See subject. Couldn’t decide on what emphasis to make it emphatic, so I chose both.
After all, it wasn’t you and me. Sirhan Sirhan had his reasons, generally clustered around his Palestinian nationalism, and thinking, I don’t know, semi-rationally, even if wrongly, and his attack sparked by propinquity, that a different potential President would be anti-Israel.
Oswald was a Communist. Beyond that I got nuttin.
Because he wanted to be important in history.
And he had a great opportunity. When fate hands you such circumstances you have to act.
Moderator Action
I don’t think this can be answered factually. Oswald never gave a motive, and even the Warren Commission did not come up with what they thought was a definitive motive.
I’m going to move this to IMHO to allow speculation and opinion, but let’s all keep in mind that this was posted in GQ first and the OP is probably looking for something as close to factual cites as we can give. In other words, opinions based on cited facts would be preferred over complete guesses and wild speculation.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Just to start things off, this is what the Warren Commission had to say (note that it does say they did not make a definitive determination of his motive):
[QUOTE=Warren Commission Report]
Clues to Oswald’s motives can be found in his family history, his education or lack of it, his acts, his writings, and the recollections of those who had close contacts with him throughout his life.…
The Commission could not make any definitive determination of Oswald’s motives. It has endeavored to isolate factors which contributed to his character and which might have influenced his decision to assassinate President Kennedy. These factors were:
His deep–rooted resentment of all authority which was expressed in a hostility toward every society in which he lived;
His inability to enter into meaningful relationships with people, and a continuous pattern of rejecting his environment in favor of new surroundings;
His urge to try to find a place in history and despair at times over failures in his various undertakings;
His capacity for violence as evidenced by his attempt to kill General Walker;
His avowed commitment to Marxism and communism, as he understood the terms and developed his own interpretation of them; this was expressed by his antagonism toward the United States, by his defection to the Soviet Union, by his failure to be reconciled with life in the United States even after his disenchantment with the Soviet Union, and by his efforts, though frustrated, to go to Cuba.
Each of these contributed to his capacity to risk all in cruel and irresponsible actions.
(Warren Report, pp.22f)
[/QUOTE]
ETA: Also note that PSXer’s reply is one of the reasons given in the Warren Commission’s list.
He was a nut.
Yup, just like most of history’s assassins.
You’re walking down a lonely street, nobody in sight. There’s a church with a big stained-glass window. At your feet, you see a brick.
There actually are people for whom that, alone, is sufficient temptation.
And I’m guessing that he believed stuff like this, and thought that he was performing a service for his country.
And he was a nut.
I thought I read that a few months before the assassination he was handing out pro-Cuba, pro-Castro pamphlets. (Another indicator that he was too erratic and uncontrolled to be an agent for a foreign power.) Since JFK was responsible for approving Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis, humiliation of Castro and removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, then another good reason for LHO to want to take out JFK.
[ul][li]His life was empty and pathetic, and he wanted people to think of him as influential and a historic figure.[/li][li]He was a troll, who glommed onto Marxism as a young man to get attention.[/li][li]He had built up the Soviet Union as Eden on earth in his mind, and then defected there. They didn’t treat him as very important, and he found out it was a shithole.[/li][li]So he transferred his loyalty to Cuba and began building that up as Paradise. [/li][li]Kennedy, in the Bay of Pigs fiasco and elsewhere, made it clear that he was an enemy of Cuba and Castro. [/li][li]By coincidence, JFK happened to be riding past the building where Oswald worked, and LHO saw his chance to fix all his problems at once. [/ul][/li]Plus, he was a nut.
Regards,
Shodan
Not really. That poster is an example of nutty right-wing extremism; as previously noted, Oswald was more of an extremist left-wing nut.
But, yeah. Basically this.
If you’re the world’s biggest somebody driving by the world’s smallest nobody, use the bubble top.
He was itching to kill somebody. He was the type of CTist who wanted to be part of an imagined conspiracy. His adult life is full of irrational action, nothing surprising about a nut like that killing someone.
Oswald’s wife testified about his motivations for attempting to kill Walker. Oswald left a note behind for Marina before his attempt on Walker. He doesn’t sound crazy in that note. He thought of every detail. Prepaid bills, and gave quite specific instructions. I think he approached the JFK shooting the same way. He put some thought into it and (in his mind) felt it was necessary.
He prepared for a long time to kill Walker. That was much more politically motivated. He only had a couple days to plan JFK’s shooting. It was more spontaneous
All these answers and you people left off the most obvious one: He was a nut.
Good summary. A lot of his antics were purely attempts at being a bighsot or looking important. When these ideas failed he moved onto another attention getting scheme. The whole ‘Fair Play For Cuba’ where he claimed to be President of but was revealed to be just him as the sole member shows this perfectly. When a friend suggested he would be a good political officer if Communism took over he genuinely smiled at the thought.
Look at Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated James Garfield. Nut.
Leon Czolgosz, who killed William McKinley, claimed to be an anarchist, but even other anarchists were leery of him. Nut.
John Schrank, who shot Theodore Roosevelt claimed McKinley came to him in a dreamand ordered him to kill Roosevelt. Nut.
Squeaky Fromme, John Hinckley, the list goes on. Nut is almost a job requirement for a would-be assassin.
Did any of them kill their victims in any less of a very public way? Oswald was unique in that he did it from cover and tried to get away with it. But didn’t manage to wipe his fingerprints.
Oswald was able to try it from a distance because he had marksmanship training, and a rifle that could hit at a distance. Most other assassins didn’t have that sort of training, so it was better to do it from up close. Oswald didn’t have to.
