If you read back through the posts there are at least 6 posts who say, or agree, he was a nut.
My god! You could substitute Obama for Kennedy and no one would notice. Except for the federal troops to enforce federal law.
But this cannot explain LHO. He was a committed communist not a right wingnut. He may have had similar beliefs but on the other side.
This is probably about as close to as factual an answer as we’ll get, not to mention the summary of other assassins and would-be assassins shows how well Oswald fits in, and has long been my “talk to the hand” for conspiracy loons I don’t want to get trapped into listening to (including my brother, who went through an unfortunate phase we don’t discuss). I mean, Guiteau and Czolgosz might as well have been passing around a big cup and chanting “gooble gobble, one of us,” as soon as Ruby pulled the trigger, and Oswald arrived wherever he arrived.
A lot of Kennedy conspiracy buffs know a lot about the Kennedy assassination, but next to nothing about the politics of assassination in general, or the psychology of assassins.
Sadly, Oswald did make a name for himself this way, and conspiracy buffs who try to let him off the hook by making him a Marine sniper, who spoke perfect Russian, and was specially selected by the CIA for a role in history are doing exactly what he wanted.
Jack Ruby may have wanted to spare Mrs. Onassis (Kennedy at the time) a trial, but he’s really the one to blame for Oswald’s legendary status. If there had been a trial, I doubt we’d have the same level of conspiracy lunacy that we have because Oswald died without talking. I’m sure if he’d had a trial, given his love of attention, he would have ignored the advice of his lawyer, and taken the stand.
Whoosh.
How can you tell when someone is being sarcastic, or simply joking? I can’t.
If he wanted to be thought important, why did he then claim to be a patsy?
Calling him a “nut”, while it may be true, is not really much of an explanation. It is more a way of blowing off the request for an explanation. The vast majority of ‘nuts’ never even consider trying to assassinate anyone.
He wanted to be part of the big conspiracy that existed in his mind. Having him as the head of the conspiracy wasn’t going to sound too convincing so he painted himself as the minor character that he would appear to be. Maybe. Or maybe he was a nut and had nothing close to a rational explanation for his actions.
Some nuts assasinate people, he was one of them. He’s a dead nut and we’re never going to find out more, so yes it is a way of blowing off a request for an explanation, because there is no way to provide an explanation.
I don’t think he was a nut - he had passion for various causes - although like everyone else - he probably felt the need to belong to something. He kept trying and failing to cause any type of change and the fact that Kennedy happened to literally be driving by his work - and the route was made public - made this an almost forgone conclusion.
He wanted to start or be part of a movement - he just must never have felt important - and this was his way of doing it.
I think Shodan’s answer sums it up pretty well.
Of course it depends on how you define “nut” I consider a nut someone who is detached from reality. Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and the Virginia Tech killer could probably be considered nuts - well at least the first two - I am not as familiar with the last - so I can’t say for sure - but I’m pretty sure he was.
That guy who tried to kill those girls in the sorority house, Susan Smith, and Tim McVeigh - I wouldn’t consider nuts. While the first two were definitely mentally ill - they knew what they were doing and had good reasons for it - the first was angry and wanted to hurt as many people as he could, Susan Smith loved her children and thought life was painful and wanted to die and wanted to spare her children from being motherless and growing up in a cruel world - that makes sense to some people with severe depression, and McVeigh wanted revenge for what was done at Ruby Ridge.
I think Oswald was more like the uncle that thinks weird things about the federal reserve and has all these ideas that don’t really make sense if you think about them, but is totally rational in everyday life. Just cause you can’t rationally figure out things that are going on - doesn’t make you a nut.
I mean the sorority house guy was sort of a nut when it came to his understanding about his problems, but what he did wasn’t really in my mind “crazy” - it was awful, but lots of people are in denial that they are the source of their own issues.
I picked my examples off the top of my head - and can see how people would think I’m wrong.
All assassins may be nuts but all nuts are not necessarily assassins.
Read Stephen King’s 11/22/1963. His research is impeccible, the book is incredibly readable, and it boils down to “Oswald was a paranoid nutjob.”
Oswald and most of these had life traits in common: throwaway kid childhoods, drifting in and out of jobs/military service and relationships, attachment to some marginal ideology (Guiteau tried to join the Onida community, where they made quality tableware and practiced free love: when none of the women took him to bed he packed his delusions and went elsewhere).
If any of the assassins is outside this mold, it’s Booth. He had a solid place in society, and plenty of positive reinforcement in the way of money, sex and peer respect. But the losers who attached themselves to him did fit the disgruntled loner profile.
Let’s not forget Sara Jane Moore, a paranoid nutjob who tried to make a name for herself by attempting to kill Gerald Ford 17 days after Squeaky Fromme’s failed attempt. The wiki article states that Moore & Fromme are the only two women who ever attempted to kill a President–the same president, 17 days apart, and they both failed!
Thanks to everyone so far. I really had no idea. To me a “nut”," as mentioned above, is in Hinckley/Travis Bickle territory, and I would have no qualms, after swallowing, to see him judged incompetent morally. (I’m not going into the law here.) And I know–thanks to some good threads here–how Oswald was no Delta Force scholar-activist for Communism.
And in OP I mentioned propinquity. Unless I got it wrong ( 
) that was the serendipitous opportunity,* but like mentioned repeatedly, starting with the Warren Commision, that was part of the puzzle.
Two points: the cite of the “Wanted for Treason” poster, particularly with no comment, was obviously irrelevant, unless is cited for theories that, I don’t know, he was working for anti-Communist, ant-Cuba, anti-Right causes, in which case you’re a loon, and was disinvited here. Or by people who feel it necessary to point out there were/other other nuts then/there/now, and are perhaps unhappy that the Left as a whole “looks bad,” and need to insert something just so we know and remember the “bad-looking” Right. What else, if that poster can follow enough to read and understand OP? It is nothing but a political jab.
engineer_comp_geek, thanks for setting up the OP in forum and context/intro.
*By correct definition, a serendipitous opportunity for a bad outcome is an oxymoron. This sparked a GQ thread for the correct word. That thread will soon be revived with an earth-shattering contribution. You heard it here first.
Actually, Squeaky Fromme didn’t have a throwaway childhood-- she had a crazy stage mother who pushed to into dancing professionally beginning when she was five of six, and she did tap, jazz, and some modern dancing. Then her parents got divorced when she was young, and IIRC, her mother tried to initially live off her daughter’s earnings, and couldn’t quite make it, because Fromme never hit it “big,” albeit, she was reasonably successfully for a child performer. Her mother resented Fromme, because she (the mother) had to take a pedantic job, and it was the breakdown of their relationship. I don’t think Fromme really like being little and cute, anyway, and certainly, as a very petite tween, didn’t like being forced to pretend she was still eight and precocious.
Once she was an adult, she never performed again. Shooting the president wasn’t even an attempt to be the center of attention. It was “for Charlie.” She wasn’t one of the women in prison “for” Manson, and she wanted to be, even while everyone else who escaped the family was breathing a sigh of relief they weren’t Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, or Leslie Van Houten. She was trying to get herself sent to prison. She may not have carede whether she even killed Ford or not, since failed presidential assassins get long prison sentences too.
But I guess if you take the fast decay of her relationship with he mother when she outgrew being cute, and her absent father after the divorce, she may have very much felt like a throwaway child.
She definitely wasn’t the picture of mental health, and was devoted to a misguided ideology, which they all had in common (if you count Guiteau’s schizophrenic belief that the All Mighty ordered him to kill the president, and then the next president would make him ambassador to France. IIRC, he was caught when he contacted the white house about his ambassadorship).
Well, you can do better than a fictionalized account, too. Read Bugliosi instead.
The bottom line is that we do not know, with any certainty, what LHO’s motive was. He never said, never wrote it down, never had a chance to be grilled about it. Everything is inferences, and from there, his whole adult life points to deep disaffection with the “normal” world that had no place for him. In an out of the Marines, in and out of loudmouthed communism, in and out of Russia, into extreme pro-Cuban support… he was like many others, especially in that era - an intelligent, angry, disaffected young adult who hated the world around him and thought anything must be better.
Calling him a “nut” isn’t inaccurate; it just sweeps too much into too small a pile. Yes, he was nuts… but so were hundred and thousands of others who railed and took up signs and arms against “the Establishment” in the years that followed. Had he not gone the assassination route, of either Walker or JFK/Connally, he might well have ended up in one of the fringier civil rights or antiwar groups.
It’s as big a mistake to brush him off as just “a nut” as it is to suppose him the pawn of monstrous, globe-spanning conspiracies. He was an individual who broke, like many before and many more after him, but in a way so spectacular that he’s remembered and analyzed while thousands of other who died in small incidents or were locked up are forgotten.
He wanted to impress Jodie Foster.
She was a week old and still called by her real name. What a nut.
He was a deeply insecure man who was also a failure. He abused his wife, he was unable to hold or obtain a decent job and he was going nowhere in his life. That he could shoot a rifle well seems to have been his only true “skill.”
He seems to have conceived a scenario in his head where he would be viewed as being a “hero” if he killed Kennedy, who was exceptionally unpopular in Dallas at the time. He seems to have realized how badly he miscalculated this happening after he did it as there was really no reason for him NOT to have admitted that he did shoot Kennedy after he was caught. It’s a virtual certainty that he would have been tried and executed as almost all previous presidential assassins were. (John Wilkes Booth being the sole exception)
The scary part is that there are thousands of people just like Oswald all over.
Ticking time bombs waiting to explode.
But the term “nut,” however inadequate, is really the only term we can use to describe someone whose thought process can best be described as A+B=fish.
Look at Oswald. From a 15-year old high school dropout who develops an interest in Marxism, he enlists in the Marines. Only days after his discharge, he goes to the Soviet Union and renounces his citizenship. He marries a woman six weeks after they meet, gets tired of life in Soviet Union and returns to the U.S. Once back here he gets fired from a series of jobs, buys a rifle (under a false name) and tries to shoot a right-wing general, passes out pro-Castro literature (using his false name), threatens to blow up an FBI office (using his real name), and rents a room (using a different false name.)
Clinically insane? Maybe. Legally insane? Probably not. But “nuts” seems to cover it.
FWIW, if I remember correctly, the pamphlet cited was produced and disseminated by the John Birch Society.