Indeed, some of the earliest CTers were trying to pin the conspiracy completely on Communists.
It wasn’t until later that the CIA & military industrial complex became the vague, shadowy villains.
We’ve heard from many shooters that a 60-80 yard shot is fairly easy, even with iron sights.
Assuming that Oswald’s target was the head, he hit the target with one shot out of three. That doesn’t at all sound like an incredible feat of marksmanship to me.
I’ve never noticed a partisan divide in the JFK nuttery camp. I was struck, however, by Tom Brokaw’s comments this last weekend, where he said that ‘everyone knew’ that if JFK was going to be in danger, it would be in ‘a place like Dallas Texas’, leaving the insinuation that JFK was somehow under threat from right wing extremists or racists or something.
The fact is, Oswald’s Communism had nothing to do with it. Oswald was simply a nutcase. He was recommended for forced psychiatric care in the states, and then the same thing happened in the Soviet Union. He was court-martialed twice in the Marines for crazy behavior. He tried to join the revolution in Cuba and was turned down. He beat his wife, and was basically a paranoid schizophrenic ass. He was the prototype of the crazy lone gunman.
Yep. And shooting from behind gave him a nice low deflection shot, and he was helped by the fact that after the first shot the motorcade slowed almost to a halt giving him a large, very slow moving target.
The other shot that hit JFK was to the upper back, high enough to exit the throat. Pretty close to the head.
I’ll say upfront I know fuck all about Oswald, about his connections, about what they may or may not have done…BUT
To me, this is where the anti-conspiracy reasoning falls down a little.
Nobody says that 7 different world leaders had to get together and brief the killer, or that 19 different secret service agents had to be in on the plot…
All it would actually require to “push” someone in that direction would be ONE person, just mentioning to Oswald - “hey - one way to get people to take you seriously is to kill the president”. If at the same time that person had a piece of information that could help - or could otherwise steer a security team away from checking something quite so thoroughly it may just work out. It would be a “hail mary” once in a thousand type of play but not totally beyond the realms of possibility.
(no I don’t think this actually happened)
The same goes for the 9/11 is a govt setup conspiracy. Nobody with a brain believes that this could be managed, and gotten away with.
However, it’s also not beyond the realms of possibility that some senior agent / investigator had just enough of an idea to stop the hijackers - but decided something like “hell - let them try, the plan won’t succeed, but if they try then we have a reason to attack Saddam” - again, I’m not saying it has to be some deep cover operation involving multiple depts, but rather just some guy who got the wrong idea and was acting outside what he was supposed to do.
In short - a conspiracy theory doesn’t have to be a huge elaborate scheme - it is possible that somebody knew more than they let on, and that information could have caused a different outcome, but they deliberately didn’t act on it for reasons of their own.
Yeah -
But what proof do you have that the third shot was “perfect” and that he “was capable of it” rather than it being a lucky fluke?
To put it into comparison - when I was playing golf as a teenager I played off a 32 handicap (which is about as bad as you get and still allowed to play), yet despite that,
- On one occasion I was less than 2" away from a hole in one on a par three - something which is professional range accuracy
- On another occasion I was less than 24" away from a hole in one on a par 4 (a hole in one on a par 4 is something that is a "once in a lifetime, even for Tiger Woods)
The point to take - why couldn’t Oswald just have been “lucky” on his last shot? Unlikely - sure, but unlikely things do happen. (and I’d bet more money on him getting lucky than on there being a CT because he wasn’t good enough to make the shot)
And there’s nothing that says that the ONE person couldn’t have been a Dallas bartender sometime in August 1963. Or that Oswald got together with some drinking buddies one night and cracked wise about killing the President.
And that’s the other thing about conspiracies. They don’t have to be “powerful”, but the CT-ers want them to be - it makes for a better story, obviously.
So, here’s my JFK CT-theory, proudly revealed here for the first time:
LHO had another loser drinking buddy who, on the afternoon of 11-22-63, was freaking out saying “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, OH SHIT! I didn’t think the dumb son-of-a-bitch would actually kill the President! I mean, we were just drunk and talking crazy, right, Stu?”
To me, that seems more likely than any of the “powerful cabals” theories out there. A lone nut, possibly egged-on somewhat by his loser acquaintances, takes a shot that changes the world.
I don’t think there’s any evidence for this, but since that hasn’t stopped tens of millions with other theories, why should it stop me? 
All of this is reasonable, but in the end it’s not much of a conspiracy.
Certainly Oswald moved in a world that hated Kennedy and the entire US power structure; it’s almost beyond doubt that he heard barstool and living room mutterings about “killing” this person and “blowing up” that building and so forth. Was Oswald influenced by others, including such specific statement? Almost beyond question.
But that’s not a conspiracy. Conspiracy, both legally and linguistically, is an active effort of more than one person to achieve a criminal act. No such person exists in the JFK case - no one, from the Commission to the House bozos to hundreds of amateur through semi-pro researchers has ever turned up a single credible person who materially assisted, guided or influenced LHO with any of his illegal acts.
And that’s where the conspiracy theories fall down… a lot. They all begin by dismissing a well-composed set of evidence on the absolute belief that one person just couldn’t and wouldn’t have done it. Since Oswald could not possibly have done it on his own, and would not have done such a thing on his own, there MUST be a conspiracy of some kind that made/helped him do it. Your Mission: Find It!
But it’s beyond need for further proof that Oswald did do it, although we have only the murkiest understanding of his reasons and motivation. But no conspiracy above someone muttering on the next barstool has ever been proven, and - I’ll say it again - no one seems to have a problem with Whitman, Huberty, Sherrill, Klebold/Harris, Cho, Nidal and Lanza acting completely on their own, with no supporting cast or conspiracy, and with no readily understood motivations. Add in the two prior Presidential assassins, and the nobody who shot Huey Long. I don’t think even Breivik had any assistance (not 100% sure on that).
Lone nuts happen. Lone nuts don’t need conspiracies or assistance. Lone nuts sometimes get caught; sometimes just kill themselves; sometimes pull off exactly what they set out to pull off, to the tremendous shock of everyone around them and the world.
Oswald was a lone nut who was just skilled and lucky enough to succeed. Accept the massive body of evidence to that effect, and there’s no need to create nonsensical theories out of thin air, whether they involve nations or an anonymous helpmate who left a door unlocked.
You’d think a senior agent/investigator might have noticed that none of the hijackers were Iraqi, thus requiring anyone wanting to attack Saddam Hussein to gin up an entirely new casus belli (which is what happened in real life after all).
The internet makes it easy to find lots of exceptions to every rule.
40% of Democrats believe in creationism, but I think you would agree that conservatives pretty much own that one.
The NYT thinks Dallas “willed the death of the president” and goes on to list many examples of right-wingery in Dallas that would make a damning case except that they had nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination.
I’ve got nothing to bring to this discussion except a question.
If everything that can be known about the assignation of President Kennedy has been made transparent how do we account for the file from the House Select Committee which is not to be released until 2029?
That’s nearly a generation. Why the reticence to withhold the information in the file?
Error: Why the reticence to release the information in the file?
…I still don’t see the conspiracy theory. The Norse were in Greenland for 500 years. As long as the time from Colombus untill today, roughly. There is lots of time for Stuff To Happen in that timespan. The Norse demonstrated the ability to reach North America at the start of the period. America also contained goods desired by the Greenlanders.
That there were more expeditions from Greenland seems a theory which is overwhelmingly probable, but lacking direct evidence. From there on, there is of course a list of theories getting less and less probable, and eventually leaving the domain of plausible behind…but where is the conspiracy?
The connection is mostly in the way the nonsense is expressed, using the same type of false facts and faulty reasoning. The “experts” are against them and are suppressing their opinions, which are just as legitimate. It’s a very small step from rune stones to climate denial.
I, like you, have a problem with that article. Kennedy was killed for his anti-communism, making the fact that Dallas right-wingers disliked him irrelevant to explaining the assassination.
However, this was not an editorial expressing the views of the New York Times. That paper publishers a wide range of opinion articles, and it is a mistake to infer the paper’s views by citing one.
Fair point, but today they ran a straight news story that is in the same vein as the editorial. One might be excused for thinking Sulzberger is trying to “swift boat” southern conservatives by exploiting people’s loose grip on history. If you didn’t already know who really shot Kennedy, this story would make you think the mayor of Dallas got up a posse and lynched him in front of a burning cross.
Years ago I used to pay for an out-of-town subscription to the Times, but they’ve really gone off the rails the last ten years or so.
Complete WAG: The file refers to a source within a foreign entity thought to be potentially responsible for the assassination. E.g., Cuba’s DGI, Russia’s KGB/FSB, any of the worldwide Mafia groups, whoever else. Revealing that the U.S. could positively say that the relevant entity was excluded as a candidate might reveal the source and/or the methods used to obtain that information. The delay is to allow the source to pass through natural causes. Again, a complete WAG.
Almost every major investigation or hearing generates such sealed files, and those looking for conspiracies make too much of them.
Such things have historically been because they named living persons in ways that could be damaging or libelous, or because the evidence was given by people who did not want to be publicly identified. It has almost never meant anything of much interest to the investigation or hearing because anything genuinely relevant would have become part of the published proceedings or report.
Think it through: would any reporting body leave contrary or explosive evidence to be unsealed some time later, even if after their deaths?
Pretty much all the remaining files on JFK will become public in the next 15 years, and I predict that none of them will contain any particularly shocking revelations - just testimony and evidence that add nothing to the original or reconsidered reports but could have needlessly damaged lives or reputations of those who testified or were implicated.