Indeed. An example of this is the declassification of WW2 files that started in serious ernest in the 90’s. This, combined with a resurgence in interest in the war by Baby Boomers (whose Dad’s participated in the war), and the declassification of formerly Soviet files led to a huge increase in written books on the War.
But some files, particularly Defense Intelligence and CIA (then OSS) files remain sealed. Some wildcats declared that there must be hugely damning info in them, like pictures of Roosevelt and Hitler in the bath together, or some super secret weapons the aliens gave us.
In reality, it was simply protecting people. Those OSS files would have names of people who were giving information or accidentally revealed information to the allies. The information itself is probably long past relevance, but the names of the people who gave it would shown to everyone in the Axis countries. While those people might have long passed on by the 90’s their kids and grandkids might have to face some hotheads in those countries who might take action against them. It was easier to just keep the information sealed until the memories were long distant history.
I have to admit that your link does perfectly support your point. I would defend the news article a little in that the story line seems to be one that a lot of people in Dallas believe. Once you accept that writing a story on Dallas 50 years later is reasonable, the tale is going to sound rather as it does. On the other hand, the bare mention of Oswald being a Marxist is underplayed.
The Times is still an excellent source for hard news regarding topics such as understanding the Affordable Care Act. And some of their story lines, such as on the exclusion of prestigious hospitals from many exchange plans, have not been pleasant reading for ACA supporters.
A lot of what can seem like a slant is really just an attempt to provide a clear story line on which to hang the facts.
The only aspect of the case that leads me to reflexively suspect some kind of conspiracy (without any idea, much less evidence, of what that conspiracy might have been) is the point where Jack Ruby comes into the story.
It defies logic to accept at face value that there is nothing unusual at all about some local mafioso nightclub owner just taking it upon himself to walk right
into the jail and gun Oswald down, on live television, in front of dozens of police and reporters the day after he was arrested.
Ruby had connections and dealings with people ranging from powerful mob bosses, union leaders and corrupt law enforcement and politicians, all the way down to a whole cast of small time thugs, pimps and police snitches. He could have chosen a thousand better times and places to have Oswald killed, whatever his motivation for doing so, where he would have had at least a chance of getting away with it and retaining his freedom.
Assuming that he was psychologically stable enough to be capable of understanding his actions and their consequences, which all signs seem to be that he was, the only explanation for finding it worthwhile to sacrifice his freedom and possibly his life would be that he needed to shut Oswald up quickly, and the consequences for doing so in the manner that he did were somehow preferable to whatever consequences he would face if it weren’t done.
Something beyond a hot-headed wish to avenge the President, or protect the first lady from having to return for a trial, or restore the good name of Dallas (as have all been suggested for his possible motives) had to be motivating him to act when and how he did. Who, what or why, I have no idea. But his role in this case just doesn’t fit into the picture in any way that doesn’t raise suspicion that he was operating under coercion by an unknown party for unknown reasons.
Well, my wife and I were discussing Ruby the other day. We both thought he and Oswald had the same problem, they were willing to kill people in order to be thought of as important. Both of them were pretty narcissistic guys. One got his photo taken with a rifle and a paper announcing his next target, the other would get his photo taken with strippers.
Oswald first tried to shoot Edwin Walker, then successfully shot Kennedy in order to “make his mark”. I think Ruby used Oswald for the same purpose.
It’s possible but much easier to believe about Oswald than Ruby. Ruby was already established and “important”, at least in his own circles. It seems like he had plenty to lose and wasn’t the bitter, disenfranchised and powerless type.
Also both Oswald and Ruby made statements that they were manipulated into their situations; Oswald with the ‘patsy’ statement and Ruby with something to the effect of “The people behind this will never allow the facts to surface.”
Someone who wanted to make a mark on the world or a name for themselves would be defeating the whole point if they claimed they were just a powerless pawn in someone else’s game once arrested.
Of course even absolute proof that Ruby was involved in a conspiracy to kill Oswald still wouldn’t be proof that Oswald was part of a conspiracy to kill JFK. It might add some plausibility to the idea of a smaller conspiracy like an organized crime hit.
It is so easy to believe that Oswald acted alone because the mechanics of the crime were so ridiculously straightforward. A clear day, an open car, a window with a birds-eye view and someone willing to pull the trigger of a $15 rifle is all it took. It could have been conceived, planned, and carried out by one guy on the spur of the moment with no big government cover ups or massive conspiracies. By the same token such a simple plan could also easily have been made by four other guys, who manipulated Oswald into pulling the trigger and Ruby into killing Oswald.
As I said from the Oswald side of the equation, while there is no reason to think such a scheme is impossible, there is also no real reason to think it was the case. But then when Ruby comes in the whole thing gets mysterious and murky and Oliver Stone-ish. The guy was knee deep in various organized crime, friends with several well known mob bosses, had many ties, both legitimate and illegitimate to local businesses, politicians and police and he just decides on the spur of the moment to throw it all away and kill a Presidential assassin on live TV for some personal reason while claiming he was manipulated into doing it?
Maybe I am a hopeless conspiracy theorist but that part of the whole story has always been very suspicious to me.
Well, rule number one of avoiding conspiracy thinking: if you have questions, go ask and get those questions answered; don’t let the question be the answer.
Well, Ruby was involved in the underworld, but he hadn’t made it. By all accounts that I’ve heard, he thought he was small fish, at best.
I’d say that neither of them were predisposed to think their plan through much further than, “I’ll kill them, and then I’ll be a HERO!” Even if they had put more thought into it than that, prison and history are littered with people who only figure out their ideas were bad ones after the fact. Sometimes they only have to see the corpse, and they realize it isn’t going to work out like they imagined. To blame others after the fact is so common it’s almost a comical act.
The questions about Ruby have been answered reasonably well, as well. There’s no real need to take CT distortions and ignorance down a long winding road.
Ruby might have been known by mobsters, and they may have frequented his clubs, but he was nowhere within their circles. He hung out with cops too much for them to even remotely come close to trusting him with anything.
Another major flaw in any conspiracy theory is the character of Oswald himself. If you’re the CIA, or the Mob, or the Soviets, or any other mastermind behind a conspiracy, the LAST guy you’re going to choose for your hit team is an unstable loner with a history of paranoia and lack of loyalty. He’s exactly the kind of guy who would either screw up the entire deal or simply rat you out immediately after being caught. And you can’t guarantee that you can kill him after the assassination - Ruby got lucky.
As for Ruby himself, he may have thought that he’d be seen as a big hero and make his mark in history as a good guy who avenged the president. He may even have deluded himself into thinking he’d get off lightly because of the nature of the guy he killed.
But if you must have a conspiracy explanation for Ruby’s killing of Oswald, it doesn’t have to be a conspiracy involving the assassination. It could be that Oswald had been involved with other shady people on unrelated issues, and someone decided he needed to be silenced before he told the cops everything. Oswald was certainly looking for any opportunity he could find to cause mayhem - he had recently tried to join the Cuban Revolution and had traveled to Mexico to do so. He handed out leaflets on the streets, tried to assassinate a General, etc. Who knows what other stuff he had on the drawing board when the opportunity to kill Kennedy landed at his feet?
But ultimately I don’t believe any of the conspiracies. Oswald shot Kennedy, Ruby took an opportunity to make history. He was friendly with the cops and had access to the building where Oswald was being transferred. Maybe one of his cop buddies even said something like, ‘Too bad we can’t just shoot the sumbitch’ in Ruby’s presence, and Ruby took the advice to heart. We’ll never know.
We can be pretty sure that Ruby’s shooting of Oswald was not premeditated. Oswald was supposed to be transferred to the jail at 10:00 am. That morning, we know:
[ul]
[li]Jack wasn’t in a hurry - he stopped to talk when leaving his house.[/li][li]He was at the Western Union office until 11:17, 77 minutes after Oswald was supposed to be transferred.[/li][li]He left his dog in his car[/li][/ul]
He arrived at the basement of the DPD just seconds before Oswald came out.
While I am against conspiracy theories, this argument always makes me uncomfortable. Neither the CIA, the Mob, nor the Soviets strike me as uniformly competent. Also, from the spy history books I’ve read, I’m not generally impressed by the stability and loyalty of intelligence agents. If they wanted Kennedy dead and really had an plausible opportunity to recruit someone who worked in a building overlooking the parade route – and I don’t believe they did – they might not at that point be overly fussy about the agent’s identity.
Oswald’s biography does seem quite relevant to me, but it has to be looked at a highly detailed level. When exactly is it claimed that the conspiracy began? It couldn’t be before the parade route was finalized on November 18, 1963, since the route was unusual and, until then, there would be no reason to try to recruit an agent who worked in the Book Depository. I suppose you could say that the Mob recruited him before November 18 and then got incredibly lucky with the choice of route. Or you could say that the CIA had control over the known two secret service agents who set the parade route in consultation with known Dallas police. But both the luck story, and the CIA/Mob/Soviets-set-the-route story are, for different reasons, highly unlikely. The story that President Kennedy had the bad luck to be driven by Oswald’s window is much more plausible.
Wait let me see if I have this right.
One one hand the CIA et al are incompetent.
On the other hand these buffoons pulled of a conspiracy that has held up for 50 years. That would require world class Dr. Evil brilliance.
Come on pick one argument or the other, you can’t have both.
The other objection against this class of CTs is its inefficiency.
Say that the CIA set up Oswald as a possible assassin. What are the odds of his success? He couldn’t have known too far ahead of time that he would even have a chance. He couldn’t practice the shots. He wouldn’t know how good a view he would have. He didn’t know whether he would be alone to have an opportunity. He couldn’t have known that Kennedy was going to be riding in an open car. The people setting him up would have been aware of these problems as well. At best they could have calculated that he might have a very small chance of even taking the shots, let alone make the kill.
So either the CIA was risking an incredible iffy chance of success or else they must have had dozens of potential assassin scattered around Dallas or maybe everywhere in the country where Kennedy had been or would be on a trip.
Either one of these is remarkable behavior for a group conspiring to kill a president of its own country. It either leaves everything to chance or else it leaves dozens of loose cannons to spill the beans. This is beside the simple facts I gave above, that the lack of any escape plan for Oswald or a death plan that wouldn’t have left him in the hands of the police for days, is insane behavior on the part of conspirators. I know the rebuttal is that the CIA’s death plans for Castro were this insane, but the comparison is bogus. An assassin has to work and be handled differently than a covert agent smuggling in a death trap and they had complete and easy access to their target along with complete freedom of movement. If they had wanted to kill a president, a trained agent would have orders of magnitude higher odds of doing so and getting away invisibly.
One of the things I find most amusing about Kennedy CTs is that the non-believers simultaneously find it boggling that a marksman might hit a target two out of three times but that swear that conspirators would set up a plan that didn’t have a two in 3 million chance of success. When I say CTs are bad thinking, this sort of synapse failure is at the center.
It has been widely reported that Ruby was seen in the halls of the Dallas Police headquarters several times starting almost immediately after Oswald’s arrest.
At 43 seconds intothis video Ruby is seen standing in the hallway of the Dallas Police headquarters shortly after Oswald’s arrest, before he had even been charged with the assassination.
At 1:08 in this video of a press conference held late that night, Ruby can be heard correcting the Dallas DA about what Cuban organization Oswald was allegedly involved with. He was impersonating a reporter at the DAs press conference the night of the assassination. He later told the FBI he was carrying his revolver in his right coat pocket at the press conference but it isn’t clear if he admitted he was planning to kill Oswald.
In the videos of him shooting Oswald 2 days later you can hear several police officers yelling “Jack! Jack!” He was well known to many local police since many of them spent a lot of time in his clubs and he had been arrested many times on various charges.
But none of them noticed him standing around during this very high security prisoner transfer, like a white elephant in the room, until he fired the shot. Or if they did, they didn’t seem to think it was suspicious for a mafioso nightclub owner to have found his way into the garage, mix in with the press and await Oswald’s arrival.
Lone vigilante or coerced assassin - either way leaving his dog in the car when he finally shot Oswald isn’t the most difficult part of the story for me to reconcile under the circumstances
If the question is whether or not Ruby’s killing of Oswald was premeditated, none of that stuff matters. It couldn’t have been, because he wasn’t there when Oswald was supposed to come out, and he couldn’t have known that Oswald’s exit had been delayed by well over an hour.
How so, when he was on a first name basis with half the police in that building? They didn’t have telephones in the 60s?
What motive would you suggest Ruby had for loitering around in the jailhouse for the two days prior? Impersonating a newspaper reporter and putting himself in hallways where Oswald might be moved through?
The same motive people have for slowing down to rubber neck at a car accident. It was the biggest news story in the world, and it was taking place at the police station where Ruby was known and had ready access. I’m sure morbid curiosity was compelling Ruby to hang out there.
You have posited that Ruby had mob ties. With whom? From what I’ve read, the big mob bosses (whose phones were already tapped) didn’t recognize his name when he shot Oswald. I think your perception of Ruby as “knee deep” in the underworld is mistaken (although it would have pleased Ruby greatly; it appears that he longed for significance).
Does any of that document a connection between moving LHO and Ruby being in the right place to shoot him? You have some things that are questionable, but they don’t demonstrate any way for Ruby to have been in the right place at the right time other than chance. If you can make that connection you’ll have something; but otherwise it’s unsupported speculation.
So your planned killing of the assassin has the killer muddling about running errands before doing the job? That’s really shaky grounds.
Furthermore, the final delay was Oswald changing his shirt, which few knew about or made note of and delay the transfer just enough for Ruby to arrive.