The Kennedy assassination: Oswald's motives

The 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination focused a lot on the assassination itself. But it was also the end of his Presidency, and therefore became the occasion for airing, printing and digital reporting on Kennedy's Presidency itself.

There are certainly no shortage of theories about the assassination itself.

Edward Jay Epstein is one of the best-known Kennedy assassination researchers. He's convinced that Oswald was the one who killed Kennedy. But like pretty much everyone who's looked closely at the Warren Commission's work, he finds it seriously deficient.

In Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? Huffington Post 11/22/2013, he looks at the leftwing politics that Oswald espoused and at his connection to Communist countries:

In light of this overwhelming evidence, the issue that ought to have concerned Americans was not Oswald's technical guilt but his dangerous liaisons abroad. Only eight weeks before the assassination he had excited FBI and CIA interest in his activities by renewing his contacts with Cuban and Soviet intelligence officers in Mexico City. Although these foreign connections remained of great concern to the two U.S. intelligence agencies, they were considered too sensitive to be aired, publicly in the emotional aftermath of the president's slaying.

These issues have always played a prominent part in research and arguments over the Kennedy assassination. In terms of ideological usefulness, a connection of the Soviet Union or Cuba to the assassination would obviously be helpful to the rightwing who opposed any kind of relaxation of tensions or stabilization of relations between the US and the Communist countries. An explanation of rightwing oil millionaires or the CIA being behind it would broadly be more favorable for liberal-to-left priorities.

There is evidence to support arguments on both sides. Epstein in that piece gives only arguments for the first side. And that is a real possibility, though the evidence is far from conclusive. One suggestive piece of information is Oswald's apparent attempt to assassinate Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, a notorious rightwing fanatic in uniform in the early 1960s. (Colin Schultz, Before JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald Tried to Kill an Army Major General Smithsonian.com 10/04/2013)

But the evidence also suggests that Oswald may have worked as a counterintelligence operative for the CIA. John Newman discusses those indications in Oswald and The CIA (1995).

If these seem like two broadly divergent sets of possibilities, they convergence in the complex and often hapless US government plans to overthrown the Castro regime in Cuba, including assassination plots against Castro and other Cuban leaders. Those plans involved two Administrations, Eisenhower's and Kennedy's, and an unusual set of characters, including Cuban exiles, Castro sympathizers, the CIA and American mobsters. The CIA's desire to keep secret any indications that it had been involved in assassination plots against Castro was in itself a motive for them to withhold information from the Warren Commission, a desire which the Warren Commission was more than willing to accomodate.

One good point Epstein makes is that over the years, the focus on forensic questions around the assassination itself, over whether there whether there was more than one shooter and so on, have diverted focus from the most perpetrator who was clearly involved, Oswald himself:

The endless tangle of questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and has obsessively fascinated, if not entirely blinded, a generation of assassination buffs probably never will be resolved.

Within this morass of facts, however, there is a central actor, Lee Harvey Oswald. His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper's nest. His cartridge cases were also found near the body of a murdered policeman on the route of his flight. He was captured resisting arrest with the loaded murder revolver in his hand.

Nova recently did a special on the forensic questions around the shooting itself, Cold Case JFK 11/13/2013:

This film includes an account of forensic tests to examine the question of the so-called "magic bullet," one of the major questions that Robert Richter left open in his Nova special, Who Shot President Kennedy? (1989) narrated by Walter Cronkite.

Tags: edward jay epstein, jfk assassination

Conspiracies real and imagined: the JFK assassination

Since this 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination is being commemorated all over the media, I though I would republish here the full post I did on 02/10/2010 on the conspiracy theories around it.

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This is Part 3 of a four-part discussion of the book Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (2009).

The Kennedy Assassination is probably the most famous of all sets of conspiracy theories, except maybe for anti-Semitic theories about the World Jewish Conspiracy. And even those like to work the Kennedy assassination in.

I'm one of probably about 10 people in the country who actually believe the "lone gunman" theory of the JFK assassination: Oswald, with the rifle, in the Book Depository. But Olmsted's main point here is valid. The Johnson adminstration wanted to wrap up the investigation quickly. The FBI had its secrets to hide, i.e., a seemingly lax handling of the information on Oswald that they had been tracking up to the assassination. The CIA also had a secret assassination program against Fidel Castro that they wanted to be sure stayed under wraps, but which could have been plausibly seen as a motive for the Cuban government to attempt an assassination of Kennedy.

And the eagerness of the official investigators to put the case to rest wound up generating a lot of suspicion in the decades since. "Oswald may have been the real assassin," Olmstead writes, "but the FBI's refusal to consider alternatives ensured that conspiracy theories would flourish."

In some ways, the JFK assassination is a very different kind of conspiracy theory story the first three she describes: revisionist criticism of the First World War, the Pearl Harbor Conspiracy, and the Red Scare. Those all served some substantial political purpose: opposition to war, discrediting of the Roosevelt administration and (for some) of the American war effort in the Second World War, inflaming public passions against Communists to bolster support for Cold War policies, demonizing Democrats as subversives and anti-American.

The JFK assassination conspiracy theories, though, were a much more eclectic set of theories generated by cranks, amateur historians, serious academics, Congressional researchers, investigative reporters, and conspiracists who wanted to work this incident into their Grand Scheme. And, as Olmsted's account illustrates well, research into this case touched on issues historically important in their own right, such as the FBI's questionable competence and willingness to indulge coverups, the CIA's assassination plots that hired major mobsters for the job, Johnson's foreign policy concerns that a thorough investigation would reveal Communist powers' involvement which in turn might lead to a nuclear war, even the question of whether Kennedy had to decided to phase out the American military presence in Vietnam.

While Olmsted is sensibly critical of the approach of the early JFK assassination buffs, she is also fascinated and at least a little impressed by the process. She credits Sylvia Meagher with being pivotal in organizing the early network of assassination researchers. Not incidentally,Meagher was an employee of the World Health Organization who had been dragged before a security hearing in 1953 because she had questioned the legality of the government's loyalty program of the time. She was aware from personal experience that the government was sometimes willing to do stupid and abusive things.

According to Olmsted's account, the first two major books that popularized skepticism of the Warren Commission Report, Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment (1966) and Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest (1966), drew heavily on the work of these researchers linked in an informal network. These early theories were largely generated by people like Meagher who considered themselves on the left of American politics. Though far-right groups like the John Birch Society were quick to decide it had all been a Communist plot, like they thought pretty much every event in the world was.

Olmsted also stresses that many among this network of amateur criminologists and historians were women. In a case of the kind of groupthink among the press that in later would grown to bizarre, pathological proportions around other issues, conventional wisdom rallied around the officially accepted version, the Warren Commission's. And the female amateur researchers involved, Osmsted notes, were a particular target:

The women came in for special criticism. The authors of one 1967 attack on the assassination researchers, for example, devoted a condescending chapter to the "housewives' underground," which implied that female researchers such as Meagher and [Maggie] Field were looking for meaning to fill their empty lives. Meagher was singled out as the "Housewives' Supersleuth," though she was a divorcee with a full-time salaried job. [The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report by Richard Warren Lewis and Lawrence Schiller (1967)]

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison also boosted interest in JFK assassination conspiracy theories when he indicted a gay New Orleans businessman in 1967 for plotting to kill Kennedy. But he also helped brand them as the domain of crackpots when he fairly quickly showed himself to be one. As well as a DA bringing abusing his prosecutorial powers.

I have to confess that, despite my fuddy-duddy view of the JFK assassination, I have pretty much always been fascinated by the case. So reading Olmsted's account of it is also a bit of a guilty pleasure.

Tags: jfk assassination, kathryn olmsted, real enemies