I realize that you are just speculating, but this doesn’t sound plausible to me for several reasons:
I think that conspiracy mythology of the “grassy knoll” has distorted what that location actually was. It was some green grass backed by a fence, and behind that fence was an empty parking lot. So, anybody actually standing behind the fence behind the knoll was actually standing out in the open in an empty lot. They had no cover, and it would have been a lousy place to try to do something discreet.
The angle from the knoll was poor. It wasn’t much elevated (unlike a top floor of a building), so you’d have to shoot through the crowd and the front of the car to hit Kennedy. This is the same reason that Oswald shooting Kennedy as he drove towards the depository isn’t sensible - Oswald would be shooting through the front window of the large limousine, whereas the shot he did take gave him an unobstructed view of the back of Kennedy’s head.
If this was a professional job with multiple teams, why was Oswald working alone? Snipers have spotters, but he was the outlier?
Similarly, if this was a coordinated effort, why didn’t Oswald have a clear getaway plan? You might claim that perhaps he had a rendezvous planned at the movie theater, since that’s where he ended up,
but he took a circuitous route to get there and then called attention to himself by not paying for a ticket but instead sneaking inside.
There is simply no evidence that Oswald was speaking with, or meeting with, people in advance of this date. This was the early 1960’s - communication was limited to in person meetings, phone calls, or letters. All of those would likely leave some clues, but nothing concrete can be identified.
Prior to the murder, Oswald went to Mexico, where he tried to get a visa to enter Cuba. He was rebuffed at the Soviet and Cuban embassies. That’s what, I believe, you are referring to.
And while it might indicate some foreign connections, I think a more direct and reasonable interpretation is that this crazy guy who loved Marxism (but had been disillusioned by the Soviet version) had decided that Cuba was the paradise he sought. When his attempt to enter the country failed, his desperation worsened until fate gave him an idea (where, I’m speculating, I think his addled mind thought that he would be hailed as a hero of the revolution once he offed JFK).
If it did indicate foreign connections, and not just his eccentricities, don’t you think it would have led to some other demonstrable evidence of this arrangement? At the least, some strange people he kept calling or meeting or some unexplained money he had.
Oswald had already been interrogated for many hours, over a few days, when he was killed. If there was supposed to be others involved, why hadn’t he made mention yet? If he was willing to sing like a canary, why was he not giving any indications?
And Ruby’s killing was about as random as can get. Oswald was scheduled to be transported earlier, but was delayed. Part of that delay was his own request to change his clothes. Ruby had been wiring some money when he wandered over. His beloved dog was still in his car. And (one of my favorite facts), he was so clumsy with a gun that he used his middle finger to pull the trigger. This was about as far removed from a professional job as you can possibly get.
At the risk of being vilified as a conspiracy theorist, I’m not sure I follow you on this point: what clues would likely have been left from, as you say, phone calls? If a guy called Oswald’s house from a local phone two or three weeks before the assassination, then what would’ve ensued, records-wise, in 1963?
I would be interested in knowing what evidence that you think that they dismissed. This was the most thorough criminal investigation in history. But the problem with trying to be so completely thorough is that it leads to ever increasing errata and miscellany that is ultimately irrelevant to the case.
I mean, once you have 10 witnesses confirming some fact, is it really probative to spend a lot of time addressing some misconception of the 11th person who was asked about it? The problem with this case is that the 11th person’s error (which might have been entirely inadvertent) becomes grist for entire books and lectures about some alternative theory of guilt.
Oswald stayed in a rooming house in a very small room, with a communal phone. If he was getting furtive calls, then presumably we’d have some witness to it. He had no privacy where he lived.
If he was walking to a pay phone, well, where was it? When did he go? Because by “clues” I was referring to things like his landlord saying, “He would duck out at night“ or “some guy with a really thick foreign accent kept calling and asking for Lee.”
My point is saying that there were only so many ways to communicate back then is to observe that you couldn’t just speak privately in your room. If there were telegrams or letters, we’d know (just like his mail order purchase of the rifle). And if he was using the phone, people would have seen it.
This is a statement expressing certainty. They “dismissed evidence”.
I hope that you’ll agree that this is a complete backtrack. You don’t actually know that evidence was dismissed. Apparently, you won’t even venture a guess.
In fact, if it’s hard to know what evidence was dismissed, how do you even know that it was actually dismissed?
If I walk into my house and go “something was stolen.” and you ask me what is missing and I go “it’s hard to say”, how much time are you going to spend looking for missing items?
What I’m noticing is that the people who have other ideas about what happened seem to be basing this on feelings or ideas that popped in their heads, and not evidence.
You can’t meaningfully counter something that has a lot of evidence with conjecture, I would say. You need to have some information that leads you to your conclusion.
It’s entirely expected that something like this will feel off. It’s human nature to want a story. I would argue that you really need more than that, given the mountains of evidence we do have. Weird things can and do happen.
To quote Guiteau, “I did notg kill Garfield. I merely shot him.” Certainly he tried to kill the President. Had the wound been washed and sewn shut, the man would have lived. Malpractice killed him.
I knew Mark Lane fairly well in the 1980s. He received a lot of money from different sources to fund his efforts, and I am pretty sure that was true in the 60s as well. $1,500 from the Soviets wouldn’t have made much of a difference, even in 1965. It certainly wasn’t what was motivating him. He remained a committed and idealistic critic of the Warren Commission. I note his Wikipedia page contains a quote from him denying the allegation. He liked to claim that while people challenged his conclusions, none of the facts in the heavily-footnoted Rush to Judgment were ever proven to be false. Indeed, it’s mostly based on the Warren Commission’s own investigation and report.
I think the unusual circumstances of such a high profile assassination would have spawned persistent conspiracy discussions regardless of Soviet interference.
I should add that I have not adopted any of my friend’s conclusions about the JFK killing, but I do think he pointed out a lot of legitimate questions. [I do think he was on to something with the MLK assassination, but that’s a different thread]
I won’t speculate as to what may still be in those files, though I agree it’s probably stuff that implicates national security. But as to conspiracy theories, my take on it is that there are just too many loose ends to conclude that Oswald was simply a nutter who acted completely on his own. There were all kinds of Russian connections, and more significantly, all kinds of Cuban connections, including alleged contacts between Oswald and Cuban intelligence. Then there’s the mysterious shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby, which introduces Mafia connections.
So what really happened? Let’s let speculation run wild for a moment. JFK had some serious enemies, not the least of which was Fidel Castro who hated him because of the Bay of Pigs (and allegedly other assassination attempts). And the Mafia hated him because they had helped elect him, then felt betrayed when his administration, mainly in the form of his attorney general brother RFK, launched a crackdown against the Mob.
So how about this for a theory? Oswald acted alone, yes, there were no other shooters. But it was the culmination of Castro’s efforts to have JFK assassinated, for which they found the Mafia to be willing allies. To insulate both of them against being implicated, their ideal gunman would be an ignorant and naive patsy who could be easily manipulated and then disposed of. Oswald himself probably never knew who he was working for, except maybe in a very general way that was unverifiable. But he was silenced anyway. They probably planned to get to him before he was arrested, but he was stupid enough to get caught almost right away, which made Jack Ruby’s job a lot more difficult.
My theory (I honestky don’t know how much evidence there is for this)- Oswald was a crazy guy who got lucky when security screwed up. Ruby, also crazy, got lucky too. Then, various groups acted deliberately mysterious to cover their own incompetence. “We’re not saying there was a vast, shadowy conspiracy- but we’re also NOT not saying that.”
I also find it interesting that I haven’t heard any conspiracy theories about Hinckley shooting Reagan.
And a look at their assassins’ motives will show them to be two disaffected, emotionally unstable who personalized their grievances onto the President of the United States.
John Hinckley, Arthur Bremer, Squeaky Fromme, Sara Jane Moore, Sirhan Sirhan, Giuseppe Zangara – the list of people who came close to assassinating a President (or candidate) is full of lone nuts with guns.
Yes, but none of those cases had the plethora of mysterious, unexplained loose ends that have haunted the JFK assassination right from the start, as I stated above.