When Oswald assassinated Kennedy, was it public knowledge that Kennedy had sanctioned the attempted to kill Castro? Same for the supposed South Vietnamese leader?
Probably not, but Oswald wasn’t operating on fact based decision making. His communist sympathies and hatred of American policy may not have been tied to Kennedy at all, killing him was just opportunistic.
I should have done a little research before posting.
Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated less than a month before JFK, but it doesn’t appear to have been something the USA government wanted.
As for Castro, I found this quote that points out that it wasn’t entirely a Jack Kennedy thing:
But still, assassination was a thing that was going on. Oswald turned that back on the USA.
Remember that Oswald tried to kill General Edwin Walker months before Kennedy. Walker held extreme right wing views and had been ousted from his command by the Kennedy administration. Oswald was itching to kill someone, and the particulars of the politics don’t seem to have mattered.
Crucible I think you’ve made several errors. You’re looking for a motive that makes sense to you. Often, there isn’t one. People do things for random, minor, or highly illogical reasons. Why did Ruby shoot Oswald? Was he a tool of the conspiracy, tying up loose ends? Or was he just another crazy guy with a gun?
Oswald originally was a Marxist, who idolized the Soviet Union. Then he defected to the USSR (which is why the Marines dishonorably discharged him). After living in the USSR for a few years, he discovered it was as big a shit hole as the worst of the USA, came back, and transferred his loyalty to Cuba. He was the founder (and only member) of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee branch in New Orleans.
He was searching for some way to validate his empty and pathetic life. He thought killing Kennedy would make him important.
It happened that he was working in the Texas School Book Depository when Kennedy’s cavalcade was passing by. Oswald found out about it, and decided that this was his chance.
As mentioned, he already tried to shoot Ed Walker (and failed at that too). He tried again with Kennedy, and for once in his life managed to bring something off successfully.
Regards,
Shodan
Everyone has an opinion. Did he write anything that made the motive for assassinating Kennedy clear? did he say anything in the time the police had hm in custody? Why didn’t he brag about it? Why didn’t he express any threats beforehand?
People believing in ‘gun rights’, that the 2nd amendment is for protecting us from a tyrant or a tyrannical government? They seem to be saying that one would be crazy NOT to take an opportunity to assassinate someone they say is trying to remove that ‘right’. Are they less likely than Oswald to take action?
It takes more than being a little crazy to assassinate someone. It takes planning and coaching. Suicide bombers all have coaches. I bet Oswald did, too.
In other words, “It happened that…” doesn’t cut it for me.
You keep asking questions, but you don’t seem to be reading any of the answers…like the one just before your last. Is this just another case of someone pretending to look for answers while in reality fishing for people to validate an already established belief?
Thanks Czarcasm. You said it better than I could have in my exasperation.
I repeat- read “Case Closed”. After that - if you have the time - read “Reclaiming History”.
You keep saying that it isn’t important that Oswald didn’t impart his desire to kill Kennedy in any way to any one beforehand. I think it is.
You say it isn’t pertinent that he didn’t brag about his accomplishment afterwards. I think if he acted alone for political reasons, he would have. ‘sic semper tyrannus’, (if Booth actually said it, or if Brutus…). I still think it is revealing of something that he didn’t.
so, let me have my pathetic opinion and go on your way. surely you aren’t afraid I will somehow hurt you by what I believe? In other words, why the exasperation? Surely you’ve been around long enough to know that not everyone agrees with you all the time?
Why your exasperation with differing opinions that are based on years of evidence gathering and not blind supposition? If you want to state your opinion and restrict the opinions of others, you could always start a blog, y’know.
You admit that before starting this thread, you weren’t aware of Oswald’s previous assassination attempt and that he was espousing political crazy talk on TV, contrary to your original assertion. Dude, just go read a couple of books on the topic already.
Unless you are witholding some superior knowledge of the events surrounding the assassination, you are are arguing from the same relatively incomplete set of facts as the rest of us.
There is nothing in primary sources to suggest that Oswald acted with anyone’s help.
There is ample evidence that Oswald was a crazy loser with a grudge against the US government, who had already tried and failed to kill a general.
There is as much evidence for a conspiracy to kill Kennedy as there is for a conspiracy to kill Mickey Mouse. Which is to say, none.
Unless you provide evidence of a conspiracy, your feelings are not persuasive to any rational adult. Feelings are not how we design bridges, or launch rockets, or determine historical facts.
Ray was a career criminal who had broken out of prison. He had an inflated view of himself as a criminal mastermind who no jail could hold. In Memphis at the time there were rumors in the criminal underworld that rich racists would pay large amounts of money to anyone who shot King. Thus Ray thought he could kill King and collect money for it and if he was caught he could escape from prison like he did before.
this certainly doesn’t convince me that he was crazy enough to kill the president. He didn’t express any tendency to violence, didn’t give off any weird vibrations.
He sounded a lot more ‘together’ than most of the NRA activists do, today, or the TEA Party people.
What makes you say this interview revealed him as a dangerous person?
At his age, a lot of young people still read philosophy from all over the map. Today, his ‘Fair Play for Cuba’ organization would almost be mainstream!!!
I don’t see why some of you are so strident about this matter. I still don’t perceive Oswald as the sort of person who would, absent a terrible setback in his life caused directly by the government, go to the mattresses on the whatever floor of the book depository building.
I grant you, direct evidence of conspiracy seems not to be there to find. Absence of evidence, then, to me, says you have to examine other factors, and it still doesn’t feel right to me that Oswald was an independent actor.
there are millions of people today who have the ‘pitiful little failure of a life’ Oswald did. Besides, his life wasn’t empty. He had a beautiful wife, etc., and a life mission, perhaps, to argue that marxism was worthy of consideration.
Somehow this seems to have escaped your notice, crucible. You’ve said you don’t understand Oswald’s motive and you said flat-out that there were “no indications.” Well, he was an avowed Marxist who disliked JFK’s Cuba policy and he tried to kill someone else - General Walker, an extreme anti-Communist - a few weeks before the killed Kennedy.
I once knew a guy who would pretend to be really dense about obvious things, just because it was fun to get a rise out of people who took him seriously.
We can play “Battle of the Uninformed Opinions” all day if you like.
My gut feeling is that a legitimate conspirator should have run around in the street with his pants on his head immediately after the assassination. Oswald didn’t, therefore, there was no conspriracy. I’m right and you’re wrong.
I also have no evidence that Macdonald’s puts a substance in the Big Mac which makes you crave it fornightly, but I have a strong feeling. So it’s true.
Weeeeeeee! Your turn.
Are you old enough to be aware of how Marxism and Communism were perceived in that era, or are you a post-Cold War adult who thinks commies are some kind of cute arctic bunny?
Oswald preaching Marxism and handing out pro-Cuba flyers in that time was about as benign and positive as someone haranguing crowds in Times Square and passing out flyers in favor of al-Qaida today, if not worse.* It was a VERY extreme position to take in public and like many who did so at the street-corner level, Oswald’s behavior seems to have stemmed as much from psychological problems as any genuine belief in or commitment to Communist ideals.
*al-Qaida is a minor movement that would like to destroy the west. The USSR was a country dedicated to conquering or destroying the US, and they had the means to do so, and those means were armed and ready to do so for 30+ years. That makes bin Laden a cute bunny by comparison.
One of my points in posting this at all, mr. admin guy, is that the level of anti-government, anti-person, rhetoric today greatly exceeds the outward manifestations expressed by Oswald. By comparison, to me, he seems quite rational.
I’m left with the fact that I forgot about the General Walker assassination attempt. What is the evidence for that? Any admission by Oswald?
Listen, i’m not a cooky ‘there has to be a conspiracy’ person. All I ask is that people dispassionately examine the non-threatening demeanor of Oswald as compared to the thousands of threatening messages you can find on almost any comment section of any national news story.
I don’t think of Oswald as any sort of martyr, or a complete dupe, but I do think he didn’t demonstrate anywhere near enough vitriol to have just decided, one day, to kill the president, damn the consequences. He wasn’t insane. I think he thought he was working for someone and he was going to get away with it.
I am struck with the concern of an administrator about my opinion not meshing with yours. To me, that isn’t an administrator’s job, making sure everyone says the same thing.
There are fifty years of difference between the environment Oswald spoke and acted out on and today. Morever, the JFK assassination and the events that followed through the RFK assassination were total game-changers with respect to how the public viewed and responded to government.
If you can’t place things in historical context, you need to be a hell of a lot less dogmatic in discussions of historical events.