assassinate (or discredit) Castro occurred during JFK’s watch. To think that he would have sought reapproachment is patently absurd.
It might be nice to think of JFK as a peacenik, but reality does not bear this out.
How familiar was Hathcock with the facts? Did he actually say it? (I can find one quote from him, endlessly repeated, but no primary source.)
I simply don’t believe Carlos Hathcock said he couldn’t hit a slow-moving target at 75 yards. I could do it. It’s been successfully replicated. So why couldn’t he? Ridiculous.
WAS OSWALD A POOR SHOT? THE MARKSMANSHIP
ABILITY OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S ALLEGED ASSASSIN
Michael T. Griffith
1996
@All Rights Reserved
Expanded on 8/27/96
The Warren Commission … leaned toward the view that Oswald fired the three shots in less than six seconds. Most lone-gunman theorists now claim that Oswald fired three shots in 8.4 seconds. They assert that he fired and missed at right around frame 160 of the Zapruder film. However, in order to accept this claim, we would have to believe that for his first and closest shot Oswald completely missed, not only Kennedy, but the entire limousine. … However, even assuming that Oswald fired and missed at around frame 160, this would mean that he fired his next two shots in less than 5.6 seconds and hit Kennedy with both of them, which still would have been a skillful performance, especially since the FBI and the Army established that the alleged murder weapon, a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, could not be fired faster than 2.3 seconds per shot, even in the hands of experienced, expert riflemen.
…
------Oswald’s Marine Rifle Scores------
Even after weeks of practice and intensive training, Oswald barely managed to qualify at the level of “Sharpshooter,” the middle of three rifle qualification levels in the Marines. He obtained a score of 212, two points above the minimum for the “Sharpshooter” level. In other words, even after extensive training and practice, and even though he was firing at stationary targets with a semi-automatic rifle and had plenty of time to shoot (even during the so-called “rapid-fire” phase), Oswald narrowly missed scoring at the lowest possible qualification level.
The next time Oswald fired for record in the Marines, he barely managed to qualify at all, obtaining a score of 191, which was one point above the minimum needed for the lowest qualification level, “Marksman.” To put it another way, he came within two points of failing to qualify.
------Three Marine Colleagues------
Nelson Delgado, Sherman Cooley, and James R. Persons served with Oswald in the Marines and saw him shoot. Here is some of what they had to say about his marksmanship ability:
- Nelson Delgado
Before the Warren Commission:
Q. Did you fire with Oswald?
DELGADO. Right; I was in the same line. By that I mean we were on line together, the same time, but not firing at the same position, but at the same time, and I remember seeing his [shooting]. It was a pretty big joke, because he got a lot of “Maggie’s drawers,” you know, a lot of misses, but he didn’t give a darn.
Q. Missed the target completely?
DELGADO. He just qualified, that’s it. He wasn’t as enthusiastic as the rest of us. We all loved–liked, you know going to the range. (8 H 235)
…
… in Oswald’s particular case … Maybe out of a possible ten he’ll get two or three Maggie’s drawers. Now, these [the Maggie’s drawers] are a red flag that’s on a long pole, and this is running from left to right on the target itself. And, you don’t see this on a firing line too often–not a Marine firing line. You can’t help but noticing when you’re seeing disks, round cylinder things, coming up and down, and farther on down the line you see a flag waving [i.e., a Maggie’s drawer]. Well, that was gonna catch your eye anyway. And we thought it was funny that Oswald was getting these Maggie’s drawers so rapidly, one after the other. And this is why I can’t think that he could be a good shot, because a good shot doesn’t pull this. He’ll pull a three, but he won’t pull a Maggie’s drawer-- that’s a complete miss.
… Henry Hurt interviewed over fifty other former Marine colleagues of Oswald’s. Hurt reported the results of those interviews:
On the subject of Oswald’s shooting ability, there was virtually no exception to Delgado’s opinion that it was laughable. . . .
…
No one has ever duplicated Oswald’s alleged shooting performance; not even world-class or Master-rated marksmen have done so. For that matter, no rifle test has ever actually simulated all of the factors under which Oswald would have fired. FBI rifleman and ballistics expert Robert Frazier admitted in 1969 during the Clay Shaw trial that no FBI reenactment had duplicated Oswald’s alleged performance. Monty Lutz, an expert rifleman and ballistics expert who served on the firearms panel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, conceded during a 1986 mock Oswald trial that to his knowledge no marksman had duplicated Oswald’s supposed shooting feat.
…
Lutz, an expert shot himself, also testified that he conducted his own rifle test but that he FAILED to duplicate Oswald’s supposed shooting feat.
Some lone-gunman theorists will assert that Oswald’s alleged shooting performance was duplicated by several expert marksmen in the CBS rifle test. However, the CBS test did not simulate all of the factors under which Oswald allegedly fired. Furthermore, the four riflemen who managed to score at least two hits out of three shots in less than six seconds failed to do so on their first attempts, yet Oswald would have had ONLY one attempt. And, needless to say, all of these men were experienced, expert riflemen. Seven of the eleven CBS shooters failed to score at least two hits on ANY of their attempts. The best shot in the group, Howard Donahue, took THREE attempts to score at least two hits out of three shots in under six seconds. In addition, the CBS shooters did not use the alleged murder weapon, with its difficult bolt and odd trigger–they used a different Carcano.
The impossibility of Oswald’s alleged shooting feat was what led former Marine sniper Craig Roberts to reject the lone-gunman theory. Roberts explains as he recounts the first time he visited the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository:
I turned my attention to the window in the southeast corner–the infamous Sniper’s Nest. . . . I immediately felt like I had been hit with a sledge hammer. The word that came to mind at what I saw as I looked down through the window to Elm Street and the kill zone was: IMPOSSIBLE!
I knew instantly that Oswald could not have done it. . . . The reason I knew that Oswald could not have done it, was that I could not have done it. (KILL ZONE: A SNIPER LOOKS AT DEALEY PLAZA, p. 5)
Retired Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock is likewise skeptical of Oswald’s alleged shooting feat. Hathcock is a former senior instructor at the U. S. Marine Corps Sniper Instruction School at Quantico, Virginia. He has been described as the most famous American military sniper in history. In Vietnam he was credited with 93 confirmed kills. He now conducts police SWAT team sniper schools across the country. Craig Roberts asked Hathcock about the marksmanship feat attributed to Oswald by the Warren Commission. Hathcock answered that he did not believe Oswald could have done what the Commission said he did. Added Hathcock,
Let me tell you what we did at Quantico. We reconstructed the whole thing: the angle, the range, the moving target, the time limit, the obstacles, everything. I don’t know how many times we tried it, but we couldn’t duplicate what the Warren Commission said Oswald did. (KILL ZONE, pp. 89-90)
…
Michael T. Griffith is a two-time graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and of the U.S. Air Force Technical Training Center, San Angelo, Texas, and the author of four books on Mormonism and ancient texts. His articles on the JFK assassination have appeared in DATELINE: DALLAS, in DALLAS '63, and in THE DEALEY PLAZA ECHO, and he is the author of the book COMPELLING EVIDENCE: A NEW LOOK AT THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY (Grand Prairie, TX: JFK-Lancer Productions and Publications, 1996).
Y’know I love the “They couldn’t duplicate Oswald’s shot” idea.
Take Oswald to the firing range. Tell him to fire three shots at the target.
Now take a world class sniper, and tell him to duplicate Oswald’s pattern of shots. Of course that’s going to be insanely difficult!
What’s easy is sitting up in the Book Depository and blowing Kennedy’s head open. It’s hard to hit Kennedy in exactly the same places, with exactly the same angle, and have the bullet also hit Connelly, and also miss Jackie and Connelly’s wife.
But if all you wanna do is fire a couple rounds into Kennedy and kill him, well, that’s no problem at all.
The testimony that Oswald wasn’t a particularly good shot is irrelevant. Oswald didn’t need to be an expert sniper to fire three shots at Kennedy and hit him two out of three times. If Oswald was an expert sniper he would have fired ONE shot and that one shot would have killed Kennedy. Oswald wasn’t an expert sniper, he was a mediocre (but not abyssmal) shot, and he clean missed his target one out three times, and only hit him twice. That ain’t no fancy shootin’.
Denquixote, are you contending that it was impossible for Oswald to make those shots, or that it was unlikely for Oswald to make those shots? How do you reconcile the other evidence (i.e. his bringing a rifle-sized package to work, his fleeing the scene, his prints on the gun) that supports the inference that Oswald shot Kennedy?
Welcome to Irony Central.
In laying out the actual eyewitness evidence for the Kennedy shooting you misstate the eyewitness evidence for the Tippit shooting. Only one person saw the actual shooting, another saw Oswald administer a coup de grace shot but not the previous ones, a few others saw him at the scene a few moments later, and several saw him fleeing the scene, gun in hand. (And of course, the gun in his posession when he was arrested was the one that killed Tippit.)
Which reminds me: on the off chance that there is anyone out there who actually thinks Oswald’s “I’m just a patsy!” statement has any more credibility than a seven-dollar bill, lemme point out that at the Texas Theater he shouted “I am not resisting arrest!” just a few moments after he slugged a cop and whipped out his piece. :rolleyes:
I hate to nitpick someone who does such a tireless and thorough job of debunking the CTers, but I feel a need to.
It’s far from certain that J. Edgar Hoover ever gave an order to deep-six anything in the Kennedy case. Given how he ran things, he didn’t need to - FBI agents knew from bitter experience that they’d better cover their butts from Hoover’s wrath. One example I’m sure of: Hosty was ordered to destroy the Oswald note by his boss in the Dallas office, who was damned near apopleptic over the possibility of Hoover finding out that they had any information that suggested that Oswald could have been a threat to the president. (On the basis of that incident alone I’d say the “cleaning up” was far more than a possibility. It happened.)
(About that note: according to Buligliosi, Oswald’s threatening note was unsigned and Hosty didn’t connect it to LHO until after the assassination. Speaking of Reclaiming History, it really should be described as a 2,600 page book; the Endnotes on the CD-ROM are just as important as the main text, sometimes moreso. And yes, I’ve finally finished reading the sucker. Phew!)
I don’t know all the facts and I don’t pretend to. I just get tired of hearing all the “experts” on this board talking about how they could make the shots that Oswald was supposed to have made with a second rate rifle they have never seen and with very suspect marksmanship skills under the pressure that he had to be under. It’s not as if Oswald was Carlos the jackal who did this for a living, he was a fuck-up who shot himself with his own gun while in the Marines. I am not saying he did not do it or could not have done it. What I am saying is - there is a lot that we don’t know.
I mean Oswald tried to kill general Walker twice-was he known to the police at all? Plus, the FBI was pretty active in Dallas-JEH was keeping a careful eye on Lyndon Johnson’s cronies (LBJ was involved in quite a number of questionable business deals, in the 40’s and 50’s). I am quite sure that Oswald was known to the Dallas FBI office.
The only really puzzling thing about the assassination: the Kennedy family made NO effort to dispute the warren commision’s findings-my suspicion is that Old man Kennedy (Joe Sr.) was in bed with quasi-mob type crooks. Had the investigation proceeded (beyond the Warren Commision’s boundaries), it might have been very embarrassing for the Kennedy reputation! :eek:
But most of us are at least trying to learn but you seem to be clinging to your ignorance. I am saying Oswald did it - it was a trivially easy shot and people watched him do it. This alone is proof that it happened but it’s also confirmed by the majority of the circumstantial evidence.
Anyone who’s saying otherwise is wrong. They’re either misinformed about the facts or they’re in denial of reality or they’re trying to make a buck by selling something to people in the first two categories. You don’t seem to be selling anything and we’ve given you the facts. So why are you still in denial?
sigh So far as anyone knows, Oswald shot at Edwin Walker just once. This is what makes these assassination threads so annoying but necessary: there’s so much half-right information wafting around.
I don’t recall ever reading that Oswald had popped up on DPD radar. Nor can I think of a reason he would have done so.
Re: your last paragraph: that’s a new one. Excuse me while I sigh again. As long as Homo sapiens feels inclined to make mountains of molehills, and we will, there will be people who object to established conclusions on the smallest of grounds.
I think that raises an interesting point: The Kennedy’s had a lot of secrets. Lots of people like to raise suspicions about the shooter because the Kennedy family were protective of Kennedy’s body and medical evidence. The fact is (as we now know), JFK was in much poorer health then the public was led to believe. He also had a questionable moral compass, as evidence by his many, many affairs. There may indeed by some secretive behavior following the Kennedy death, but a lot of it stems from the desire of the family to keep their own skeletons stuffed in the closet.
(Although it should be noted that Joe, Sr., had suffered a stroke in 1961 and was partially paralyzed and unable to speak after that, so I’m not sure how much influence he was still weilding over family affairs).
Damn double post!
I could do it and I am a lousy shot. I don’t know what Carlos’ problem is, but he’s either way overestimating the difficulty of the shot, or is vastly underestimating his skills.
Interesting thread, even if it’s a topic that pops-up around here every year or so – never paid much attention to the other threads.
Having said that, after reading this one and doing some independent research of my own, I’m not half as sure as so many of you are that Oswald did this on his own. Never mind the “anybody could make those shots with a few hours of training” bit.
I just don’t see as clear cut as (most) of you guys do.
Sorta. He was known to them because he was a repatriate from the Soviet Union. That was a reason to keep an eye on him. BUt they did not consider him a danger per se.
The police didn’t know anything. The reason we connect Oswald to the attempt on Walker is because Maria told everyone. Then when they compared the physical evidence (bullet) it matched Oswald’s rifle.
Or maybe they just agree with the findings. They’ve said as much when conspiracy buffs try to engage them.
One of the things Reclaiming History notes is that the WC was very thorough, even with its time limit. They were actively looking for a conspiracy and could not find one. The idea that officials with disparate politcs as Gerald Ford and Earl Warren could conspire to cover up anything is bit off-putting and unlikely.
Please provide information that accompanies that assertion. As you have heard here, there is a lot to suggest LHO did commit the crime: he purchased the murder weapon, he brought it to work, he had sniper experience, the shot was plausible, his prints were on the murder weapon, he fled the scene, he shot a cop who approached him…
What facts do you have that raise uncertainty (and, again, I say this as someone who has long wanted to believe in a conspiracy, but had to dismiss that claim after actually looking at the wild speculation that accompanies this murder)?