Clearly the real killer was a time traveler from 1863. Get James West on the case!
If that was the case, why in the world would they do it publicly, in full view of hundreds of witnesses, when so much could go wrong?
They had easy access to the President. Just poison him and attribute it to a stroke or something. Hell, with this particular president it’d be easy. Just send a hooker in to do it.
I believe FDR’s last words were reported as something like “I have a bad headache”, then we were told he died. Boom, Truman’s coup de tat is successful, and nobody (but me!) were ever the wiser.
(Nixon tried the same with Ike, but that retired general was too tough for him. He survived his “heart attacks”).
Even easier than that. Unknown to the general public of the era but fairly well known in the White House, JFK had several health issues and was taking a virtual pharmacy’s worth of meds - opiates, uppers, downers, lidocaine injections, all sorts of things. An actual accidental overdose was actually plausible, without the need of outside intervention. If it wasn’t already, it should have been a legitimate fear to everybody around him.
Without basis, perhaps, but not as outlandish as most of the conspiracy theories. The idea that the CIA was in cahoots with the mob is ridiculous because of the scope of the operation and the number of people who would have been recruited to make it happen, none of which has ever come to light in the decades since. The idea that Oswald may have confided in one other person is a lot easier to swallow.
Maybe there was someone else, but he got scared and left early. There’s no evidence to support that idea, but it’s not absurd on its face.
WWI actually. 6.5×52mm Carcano Model 38 infantry carbine . And it used smokeless powder of course,
There are several Yuotubes of that gun being fired. It has a muzzle blast, but no smoke.
Nope.
All the ballistics etc show Oswald was the sole shooter. Period.
That doesnt mean there wasnt people supporting him, however. There could be a conspiracy there. We dont know why he shot JFK for example.
Except that it is absurd because Oswald fits the profile of a Travis Bickle-esque loner, alienated from all other influences, and there is a complete absence of evidence of anything to the contrary. There is zero indication that he was allied with anyone or that he was even capable of formulating a coordinated plan with conspirators at any level, much less that he was being ‘run’ by the mob, the CIA, the KGB, or the FFA…
Frankly, the entire JFK assassination connivance is based on the post hoc premise that Kennedy was an explicitly Arthurian paradigm-changing leader who could only be defeated by a cabal of conspirators (even though nobody seems to have a firm grasp on who, what, or why) instead of being killed by some random asshole with a tangential grievance. In reality, Kennedy was a normal politician doing normal political things including reniging on campaign pledges and compromising his supposed principles to be perceived as effective and maintain continuity of governance, and also to bang Marilyn Monroe. JFK getting shot in Dallas was about as random as Gavrilo Princip shooting Franz Ferdinand, and frankly had fewer consequences.
Stranger
Well as someone who shoots a lot of guns you can get smoke with bad ammo. Not all the powder ignites in the barrel causing the “smoke” you see. I can see whoever buying old WW2 surplus ammo that was incorrectly stored and thus you get smoke.
I was also just reading if you oil your gun and then fire, the oil will sometimes catch fire and smoke after you fire for the first time. If the other shooter has cleaned/oiled his gun to ensure proper operation, then fired his single shot, it could also lead to smoke.
Both scenarios might produce small wisps of smoke but these are not going to be observable from any distance. And someone here will set me straight, but wasn’t the smoke in the event attributed to an idling motorcycle?
Hmm…accidental overdose, then a staged “assassination” to cover it up?! Perhaps Disney was hired to provide a animatronic president for the ride. Say…Disney=Magic Kingdom=Camelot…it all fits!
(Not mocking your point about Kennedy and the meds, only the conspiracy theorists)
Wasn’t Princip part of an actual conspiracy?
Yes, Princip is not a good example. That was a conspiracy by Young Bosniaks, with some backing from the Black Hand. There were about half a dozen of them in Sarajevo along the line of the planned motorcade. One threw a grenade at an earlier stage, injuring some of Franz Ferdinand’s entourage. Another had a chance to shoot but got cold feet.
It was a bit of a fluke that Princip had a clear shot. Franz Ferdinand’s driver took a wrong turn, then had to stop to back up, giving Princip his shot.
But when you have half a dozen potential assassins, with weapons and explosives, plotting together, it’s not a coincidence that one of them got the chance and was successful. Which one, that was up to chance.
But there is no similar proof of conspiracy and planning for Oswald.
I have sometimes wondered what happened to that driver.
Testified at the trial, later taken into the Emperor’s service, later given compensation of 400,000 crowns.
After the war, bought a nice little inn in Brno, which he operated until natural death in 1926.
The problem appears to have been poor planning by the mayor and other Sarajevo officials, who didn’t give him clear instructions as to the route.
Franz Ferdinand wanted to go to the hospital to see the members of his entourage that had been injured by the bomb. The change in route wasn’t clearly communicated.
I wonder if the “several men” standing there behind the fence could have been using ‘non-smokeless’ cigarettes? Especially in 1963, a bunch of guys together you’d usually have a number of smokers.
There’s no manifesto or anything, but Oswald wanted to go to Cuba. Kennedy had imposed an embargo. And fate had Kennedy driving by Oswald’s work.
Hmmm. Big pay-out after the successful assassination, then an untimely death at the age of 39, and I just bet there was no autopsy, which would not have been able to reveal exotic poisons anyway…clearly Lojka was in on it and then silenced, probably because he was working in his memoirs, undoubtedly provoked by a guilty conscience. The beauty of it is, rather than relying on a Ruby to silence Princip, Lojka’s own testimony did the trick of putting him away and shutting down further investigation. Typical European cosmopolitanism on display: much more subtle and sophisticated than the customary American reliance on gunplay. Brilliant!
Not to mention Princip allegedly killed two people with 2 shots from a handgun. That is so unlikely as to strain credulity. Only someone in Lojka’s position could have placed two shots so accurately.
This is fun.
Yes, but there while there was a conspiracy to assassinate Ferdinand there wasn’t any kind of deep coverup or web of deception by a cabal of powerful elites; it was your basic revolutionary zeal by inexperienced bumblers who almost accidentally managed to pull it off. Furthermore, it was a really half-assed and ill-conceived the assassination plot to kill a Hapsburg regardless of alignment (Ferdinand was actually sympathetic to the cause of Serbian autonomy; he was pretty much despised by the rest of his house and forced to renounce his descendants’ rights to succession), and only incidentally a proximate cause of the First World War, as Europe was a powder keg of ethnic resentments combined with byzantine alliances and mutual protection treaties that was going to get lit off sooner rather than later.
And back to Kennedy, the main argument against the CIA or the Mob doing the killing, aside from a complete absence of anything approaching credible evidence or verifiable testimony, is that in every other case that the CIA has gotten involved in some assassination/overthrow plot they haven’t been able to keep it under wraps for more than a few years and it usually generates so much blowback that they spend their efforts ineptly trying to cover their tracks; the notion that the CIA could maintain secrecy on a high profile operation for over six decades is risible. The Mafia is even worse; put five mafiosos in a room to plan a killing and three of them will end up informing on each other. Maybe LBJ could get away with it—he was a sharp operator—but then he’d make some crude comment to his tailor about how he splattered that *****’s brains all over Dealey Plaza that would be caught on tape and we’d all know about it by now because it would be sucking up Youtube bandwidth.
The smarter and more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, the more unlikely it is to be even remotely true because most conspiracies fall apart due to their conspirators being real people with emotions and petty rivalries and short-sightedness. We’ve gotten this idea through decades of movies about political conspiracies and genius psychopath serial killers that elaborate crimes are normal, but talking to any police investigator or reading history on actual conspiracies will cure that ill-founded notion.
Stranger
Well, yeah, sure, but let’s not forget that the real winner in the JFK contretemps was Gerald Ford, who was actually on the Warren Commission and then polevaulted into the vice-presidency and then the very office of the presidency itself. Don’t forget, Ford was a Michigan politician, and Detroit is in Michigan, which means Ford undoubtedly knew members of the Purple Gang, that is to say, had mob ties. Kinda puts a whole new light on Oswald, doesn’t it!
The Umbrella Man is very curious to me. I reckon in the Oliver Stone movie the Donald Sutherland character says to Costner something like, “What are the chances the Secret Service would allow someone to even have - let alone open - an umbrella on a cloudless day”
Apparently umbrellas were some kind of protest thing back then. Yet really, WTH, some guy on Dealey Plaza is carrying around and opens an umbrella as the President is passing by in an open car?