While I appreciate those who would add heft to my thread by speculating on conspiracy theories, I specifically offered as a premise to this “debate” (it’s really a question, but a speculative one about a volatile subject, so I put it here) that there is no conspiracy theory.
I should confess that my question arises as I slog my way through Vincent Bugliosi’s very detailed book on the assassination, Reclaiming History, and I just finished the chapter detailing Oswald’s life.
He seemed to me to be fairly meticulous (albeit delusional) in his planning, so the impulsive nature of this murder seems suprising - then again, he was given an opportunity to do something historic, with practically no notice. It was probably a “now or never” decision.
I guess I can believe those who say he thought he’d just wander out of town; given how easy he managed to escape suspicion following the attempted murder of General Walker, and I don’t doubt that he had a distorted view of his ability to escape.
Then again, maybe he was hoping for a show trial, where he could rant and rave against the evills of the capitalist system, in the hopes of acheiving signifcance or fame (something he seemed to covet). If that’s the case, though, then why try to get away at all?
Well, in fairness to the CTers, ones answer to the question rather hinges on whether or not someone believes there was a conspiracy or not. If not, then it’s sort of a boring answer…LHO didn’t really seem to have any coherent plans for escape, or even what one would consider a real solid plan for the assassination itself. I think this is what bothers CTers so much, actually…the randomness, the luck involved, the fact that one lone nutter without even a decent plan could decide almost on a whim to pick up a gun and shoot the President of the United States. People don’t want to think about that, so they instead want to impose some order on a chaotic situation by inserting in mysterious covert organizations in the US that planned the whole thing, right down to the detail of LHO looking like a plan-less schlub who just got lucky.
The reality is, as most of the posters in this thread have said, that the Leester was just a barely functional loser who really didn’t have a plan, just a gun and some luck.
Even without believing in a conspiracy theory, it amazes me how incompetent the FBI and Secret Service were. The FBI knew where Oswald worked, but never thought to note the connection between the parade route and his place of employment! They missed the connection between Oswald in New Orleans (where he was protesting US intervention in Cuba) with the Texas Oswald that was pro-Soviet. It amazes me how the lack of the sort of computer database commonplace today deprived the agents of the chance to anticipate Oswald’s crazy act of violence.
Oswald’s entire life demonstrates a complete inability to think ahead for more than five minutes at a time. No, he didn’t have an escape plan.
Atomicktom, I’m not sure that even today the Secret Service would have noted Oswald as a threat. I’m not sure that he was a threat until about two days beforehand.
In a way Kennedy came to Oswald, not the other way around, well sort of anyway.
This seems to be a muder of opportunity. Remember Oswald, like many people in the 60s, had self-styled himself as a poltical activist. He and others wanted and believed they could change the world. In a way Oswald, could’ve saw the murder of Kennedy to be a chance for his own personal mark on history and he took it.
Then he worried about how to get away with it. This is why so many murderers get caught. They don’t think it through at all.
He was calm and composed enough immediately after the shooting to get past a police officer on his way out of the building. Officer Marion Baker confronted Oswald on the second floor but let him go after verifying through another employee that Oswald did work there.
So lets say that after passing the officer, Oswald goes to the restroom, does what he needs to compose himself, and finishes the day (or goes home with everyone else, I doubt that many textbooks were shipped that day) and then goes home.
The next morning wouldn’t he have been able to hop a plane pretty well scot-free? Or did they have an idea about him by then?
I agree, but Oswald made it home, then went back out onto the streets with his revolver, whereupon he shot officer Tippet and was eventually captured. Where was he going?
This I disagree with. Oswald was delusional, but his dramatic plans were always planned out months (sometimes years) in advance. Before going to the Soviet Union, he had saved up money and read books for years, then got his mom to go along with a plan to claim hardship to get out of the Marines early, and had even enrolled in a European university to lend credibility to his student visa.
Before shooting General Walker, he had taken photos of the area, and probably had staked it out many times. He left detailed instructions for Marina, his wife, if he didn’t return.
Before he went to Mexico to try to enter Cuba, he had collected press accounts and letters of his political activism, in hopes of demonstrating his commitment to the Cuban cause.
None of these were done on a whim. Sure, Oswald was a drifter who couldn’t keep a job, but that reflected more on his anti-social weirdness, rather than an impulsive nature.
Killing JFK, while necessarily spur of the moment (since he didn’t have much notice of the event) strikes me as out of character for Oswald, at least in terms of the time he spent getting ready for it.
Of course he was a threat. He had already tried to kill General Walker (although the authorities didn’t know it). But, if the FBI had been aware of what information they had, then the Secret Service would have known that a pro-Soviet (and recently Pro-Cuba) malcontent was working in a building along the President’s parade route. That fact alone, in more modern times, might have inspired them to change the President’s route, or at least secure the building before they had a motorcade.
I think the problem Oswald had was the rifle. He must have realized that he couldn’t dispose of it, and must have assumed that they’d connect it to him pretty quickly. He might have also assumed that it would be obvious where he had shot from (later conspiracy theories notwithstanding), so he felt an urgent compunction to leave the scene immediately.
The more I think about it, the more I think that Oswald didn’t really plan the event; as already stated, he just found out about the parade a day or so prior. But, I do think he probably envisioned himself standing trial, on a national stage, and figured that he’d be - if not exonerated - at least made into a political prisoner notorious around the world, and (in his deluded mind) made into a hero in the “Marxist” world.
I’m curious. Where did you come up with the notion that President Kennedy “was getting far too popular” and could you please explain the difference between becoming popular and becoming “far too” popular?
The “sort of computer database commonplace” pre-911, deprived the US government “of the chance to anticipate” 911. The “sort of computer database commonplace today” deprived the US government “of the chance to anticipate” the Shoe Bomber, the Underwear Bomber, and the Times Square Terrorist. These facts are not amazing. Computer databases are the new false idols.
I think they would have figured it out pretty quickly. They found the rifle shortly after the assassination and I believe Buell Wesley Frazier, the co-worker that had given Oswald a ride to work, put the pieces together without too much trouble. He typically gave Oswald a ride home on Friday and picked him up again on Monday, but in this case Oswald asked him for a ride home on Thursday, and when he picked him up on Friday he was carrying the rifle, which he stated was curtain rods. Also, Marina Oswald stated that when she heard the president had been shot she went out to the garage where Oswald kept his rifle, and when she saw that it was gone, she knew Lee had done it.
Oswald may have been told, and may have believed that there was an escape plan to evacuate him, but when it became obvious to him that he had been set up to be the patsy (as he characterized himself), he knew that there really was no escape plan.
His movements upon leaving the TSBD are those of a confused and panic-stricken individual. First he walks down Elm Street as far as Murphy Street, and then boards a bus going in the direction from which he just came, rides it two blocks as far as Lamar Street where it gets stuck in traffic, so he gets off and grabs a transfer on his way out. He then walks down Lamar as far as Commerce Street and grabs a cab, which takes him south along the Houston Street Viaduct and drops him at North Beckley Avenueand Neely Street; he backtracks on foot to his rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Avenue, where he grabs a jacket and a gun, and then again walks back past where the cab had dropped him, past Davis Street, and down Crawford as far as 10th Street. There, he turned to his left and walked as far as Patton, where he encountered patrolman Tippett. After the confrontation which led to Tippett’s shooting, we are told that he fled south on Patton, turned right on Jefferson and went back toward Crawford, where he abandoned his jacket on a vacant lot, and then proceeded back along Jefferson, heading west as far as the Texas Theater, where he sneaks past the ticket clerk and hides in the darkness.
These don’t seem to be the actions of someone who resolved to commit a political assassination; one would think that such a person would be somewhat calmer, especially if they were no stranger to rifles and the shooting of them, and an appreciation of the situation. It is not likely that any Marine, in full understanding of the situation, would have behaved in the way Oswald did.
Oswald not taking a cab directly to his destination doesn’t prove betrayal - he may have just not wanted to give his address to the driver (I know I wouldn’t under the circumstances). He only becomes arguably panicked after he shoots Tippet, and even then, his actions aren’t too erratic - he dumps a (bloodstained? distinctive?) jacket and tries to hide for a few hours. His mistake was not paying the box office clerk, calling attention to himself, though it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Oswald apparently realized, in his more rational moments, that November 22 was not just going to be another day at the office. When his wife got up on that day, she found that before going to work he had left on the kitchen table his wedding ring, financial papers like bank records and insurance policies, and a note telling her not to worry about anything that might happen that day.
Hey, I’m not saying he wasn’t involved – sure he was!
But he probably believed or was led to believe that he was the only one involved, and it became apparent to him at the time of the assassination that he wasn’t – there were other shots being fired that he wasn’t responsible for. It was at that time that he likely realized he was being set up, and decided to bug out.
It could very well be that the original escape plan was to flee east on Elm, but he realized that this was also a lie, so he turned around, realizing that he was on his own. His actions after that point could well be those of someone who knows now that they will have to depend on themselves to get away, because any help that was promised isn’t going to be where he was told it was going to be.
The problem is that you’re creating hypotheses out of nothing. You may as well speculate that the only reason Oswald took the bus was because his Martian anti-gravity boots malfunctioned.
The possibility of Oswald being part of a conspiracy depends on him making plans with other people. How did he do that? Oswald was married, he had a family, he worked a steady job with other people around, he traveled on public transportation. When and where was he meeting his fellow conspirators? He didn’t get any mysterious messages in the mail or by phone - his wife would have noticed. He wasn’t meeting with shadowy figures - again, the people around him would have noticed this.
Nothing? The guy was a lousy shot. His rifle was a piece of crap. The scope was out of whack. He wasn’t that bright, and was prone to flights of fancy.
Definitely the kind of guy I would pick to get caught while the other guilty parties got away.
Except he was the only one in the place where the shots came from, they came from that rifle, and Oswald was the one who took the shots. All the stuff you post are irrelevant hypotheticals once you look at the evidence.
Except, as far as anyone can tell, there were no other parties involved. You need to show that first before you go down this route.
At the risk of dooming my own thread to failure, I had hoped to raise a question about the JFK killing that didn’t posit wild speculation about a conspiracy. I’m endlessly fascinated by the assassination, but have come to the confident conclusion that the official story is the one most close to the truth, and that CTs are universally based on misinformation, wild speculation, or a failure of critical thinking skills.
With the “lone gunman” as a premise, it may well be that this thread doesn’t offer much in the way of debate - if he’s crazy, then predicting what he had in mind is probably impossible. But, I endeavored to bring the discussion of Oswald away from the conspiracy realm, to no avail. There’s already a thread open about the loony theories that are out there (and there are lots of archived threads about the same topic), so it’s pretty clear to me now why the interest in the JFK assassination, even among the esteemed members of the Dope, continues to persist.