Did Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate JFK?

If this was a conspiracy, it did go off without a hitch, insofar as Kennedy died, and nobody has ever been convicted of any wrongdoing. I think, however, that the reason we are talking about this 40 years later is because JFK was the President of the U.S., a beloved man, and his death is one of those “where were you when” moments.

I encourage and applaud skepticism. I think it should motivate us to look closely at the facts, and scrutinize as best we can. But I now see why some Dopers rolled their eyes at another JFK thread; when presented with lots of compelling evidence that LHO committed the crime, some people will just ignore it and throw out another “tidbit”. It’s an endless exercise in futility.

I’ve asked you several times to reconcile the totality of evidence suggesting Oswald was the shooter, and you’ve just ignored that and continued to identify new factoids. Now, George HW Bush and the CIA are involved? I don’t think you’ll say that, but you’ll just use that story to again say “we’ll just never know.”

Imagine, if you will, that you are on a jury in a murder trial (not of the president; just some random victim). The prosecutor places the defendant at the scene of the crime, demonstrates that the defendant owned the murder weapon, that he brought a bag that could have contained the weapon to work, that the weapon is found at his workplace, that his prints are on the weapon, that he has had sniper training, that the shot is possible, that he fled the scene, that he shot a police officer who approached him a little while later, that he has an erratic past, et al.
Would you still be the one to say, “but he once shot himself in the foot when he was a Marine,”, and “I heard that somebody in the government wanted details of the crime right after he was arrested” so “we’ll never know if he did it”? Or, do you so sincerely want to believe in a scandal that any tidbit that satsfies that craving becomes a compelling argument?

Got a link?

Pretty much all the files are open - see the National Archives’s The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. Their FAQs discuss the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, the ARRB and the declassification process that resulted.

Granted, the misconception that they aren’t is widespread amongst those who’ve only casually followed the controversy over the years.

The Select Committee on Assassinations Report, from the National Archives site I just linked to.

Their evidence for the fourth shot (which they thought missed) was entirely dependent on the original, now long-since discredited, analysis of the dictabelt recording.

I would not make too many claims about what people heard.

It was not pristine, and there’s nothing odd about finding a bullet on the stretcher of a person who has been shot.

Value = 0. Hunt’s son has been trying to sell his story of ‘Dad killed JFK’ for decades.

A one-day ‘stunt’ trail was of little consequence. The BBC 1986 trail was much, much more thorough and was as close to being a trail for Oswald as you could get Vincent Bugliosi was the ‘DA’ in that case. The jury was not hung by any means.

Based entirely on last minute acoustical evidence now completely dicredited. Their conclusion was also that none of the people or organizations the buffs point fingers at could do it, and they couldn’t figure out where the shot would have come from. Essentially they were saying that on the same day Oswald shot JFK, there was another random shooter with no relationship to Oswald who also took a potshot at JFK from an uknown location, missed, and got away clean. Up until the dictabelt the HSCA was doing quite well.

I have fired an MC, as have others. The shot has been simulated without problems.

I take it denquixote cannot or will not describe any possible evidence that might convince him of Oswald’s sole guilt.

Rachel McAdams studies the JFK assassination?

Also, since (1) the four ‘gunshots’ occur after a dispatcher announces that the presidential motorcade is heading to Parkland hospital and (2) the most likely source for the tape, officer H.B. McLain was located at the Trade Mart rather than Dealy Plaza, the conspirators apparently decided to fire off a bunch of shots in a location where Kennedy wasn’t a minute after his death.

Yep. It gets her hot.

What do you mean nobody’s presented any facts? Lots of us have. I have. I have to qualify with a rifle as part of my job and we shoot under conditions that are more difficult than the ones Oswald was shooting under. If you believe it’s an impossible shot, then go out to a range, rent a rifle, and try it yourself. Even if you’ve never handled a rifle in your life, I’m betting you can hit a man-sized target with a scoped range and a bench rest from eighty yards on your first attempt. Having done it yourself, you may finally believe the reality of how easy it is.

There are lots of things that might convince me of Oswald’s guilt, chief among them a confession. Secondly an eyewitness, that is, an eyewitness that did not pick him out of a lineup after seeing him from some distance do something that appeared to be firing a rifle, but rather someone close enough and familiar enough that there could be no mistake. Something else, which I don’t know if they had in 1963 or if a test can be conducted on an exhumed body is the test that shows if you have fired a gun. They do it with handguns, I don’t know if they do it with rifles. The release of all assassination files and documents currently being withheld, including CIA files. As I have said repeatedly there is much we don’t know as citizens. Until we know what is being kept from us I remain a skeptic. Maybe someone could explain why, if it is so cut and dried, that it takes Bugliosi 2000 pages to settle the case. Is he just long winded or what? If the book comes out in paperback I may buy it.
I saw a movie around 1990 called “The Package” which had certain similarities to some conspiracy theories. It was convoluted, complex and would have been thought at one time to be unbelievable. Nothing is unbelievable to me at this point. This is a lot like the UFO question. Do I think the military is hiding UFO’s at Area 69? No. Would I be surprised to know that they are? No.

Too bad, we’re not going to get one.

As Bugliosi points out, most crimes, even in public, do not have witnesses.

The test as they had it, was usless, and was not evidence either way.

You know this, how?

Why so long? The timeline, the background on Oswald. And then he has the unenviable task of having to dissect the HUNDREDS of claims by conspiracy nuts over the past 40 years. Posner took fewer pages because his was just a narrative of the events, with comments about buff claims along the way. His pages devoted to anti-buff work are not that many.

Movies are not evidence.

Congratulations. You’ve finally posted something no one can argue with - your state of mind. I for one am happy to take you at your word, that you would do the job slowly and deliberately. You are to be commended for your work ethic.

There’s just one little question: is your state of mind exactly like Oswald’s state of mind at the time of the assassination? (If it is, I suspect the FBI and Secret Service would love to have your name and address.) I’d ask you to prove that Oswald thinks just like you, but of course that is impossible.

In other words, just because you would take your time, that does not mean someone else would not.
It’s true he didn’t confess. But you might want to consider his behavior when he was interrogated. He generally didn’t hesitate to answer questions of no consequence. He was catty about other matters.

There was one subject where his response was uniformly one of emphatic denial: anything that connected him to the murder weapon.

Did he own a rifle? Oswald: No! Evidence: he did, in fact, buy that rifle by mail several months before the assassination.

Did he bring a package containing what he said were curtain rods to work that day? Oswald: No! All I brought was my lunch. Evidence: the guy who drove him to work that day said Oswald had with him a package that Oswald said contained curtain rods (the driver’s sister also saw the package) but no lunch.

They showed him the photos of him holding the rifle. Oswald: That’s not me! They’re fake! (In doing this LHO became the first Conspiracy Theorist, since this is their stock response whenever they can’t explain away some piece of evidence). Evidence: real experts (i.e., not Robert Groden) say the photos are real, and Oswald’s wife said she took the photos. Further, they asked him where he had lived in Dallas and he gave them a detailed list of addresses except for the location where those photos had been taken.

There may be more that I’ve forgotten, but the pattern is clear: Oswald was determined to distance himself from the murder weapon.

Familiarize yourself with the concept of “consciousness of guilt” and see where that leads you.
P.S.: Given that there have been a thousand books (at least) written on the Kennedy assassination, there’s no way Bugliosi could debunk everything in 2600 pages - or even 26,000.

Also, the House Special Committee on Assassinations had prepared a draft final report saying their conclusion was that Oswald did it and there was no credible evidence of a conspiracy; then the (thouroughly debunked) acoustic evidence came along at the last minute and reason flew out the window. Imagine that - a government committee being wrong about something. . . .

Of course, a detailed confession from him about how and why he’d done it would be nice. But, despite the occasional claim to the contrary, there’s no reason whatsoever to expect one to be forthcoming now. Everyone is limited by the available evidence, not just by what you’d like - on a whim - to exist.

Pretty much nobody - regardless of their position on the assassination otherwise - believes that there was any such really close-up potential witness. (Because, duh!, any shooter would have tried to avoid being seen.) In other news, if wishes were horses …

Actually, just such testing showed that Oswald had recently fired a gun. One can explain this away by pointing to his shooting of Tippett, but that in itself is rather incriminating.

It’s exactly just such calls, after Stone’s JFK, that were heeded in the early Nineties with the passing of the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. Evidently without effect.

You’re complaining that Bugliosi is too thorough?

Well, Julius Caesar was assassinated by Brutus and there was a conspiracy back then. It doesn’t seem so shocking to me to imagine that JFK’s death was the result of a conspiracy either.

IMHO, one of more influential books I’ve read is Lebedev’s book, “Treason for my Daily Bread”. Excellent work, but very difficult to find in American libraries. It suggests a Nazi connection, long before the Torbitt Document came out. Caesar, Czar, Kaisar. Interesting that the words all originate from the same name.

JFK’s death in late 1963 came at a very convenient time for the rightwing extremists in America. Cui bono? Progressive thinking certainly didn’t benefit. The country lurched backward into a national security imperial state, and we’re living with the repurcussions since then.

To be honest, some of the replies I’ve read are so misinformed and totally off-base that I don’t waste my time to reply.

Does the conspiracy to kill Julius prove the existence of a conspiracy to kill JFK? Actually, a more timely example would be the conspiracy to kill Lincoln, but that doesn’t prove anything about JFK, either.

Yes, interesting, if this was a discussion of linguistics and not 20th-century assassinations.

Including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the National Voting Rights Act of 1965, both signed by JFK’s successor?

I’ll take it, then, that you cannot refute anything in the quoted section. I’ll ask the same question I asked denquixote - can you conceive of evidence that would prove Oswald acted alone? Is there anything that could convince you?

Wait, so the Civil Rights movement was a lurch backwards? Johnson’s great society anti-poverty programs?

You’re dreaming if you imagine that Kennedy was the 1963 version of Dennis Kucinich. He was a cold warrior, he loved the CIA and military special forces, he ordered the coup in Vietnam and escalated our involvement there, he ordered the assassination attempts on Castro, he took us to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Kennedy didn’t give two shits about civil rights for colored people, Johnson was the one who made it all happen.

I honestly can’t understand how someone could imagine that Kennedy was a left-wing peacenik, and such a threat to the reactionary military industrial complex that they had to kill him. It’s a fantasy that has no relation to reality.

Wait, so the Civil Rights movement was a lurch backwards? Johnson’s great society anti-poverty programs?

You’re dreaming if you imagine that Kennedy was the 1963 version of Dennis Kucinich. He was a cold warrior, he loved the CIA and military special forces, he ordered the coup in Vietnam and escalated our involvement there, he ordered the assassination attempts on Castro, he took us to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Kennedy didn’t give two shits about civil rights for colored people, Johnson was the one who made it all happen.

I honestly can’t understand how someone could imagine that Kennedy was a left-wing peacenik, and such a threat to the reactionary military industrial complex that they had to kill him. It’s a fantasy that has no relation to reality.

Of course it wouldn’t be shocking if it were true that JFK’s death was the result of a conspiracy. Conspiracies to commit assassinations occur all the time, Lincoln’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy. As I’ve said several times, the contention that Oswald, as the shooter, was part of a larger conspiracy at least doesn’t contradict known facts. The only problem with the notion that Oswald was an agent working for a larger conspiracy is that there is no evidence that he was. If you want to postulate that Oswald was working for some group, you have to somehow provide some evidence. The fact that no credible evidence has emerged over the last 40 years, plus the fact that Oswald’s life story shows him to be a deranged pathetic loner, means that most reasonable people aren’t going to expect such evidence to show up.

Well, one shit anyway.

Hey, ngant17, c’mere. Lemme explain something. Those of us here who believe Mr. Oswald acted all by his lonesome don’t do so because we’re shocked by the idea of a conspiracy, or because we just can’t believe there could have been a conspiracy, or anything like that. Of course there could have been a conspiracy in the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

We believe the way we do because we’ve looked at the primary evidence and find beaucoup reasons to think Oswald was involved, and no good reason to think anyone else was.

The Warren Commission looked for evidence of a conspiracy and found nothing credible. And while the House Select Committee on Assassinations [yeah, I got the name wrong earlier] was, because of its last-minute leap onto the Acoustic Evidence Bandwagon, able to claim there was “probably a conspiracy”, it could not actually identify that conspiracy.

I’d be tickled pink if you could make a good case for conspiracy. Butcha gotta actually make the case!