Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Three: The Lone Gunman

With his wife Marina so near the end of term and ready to deliver their second child, it was determined she should continue to stay with the Paines while Oswald moved into a room at a boarding house closer to Downtown Dallas, where he was searching for work. It worked out well when Oswald, who couldn’t drive and had no vehicle, got the job at the Book Depository, as it was just a 2 mile bus ride from his boarding house. On some weekends, he caught a ride the 27 miles to the Paines’ house to be with Marina. He caught that ride with his new co-worker at the Depository, Buell Frazier, the brother of Ruth Paine’s friend, through whom she had first gotten the lead on the job at the Depository. Marina gave birth to their second daughter in late October, and Oswald saw them at the end of most weeks, otherwise settling into his new job at the Texas School Book Depository, where he was known to sit by himself in the lunchroom and read the day old newspapers. Later the next month, some of those newspapers contained an announcement that President Kennedy’s motorcade would be passing right through Dealey Plaza, smack in front of the Texas School Book Depository. Some conspiracy speculators charge that the motorcade’s route was changed in order to give Oswald his shot at Kennedy, but there is no evidence for this beyond one newspaper misreporting the route, showing a different one that would also have provided a clear shot at Kennedy from the Depository. Regardless of what newspaper Oswald may have read the news in, it’s clear that he did read it and began to hatch a plan, seeing a far more massive opportunity to change history than that which he had attempted to seize in firing his rifle at General Walker. What makes it clear is his behavior during the few days between the news releasing and the day of the assassination. On Thursday, the 21st, the day before Kennedy’s arrival, the notoriously stingy Oswald splurged on a big breakfast, and at work, he asked Buell Frazier to give him a ride to the Paines’ house, an unusual request for a Thursday. He explained it away by saying he needed to fetch some curtain rods from their house for his room at the boarding house, something that his furnished room already had. Sometime before leaving with Frazier, probably using materials present at work, he crafted a long sack by taping together pieces of paper. Marina was surprised to see him that Thursday. He usually called ahead, and he was acting somewhat desperate, trying to kiss her and being more affectionate than usual, saying he missed her and that he “wanted to make peace” with her. Marina brought up the President’s visit, thinking Oswald would relish the opportunity to expound on politics, as he usually did, but Oswald refused to talk about it, claiming he knew nothing about Kennedy’s visit, and remaining quiet through dinner. At some point, Ruth Paine recalled that he had gone out to their garage, where he had stored a bundle that the Paines thought was camping equipment, wrapped up and leaning against a wall, but which Marina knew was his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. When he left to go back to work the next morning, November 22nd, he left almost his entire savings, $170, on the dresser for Marina, telling her to take as much as she needed and “buy everything.” He also left his wedding ring behind. He walked to Buell Frazier’s house carrying a long, taped up, brown paper parcel, placing it in the back seat of Buell’s car and then simply staring at Buell’s sister in the window to indicate his readiness to leave. It struck her as unusual. When Buell came out and asked what was in the back seat, Oswald said it was the curtain rods he had mentioned previously. Some have tried to claim that Frazier and his sister’s estimation of the length of the package shows that it couldn’t have been Oswald’s rifle, even disassembled. However, curtain rods were never found inside the book Depository, but the Mannlicher-Carcano was, hidden between boxes near a stairwell. Moreover, the package they saw him with that morning, made of brown paper and tape of the kind found in the Depository, and which Buell saw him take into the Depository that day, was the same as an improvised paper bag that would later be found at what appeared to be a sniper’s nest. On the sixth floor of the Depository, which was under construction and almost entirely empty at the time of Kennedy’s arrival because employees had taken their lunch and gone out to watch the passing motorcade, stacks of books had been moved to create a little hiding place by the south-east corner’s window, obscuring anyone’s view of someone standing in that corner looking down on Dealey Plaza. In that makeshift alcove, crime scene investigators found a palm print and a right index fingerprint on boxes, later identified as matching Oswald’s prints. Inside that improvised paper bag found in the sniper’s nest were fibers that matched the blanket that Oswald had kept his rifle in before taking it from the Paines’ garage, and silver nitrate tests would later reveal Oswald’s palm and fingerprints on that bag as well. Along with this evidence were three rifle shells that would later be conclusively proven to have been fired by the Mannlicher-Carcano abandoned elsewhere in the building. That Mannlicher-Carcano was confirmed to be the same rifle Oswald held in the famous backyard photos, as mentioned in Part One, but more than this, a palm print matching Oswald’s was lifted from the stock by Dallas police, and partial fingerprints found on the trigger guard would eventually, through photo enhancements reveal 18 matching points, convincingly identifying them as having been left by Lee Harvey Oswald’s right ring and middle fingers. This evidence alone, from the testimony of Frazier and his sister, the Paines, and Marina, as well as concrete evidence afterward documented by Dallas police, appears conclusive. But those who believe in a conspiracy to murder Kennedy have been determined, through the years, to make this a far more complicated puzzle than it actually is. As the author of one of my principal sources, Vincent Bugliosi, told the Los Angeles Times: “Because of these conspiracy theorists who split hairs and proceeded to split the split hairs, this case has been transformed into the most complex murder case in world history. But, at its core, it’s a simple case.”

Hearing the evidence laid out like this should be convincing—damning, even—but if you have invested your belief in any of the many longstanding conspiracy theories surrounding this case, perhaps because you read a conspiracist book or two, or because you watched the Oliver Stone film JFK, or simply because you have heard too many friends or family members regale you with their secondhand regurgitations of conspiracist reservations, then I’m sure you are already formulating objections. Fingerprint evidence can’t be trusted, you might protest, or, If it was Oswald’s rifle, then of course it would have his prints on it. Notwithstanding the witness testimony that entirely details his efforts to retrieve the rifle himself and smuggle it into the Depository after the newspaper announcements of Kennedy’s motorcade route, those who want to believe Oswald was a patsy will contend that someone planted the rifle and the shells, even though there is no evidence of anyone else entering the Paines’ home and having the chance to fetch the rifle from their garage. Also, a complete frame job, I suppose, would entail knowing which boxes Oswald had recently touched on the 6th floor, so that when they built the sniper’s nest, they could use boxes that had his palm prints on them. And since no mysterious strangers were witnessed by the many book Depository employees that day, it would mean the conspiracy would have to be composed of other employees there. A more feasible conspiracy claim is that Oswald did fire his Mannlicher-Carcano, but that he was not the only shooter that day, that the supposed conspirators allowed him to take his shots but took shots of their own as well to ensure the job was done. This notion, that there were other shooters present, within the book Depository or on the patch of grass between a parking lot and a fence along Elm Street near the railroad overpass—the so-called “grassy knoll”—or elsewhere, has become the central thesis of nearly every conspiracy claim surrounding the JFK assassination. According to these narratives, Oswald may have been a shooter, but he was not the shooter. It’s these claims that we must examine in order to achieve a clear picture of what happened on that chaotic day. But first, let us take a moment to imagine and remember the historic and tragic moment with something approaching respect and sympathy for a beloved life that was lost.

The President’s motorcade, minutes before shots were fired on Dealey Plaza.

At 12:30pm on November 22, 1963, the presidential motorcade turned from Main Street onto Houston Street, to much fanfare. Crowds lined the street, cheering, as John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie waved. In the convertible limousine’s fold-down jump seats sat Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, also waving to the crowds. In the front seat, driving and riding shotgun, were two Secret Service agents. Kennedy himself had chosen to do away with the plastic bubble top that might have saved his life that day, preferring to have nothing between himself and the gathered people. As usual, all was not as it may have seemed with the President, who presented a public image of great vigor despite personal health struggles. Under his suit, he wore a back brace strapped against his body with ace bandage. Despite any pain or discomfort, though, he also wore a smile as he passed through Dealey Plaza toward the Texas School Book Depository. He had a nice luncheon to look forward to—roast beef. When the first shot rang out, many thought it was a vehicle backfiring, or maybe a firework. But the following gunshots, and the terrible commotion inside the President’s vehicle, made it very apparent what was happening. Dealey Plaza exploded into panic and pandemonium, screams of terror and anger, shouts of confusion, filling the air, ringing through the plaza’s strange acoustics, and echoing, like the gunshots, even today.

Among the claims made to support the idea that Oswald could not have committed this heinous act alone are the claims that he was not a good enough marksman, or that his rifle was not accurate enough, or that its bolt action could not possibly be operated fast enough. It is odd that conspiracist authors have decided Oswald was a terrible marksman when he actually qualified as a sharpshooter with the Marines. The superior officers in charge of the marksmanship branch and Oswald’s training, who actually have some idea of Oswald’s skill with a rifle, Sgt. James Zahm and Major Eugene Anderson, have gone on record as saying Oswald was a fully capable marksman, and more than that, that the shots taken from the Depository were not especially difficult, that it was, in fact, “an easy shot for a man with the equipment he had and his ability.” A marine who served with Oswald, Nelson Delgado, is sometimes quoted as remembering Oswald not hitting his targets, but Delgado didn’t serve with him at the time when he received his marksmanship training and therefore was not an authority on his abilities, as were the officers who trained him. Another tale has it that Oswald came up empty handed on a rabbit hunting trip in Russia, but of course, hunting rabbit is far different than taking a pot shot at a man in a slow-moving convertible, and Oswald’s brother Robert remembered Oswald complaining about that hunting trip, saying his rifle’s firing pin had broken. Robert himself had been hunting with Lee more than once and has stated, “He was a good shot.” So that leaves his equipment, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, which conspiracist authors allege is universally condemned as slow and inaccurate and a terrible choice for sharpshooting. Certainly it may not have been the absolute best choice, but Oswald chose it because it was the right price. He clipped a coupon from the magazine American Rifleman to buy it. As for Oswald’s particular Mannlicher-Carcano, when the FBI conducted shooting tests with it, they found it “very accurate.” It had come with a four power telescopic scope already assembled, easily seen in the backyard photos, and the FBI firearms expert who examined it stated that it required hardly any adjustment within the range of the assassination shots, and that such a scope would allow even an untrained marksman to operate the weapon like a sharpshooter. And it was further determined that the rifle had little kickback, which would aid in maintaining aim after firing and rapidly working the bolt-action to reload. The false claims about Oswald’s rifle seem to have no end. It’s been claimed that it had a “hair trigger” that would have made sharpshooting difficult, but it was determined that its trigger needed 3 pounds of pressure, a full 2 pounds more than anything considered a hair trigger. Some have even claimed that Oswald could not have used it properly because it was set up for a left-handed person, but the $7 scope on Oswald’s rifle would be used exactly the same way by a lefty or a right-handed person. That only leaves the claim that Oswald could not work its bolt-action quickly enough to fire off the shots.

Three shells were found in the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the book Depository. According to the Warren Commission, the three shots had been fired in just about 5 to 5 and a half seconds, and during the FBI’s testing of the weapon, they determined that it took 2 and a quarter seconds to work the bolt action and take aim, which meant firing all three shots seemed impossible. However, it has been proven more than once that it is possible. A 1975 CBS documentary recorded the efforts of 11 marksmen to fire three bullets from a similar weapon at a moving target, and some were able to fire all three shots in only 4.1 seconds and still hit their marks. The House Select Committee a couple years later also conducted such tests, and as a result, they lowered the minimum time to fire three good shots from the Mannlicher-Carcano to less than 3 and a half seconds. And it must be kept in mind that, according to Marina, Oswald obsessively practiced the bolt-action on his rifle, such that he must have been expert at working it. Regardless, though, there is good reason to believe that Oswald took well more than 5 seconds to fire his three shots. You see, the entire basis of the 5 second time-frame is based on the Zapruder film, the 8mm home movie filmed by a local dressmaker. The Warren Commission worked under the assumption that the first shot fired must have hit, since Oswald must have had the time to aim carefully with that shot. In the film, Kennedy and the Governor seem fine, then Zapruder’s view of them is obscured by a sign, and afterward, they appear to be reacting to their gunshot wounds. Knowing that Kennedy must have first been struck while he was passing the sign, and further knowing that for a few moments as he approached the sign, until a certain point while passing behind the sign, he must have been obscured from the sniper’s view by a certain oak tree, it was determined that the first shot must have been fired just after emerging from the foliage and while obscured momentarily from Zapruder’s camera—at frame 210 of the Zapruder film. Knowing from the consensus of eyewitness testimony that the head shot, which can clearly be seen on the film, was the final shot, this allowed them to determine that the three shots had been fired in 5 to 5 and a half seconds. One of these bullets struck Kennedy in the back, exiting his neck and further injuring Governor Connally. The bullet believed to have caused these injuries was later discovered intact in Connally’s hospital gurney. The final bullet entered the back of Kennedy’s skull and created a massive exit wound on the right side of his head. The problem with the Warren Commission’s timeline is that they presumed the first bullet hit Kennedy in the back, the second bullet missed, and the third hit his head. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that Oswald’s first shot, the shot many witnesses believed was a backfire, was taken before Kennedy passed behind the oak tree’s foliage, and that this was the shot that missed, making the second and third, taken after he emerged, the only two that hit. This would make sense; one can imagine Oswald aiming and then taking a hurried shot before Kennedy went out of sight behind the foliage. Governor Connally, who survived, always insisted that the first shot, which he had heard, had not been the one that struck him. Multiple witnesses describe hearing the first shot just as their car turned from Houston onto Elm in front of the Depository and passed behind the oak tree there. Oswald’s acquaintance Buell Frazier, on the Depository steps, heard it that way, as did a witness half a block away, and another standing on the corner of Houston and Elm as Kennedy’s limo made its turn.  Up on the railroad overpass, another witness described the first shot coming as the corner was taken, and even the President’s own driver and another Secret Service agent remembered it that way. In fact, some witnesses even report having seen sparks as a missed shot struck the pavement. One man even had minor injuries likely from chips of concrete striking his face. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez (about whom I had occasion to speak when talking about his hypothesis regarding the mass extinction of dinosaurs in my episode on the Chicxulub Crater) suggested that evidence of a first missed shot could be discerned through “jiggle analysis” of the Zapruder film, that is, examining the film for blurs caused by Zapruder jerking when the first shot startled him. Sure enough, a significant jiggle was detected at the moment when Oswald would have been about to lose his shot because of the obscuring foliage as the President’s limo completed its turn. If, as this evidence suggests, this was the first of the three shots, then Oswald would have had something more like 8 whole seconds to fire the three rounds.

Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, Warren Commission exhibit 139.

Then there are those conspiracists who claim there were more than three shots. For writers who push the idea that shooters other than Oswald were present on Dealey Plaza, such as on the grassy knoll, it is imperative to suggest more than three shots were heard, or that they were heard from directions other than the book Depository. The 200 or so witness statements that speculate on the origin of shots are sometimes given as a percentage, to the effect that some startlingly high percentage of the witnesses believed the shots came from the grassy knoll rather than the book Depository, but conspiracist authors, such as Josiah Thompson in Six Seconds in Dallas, have been caught falsifying the numbers and misrepresenting the testimony. The fact is that 88 percent of the witnesses heard exactly three shots, and only 5 percent claimed they heard more. Likewise, the largest portion of the witnesses, 44 percent, could not determine where the shots came from, and of those who believed they could, most—28 percent—identified the Book Depository, with only 12 percent suggesting the grassy knoll, and only a measly 2 percent saying they heard gunshots from multiple directions. This last bit is important. Hardly anyone claimed they heard shots from more than one direction. So that means those who heard shots originating from a different direction than the Book Depository, from which we know three shots had been fired, were likely just confused by the acoustics of the plaza, which are known to make pinpointing the location of a sound difficult. Numerous witnesses even specifically mentioned being confused by echo patterns and admitting to uncertainty because of them. These acoustics could easily explain the few witness statements about a fourth or fifth shot as well. But the most confusion regarding number of shots was created by the House Select Committee in 1979, when they obsessed over a recording from Dallas police channels apparently captured from a motorcycle officer’s radio whose microphone was stuck on and capturing constant audio. The thing is, they didn’t know whose mic it was, or if it was even at Dealey Plaza that day. No gunshots were heard on the staticky recording, but they had experts pick it apart for inaudible sounds. A first set of experts said they found “impulses” that may have been gunshots, and after attempting to recreate the impulses by firing two rifles on Dealey Plaza, from the Depository and the grassy knoll, recording it, and then comparing these impulses, they suggested that the recording had been on or near Dealey and recorded four shots. Their certainty was 50 percent, but then just as the Committee had been ready to deliver its conclusions, a second pair of experts they consulted claimed it was as high as 95 percent. Then a Dallas policeman who had been accompanying the motorcade offered the dubious statement that sometimes his mic gets stuck, and that clinched it for them. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, which had been moving inexorably toward a finding that Oswald acted alone, changed their conclusion to declare that JFK was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” all based on that mysterious recording. Conspiracy lovers just about did backflips, of course, but they were less excited when the officer afterward listened to the recording and said it couldn’t be his mic, because no sirens were heard when he accompanied the motorcade to Parkland Hospital. And the entire farce of the police channel recording would be revealed within a few years, when National Academy of Sciences experts made out some cross-talk on the police channel recording that was known to have been spoken by a sheriff one minute after the assassination. So the audio evidence of four shots that swayed the committee in favor of conspiracy, on which no gunshots or sirens could actually be heard, and which might not have even been a recording of audio at Dealey Plaza, had actually been recorded after the time in question, making the supposed “impulse patterns” observed by audio experts nothing but further crackling among the static.

Some eyewitnesses claimed they saw multiple shooters in the Depository that day, but their testimony has been discredited. For example, a prisoner in the Dallas County Jail claimed he was able to see two men in the sniper’s nest, but he was considered unreliable, not only because of his multiple arrests for behavior displaying mental instability, but also because the FBI determined one could not actually see the Depository from his cell. Other witnesses claimed to see multiple gunmen in windows other than the one around which the sniper’s nest had been made, or on different floors, but their testimony is invariably inconsistent, not matching established facts or even statements they made themselves in the immediate aftermath, and more than once was contradicted by people they had been with, who didn’t see the same thing and also indicated that the witnesses never mentioned seeing such things at the time. On the other hand, a great deal of consistent eyewitness testimony describes a lone man, fitting Oswald’s description, in the 6th floor window that had been turned into a sniper’s nest, even seeing the stacks of boxes behind him, and seeing the rifle in his hands. A Dallas Times Herald photographer and another cameraman who were both in the same motorcade vehicle witnessed this. A court clerk across the street pinpointed the window as well, said as much to his friend, and then directed a deputy sheriff to search there. A student on the street below looked up after the first shot and saw the barrel extended from that window, and then he saw the muzzle flare when it fired again. A fifteen year old boy who had been lifted onto a high perch across the street for a better view said he saw everything in the sniper’s nest, indicating just one shooter and running to a police officer immediately to report what he’d seen. A construction worker named Howard Brennan who had a perfect view of the sniper’s nest described a man fitting Oswald’s description to a T, and even described his lack of expression before the shooting and his self-satisfied smirk after.

Conspiracist writers relentlessly attempt to discredit Brennan because he didn’t express absolute certainty while later picking Oswald out of a lineup, but he did pick him, and later he explained his hesitance to express certainty as a product of fear, since he was having second thoughts about becoming a principal witness against the President’s assassin, thinking it could put a target on him if there really were some conspiracy, as some were already saying. Conspiracist authors like Jim Marrs, and Mark Lane, one of the earliest and most vociferous conspiracy peddlers, bring up Brennan’s poor eyesight to discredit him, saying he was nearsighted and thus could not have seen all the details he claimed. In fact, though, Brennan was farsighted. After the assassination, his eyesight was damaged in a sandblasting injury, but at the time of the assassination, he was actually peculiarly suited to discern the specific details he described from a distance. Regardless of all this testimony from outside the Depository, though, the statements of other Book Depository employees clear everything up. His fellow workers saw him on the sixth floor, lurking near the windows that looked out on the plaza. At about 11:45am, everyone took their lunch, intending to go down and watch the passing motorcade, and several remembered Oswald staying behind. One coworker even came back to get some cigarettes he had left on that floor, saw Oswald near the sniper’s nest window, and asked him if he was coming down for lunch. Oswald said he was not. Another employee came to the sixth floor to see where others were gathering and found it empty, but he did notice the high stacks of books in front of the south-east corner window. He ate his lunch quickly at a different window and then left to find others who were watching the motorcade, joining two friends at a fifth-floor window just below the sniper’s nest. All three, Harold Norman, Junior Jarman, and Bonnie Ray Williams, are critical witnesses, for they heard exactly three rifle shots coming from directly overhead, and they were even seen by some witnesses on the street leaning out their window and straining to see the window above them.

Commission Exhibits 1301-2, revealing Oswald’s sniper’s nest, courtesy the National Archives.

Much has been made of the supposed goings on at the grassy knoll further down the motorcade route from the Depository, but if we look closely at the reasons for suspecting a shooter was there, it starts to look entirely like a red herring. Remember that all the physical evidence and the preponderance of witness testimony indicate just three shots were fired, and all from the Depository. We’ve also established that echo patterns in Dealey Plaza confused the origin of sounds. Therefore, it is unsurprising that a couple police officers—not fifty, as some unreliable witness testimony claimed—went first to the grassy knoll to search for a gunman, and that they very quickly discerned there was nothing there. Being urged by most witnesses to search the Depository, that building quickly became the focus of their search. As with much conspiracy speculation, claims involving the grassy knoll often rely on mistaken witness statements, like that of a woman, Julia Ann Mercer, who was stuck in her car during the motorcade’s passage and said she saw men taking a gun case from a pickup truck and taking it to the grassy knoll. It turned out that the truck was stalled, and the men were getting tools from the back in order to fix it. The Dallas police had been monitoring the vehicle as they tried to maintain security on the plaza. Much of the speculation about the grassy knoll derives from witness statements that a puff of smoke was seen there during the shooting, but any modern ammunition a second shooter would have been using would be mostly smokeless, and the strong northerly wind that day would not have allowed smoke from a firearm to simply linger in the air. If something smoke-like were momentarily seen above the grassy knoll, it’s more likely that it came from the exhaust of an abandoned police motorcycle, as one witness described, or from the nearby steam pipe which would shortly thereafter scald the hands of a Dallas police officer searching the area. Other than these mistaken reports, there are the unreliable accounts of people seeking attention, like Jean Hill, who was swept into the drama because she took a Polaroid picture of the back of Kennedy’s limo at about the time of the third shot. Her early reports show a lack of reliability, getting all kinds of things wrong, like not being clear on the number of people in the car with the President, saying she saw a dog in the car, and claiming things happened that did not, for example, attributing exclamations to the First Lady that no one in the vehicle heard her make. Hill’s story became more and more lurid as she had further chances to tell it. First she added that she heard five or six shots, the later ones from an automatic weapon. Then she said police fired back on the shooters, which clearly never happened. Then she said she gave chase to a suspicious man, even though photos taken in the wake of the assassination picture her not having moved from her original spot on the south side of Elm. Her statement was afterward taken by a Times Herald reporter, but in later retellings, she claimed it was some mystery men impersonating Secret Service agents who questioned her. In that initial interview, she emphatically asserted that nothing had drawn her attention during the shooting, but more than 20 years later, she was enthusiastically providing conspiracist author Jim Marrs with details about gunmen firing from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. To explain why her later claims don’t line up with testimony she gave to the Warren Commission, she claims that she was coerced to alter her story, even though a stenographer was present and recorded none of the threats and manipulation she describes.

On and on it goes with the witness claims about the grassy knoll. A tiny portion of another woman’s faded Polaroid is blown up and said to show a mysterious badged man with a rifle, though in fact it just appears to be foliage. A man in a nearby railroad signal tower, who had a view behind the fence on the grassy knoll, said he saw two men behind the fence, standing apart as if they did not know each other, but then after speaking with conspiracist author Mark Lane, as happened with more than one witness, he changed his story to say he saw a flash of light as though one of the men had fired a gun. In fact, though, he has admitted that he was busy at the time of the assassination, having to work the control panel in his tower, which required him to have his back turned to the entire scene. Fifteen years after the fact, yet more grassy knoll shooter witnesses came forward, one claiming to have seen men with CIA IDs there, and asserting that he heard bullets flying past his ear. Another says he saw a man in a suit enter the railyard behind the grassy knoll and pass a rifle to another man, who disassembled it. But the problem with these latecomers’ claims is that others who were present in those areas did not see them there, casting doubt on whether they were there at all, or at least on whether they were where they claim to have been. This is the same credibility problem that all the grassy knoll claims suffer: there are other witnesses who were present and saw nothing of the sort. There are numerous witnesses confirmed to have been within view of the grassy knoll who saw no shooters peeking over the fence, and three who were standing just in front of the fence who certainly would have been aware if a rifle had been fired just behind their heads. And there were police stationed on the railroad overpass for security purposes who would have been able to spot any gunmen firing from that fence in broad daylight. Yet claims about the grassy knoll never cease. One writer, David Lifton, determined to make the grassy knoll idea work despite its problems, fell so deep into his scrutiny of faded photos that he began to see all sorts of strange things, convincing himself that conspirators had somehow managed to build fake trees on the knoll as a kind of hunting blind. He claims they must have built this artificial foliage without anyone on the busy plaza having noticed, and then afterward removed it in the days following the assassination, when the entire plaza was an active crime scene, again without anyone seeing them. And more than that, in the shapes and shadows of photo enhancements he made himself, he believed he could make out men in those fake trees wearing headsets and spiked imperial Prussian helmets, using periscopes and manning machine gun emplacements. In fact, he was pretty sure that he recognized General Douglas MacArthur somewhere among those black-and-white blotches. To illustrate the absurdity of the notion that General MacArthur was hiding in fake trees on the grassy knoll to oversee Kennedy’s assassination that day, it’s helpful to know that there was much mutual respect and admiration between the two, who had both served in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. At the time, MacArthur was 82 and frail, ailing from cirrhosis, which would take his life in less than a year. Kennedy had actually already made plans for MacArthur’s state funeral. Upon hearing the news about the assassination later that day, MacArthur sent Jackie Kennedy a powerful telegram, which reads, “I realize the utter futility of words at such a time, but the world of civilization shares the poignancy of this monumental tragedy. As a former comrade in arms, his death kills something within me.” Unfortunately, it’s quite typical of conspiracy speculators to not consider the human side of their claims, to toss out connections and spew ill-considered allegations, just hoping something sticks, never really considering that the names they throw out belong to actual people with rich lives and relationships and feelings.

A Polaroid photo taken the moment after the fatal head shot, in which can be seen a few people standing on the grassy knoll and, if we may judge by their postures and the direction of their gazes, clearly not hearing shots being fired from behind them.

The last and, to some, most important element to consider in this forensic mess, so relentlessly obfuscated by conspiracy speculation over the years, is that of the single bullet, dubbed the “magic bullet” by doubters, that was determined to have entered Kennedy’s back, exited his neck, and then caused multiple wounds in Governor Connally, thereafter remaining intact and ending up in the governor’s hospital gurney. There is, of course, much to be said about the actions and statements of the doctors who treated Kennedy at Parkland, the taking of his body out of Dallas on Air Force One, and the results of his autopsy at Bethesda, and the conspiracy narratives that have been spun around these events. In fact, there is so much that I will be releasing a patron exclusive on the topic. To conclude this episode, let us only look at the so-called “magic bullet” trajectory. Using the visible reactions of Kennedy and Connally on the Zapruder film to determine when they were struck, the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee encountered a timing problem. It appeared to them, looking at Kennedy’s arm movement and a later change in Connally’s facial expression, when he opens his mouth widely—a moment in the Zapruder film that Connally himself identifies as when he was shot—that there was too long between their reactions. They both tried to explain this away by saying Connally simply had a delayed reaction, but Connally himself said he instantly felt the bullet’s impact. This discrepancy, which conspiracy speculators take as proof they had been struck by different bullets, has since been resolved by expert modern enhancements of the Zapruder film in the 1990s. It can now clearly be seen that between frames 224 and 227, Kennedy assumed “Thorburn’s Position,” a neurological reaction to spinal injury as the bullet passed near his sixth vertebra, and Connally, nearly simultaneously changes his posture. His lapel can even be seen to flip up in the same spot where there was later seen a bullet hole in his shirt. The moment he picked as when he was hit, when he opens his mouth widely, was more likely a reaction to his first attempt to take a breath after being shot, when his lung collapsed. With the timing problem resolved, there is the further question of the bullet’s path through Connally’s chest and his right wrist and then into his thigh.

With the timing problem resolved, there is the further question of the bullet’s path through Connally’s chest and his right wrist and then into his thigh. The famous claim of those who mockingly call it a “magic bullet” is that it would have had to make impossible turns in midair to make all of Connally’s injuries. There is no surprising refutation here. That’s just simply untrue. Computer recreations of the Zapruder film have demonstrated that Connally was in a perfect position for the bullet to take its path, turned in his seat to search for the source of the first gunshot he had heard. Fired downward from the Depository’s sixth floor, as recreations proved it must have been, the bullet passed through Kennedy and entered Connally’s back, changed course slightly within his body when it struck his rib, exited below his right nipple, then passed through his wrist, which was in front of him holding his hat, and entered his thigh only a short way. The path of the bullet can even be discerned in the Zapruder film when one sees the movement of his hat at the moment his wrist is struck. Some have claimed the bullet later found in his gurney was too “pristine” and must have been planted, but it was a full metal jacket round, designed to pass through its targets as it did, and it was slightly damaged. The doctor treating Connally at Parkland immediately suspected the bullet must have survived intact when he saw how shallow the wound in his thigh was, and he even suggested Connally’s belongings be searched to find it. Lastly, anyone who watched the film JFK knows that much has been made of the motion of Kennedy’s head when he was struck by the last shot. “Back and to the left” echoes in our minds, having even become a darkly humorous meme, parodied in Seinfeld. Conspiracists claim the head’s backward movement demonstrates that he was not shot from behind but from in front, from the grassy knoll. However, again, conspiracy proponents are just talking out of their asses here, pretending to be experts on the human body’s reaction to gunshot wounds. Actually, doctors with expertise in gunshot wounds say that every person reacts differently depending on numerous factors. Some of the factors identified by experts for Kennedy’s backward movement include a neuromuscular spasm, triggered by the destruction of his cortex, causing his back and neck to stiffen, a reflex heightened by his tightly strapped on back brace, which prevented him from falling forward. Another factor is the so-called “jet effect” cited by Nobel prize-winner Luis Alvarez, who observed that the explosive force of his massive exit wound on the front right side of his head may have actually thrust him back in the opposite direction. Regardless, though, if conspiracists will only believe the shot came from behind if there is a forward motion, they should be satisfied by the fact that enhancements of the Zapruder film indeed show him jerking a couple inches forward before his motion back and to the left.

A diagram of the single bullet’s remarkably unmagical path, included in Posner’s Case Closed.

Further Reading

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Two: The Activist

On Wednesday, April 10th, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald tearfully admitted to his Russian wife Marina that he had been fired from his photoprint trainee job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. His eyes welled up with tears as he blamed the FBI, who he assumed had spoken to his employer and gotten him fired. In fact, after his second interview, the FBI appears to have lost track of him for the time being because of his frequent moves, but Oswald’s inflated sense of self-importance made it hard for him to believe they weren’t hounding him. Marina could tell he was on the edge of something that night, as he ate dinner tensely and silently. After dinner, he left the house, and Marina became anxious, pacing and fretting over what she should do. She had no great love for her husband, who had long abused her physically and mentally, but she relied on him. He had refused to teach her any English, probably so that she was wholly dependent on him, and it worked. Her only friend was Ruth Paine, whom she had met through the Russian émigré circle that had cast them out because of their dislike of Oswald and because of Marina’s reluctance to leave him despite his abuse. Ruth, however, who could speak some Russian, as she was learning the language, remained close with Marina, wanting to help her but fearing retribution from the volatile Oswald. On this night, though, Marina feared telling Ruth about her suspicions. Four days earlier, Lee had left the house with his rifle, the one she had photographed him holding, and he had returned home without it. She had worried since then that he intended to do something terrible with it, and tonight she had an awful feeling. If she told Ruth, though, her friend might report Lee to authorities, and she feared being left alone America, unable to speak the language, with no husband to support her, especially now, as she was pregnant with their second child. So instead of calling anyone, she went into Oswald’s little study, where she found a note with a key set on top of it. It appeared to have been left for her, written in Russian, telling her where his post office box was located, telling her to reach out to the Soviet embassy for help and assuring her that once they found out what had happened to him, they would come to her aid. The note read like a last will and testament, instructing her what to do with his papers and belongings and how much money he had left behind for her, but it ended by telling her where she could find the city jail in the event that he had been captured alive. Needless to say, the note only upset her more, driving her to near desperation when Oswald finally returned before midnight. He looked quite shaken himself, breathing as if he had been rushing home on foot, and pale-faced, as if terrified. When Marina confronted him about his note, he confessed that he had attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker, the right-wing extremist he had been stalking, by shooting at him in his home. He wasn’t certain whether he had succeeded, for after taking his shot, he had fled and buried his rifle. He turned on the radio, expecting at least to hear about the attempt, but was disappointed when he could find no news about it. Marina slept poorly, fearful of police tracking dogs leading authorities to their door. When she woke, she found Oswald hunched over the radio. She did not understand the English spoken by the broadcaster, but she gathered the gist of the report when Oswald angrily said, “I missed.” In fact, he had only just missed his mark. His bullet had gone slightly off its course when it passed through a wire screen, causing it to carom off the window’s woodwork before striking the glass. Lee explained that he had been planning the assassination for months, showing her photos he’d taken of Walker’s house and maps on which he had traced his escape route. He assured her that killing Walker would be like killing Hitler before the Holocaust, that the ends justified the means, but Marina extracted a promise from him that he wouldn’t try to kill Walker again, threatening to go to the police with evidence of his guilt if he ever did such a thing, and insisting he go stay with family in New Orleans and look for a new job there just to keep him out of trouble. For days afterward, she noticed Oswald having violent nightmares in his sleep. She feared her husband was irredeemably sick in his mind.

*

It did not take long for conspiracy believers to begin messaging me about claims I “overlooked.” It was implied by some of these reply guys that I had some ulterior motive for the position I am taking on the Kennedy assassination, or that I have knowingly presented false information for which there is no evidence. True to the character of a conspiracy speculator, they see conspiracy everywhere, so if someone presents a compelling argument to refute their notions, they must also be part of some conspiracy to obscure the truth. Some of the complaints were about parts of the history that I haven’t even gotten to yet, demanding my position on some conspiracist claim that I will likely eventually address during the series or its tie-in exclusives, such as the claims about Oswald’s friend George de Mohrenschildt being his CIA handler, telling all later in life, and then being suicided just before he could testify. Please realize that I cannot address every false claim or misrepresented detail in this series. It’s not a 5-hundred-page book. If you’re looking for a more encyclopedic refutation of all conspiracist claims, I encourage you to read my sources. Nevertheless, I made attempts to answer the claims about de Mohrenschildt in good faith by responding to one self-appointed social media interrogator, though admittedly in brief, since I was planning a patron exclusive podcast episode about de Mohrenschildt, but my reply was apparently not enough, as I was thereafter accused of using biased sources or even making up sources. I then indicated what my sources about de Mohrenschildt were, but they were rejected out of hand as suffering from “confirmation bias.” Tellingly, my sources’ actual research and evidence were not refuted, but rather the authors themselves, based on reputation, and no preferable or supposedly less biased sources were recommended, likely because any conspiracist authors could likewise be accused of suffering from confirmation bias, as could my interlocutors themselves. What I have shown, however, and what my sources show, is that conspiracist authors’ research frequently omits important aspects of the story and misrepresents information or exaggerates the reliability of witnesses in order to further their theses. It’s easier to attack the researcher in this case than to address their actual research, which is what I and my sources try to do with conspiracist research. So let’s talk about my sources. In part one, I mentioned Gerald Posner’s Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK as a principal source, and I’ve had loyal supporters of the program message me with concerns about his reputation as a plagiarist. In my view, Posner has answered for his plagiarism and misattribution of quotes, which occurred later in his career, when he was the chief investigative reporter for the Daily Beast and facing deadlines that he asserts resulted in some confusion in handling his source materials before taking responsibility and resigning. As far as I've been able to determine, few aside from the conspiracists who refuse to acknowledge his conclusions have ever suggested his research into the JFK and MLK assassinations was anything but exhaustive, calling it “meticulous” and “authoritative.” What few respected researchers suggest he may have omitted certain details, like Vincent Bugliosi, nevertheless agree with his conclusions and call his work “impressive.” Here I’ll recommend other books as sources that confirm Oswald acted alone: Kennedy scholar and assassination historian Mel Ayton’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt, and former LA County Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History. One of the conspiracy believers who has told me he would be “monitoring” my work has said Bugliosi’s background makes him biased. Surely this doesn’t refer to his personal scandals, which have nothing to do with his research on JFK and have mostly been raised by those promoting Charles Manson conspiracies, since Bugliosi prosecuted Manson. No one should believe that his abusive behavior in his private life should discredit his research unless one cannot recognize the ad hominem fallacy. Rather, it seems to be a suggestion that anyone with a law enforcement background or any connection to government cannot be trusted in this case, and that’s the same kind of thinking that would suggest everyone involved in every federal investigation of the assassination, whether conducted by the FBI, the Secret Service, or Congress, must be in on the vast conspiracy, which is simply an untenable argument. And I suppose in the conspiracist view, somehow Bugliosi, who successfully prosecuted hundreds of felony trials, including the conviction of Charles Manson, is somehow unreliable, whereas conspiracist author Jim Marrs, who also writes about the Illuminati and Freemasons covering up an extra-terrestrial presence on earth, is credible as a researcher? As you can see, some of my encounters with believers in a large conspiracy to assassinate JFK have left a bad taste in my mouth. Those I’m speaking about shouldn’t be surprised to find themselves blocked by me on social media. I’m sure they’ll take it as some victory that I blocked them, but really it’s just a reflection of your poor etiquette in the tone you took when you came at me online. I only sparingly block anyone on social media. Also, I just don’t have time to trade tweets endlessly with someone who isn’t really looking to consider my view and simply wants to save face and get the last word. I hope you keep listening and maybe keep an open mind, as I have done—yeah, I used to believe there was some shadowy conspiracy involved here, but keeping an open mind when I began to actually examine the research out there, I changed my mind and am now convinced that Oswald was a lone assassin. If you keep listening and still want to get in touch, do it by emailing me through the website instead of making it a performative public challenge, which doesn’t seem conducive to a good faith debate.

*

General Walker, not long before the attempt on his life. Image via Dallas Morning News

Back to the plot, and the pot shot at Walker. Conspiracy speculators have a conflicted relationship with the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald attempted to assassinate General Walker just seven months before he successfully assassinated JFK. Some argue that it proves he couldn’t have shot JFK from the Book Depository because his failure to hit the much easier target of Walker in his dining room proved he was a terrible marksman. We will get to the claims about Oswald’s marksmanship and capabilities of his rifle, but it is clear from the evidence of the failed Walker assassination that his missed shot was not proof of poor marksmanship. Walker himself afterward described the scene, explaining that at night, from a hundred feet away where Oswald had likely taken position by Walker’s back fence, the window would have exposed a wide, illuminated view of his dining room, and it would have been difficult to even see the wire screen that threw the bullet off its path and into the wood of the frame. As Walker explained, “[H]e could have been a very good shot and just by chance he hit the woodwork.” But after all, it could not have been so poor a shot, for even with the slight deflection by the screen, wood, and glass, the bullet still only just missed Walker’s head, for he said he felt it pass through his hair. Other conspiracy speculators dismiss Marina’s testimony, even though she knew Oswald better than anyone in the world, and they assert Oswald was not the shooter who attempted to assassinate Walker, or that the same rifle later found in the Book Depository was not the one used to fire at Walker, pointing out that ballistics experts could not conclusively match the recovered bullet to the rifle. This is true, because the bullet was very damaged, but experts did determine that it was highly probable that it had been fired from the same Mannlicher-Carcano, which Oswald retrieved from it hiding place 4 days after the attempt on Walker’s life, because certain marks on the slug matched those on bullets fired by the rifle in ballistics tests after the JFK assassination. Furthermore, neutron-activation tests proved that the bullet had been manufactured by the same company as the bullets fired in Dealey Plaza. Essentially, the 6.5mm cartridges used in both incidents might very well have sat next to each other in the same box of ammo. But even more difficult for these conspiracy speculators to explain is the fact that FBI investigators discovered evidence of the Walker assassination attempt among Oswald’s belongings after the Kennedy assassination. Indeed, five of the photographs Oswald took of Walker’s home have survived. Because this is all very hard to address, some conspiracy speculators, like the famous Jim Garrison, just ignore it, never bothering to mention Oswald’s first foray into politically-motivated murder.

Nor does it seem that Oswald gave up entirely on perpetrating an assassination after his failure to kill General Walker. Only 11 days later, his temper rose when he read in the paper that Richard Nixon was pushing to move against Communists in Cuba, and further reading that Nixon was in town on a visit, Marina says that he took his revolver and tried to leave the house to go find him. Marina lured him into the bathroom before he could leave and then locked him inside. She insisted that she would rather he kill her than leave the house with his gun to murder a political figure. She wouldn’t let him out until he had cooled down and stripped off all his clothes so that he could not easily push past her out of the house. Afterward, it turned out he had misread the paper. It was Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson who was in Dallas at the time, not former Vice-President Richard Nixon. The next day, after he had surrendered his pistol to Marina, Oswald admitted his mistake, and within 4 days, he had taken a bus to New Orleans and arranged to stay with his aunt Lillian there while he searched for a job, according to Marina’s wishes. However, he wasn’t entirely done with politics. Before leaving Dallas, he picked up a stack of leaflets sent to him by Fair Play for Cuba, a pro-Castro organization that he had taken in interest in and may have done a little demonstrating for the month prior. Oswald intended to expand his political activism in New Orleans, but first he needed to get a job. After lying freely on his many applications, he found a position greasing machinery at a coffee company for a buck and a half an hour, so he went in search of an apartment for him and Marina and little June, lying to his new landlady about where he worked. His sense of himself as an outlaw or spy being hounded by the FBI continued, though they didn’t even know where he was. The maintenance job was hard, so Oswald slacked, as he always did, spending his some of his work hours playing hooky at a neighboring garage, where the proprietor had a lot of gun magazines that Oswald would sit and read and even borrow. The owner of this garage, Adrian Alba, a firearm enthusiast, remembered Osborn picking his brain about the subject, asking him which caliber bullet was deadliest to humans. Alba sometimes worked on FBI and Secret Service vehicles, and he would later claim that he had seen Oswald accepting an envelope from an FBI agent who was getting a vehicle serviced at the garage. Conspiracy believers love this story. The problem is Alba mentioned no such incident when questioned by the FBI or the Warren Commission after the Kennedy assassination, only first claiming it fifteen years later because, according to him, he had forgotten it. When the House Select Committee investigated this claim, though, they found no record of the FBI using Alba’s garage all that year.

Exhibit showing Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans.

In June, about a month after Marina and his daughter had joined him in New Orleans at the squalid little apartment he had rented for them, Oswald took her to the hospital and learned that they would not deliver Marina’s child for free, even though Oswald’s income was very small. Marina remembered this as an inflection point in his evolving feelings about the United States. When he had grown to hate Soviet Russia and wanted to return home, he had softened a bit on the U.S., but his hatred of American capitalism had only grown more pronounced since his return stateside. He had many times suggested that they should return to Russia. She remembers that it was after the hospital turned them away that he first made a disparaging remark against President Kennedy, specifically about how “his papa bought him the Presidency. Money paves the way to everything here.” So he threw himself into his political activism for Cuba, believing that, though Russia had let him down, Castro was surely building a perfect Marxist utopia, and the U.S. should leave them be. He started by disseminating leaflets that said “HANDS OFF CUBA” and encouraging people to join his branch of Fair Play for Cuba, which was just him. He never managed to attract any prospective members of the branch he hoped to start, but that didn’t stop him from writing to the President of the organization, as well as to leaders of the American Communist Party, and bragging about all the good work he was doing in New Orleans, lying about his chapter’s growing membership. In a further effort to impress, he tried to infiltrate a local anti-Castro Cuban expatriate group, presenting himself as a supporter and offering to train Cubans to fight Castro. These Cubans were suspicious of him right away, and later, when they happened to see Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in the street, they confronted him, starting a big fight for which all of them were arrested. While the Cubans made bail, Oswald was stuck there overnight. After lying in his police interview about where he lived and worked, he asked the police to contact the FBI. The fact he asked for the FBI, and that an agent promptly came to the station on a Saturday, is latched onto by conspiracy speculators as proof that he was working with them, but the agent who reported was simply the agent on Saturday duty at the local FBI office and was duty-bound to answer such summons by the New Orleans police in order to determine whether the case might be of interest to the Bureau. Their meeting was not secret, and the report that the agent afterward wrote indicates that Oswald also lied to him. It is apparent that Oswald, who believed the FBI was hounding him and getting him fired from jobs, wanted to explain his arrest to the FBI on his own terms. He claimed that other members of Fair Play for Cuba had asked him to distribute the leaflets, giving one of his go-to alias names, Hidell, to the agent. Furthermore, if he really were secretly working with the Bureau, as some researchers have pointed out, it does seem unlikely that he would completely blow his cover by summoning the FBI to him like that.

What really complicates any rational, evidence-based detailing of Oswald’s path to assassinating Kennedy on Dealey Plaza is the sheer quantity of false claims that have afterward been made by conspiracists looking to sell books and witnesses who were either genuinely mistaken or seeking attention. It is nearly impossible to tell the story without stopping every minute to say, “some have claimed this, but here’s why they’re wrong.” For example, it has been asserted that the anti-Castro Cuban arrested for fighting with Oswald, Carlos Bringuier, the New Orleans delegate of the Cuban Student Directorate, was allied with the CIA and staged the fight and the arrest just to establish Oswald’s supposed cover as an activist supporting Castro. Bringuier denies it, and the only evidence of his contact with the CIA came after the Kennedy assassination, when the agency interviewed him about his nephew, who had defected to the U.S. from Cuba. So it is just a baseless accusation that, once made, gets repeated despite a complete lack of evidence that it’s true. This is the stock in trade of the conspiracy speculator. Some claims, however, start with a bit more, a puzzling detail and a coincidence. These are the claims that are harder to dispute, because a conspiracist will never admit to the existence of coincidence. One such rabbit hole has to do with a certain address that Oswald appears to have stamped on a few of his leaflets. Most were stamped with his home address, or with the name Hidell and his P.O. Box, but a few were stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, a building at which a private eye named Guy Bannister kept an office. Bannister was a former FBI agent and Bircher with connections to the intelligence world, and he also did investigative work for Carlos Marcello, a powerful mafia figure, so for a conspiracy speculator, he is the perfect person to connect Oswald to a variety of different groups they like to imagine were behind the President’s assassination. However, both the FBI and the Secret Service investigated this connection, finding that none of the building’s tenants, nor its janitor, had ever seen Oswald there, and none had ever seen any Fair Play for Cuba literature in the building. Years later, though, the House Select Committee on Assassinations and various conspiracist authors managed to find some people to say they had seen him there. One, another P.I. who sometimes worked with Bannister, was a known drunk and liar who had previously stated that he had never seen Oswald there. The other, Bannister’s secretary, likewise said at first that she’d never seen Oswald there, and only later said she had, after apparently being paid by the conspiracist author interviewing her, to whom she would later admit to lying. So with nothing concrete or credible tying Oswald to that address, the only question remaining is why it was stamped on his leaflets. It’s been suggested that it may have been mere coincidence. Oswald was known to use false addresses all the time, and he happened to pass by this address when visiting the unemployment office. Perhaps he even saw a “For Rent” sign on the building and fantasized about opening his Fair Play for Cuba branch office there, even though he didn’t have the money for it. Then there is the fact that this used to be the headquarters for an anti-Castro organization, and Oswald may have seen the former address stamped on some of their old leaflets. In that case, stamping the address of a rival group on his propaganda may have struck him as funny, ironic, or even as a provocation.

The oddball David Ferrie, often connected to Oswald through coincidence.

The wayward stamped Camp Street address also leads conspiracy speculators to link Oswald with a strange man named David Ferrie, an anti-Communist mercenary and self-ordained bishop who claimed to be a cancer researcher, a fighter pilot, and a hypnotist. Ferrie was a strikingly odd character, and looked unusual as well, suffering from alopecia and compensating for his complete hairlessness by wearing a red wig and pasted on eyebrows. Ferrie worked with Bannister as well as for mafia boss Carlos Marcello, but he was further connected with anti-Castro Cubans. Conspiracists argue that Oswald had known Ferrie since he was 15 and had joined the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans, where Ferrie happened to serve as a squadron captain. Ferrie later told the FBI that he never knew Oswald, but of course a conspiracy believer wouldn’t believe him. Records show that Ferrie had been rejected from rejoining the patrol after giving right-wing lectures to cadets in 1954 and wasn’t reinstated until 1958, which would mean he wasn’t there when Oswald was a cadet in ’55, but certain photos have appeared purporting to picture both of them together in a large group. Some such photos were proven to be fakes, while others were not, but regardless, happening to be in that organization at the same time, or even in the same photo, does not prove a relationship or a conspiracy, and Ferrie may have been truthful in saying he didn’t know Oswald if he didn’t remember the youth. The more unusual accusations linking David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald would turn up years later, when Jim Garrison produced six witnesses from the little backwater Lousiana town of Clinton who claimed in testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that they had seen Oswald with Ferrie in a car in Clinton when an initiative was underway to register Black residents to vote. They said that Oswald got out of the car and stood in line with the Black registrants. This certainly does seem like something Oswald would do. He was known to disregard segregation codes out of principle and sit among Black people in public places, such as at his own trial for disturbing the peace. However, it doesn’t make much sense for David Ferrie to have been involved, since he held right-wing views, which of course makes it out of character for Oswald to associate with him at all. It has been suggested that they were involved with some FBI COINTELPRO operation, to infiltrate and undermine the Congress of Racial Equality, which was organizing the registration that day, but this too would be very out of character for Oswald, requiring us to believe he had been building a false persona since middle school, when he was first drawn to leftist politics. A clearer explanation is that the witnesses, whose testimony was sealed by the House Select Committee, were mistaken, or had been misled. Indeed, Garrison produced the witnesses after interviewing over 300 others, and there are clear indications that he and his staff coached them, encouraging them to change their story if it contradicted a known fact. For example, some of these witnesses believed they had seen Oswald in October or later, when the weather was cold, but Oswald and Marina had moved away when the weather was still hot, in September. Moreover, the fact that witnesses identified Oswald and Ferrie and another of Garrison’s suspects, Clay Shaw, may have been because Garrison only showed them those three photos and told them others had already identified them. These problems, as well as inconsistencies among the witnesses’ stories, make their claims less than reliable and leave a conscientious researcher doubting whether there was in fact a connection between Oswald and Ferrie in 1963.

After Oswald’s arrest and trial, at which he pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace, he received a little taste of fame and gloried in it, which certainly does not seem like something that an intelligence agent would be seeking. A local television producer took an interest in him, filmed him demonstrating and then asked to videotape an interview of him. Oswald excitedly wrote to the head of Fair Play for Cuba and to figures in the American Communist Party again, boasting about all the attention his fictional branch of Fair Play for Cuba was getting. With his confidence growing, he agreed to a further television appearance, but he didn’t know that the television producer had since been in contact with the local FBI office. After Oswald had summoned an agent to him in jail, the FBI now knew where he was again and had sent his file to the New Orleans office. The television producer happened to have a contact in the FBI office, learned about his file, and was invited to come examine it, something that, again, it doesn’t seem the FBI would have wanted done if they were using Oswald as some kind of confidential informant or even as a stooge. The result was Oswald’s televised humiliation, in which the reporter confronted him about his undesirable discharge from the Marines and his attempted defection to the USSR. Oswald was revealed as a liar and presented to the viewing public as a turncoat. Oswald was destroyed by the humiliation. He seemed to give up on his political activism entirely, staying at home, brooding, sitting on his porch in the dark with his rifle, practicing its bolt action over and over. As he had always done when unhappy, he fantasized about abandoning the country, this time turning his thoughts to Cuba. When Marina found him studying airline schedules, he revealed to her that he intended to hijack a passenger flight at gunpoint and take it to Cuba, and that she would need to take part, holding a gun on the passengers while he dealt with the pilots. Marina was horrified. Eventually, though, since he had successfully renewed his passport a few months earlier, he decided instead to visit Mexico, planning to go to the Cuban embassy there and lay out a case, based on his Russian defection and pro-Castro activism, for being granted a Cuban visa. He began to teach himself some rudimentary Spanish, and he sent Marina off to Dallas with their belongings to live with her friend Ruth Paine, telling her he would send for her when he was settled in Cuba.

Oswald appearing on television in New Orleans. Image via WDSU TV.

One of the really confusing aspects of Oswald’s story is that, after the Kennedy assassination, numerous witnesses came forward claiming they had seen Oswald in Dallas or elsewhere when he was actually on his trip to Mexico seeking passage to Cuba. This is not that surprising or strange, since mass media coverage often leads to misidentifications. What’s really odd, though, is that even though we know that Oswald was in Mexico—from numerous positive identifications by fellow passengers on his bus as well as at the Cuban and Soviet embassies that he visited while there, along with the fact that the Cuban embassy instructed him to get passport-sized photographs taken and those remain on file, definitively proving that the man in Mexico calling himself Oswald was indeed the Oswald we know—even though we have the evidence to refute these other identifications of Oswald at the time, conspiracists have muddied the waters further by claiming that, instead of being mistaken, these witnesses must have seen an impostor who was going around calling himself Osborn in Texas at the time. For example, an employee at the Selective Service headquarters in Austin said he came in there, but other employees could not confirm this, and no one using the name appears to have signed in. A waitress says she saw him at a nearby café that day, but does not appear to have actually been working at the time. Then a woman who had been an early founder of a certain anti-Castro organization said she’d been visited by Oswald and others in late September, and that later, she was told this Oswald had been saying Kennedy should be shot over the Bay of Pigs. Problem was, though, she couldn’t make a proper identification from photos, and her psychiatrist would later cast doubt on the veracity of her story in his testimony to the Warren Commission. The weight of testimony and evidence falls on the side of Oswald having been in Mexico, and the rest we have good reason to disregard as unreliable.

At the Cuban embassy, the consul disappointed Oswald by not granting him a visa, despite Oswald’s presentation depicting himself as a devoted Marxist, a noted activist, and a friend of Castro’s revolution. It turned out that processing his request could take weeks, but he only had a Mexican tourist visa for a few days. It was suggested that obtaining a Soviet visa might facilitate faster approval of his visit to Cuba, so Oswald made his way to the nearby Soviet embassy. Inside, he spoke Russian, presented his documents, declared he was formerly a defector and needed a Soviet visa immediately because the FBI were hounding him. He even went so far as to claim that he had some crucial intelligence that he would only divulge when they granted him his visa. The staff thought him unstable. When he was told it could take four months for his visa, he began crying out in despair. “It’s all going to end in tragedy!” he exclaimed. KGB agents present at the embassy actually sent a cable to Moscow, which was received by none other than Yuri Nosenko, who would later defect to America, as detailed in my recent Blind Spot exclusive minisode. Nosenko cabled back that they would not grant the volatile and fickle Oswald his visa, so they turned him away, diplomatically, of course. Simply proving his instability, Oswald returned the next day and brandished his revolver, complaining about how he had to carry it because of FBI harassment. They wrestled his gun away from him and kicked him out. After one more fruitless attempt at the Cuban embassy, he eventually returned to Dallas an abject failure, moving in with his wife’s friends, the Paines, who greatly disliked him for his treatment of Marina. In the end, his entire Mexican adventure stands as profound evidence that he was completely on his own.

The Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald got a job with a little help from his wife’s friend after she learned from a neighbor that they had hired her brother. Image courtesy University of North Texas

Back in Dallas, he started looking for a job, and he found it hard, not because the FBI was stopping people from hiring him, as he suspected, but because prospective employers called any former employers and learned that Oswald was a terrible employee. Eventually, with the help of Ruth Paine, who wanted to see her friend provided for, Oswald got a job at the Texas School Book Depository. Ruth had heard from someone who knew someone else who got work there that they may hire Oswald, and she had called herself to recommend Oswald, despite her feelings for him. Here we see the circumstances of the Kennedy assassination coming together, but not arranged by a conspiracy. During this time, Oswald threw himself back into politics, attending one of General Walker’s rallies as well as ACLU meetings with Ruth’s husband, Michael Paine, to whom he confided his beliefs that political change must be forced through some act of violence. We see the development of a possible motive throughout the year, as he came to admire Castro, who had been the target of assassination attempts himself, and who had been quoted in newspapers Oswald read as calling Kennedy a cretin and suggesting that “U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” We know from his brush with television fame that he relished attention for his political views, and we know that he believed he might win entrance to Cuba by impressing them with his political activism. We further know that he still had the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, and that he practiced dry runs with it incessantly while brooding. Now we place him in the book depository on Dealey Plaza. Many a conspiracy speculator has suggested that his getting the job there was part of the set-up, as it would give him such a perfect shot at Kennedy, but we know how he got the job—Ruth Paine, who despised him but sympathized with his wife. Was she part of the conspiracy too? Or perhaps her friend, who recommended the Depository, was part of the plot? Or maybe the man who hired him was a conspirator as well? And the fact is, when Oswald got the job, there hadn’t even been plans for a motorcade to pass by the building. Likewise, all of Oswald’s life, which conspiracy believers think was manipulated in order to place him at the scene of the assassination, took place long before any plans had even been made for JFK to visit Texas. The President’s trip to Dallas was not even announced until Oswald was on a bus to Mexico, and if things had gone differently there, he never would have been in Dallas that November. But conspiracy speculators see no problem with a conspiracy involving as many people is it may need to involve. Yet when it comes to coincidence, it seems they won’t even consider that one could possibly take place.

Further Reading

Ayton, Mel, and David Von Pein. Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Warren Report and Lee Harvey Oswald's Guilt and Motive 50 Years On. Strategic Media Books, 2014.

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Moore, Jim. Conspiracy of One: the Definitive Book on the Kennedy Assassination. Summit Group, 1990.

Peppard, Alan. “Before Gunning for JFK, Oswald Targeted Ex-Gen. Edwing A. Walker — and Missed.” The Dallas Morning News, 19 Nov. 2018, www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/11/19/before-gunning-for-jfk-oswald-targeted-ex-gen-edwin-a-walker-and-missed/.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part One: The Defector

Ahead of President’s Day this year, I wanted to devote an episode to dispelling some common myths or misconceptions about a well-known American president. The question was, who? I have been thinking about myths related to the youth of George Washington propagated in textbooks since my post on curriculum controversies, so that was a candidate. I’d further been thinking about conspiracy theories surrounding Abe Lincoln’s assassination since my series on the Jesuits. Both would be interesting, and I’d like to cover both, but no one seems to loom larger in American myth and conspiracy theory than John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Why is that? Is it because his assassination is more recent in memory? Yes, but there is something more about Kennedy and his legacy. He is venerated by many as an icon, a hero, an almost messianic martyr. Certainly Lincoln is venerated as perhaps our greatest statesman and savior of the Union, but he doesn’t seem to inspire the same kind of worship as does JFK. Is this notion of the real man earned or more myth than reality? When one looks more closely at Kennedy’s life and presidency, one sees that he has become more of a symbol than a historical figure. Early in his presidency, there was little to distinguish him as being among the great leaders of our history. He took the presidency at the height of the Cold War, and he suffered early humiliation when his efforts to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba resulted in the politically catastrophic Bay of Pigs failure, and likewise was unprepared for his summit with Kruschev that summer, in which, as Kennedy put it, Kruschev “savaged” him. None of this was surprising to his critics, who always viewed him as an impetuous playboy whose father had bought his way into the White House. But to many among the public, Kennedy represented a sea change in Washington, a youthful new hope sweeping away the old ways of the past. Certainly he was the youngest U.S. President, and he was replacing its oldest, but more than this, he appeared intent on ushering in a modernist and intellectual approach to government, filling his administration with Harvard alumni. He inspired such hope for a utopian future that some had taken to calling his Washington “Camelot,” making him the boy who would be king. Certainly he and his wife Jackie’s good looks and seeming vitality did much to inspire this adoration, although much of that was mere stagecraft, as Kennedy actually struggled with numerous longtime digestive and glandular diseases. His reputation as a ladies’ man, or philanderer as we might call him today, does not appear to have been exaggerated, but it has also never harmed his popularity among the American people. And eventually, he did come into his own and begin live up to the great expectations his believers had. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy displayed masterful diplomacy and leadership, deftly, though narrowly, sidestepping a nuclear incident. Afterward, he did much to soften America’s relationship with the Soviet Union. And most admirable today is his decision to make the push for civil rights the central issue of his administration. There may be evidence that he was only looking for some national purpose, or “Grand Objective” and that he was less interested in what that objective was than that we had one, but nevertheless, the simple fact that he chose racial justice and equality as that objective must be applauded. Unfortunately, he would make no real progress in ending segregation. That progress would not arrive until after his murder, perhaps hastened out of respect for him as a kind of martyred prophet. For this was the Kennedy that most Americans saw—a young idealist, an intellectual progressive, a fighter for justice and a champion of hope for all mankind—and this was the promise that was dashed on November 22, 1963, when he was shot dead in his motorcade as he passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. That afternoon, police arrested one Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine, and as would become known afterward, an attempted defector to the USSR. He was accused of the President’s assassination, of having fired the murder weapon from the Texas School Book Depository, where he worked, and of having afterward murdered a police officer on the street. Two days later, Oswald too would be dead, the victim of apparent vigilante violence perpetrated by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. While JFK the symbol of hope and progress and change would live on, his legend perhaps even strengthened by his untimely end, so too would the mystery and suspicion surrounding his death persist through the decades, long after it should have been resolved, maybe reverberating even more strongly through history than did his actions in life. And among all the alleged intrigue that confuses and obscures the truth of the JFK assassination, oddly, what has been almost entirely lost is a clear picture of the man said to be responsible for it all. This is Historical Blindness. I’m Nathaniel Lloyd, and I would venture to suggest that if you simply couldn’t wait for the disclosure of records on the JFK assassination last month, hopeful that some long-hidden truth might finally be revealed, maybe you haven’t read much about the records that have long been available.

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Through the years, as I have researched and produced this podcast, I have come to recognize that the spread of baseless conspiracy theories, whether as propaganda or as popular beliefs that arise rather more organically, represent the central sociopolitical problem of our time. You may protest that political division, racial inequity, or rising authoritarianism are more pressing issues, but I would reply that unfounded conspiracy theories often lie at the root of such issues, or at least contribute to or worsen them. I understand that this is nothing new. I’ve shown it in my exploration of Illuminati conspiracies in early American elections, the rise of the Anti-Masonic political party in the early 19th century, and the spread of anti-Catholic nativism in the mid-19th century. With modern conspiracy theories, though, we see a fragmentation. Fewer are the grand unifying theories of conspiracy, except at the extreme fringe, and many competing conspiracist versions of historical moments proliferate, becoming normalized. In 2013, Public Policy Polling surveyed more than 1200 registered voters. They found that that 20% believed in the long disproven link between autism and vaccination, 21% believed that the U.S. covered up a UFO crash at Roswell, and an astonishing 37% believed climate change is a hoax. Perhaps even more disturbing, 28% believed that a globalist cabal conspired at authoritarian world domination, or a New World Order, which of course is usually just code for Jewish World Conspiracy. Survey results like this appear pretty frequently. In 1991, more than 30% of respondents to another poll expressed belief that Roosevelt allowed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In ’95,  pollsters revealed that around 20% of people they surveyed believed President Clinton had his former aide murdered. In 2007, more than 25% of respondents to a survey believed that 9/11 was an inside job. But king of all the conspiracy theories remains the theory that John F. Kennedy was the victim of a large-scale conspiracy to murder him. In 2013, PPP revealed that more than half of those they polled believed this. More recently, polls suggest that this number is more like 60% or higher. Such numbers have not been seen since 1975 when around 60% of those polled said they thought James Earl Ray had not acted alone to murder Martin Luther King, Jr., a widespread conspiracy theory about which I previously produced a series of podcast episodes. However, like the theories about the murder of King, the theories about JFK’s murder don’t typically agree. Some say Oswald worked for American intelligence, while others say he was working for the KGB. Many argue there were numerous shooters, and some suggest Oswald was not even one of them. The FBI has been put forward as the responsible party, but so has the mafia. With so many competing theories, and so many books published and reputations staked on different versions of events, it’s nearly impossible not to believe something was going on. This is the reason I for so long dreaded delving into this supposed mystery, as it just seemed like too much research to bite off. But then I found my principal source, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, by Gerald Posner, the author of the main source I relied on in my exploration of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. Posner cuts through the many competing theories with clear evidence, indicating over and over where conspiracy theorist authors purposely misrepresent the record or omit important information in service to their own theories. One of the biggest problems with conspiracist literature on the subject, as Posner demonstrates, is that it typically misrepresents, ignores, or gives short shrift to the main suspect in the case, the man that the Presidential Commission tasked with investigating the assassination, the Warren Commission, determined had acted alone in murdering him. As Posner shows, any worthy investigation of the JFK assassination must start with the man Lee Harvey Oswald. The only reason to avoid an in-depth examination of his life would be if one had already decided he was not the lone assassin.

While the Warren Commission delved into Lee Harvey Oswald’s early childhood and psychology to determine whether he may have fit the profile of an ideologically-driven murderer, conspiracist authors like Jim Marrs and Anthony Summers tend to gloss over his youth and his troubled relationship with his mother, preferring to imply that he was perfectly well-adjusted, thus casting doubt on his guilt. This characterization of Oswald couldn’t be further from the truth. His mother Marguerite is almost universally described by those who knew her best as dominating and controlling and withholding of maternal affection. Oswald’s father had died before he was born, and without his support, Marguerite chose to commit her three children to an orphanage until she had enough money to care for them. However, Lee was too young and so would instead be passed between an array of relatives and temporary babysitters, some of whom routinely beat him, calling him “unmanageable.” When he was three, his mother finally put him in the orphanage as well, but two years later, she pulled him and his brothers out and moved them from New Orleans to Texas, into the house of a new stepfather. Another two years later, after many arguments with her new husband about wanting more money, she left back to Louisiana with Lee. Afterward Marguerite would reunite with this husband, and occasional father figure to Lee, but then separated again. This is the pattern of neglect and instability in Lee Harvey Oswald’s early years, shuttled between Louisiana and Texas, sometimes with a father figure in an acceptable residence, but more often in a poor hovel with his cold mother. His brothers would later describe him as withdrawn and brooding in these early years. He was enrolled in school after school, and he was usually older and bigger than other kids. He thought himself smarter than everyone, perhaps because of his age difference, though an IQ test in his youth, as well as his poor literacy even as an adult tends to show this was not the case.

Marguerite Oswald, image courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Like many who believe themselves smarter than those around them, Oswald refused to respect authority and resisted discipline in school. Rather than making friends, he bullied other kids, throwing rocks at them. This early propensity toward violence was clear at home as well, where he once attempted to throw a butcher knife at his brother during a quarrel. At one point during his youth, when he and his mother had moved in with his older, married brother, Lee threatened to kill his sister-in-law with a knife when she told him to lower the television volume, and then he struck his mother in the face when she demanded he put down the knife. His early attraction to firearms was also apparent as early as middle school, when he had made plans to break into a store and steal a Smith & Wesson automatic. Witness after witness after the assassination called Oswald “strange,” “belligerent,” “insolent,” “arrogant,” “a loner” and “a psycho.” At thirteen, he underwent a psychiatric evaluation due to his truancy, and his analyst, a clinical psychologist named Dr. Renatus Hartogs, saw in him “a potential for explosive, aggressive, assaultive” behavior, calling him “intensely self-centered,” “cold, detached,” “an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self-involved and conflicted mother.” Hartogs’s analysis indicates a clear propensity for violence, but he chose not to recommend institutionalization, preferring to recommend probation and further psychiatric help, hoping the boy’s mental state might still stabilize. This evaluation of Oswald is damning in proving that he had long demonstrated the telltale signs of one capable of violence and murder, but what is even more shocking is that many conspiracist authors, including the District Attorney Jim Garrison who was played by Kevin Costner in the film JFK, fail to even mention it.

Jim Garrison and others also cast doubt on the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was a rabid Communist, undermining the notion that he might have been driven by ideology to shoot Kennedy. However, according the preponderance of all testimony from those who knew him, his interest in Communism started early, developed throughout his adulthood and during his time in the military, and culminated in his attempt to defect to the Soviet Union. Other students at his middle school have spoken on the record about Lee’s radicalization in his youth, recalling how he would go on and on about the plight of the worker and bragging that he would join a Communist cell if he could find one. Apparently he had found some copies of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto in the local library, and the ideas he discovered therein became central components of his nascent identity. He was not so much radicalized, but “self-indoctrinated,” as Oswald himself put it in one of his many unfinished pieces of writing. Some have suggested that his desire to serve in the armed forces seems to contradict his newfound Communism, but that is not at all the case. He had wanted to join the Marines long before he had educated himself about Communism, and it remained his best way to escape his domineering mother and stultifying surroundings. He wanted it so much, he demanded his mother lie about his age in a failed attempt to enlist at 15 years old. Afterward, having dropped out of school and taken a job, he continued to read Communist literature, and even this early on, he tended toward thoughts of political violence. He once told a coworker that he wanted to assassinate Eisenhower because of his exploitation of the working class. At seventeen, he finally joined the Marines, but as would happen over and over, when Oswald got what he wanted, he discovered it did not make him happy. While in his youth he had bullied those around him, in the Marines, he was bullied incessantly, which in turn made him even more withdrawn and brooding. He took solace in his identity as a devoted Communist, even though it made his fellow Marines dislike him even more.  He took to flaunting his political leanings, speaking as if he wasn’t himself American, accusing them of being the tools of imperialism and exploitation. When any other Marines tried to engage him in legitimate political debate, he dismissed their views by saying they were misinformed by propaganda. It was while he was serving in the Marines that he first began to consider defection. While stationed for a few weeks in Japan, he met some Communists who talked up the USSR as a Communist utopia, and after that, he began to learn Russian and make plans. According to a fellow Marine who was stationed in California with Oswald upon his return, Lee thought for a short while about making his way to Cuba and even contacted the consulate in LA. However, those plans seem to have evaporated as he took steps to defect to Russia, asking his mother to lie for him again about being disabled and needing care so that Oswald could be discharged, whereupon he immediately took the money he’d saved in the service and booked himself passage to Helsinki, where he intended to apply for a visa at the Soviet consulate and buy a tourist package that would allow him to penetrate the Iron Curtain.

Oswald as a Marine in 1956. (Public domain image).

JFK assassination conspiracy theorists often fall into one of two camps. They say Lee Harvey Oswald was recruited by the CIA while in the Marines, or they say he was recruited by the KGB while in Russia. If they favor the KGB, they may argue he was sent back to assassinate the U.S. president, and if they favor the CIA, they may say he was sent to Russia as a double agent, and was afterward used by his intelligence contacts as a patsy to take the fall when the intelligence community conspired against Kennedy. These theories, and variations on them, give the historical Lee Harvey Oswald entirely too much credit, and basically ignore what we know about his career in the military and his time in the USSR. Those who claim he was recruited by the CIA will say he was connected to the U-2 spy plane because he was posted to the base in Japan where it was kept and tested, but Oswald served as a mere radar operator among many others and would have known the U-2 only as a blip on a screen. They claim that at one point, the CIA arranged for Oswald to be injured so that he could be absent from duty and outperforming espionage, but his fellow Marines testified that he accidentally shot himself, an offense for which he was afterward court-marshalled because his weapon was unregistered. Records further show that he never left the hospital during his recovery. The simple fact is that he was an unstable individual with anti-American views, he did not take orders well, was undisciplined, and ended up being court-marshalled twice. He was hardly a strong candidate for intelligence recruitment. And if the CIA had wanted to get him discharged and have him fake a defection to Russia, he would not have had to ask his mother to lie just so he could get a dependency discharge. When he arrived in Russia, like all other Western tourists who purchase a tour package, he was assigned a guide who was a KGB informant, and Oswald told her about his desire to defect. We know a great deal about Oswald’s time in Russia because of the KGB file on him, which Boris Yeltsin eventually gave to President Bill Clinton in 1999 after its contents had been published by Russian newspaper Izvestia, and more importantly we know about it from the testimony of Yuri Nosenko, the deputy chief of the Tourist Division of the KGB at the time, who would later defect to America and tell all. Nosenko’s division refused to grant Oswald citizenship, he said, because he was useless to them. He had access to no information, and he wasn’t even in the Marines anymore. Oswald was devastated, and his guide afterward found him in his room with his wrist cut. He had left a suicide note saying that it was to be a sweet and easy death, but after being rushed to a hospital, he was saved. Afterward, the KGB ordered that he undergo psychiatric evaluation, and a doctor confirmed his earlier diagnosis of being “mentally unstable.” Nosenko explained that the KGB certainly wanted nothing to do with him after that, but fearful that this deranged American might try to harm himself again while, at the time, Kruschev was engaged in precarious diplomatic talks with Eisenhower, they decided not to kick him out of the country. Instead, they shunted him off to Minsk and gave him an apartment and a job, telling the local KGB division to keep an eye on him. It wasn’t special treatment, as some conspiracists have claimed, but rather standard treatment for defectors, with the exception that they refused to grant him citizenship.

The KGB surveilled Oswald in Minsk, building their file on him, not because he was an asset of theirs but because they believed him unstable and capable of violence. There were still some lingering worries that he could be working for American intelligence, but as they spied on him, they came to believe, as the KGB defector Nosenko put it, that “Oswald was not an agent, couldn’t be an agent.”  They asked themselves, “Would the FBI or CIA really use such a pathetic person to work against their archenemy?” One episode seemed to satisfy the KGB that Oswald could not possibly be an intelligence agent: his radio broke, and he asked a friend he had made to help him repair it. Apparently it was a simple fix, leaving the KGB surveilling him with the impression that he’d had no intelligence training, which would have included some basic understanding of radios. Back in America, the CIA appears to have taken little notice of Oswald’s defection. According to records they’ve released, they did not start a file on him until a year after he ran off to Russia, and the file, a 201, was simply for a person of interest, not a personnel file as some conspiracist writers have claimed. So Oswald was finally living his dream in Russia, working and living in what he believed was the workingman’s paradise. Hoping to convince the Russian authorities to finally give him the citizenship they had refused him, he went once into the American embassy in Moscow and told the consul that he wished to renounce his American citizenship. However, the consul thought Oswald too young and reckless to make such an irreversible decision, so he delayed him, telling him he would have to come back, which Oswald never did as he’d afterward been sent to Minsk. And it was a good thing, too, because it wasn’t long before Oswald became disillusioned with Russia and regretted his decision to defect.

At first, he seems to have been the happiest he’d ever been. He had friends for the first time in his life because people were interested in him as an American defector. Even in love he was suddenly successful, as he found Russian women all too happy to date a man with an apartment. However, when his friends faded because he was no longer such a curiosity, and when a woman he had fallen for refused his marriage proposal by laughing in his face, the shine began to come off the place. He began to find Minsk terribly dull, and he realized that he greatly disliked the job they’d assigned him as a sheet metal worker, and that they had no intention of honoring his request of sending him to study at university. He further came to resent nearly every aspect of the Soviet socialist system, the pittance wages, the compulsory union meetings and gymnastics sessions, the mandatory political lectures, and having to work in crop fields on the weekends. One wonders what Oswald was expecting exactly, since what he came to resent, the extremely regimented and oppressive life of the worker under Soviet Communism, and what he came to realize about their hypocrisy, that there still existed a privileged class, a class of party officials and bureaucrats, elevated above the populace, was already well known in the West. Surely in the many political debates he’d had, someone had told him that the USSR was no utopia, but Oswald must have dismissed their characterization of life in Russia as Western propaganda. Now, though, experiencing it firsthand, he altered his ideology once again, deciding that he was a pure Marxist, and that the USSR had twisted and perverted true Marxism. Eventually, missing the freedoms and creature comforts of home, he decided to return to America, which he considered “the lesser of two evils.”

Associated Press image of Oswald and Marina in Minsk handed out by the Warren Commission.

Luckily for him, the consul had not made it easy to successfully renounce his American citizenship, so he still had it. However, the Russian government was not going to make it that easy for him to leave after all the trouble he’d caused them. Further complicating the matter was the fact that he met another young woman after beginning his arrangements to repatriate, Marina Prusakova, and soon they had married. Like other women, Marina began dating Oswald because of his apartment, but she seems to have agreed to marry him because she was interested in coming to America. Some have suggested Marina was a KGB agent or informant, but this is baseless speculation not borne out by any evidence and refuted by both the KGB defector Nosenko, by Marina herself, and by her family. The sudden marriage meant that now, not only did Oswald need an exit visa from Soviet authorities, but he would also need an American entrance visa for Marina. Some conspiracy theorists argue that it was all too easy for Oswald and Marina to get out of Russia, but records and testimony show otherwise. It took almost an entire year for them to make the required arrangements, and by that time, Marina had borne their first child, a daughter named June. So rather than a shamefaced return, as one might have expected, Lee Harvey Oswald seems to have felt his return to America triumphant, with a lovely little family in tow and, in his mind, unique insights into the failings of both countries. He told Marina that he expected reporters to swarm them upon their return, and he had prepared remarks scorning both the capitalist and communist systems. He was quite disappointed when there were no reporters and no one seemed to care much about his return. With no money or prospects, he had no choice but to return to Texas and move in with his brother Robert in Fort Worth. Shortly after his arrival, someone finally took an interest in him: not the CIA, who had opened a file on him after his defection, but the FBI, who commonly interviewed returning defectors. Oswald sat through the 2-hour interview and flatly lied to the agents, denying he had had any contact with the KGB and claiming he had never wanted to become a Soviet citizen and never tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship. Seven weeks later, the same FBI agents checked in again, extracting a promise from Oswald that he would contact them if any Soviet agents attempted to get in contact with him there in America. Oswald confided to Marina that he worried the FBI thought he was a spy and would never let them live in peace.

The Oswalds did not live in peace, though, and that was not the FBI’s fault but Lee’s fault, for shortly after arriving back in Texas, he began to beat Marina whenever his temper rose. And he was angry quite often. He did not care for his new job, as he’d had to take employment as a sheet metal worker again, and he was also unhappy with their living arrangements, first with his brother, then with his mother before they moved into a rundown shack of their own. During the rest of 1962, the only highlight of their lives were new friends that they made among the Russian émigré community in Fort Worth. Almost all of these Russian immigrants came to sympathize a great deal with Marina. They liked her, but they found Oswald to be intolerable, with his ill-informed political tirades. When they saw the bruises that Oswald left on Marina, they took great pity on her and came to despise Lee for brutalizing her. Some would eventually take action to convince Marina to leave Oswald and even offer her help, but she was hesitant to go through with it, and they were loath to make an enemy of Oswald, whom they believed was “unstable,” “diseased,” and “mentally sick.” Only one of the emigres proved to be a friend to Oswald, a tanned womanizing playboy character in his fifties named George de Mohrenschildt who loved to upset conventions and push the boundaries of people in his orbit. As such, he took a liking to Oswald, who really knew how to push people’s buttons, and Oswald responded well to the attention de Mohrenschildt offered him. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that de Mohrenschildt was Oswald’s handler, working for either the CIA or the KGB, but once again, with no evidence to support it, this is a case of conspiracist authors building a myth through pure speculation. It is quite clear, though, that de Mohrenschildt encouraged Oswald’s radical politics. He used to talk to Oswald about conservative acquaintances in their circle, calling them right-wing fanatics and fascists, and firing up Oswald against them. One particular target of his ire was General Edwin Walker, a segregationist and member of the John Birch Society who had been relieved of duty by Kennedy because he was handing out right-wing propaganda to soldiers. Walker was at the time engaged in an anti-Communist crusade called Operation Midnight, which of course made Oswald hate him. Some in their émigré community have testified that they believed de Mohrenschildt told Oswald in early 1963 that if someone were to kill General Walker, they would be doing the world a service. It was during this year, the year of the Kennedy assassination, that Oswald began to take specific actions that incriminate him as the assassin.

General Edwin Walker, right-wing extremist and object of Oswald’s obsession. (Public domain image)

It seems Oswald began to develop a fantasy about participating in espionage. He read numerous Ian Fleming novels and was seen to possess a book called How to Be a Spy—which really goes to show that he did not have intelligence connections, as that’s not the kind of literature that actual agents are given for training purposes. He found work in Dallas as a photoprint trainee for a graphic arts company called Jaggars, Chiles & Stovall, Inc., which allowed him to develop his abilities as a photographer, something he thought spies must do a lot of in their surveillance work. Probably using the typesetting equipment at his workplace, he forged identification under a false name, Alek Hidell. Under this false name, he ordered a Smith & Wesson .38 special revolver through the mail, and later, a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. While waiting for the arrival of the firearms, he began to plan his assassination of General Edwin Walker. He compiled maps to prepare escape routes, he wrote a manifesto detailing his motivations, and he even went to General Walker’s house and took photographs. When the rifle finally arrived, he came into the yard where Marina was hanging laundry and demanded that she take his photo holding his rifle. Though she thought him foolish, she dared not cross him. His abuse had culminated not long before in threats to murder her and in her own attempt to hang herself with clothesline rope, but Oswald’s recent obsessions had kept his attention elsewhere, so she was willing to indulge him. The photo she took that day is world famous, and the rifle in it is the same one found in the book depository after the Kennedy assassination. This photograph is damning evidence against Oswald, so many conspiracy theorists try to cast doubt on its authenticity, claiming it is a composite, or that the rifle in it is not the same as the one found above Dealey Plaza and determined to be the murder weapon, or that it is all too convenient and suspicious that Oswald would have the photo taken in the first place. All of these claims, however, have been refuted. First, we know why he had the photo taken. In it he is holding a copy of the American communist magazine, The Militant, a magazine that had recently published one of his letters. He intended to send the photo to the magazine. The photo was unlikely to be a composite fake since Marina took multiple photos of him in the yard, each with a slightly different pose, and in the 1970s, 22 photographic experts testified before Congress that not only were the photos real and untampered with, but that marks on the edge of the frame proved they had been taken by Oswald’s camera. Lastly, using enhancements of the photos, the House Select Committee on Assassinations found 56 unique marks that corresponded between the rifle in the photo and the rifle found at the murder scene. So despite the naysaying of conspiracists, the weight of concrete evidence tells us that early in 1963, Oswald, working alone, was planning some violent political act against a public figure, and that he had in his possession the gun that would be used to kill John F. Kennedy before the year was over.

Further Reading

Alcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 31, no. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 211-36. American Economic Association, www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211.

Ayton, Mel, and David Von Pein. Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Warren Report and Lee Harvey Oswald's Guilt and Motive 50 Years On. Strategic Media Books,

Brinkley, Alan. “The Legacy of John F. Kennedy.” The Atlantic, Fall 2013, https:/www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-legacy-of-john-f-kennedy/309499/.

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

“Democrats and Republicans differ on conspiracy theory beliefs.” Public Policy Polling, 2 April 2013, www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_National_ConspiracyTheories_040213.pdf.

Mailer, Norman. “Why Did Lee Harvey Oswald Go to Moscow?” The New Yorker, 2 April 1995, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/04/10/oswald-in-the-ussr.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Moore, Jim. Conspiracy of One: the Definitive Book on the Kennedy Assassination. Summit Group, 1990.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Savodnik, Peter. "Lee Harvey Oswald Arrives in the USSR." New England Review, vol. 34, no. 3-4, fall-winter 2013, pp. 161+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A363188964/AONE?u=sjdc_main&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=bbb324c3. Accessed 14 Feb. 2022.

The Coup on Cape Fear - Part Two: Red Shirt Riot

It is no secret that prominent conspiracy theorist and erstwhile U.S. President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud, proven to be without merit in court case after court case, were the main impetus propelling the Capitol Rioters in their attempted coup on January 6th, 2020. And such claims were nothing new from Trump. He was telegraphing his intentions to make these claims throughout the 2020 campaign, using this lie as a means of suppressing votes by casting suspicion on the perfectly legal and secure mail-in voting protocols that many states relied on during the first year of the pandemic. Indeed, Trump had told this lie many times before. He blamed Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012 on voter fraud, he blamed his own defeat by Ted Cruz in the 2016 Iowa caucus on cheating, and when he was projected to lose the presidential election that year, he suggested he could only lose if the election were stolen. Even after winning, he doubled down on his voter fraud claims, seemingly in a desperate effort to save face over having lost the popular vote, and he organized the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, appointing to it people like J. Christian Adams, who had been making false claims about voter fraud for years through his conservative legal group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, or PILF. The voter fraud commission was not long lived, but PILF has continued to make claims about non-citizens voting and dead people voting, all of which have been investigated by journalists and election supervisors and disproven, but conservative media amplifies these claims and not their eventual disproof or PILF’s quiet retractions of claims. It is propaganda, pure and simple. Certainly, voter fraud exists, but it is not the epidemic they claim. In fact, it is frequently conservatives themselves who are guilty of committing it in the occasional genuine cases that are proven. Take for example, some of the only real cases of voter fraud to have been turned up after all the scrutiny over the 2020 election, a cluster of incidents all in the same Florida retirement community, The Villages, where four different residents have been arrested for voting more than once for Trump. It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise; after all, in his rhetoric before election day, Donald Trump had said that, in order to counteract the cheating he said would be happening, his supporters should vote more than once. Essentially, he said there’s voter fraud, so the solution is more voter fraud! Absurd as it may seem, this is actually more common than you might think. Let us return to North Carolina, the scene of our story, for a further example. 120 years after the post-election insurrection in Wilmington, a definite case of voter fraud occurred. Conservative proponents of the widespread voter fraud conspiracy theory like to point to this case because it involved absentee ballots, but it was the Republican candidate for congress, Mark Harris, or more specifically, his political operative McCrae Dowless, who was guilty of the fraud. In Bladen County, northwest of Wilmington, a Black get-out-the-vote group had previously seen great success with an absentee ballot initiative. Many conservatives suspected that group, The Bladen Improvement Association, of voter fraud, but they never produced any evidence of wrongdoing because the Improvement Association’s use of absentee ballots appears to have been completely above board. Unable to confirm their conspiracy theories about voter fraud favoring the Left, the Right just went ahead and committed voter fraud themselves, with McCrae Dowless found guilty of organizing an elaborate ballot fraud operation, in which they would collect blank ballots, fill them out in support of Republicans, forge witness signatures using different colored pens and different names to prevent detection, and deliver them in small batches to avoid suspicion. NPR’s Serial Productions made a fantastic podcast about the whole affair, called The Improvement Association, which I encourage everyone to check out. The takeaway here is that we see a pattern among reactionaries: point your finger in voter fraud accusation with one hand while the other is stuffing fraudulent ballots into the box. We can see the pattern all the way back in the 19th century, when the progressive and reactionary parties had opposite names. On Cape Fear in 1868, after Abraham Galloway mustered newly freed Black residents and stood up to the voter intimidation of the KKK, their subsequent legitimate victory at the polls, making universal male suffrage a reality in North Carolina, was blamed on voter fraud by white supremacists. Yet thirty years later, white supremacists would gleefully resort to voter intimidation and fraud and even armed insurrection to achieve their own political ends.

Numerous times on this podcast, I have spoken about the supposed and the real influence of secret societies on changes in government. When it is the claim of a vast conspiracy, such as the idea that the Illuminati was behind the French Revolution, or that the Jesuits intrigued to assassinate kings and reverse the Reformation or the Revolution, it is a disprovable and untenable fallacy. However, there have been clear instances of secret societies influencing political change through electioneering. In Bourbon Restoration France, the secret society of the Chevaliers de la Foi, or Knights of the Faith, were instrumental in achieving Ultramontane Catholic domination of the government. I spoke about this in part two of my series on the Rise and Fall of the Society of Jesus. And in the mid-nineteenth century, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner in America, about whom I have released a Patreon exclusive podcast episode, swore their members to secrecy as they worked to stir resentment of Catholic immigrants and eventually launch the nativist Know-Nothing Party into political power, their party’s name a direct reference to the secrecy of the society that started their movement. After the Civil War, Southern Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan, another effort to influence the social and political order through secret combination, and more specifically through violence. Thus it should come as no surprise that, as the newspaper editor Josephus Daniels and the Democratic chairman Furnifold Simmons developed their White Supremacy campaign in 1898, it relied on the clandestine scheming of more than one secret society in Cape Fear country. Some of these secret societies, operating as compartmentalized cells of the White Supremacy campaign in Wilmington, were called Group Six and the Secret Nine. They did much of the on-the-ground planning for the coup to take place after the election, establishing safehouses and organizing the “citizen patrols” and “vigilance committees” that would act as death squads when the violence erupted. Some among them may have truly believed the false news about an impending Black uprising that Josephus Daniels was purposely spreading, but many of them were in it for the sake of hate and just out for blood, as evidenced by the fact that the men commanded by these secret societies, most already sporting the red shirts symbolic of white supremacist anti-Reconstruction violence in the South, had to be held back and talked down from commencing with their planned reign of terror before election day. They were champing at the bit to strike at Alexander Manly, the offending Black newspaperman who had dared to suggest that whites raped Black women just as much or more than Black men raped white women and, even more offensive to their sensibilities, that it was possible for white women to welcome the amorous advances of Black men and even made such advances themselves. The Red Shirts wanted to lynch Manly, as they had wanted to do since the day his controversial editorial was printed, and they wanted to burn his newspaper, the Daily Record, to the ground. The leaders of the White Supremacy campaign had to reassure their Red Shirts that they would be set loose on Manly and the Record after the election, and that it benefitted them and their cause to keep the peace for the time being.

Alexander Manly. Photo Courtesy of the J.Y. Joyner Library, Special Collections, East Carolina University

With their newspapers creating the false impression that the Black citizens of Wilmington were planning some kind of uprising, they justified their mustering of a standing army of Red Shirt white supremacists who were ready at any moment to strike first and thereby create the race riot they said they feared. Indeed, Red Shirts were already assaulting Black residents in the streets with impunity. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the White Supremacists had full control of the situation, which they made clear to the Fusionist Governor of North Carolina, Daniel Russell. In their first bid to undermine the forthcoming election and seize power, the White Supremacists threatened Russell. First, they said that he couldn’t make a campaign stop in Wilmington because a speech from him would set off a race war. When Governor Russell canceled his visit, they pressed further, knowing that Russell feared being blamed for the outbreak of a race war. So they strong-armed Governor Russell into removing all the Fusionist and Republican candidates for county offices. Election Day was still weeks away, and already White Supremacists in Wilmington had threatened and bullied their way to victory in all county offices up for election. Then Election Day came, and lo and behold, there was no uprising of Black residents. Instead, Black and white men alike went to the polls early, hoping to cast their votes and avoid trouble. Red Shirt “vigilance committees” stopped and searched black men wherever they saw them, certain they would find them armed or carrying kerosene intent on setting the city ablaze, but of course they found nothing of the sort. Their harassment certainly dissuaded many Black citizens from even attempting to vote though, and in some precincts, Red Shirts actually turned Black voters away in flagrant acts of voter intimidation. Many Red Shirts wanted to attempt far more on Election Day, pushing to move in force on the Daily Record offices and Black newspaper editor Alexander Manly, but they were again kept in check by their leaders, who assured them that they would be set loose like attack dogs in the aftermath of the election. Governor Russell was obliged to travel to Wilmington, his hometown, to cast his vote, but he was on alert that Red Shirts might attack him. In fact, as he was escorted to the polls by White Supremacists who wanted to avoid such a scandal, he suffered nothing worse than some insults about his corpulence. Afterward, the governor suffered the indignity of having to switch trains and finally having to hide away in the baggage car to avoid Red Shirts who were hunting him throughout his return journey. Finally, that evening, as votes were being tallied, the White Supremacists carried out the most brazen part of their plan to steal the election. They surrounded polling stations in predominately Black and Fusionist precincts, turned off the streetlights outside, stormed inside shoving people over and upending tables, knocking lamps aside. In the ensuing confusion, as poll workers scrambled and fled in darkness or stamped out fires spreading from the overturned lanterns, the White Supremacists stuffed the ballot boxes before escaping. Some of their opponent candidates had already stepped down at the governor’s request due to the corrupt bargain they’d made, and now their voter intimidation and fraud resulted in White Supremacist Democrats illegitimately winning the rest of the races. By the time all the ballots were counted, the so-called “White Man’s ticket” had swept the election of 1898 in Wilmington.

On November 9th, the day after the election, the absolute domination of the White Supremacists was trumpeted in newspapers that did not give any hint that their victory was illegitimate. The day was quiet, and many believed the White Supremacists might cease their reign of terror, having gotten what they wanted, but their secret societies and other orchestrators of the campaign knew that more was to come. They had pent up the hatred and violence of their Red Shirt army as long as they could and could postpone its full expression no longer. One white supremacist newspaper printed a notice inviting the white men of Wilmington to a meeting at the courthouse, at which White Supremacists approved a statement they called the “Wilmington Declaration of Independence.” Their declaration resolved that they would no longer be “ruled by Negroes,” nor by whites “affiliating with negroes.” They denounced the right of Black men to vote, suggesting that they used the franchise only to antagonize the interests of whites, who “paid 95 percent of taxes.” They claimed that employing Black workers had somehow harmed Wilmington’s economy and resolved that those jobs must be “handed over to white men,” and that the Daily Record was to be shut down, its editor, Alexander Manly, banished from the city. But more than this, these seditionists resolved that the rest of the city’s Fusionist government was to be overthrown. The Mayor and the Chief of Police were to be forced to resign, and the entire board of aldermen likewise would be unceremoniously ejected from office. One man emerged from this meeting, rather against the preferences of the White Supremacy campaign orchestrators and the members of its secret society leadership, as the de facto leader of the mob. Alfred Moore Waddell, a Confederate veteran, skilled orator, and former congressman, had become something of a drunk with gambling debts. Over the last year, he had seen in the White Supremacy campaign an opportunity to restore his political career, and had wormed his way in by volunteering to give speeches, one speech in particular, declaring that they would “choke the Cape Fear with carcasses” in order to overturn the current social and political order, having stuck in the minds of many Red Shirts. Waddell had only heard about the meeting at the courthouse on November 9th last minute, but once he rushed over, he was called on to speak, much to the chagrin of the campaign’s leaders. After that, he was selected to lead a committee of 25 men to plan their overthrow of the government and to further ensure that no Black man would ever again hold a position of authority in Wilmington. Waddell’s Committee of Twenty-Five started by summoning the men they thought of as the leaders of the Black community. With little time to prepare, these Black leaders, all of them lawyers and business owners, answered the summons and came to the committee, hats in hand, terrified.

Alfred Moore Waddell. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.04294

Alfred Waddell gave these Black leaders an ultimatum, reading the white men’s “Declaration of Independence” aloud and insisting that the Back leadership reply in writing, agreeing to use their influence to meet the demands or face consequences. These summoned Black community leaders left the meeting and immediately wrote their letter of response, capitulating entirely and agreeing to do everything in their power to help ensure white supremacy in the city. But their capitulation would mean nothing. The young man tasked with delivering the letter to Waddell’s house became afraid of the Red Shirts who filled the streets, firing their rifles into the air, and instead chose to drop the letter off at the Post Office. After all, word had already been sent to Waddell that the Black leaders had acquiesced in writing. Waddell, however, was hoping for any reason to escalate the situation and in the process further elevate himself. The next day, November 10th, he emerged from his home after the deadline he had given to the Black leaders to respond, and despite knowing that their response was in the mail, he declared that they had failed to respond to the Committee’s demands. Taking command of some five hundred white gunmen who had gathered in Wilmington, spoiling for a riot, he marched them to the Daily Record office and politely knocked before breaking down the door and destroying the place. Broken piece of the printing press as well as fixtures and pieces of furniture flew out of the office’s windows, and then came smoke as the Red Shirts set the place on fire. A Black fire crew quickly responded as the fire spread to adjacent buildings, but the white rioters kept them at bay until the newspaper offices were entirely burned down. Many were disappointed that the office was empty and that Alexander Manly, the truth-telling Black newspaper editor, was not there for them to lynch. Apparently he had read the writing on the wall and had already fled the city for his life. According to one story passed down in his family, Manly, who often passed for white, was stopped by White Supremacist gunmen outside of Wilmington, who believing him white, confided that they were planning “a necktie party” for the Black newspaper editor Alexander Manly. Supposedly they even gave Manly a rifle and told him to keep an eye out for himself. For the rest of his life, Alexander Manly, who had shown great courage and principle in publishing his inflammatory editorials, would blame himself for what happened next in Wilmington.

At a cotton compress that employed many Black laborers, the workers’ wives showed up, telling them that the White Supremacists were attacking, and the workers left their tasks, begging their employer to let them off work in order to protect their families and homes. Waddell’s Red Shirts, hearing the rumor that a Black mob was forming at the compress, hurried there and begged Waddell to issue an order to shoot all the black workers present. Before that situation got out of hand, though, rumor of an armed Black mob drew the Red Shirts away. A small crowd of Black men had gathered in front of a saloon, dismayed at the burning of the Record and the threats of the Red Shirts. A few of them were armed with what few old weapons they could find, and the Red Shirt mob, believing the long foretold Black uprising had begun, converged on them, amassing across the street and cursing them. Finally, the white rioters unleashed a barrage of gunfire, and some of the Blacks fired back, though they were hopelessly outgunned. White Supremacists would afterward claim that the Blacks fired first, but this seems very unlikely. Twelve Blacks and only two whites were afterward delivered to the hospital with gunshot wounds following this first skirmish, and it is very telling that all of the Black patients had been shot in the back, whereas none of the white patients had been, which certainly would seem to indicate the whites were the aggressors. Regardless, though, the Red Shirts would go on to raise absolute hell that day, marching from place to place around the city, chasing after the ghosts of rumored Black mobs that didn’t exist and shooting down Black men in the streets along the way. Telegraphs were sent to Governor Russell claiming that the Black residents of Wilmington had started the race war they had long warned about, prompting Russell to declare martial law, activate the Wilmington Light Infantry, and send in the state militia. The problem was, many of the Red Shirt rioters were part of the Light Infantry and were commanded by White Supremacy campaign leaders, and the militia detachments sent in were full of white supremacists as well. They now had a mandate from the state to put down an uprising that didn’t exist. In other words, they had the go-ahead to freely massacre the Black people of Wilmington. They hitched the rapid-fire guns that they had obtained in anticipation of this day, and they rode through the streets in machine gun death squads, mowing down any Black citizens who were not already in hiding, and afterward they went to their churches and then to their homes, shooting up the walls of their refuges and demanding they surrender, whereupon they were more likely to be summarily executed than taken prisoner. Before the massacre was over, at least 60 Black residents had been murdered, but many think the number of dead is likely much higher, counting in the several hundreds. A multitude of the Black residents of Wilmington disappeared after the White Supremacist riot, and it is unclear whether they simply fled the city or were buried in the ditches that reports say Red Shirts filled with Black corpses.

White Supremacists posing in front of Alexander Manly’s Daily Record newspaper office after burning it down. Public domain.

 That evening, as the Black families of Wilmington left their homes and hid in cemeteries and swamps to avoid the death squads, Alfred Waddell, now the undisputed leader of the White Supremacist campaign of terror, convened his Committee of Twenty-Five and plotted the completion of their coup. They sent letters to the Fusionist Police Chief, the Mayor, and the Board of Aldermen, demanding that they gather at City Hall for an emergency session. Then they simply drew up a list of names for who would replace the current officeholders. Unsurprisingly, Waddell was selected as the new Mayor of Wilmington, and the rest of the offices would likewise be filled by staunch White Supremacists. When the time came, Waddell and his Committee, as well as a huge mob of Red Shirts, stormed City Hall, shouting taunts and curses as they entered the seat of local government and made their way through its corridors to the main chamber in a scene that should seem exceedingly familiar to us in the 2020s. The purpose of the emergency session was made very clear to all the remaining Fusionist government. They were being asked to resign, and the aldermen had no illusions about whether there was any real choice in the matter. Red Shirt gunmen leaned from the rails in the gallery, scowling and scorning them. Each duly elected board member resigned in turn, and their replacement was “nominated and elected,” though election had nothing to do with it. They were being installed by insurrectionists in a blatant coup. Afterward, Waddell would claim the whole process had been perfectly legal, and astoundingly, even Northern magazines and newspapers, like Collier’s and the New York Times, would report it as such. Northern journalists had been present in town both before and during the riot because of all the anticipation of a race war, but they invariably interviewed whites rather than Blacks about the troubles and took their word for what was going on. After the overthrow of Wilmington’s government, the Times shamefully reported that the city’s Board of Aldermen had simply “resigned in response to public sentiment.” Thus the lies of seditionists and insurrectionists were recorded as truth and became the accepted historical narrative for what happened on November 10th, 1898. The lies proliferated through the years in pamphlets and even textbooks. It was not until 1951 that a historian rejected the White Supremacist version of events. Now, for the most faithful accounting of what really happened, you can read my principal source for this episode, the Pulitzer Prize-winning work by David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy.

In the days after the coup, while the working class Black residents of Wilmington stayed hidden in the forests and swamps outside of town, the Black business owners and white Fusionist leaders remained, confident that the White Supremacists would relent after getting what they wanted. The White Supremacist insurrectionaries, though, were not satisfied. They rounded up Black and Fusionist pillars of the community and directed them to depart from the city and never return. The choice was banishment or certain death, and they were not even given enough time to put their affairs in order. Even among those who complied, some still did not make it out alive, like a Black barber, Carter Peamon, who got onto a train that also carried a group of Red Shirts and was later found dead in the woods with numerous gunshot wounds. Even one white Fusionist, a deputy sheriff the White Supremacists had forced to resign, would likely have been murdered by a gang of Red Shirts during his attempt to leave town if it weren’t for the fact that he gave the Masonic distress call and some whites among his attackers were oathbound to protect him. Eventually, Mayor Alfred Waddell was obliged to get his Red Shirts under control, as it reflected poorly on him when they swarmed the city jail and attempted to lynch the Black men being held there. Waddell slowly but surely leashed his war dogs, and he even made attempts to reassure the Black families hiding in the forests and swamps that it would be safe for them to return, since the city relied on their labor despite their intentions to give as many jobs as they could over to whites. Meanwhile, the white newspaper propaganda continued to churn out falsehoods, pretending everything that had happened was perfectly lawful, and minimizing the violence that had occurred. And among the Northern newspapers that did criticize the methods of Southern Democrats, many nevertheless praised the outcome, tacitly accepting that the city was in better hands than it had been under the Fusionists. It was clear enough that even in the North, most white supporters of emancipation and universal male suffrage still did not feel that Black men were competent to hold public office and wield authority.

Top: a group of Black residents in the Wilmington community. Bottom: a group of the White Supremacist Red Shirts who massacred and banished people like those in the above photo.

Republican President William McKinley was a son of abolitionists who had campaigned against Democrat intimidation of black voters, and yet, he did little to address the insurrection in Wilmington, North Carolina, despite the Afro-American Council beseeching him to present the matter to Congress. Instead, his Attorney General directed a U.S. attorney in North Carolina to investigate the matter with a view to indict. The attorney dutifully undertook the investigation, but in the end, he found no political will in Washington to organize a grand jury. So much as I fear will the orchestrators of the Capitol insurrection of January 6th, 2020, the North Carolinian organizers and perpetrators of the White Supremacist campaign to steal the 1898 election, commit wholesale massacre, and overthrow the government ended up getting away with it scot-free. And if there is one further lesson to drive home why we cannot let the orchestrators of even a failed coup attempt get off without penalty again, it’s the terrible harm that these White Supremacists went on to do while in power. The following year, White Supremacist Democrats took control of North Carolina’s legislature, and they immediately set about enacting policies that would suppress the Black vote. The coup de grace came when they established a poll tax and required a literacy test to vote, but with the caveat that men whose fathers or grandfathers had voted prior to 1867—which of course was the year just before Black men received the right to vote—would be exempt from the requirement. So essentially poor, illiterate whites could still vote without taking the literacy test and paying the poll tax, but most poor, illiterate Blacks could not. This Grandfather Clause was one of the early examples of Jim Crow laws, a law designed to privilege whites and ensure that Blacks remained forever an underclass. Anyone who suggests that there never has been systemic racism can hardly respond to this, and those who claim there no longer remains such systemic racism simply don’t understand how these actions reverberate even today through class divisions, geographic segregation, educational disparity, and enduring racial inequality. These policies and structures spread across the U.S. North Carolina took the idea of the Grandfather Clause from Louisiana, where a similar constitutional amendment had been passed, and in the same way, other Southern states after 1898 used the North Carolina playbook to intimidate and suppress black votes. In the end, this is why we must hold the ringleaders of the January 6th insurrection to account. This is why not only civilians must be prosecuted, but elected representatives who were directly involved, including and especially the former President. They must at the very least be barred from ever again holding office under the 14th Amendment. If they are not held responsible, then their failed coup will only invite further attempts, and when the enemies of democracy seize power, who knows what authoritarian systems and structures they may attempt to establish.

 Further Reading

Bump, Philip. “The Villages sees a voter-fraud outbreak — with a MAGA twist.” The Washington Post, 5 January 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/05/villages-sees-voter-fraud-outbreak-with-maga-twist/.

DeSantis, John. “Wilmington, N.C., Revisits a Bloody 1898 Day and Reflects.” The New York Times, 4 June 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/us/04wilmington.html.

“Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.” Reveal, 24 Oct. 2020, https://revealnews.org/podcast/remembering-a-white-supremacist-coup/.

Solender, Andrew. “All The Elections Trump Has Claimed Were Stolen Through Voter Fraud.” Forbes, 29 Nov. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/11/29/all-the-elections-trump-has-claimed-were-stolen-through-voter-fraud/?sh=214fed9d1d30.

Zucchino, David. Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.

The Coup on Cape Fear - Part One: The Dark Scheme

They marched in a raucous throng, shouting and chanting, making their way inexorably toward the building that housed the seat of their government. Their intentions were clear. Manipulated and roused to action by an inundation of fake news during the recent election year, they were set on overthrowing officials who had been lawfully elected to represent them. They meant to drive them out, by coercion or by violence, if necessary, for they had not shrunk from violence that day. This was a message to the whole of the country, that men such as they, white men who felt keenly that political change had taken from them the power they felt they deserved, the supremacy to which they felt entitled, that they would not be governed by those they despised, even if they had to defy the laws they claimed to love in order to make sure of it. So with the recent election still fresh in their minds, they stormed the hall of government, kicking up a riot as they made their way through its corridors, shouting out insults as they flooded into the main chamber, pouring into the room and heaping abuse on the duly elected representatives for whom they had come searching. Innocent lives were lost in their historic insurrection, yet afterward, when the dust settled, they and the journalists who had helped to incite them would present these insurrectionists as victims, and as patriots. In the end, there would be no real accountability for the orchestrators of this coup, but the date would be long remembered and live in infamy . . . November 10th 1898.

What’s that? Oh you thought I was talking about January 6th, 2020? I suppose they do have some striking similarities, now that you mention it, but I’m referring to a different insurrection, which occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, 123 years ago. They’re quite different, I assure you. The Wilmington coup was deadly… well, yes, so was January 6th, but I mean deadlier, taking far more lives. And it was perpetrated by white supremacists… well, I mean explicitly, like ALL the insurrectionists were white supremacists, as in self-professed and proud, rather than on January 6th when it was just a good portion of the insurrectionists. Well, if nothing else, the insurrectionists of 1898 North Carolina were at least different in that they were staging a coup following an election they actually won, or rather, stole, and perhaps the biggest difference is that, they actually succeeded in their coup that day, and got away with it afterward, too. Surely those who incited the attempted coup of 2020 won’t also get away with such brazen sedition. OK, you’ve convinced me. Maybe the story of the Wilmington insurrection is indeed the perfect historical lesson we need to better understand how we must respond to the insurrection that took place in Washington, D.C., a year ago.

*

It has now been a full year since Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen election encouraged Qanon conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and true believer Trumpers to lay siege to the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., in an effort to overturn the election results by coercing then Vice President Mike Pence not to accept the electoral vote tally. In marking a year since the Capitol attack, I want to shed some light on the event by looking to the past. The Capital attack of 2020 was hardly the first insurrection or attempt to overthrow the government in the U.S. Not counting numerous slave rebellions, the most famous of which I will have more to say about later, there remains a laundry list of failed insurrections like the one that occurred a year ago. There is Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Fries’ Rebellion, and the Dorr Rebellion. There was the State of Muskogee in Florida, the German Coast Uprising in Louisiana, and the Anti-Rent War in Upstate New York. Of course, John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry would count as one, though that too was a slave revolt, and the secession of the Confederate States can be counted as the most significant. Several insurrections occurred following the end of the Civil War as a response to Reconstruction, and these typically involved white supremacists, like the White League in Louisiana, which tried to rise up against their state government in 1874. The Wilmington Coup that I will be discussing has been called the only successful insurrection or coup in American history, but that’s not quite accurate. One white supremacist, anti-Reconstruction insurrection, the Election Massacre of 1874 in Alabama, was quite successful in driving out the Reconstruction government and suppressing Black voters, and was also, as its name indicates, very deadly. Indeed, it might even have been viewed as an example to follow by the orchestrators of Wilmington’s insurrection decades later. The reason I will focus on the Wilmington insurrection as a precedent and a lesson warning us against letting the leaders of such an insurrection go unpunished is because of some striking similarities. Like the previous insurrection in Alabama and like the Capitol attack of 2020, the Wilmington coup involved a reactionary minority, outnumbered at the polls, who sought to take back power illegitimately. As with every major insurrection in the 21st century, both the Alabama insurrection of 1874 and the one we’ll focus on in 1898 North Carolina were perpetrated by right-wing extremists, and much like the Capitol attack, which has seen hundreds of participants prosecuted but none of its orchestraters, including media figures, congressional representatives, and the former president, held accountable, the leaders of these anti-Reconstruction coups were never prosecuted. However, unlike on January 6th, these insurrections succeeded, creating illegitimate, unelected governments, and encouraging similar violence in other Southern states to intimidate and disenfranchise Black voters. In fact, it can be argued that it was in this time, as white supremacists sought to illegally fortify their control of civil government and limit the political influence and economic opportunities of free Blacks that the kind of structural, systemic racism we see today first began to take shape. But what makes the Wilmington insurrection especially relevant today is the way that it was propelled by fake news propaganda, and the way its orchestrators afterward projected guilt onto their opponents. Just as apologists on the Right have claimed a false equivalence between Capitol insurrectionists and racial justice protestors, or attempted to gaslight the country by saying it was actually far-left provocateurs in disguise who stormed the Capitol, after the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, its leaders assured the rest of the nation that their seizure of power was all perfectly lawful and that their violence was actually warranted to quell a race riot initiated by Black residents of the city. The scary part is that most seem to have believed them, and this false narrative of their massacre was accepted as accurate history for more than fifty years.

This Thomas Nast cartoon depicts anti-Reconstructionist white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League combining forces to restore a “white man’s government” and redeem the “lost cause” by brutally oppressing free Citizens.

In order to grasp the motivations of the insurrectionists in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the end of the 19th century, we must look further back, at the struggle for political power in this important coastal city beginning during the Civil War. Wilmington, as with all of North Carolina, had always been a contested state, split between the pro-slavery Democratic Party and the anti-slavery Republican Party. The state was among the very last to secede and join the Confederacy, and after the Confederacy’s collapse and the end of the Civil War, Wilmington was something of a Mecca for free Blacks. There had always been a relatively large population of free Black people living in North Carolina even before the war between the states, and from the nation’s independence until 1835, the state actually permitted free Black men to vote. And at Wilmington, a bustling trade hub on Cape Fear, there were many port jobs available to Black workers, loading and hauling shipments of fruits and vegetables, rice and corn, peanuts and cotton, tar and guano. Out in the forests, they worked in the timber industry, or harvesting sap to process into turpentine. In 1868, after more than 30 years denied the vote, free Black men who lived and worked around Wilmington were again given the opportunity to exercise the franchise, and even to campaign as delegates to the state’s constitutional convention. With the state under the control of Union forces following the end of the war, and Confederates who refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the Union being denied the right to hold office or vote, it was no surprise that Republicans took the majority of delegate positions in the convention. More surprising and galling to the unreconstructed rebels, though, was that 13 Black men won their races and became delegates. The new state constitution being voted on might guarantee universal male suffrage, which, with the growing population of eligible Black voters around Cape Fear, meant that the party of slavery might never hold power again in cities like Wilmington. This was unacceptable to white supremacists, so unsurprisingly, the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, only recently formed in Tennessee, increased in that area and commenced a voter intimidation campaign. A month before the election, the KKK placed placards around the city, warning that “When darkness reigns, then is the hour to strike,” and publishing notices in newspapers stating that “THE AVENGER COMETH WITH THE NIGHT.” They even went so far as to parade ominously through the streets in their hoods, hauling a cart full of dry bones behind them. What the KKK did not count on, however, was the leadership of one delegate, a relentless campaigner for Black suffrage named Abraham Galloway, who roused his fellow Black men to patrol the streets with pistols and fence posts in hand, ready to combat any white-clad terrorist attempting to intimidate Black voters. Galloway’s resistance campaign was successful, the Black vote was not suppressed, Black men in North Carolina regained the right to vote under its new constitution, and the Ku Klux Klan, as such, did not come back to Wilmington again for several decades.

After the passage of the new constitution, the anti-slavery Republican Party, bolstered by the Black vote and the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, kept control of the state for only a couple years. In 1870, former Whigs and white supremacists formed the Conservative Party and took back the legislature. Eventually the Conservative Party merged with the dominant Democrats, who by fearmongering and race-baiting were able to muster their white base enough to retake power in North Carolina through the 1870s and 1880s, during which time they rigged the game, making it so that certain county official positions that had been going to Black candidates were appointed by them instead of elected, and finding procedural excuses to suppress the Black vote. However, following a recession, many white farmers left the Democratic Party and joined the Populist Party in the early 1890s. A new alliance between the Republicans and the Populists, called Fusionism, would eventually retake the legislature and restore the election of county officials. By this time, sixteen counties in eastern North Carolina boasted Black majorities, and starting back in 1880, Wilmington had had the highest percentage of Black citizens of any city in the South, with a staggering 60 percent of the city’s population. The result was Fusionist domination in local politics, and Black residents winning election to office and earning appointment to positions typically reserved for white men. Wilmington, North Carolina, between 1894 and 1898, was ahead of its time as a truly racially diverse community. In addition to the majority white Republican and Populist officials, like the mayor, the police chief, and the deputy sheriff, there were several Black officials, including magistrates, aldermen, and police officers. In the end, this is what chafed Wilmington’s white supremacists the most. It wasn’t the loss of their party’s political influence, or even being outnumbered by free Blacks, who mostly kept to their own neighborhoods or to the poor, wooded areas outside town. Certainly the poor, jobless whites resented when employers hired a Black laborer instead of them, but the real impetus for the white supremacy campaign mounted in 1898 was the fact that some Black men had been elevated to positions of authority over white men. The mere thought that a white man might be arrested by a Black police officer and convicted by a Black magistrate led white supremacists to bemoan so-called “negro domination.” Of course, this was classic race-baiting. Black officials were still in the minority among the Republican leaders in Wilmington and across the state, and white Republicans were sensitive to the racial resentments of Democrats, and maintained an informal segregation, such that Black magistrates decided cases for Black residents, and Black police arrested only Black offenders. After all, despite many liberal and even radical Republicans in favor of racial equality before the law, many white Republicans still shared the same notions that Black and white should not be social equals. But these first gestures toward Jim Crow segregation were not enough for white supremacist Democrats, who would not be happy unless the Black residents of the Cape Fear area were stripped of any power and made as subservient and afraid as they once had been under the lashes of harsh overseers and cruel slave patrols.

A North Carolina newspaper cartoon spreading propaganda about “negro domination.”

Here, before I go further and discuss the inception of Wilmington’s White Supremacy Campaign of 1898, I feel I must digress to clarify something about the Civil War–era and postbellum Democratic and Republican parties. You’ll sometimes hear conservative commentators today criticize the modern-day Democratic Party as being the party of slavery and the KKK. Usually, it’s in defense of the modern-day Republican Party, which has become the favored party of white supremacists—a kind of whataboutism or tu quoque fallacy, a hurling of the same charge back at the accuser… y’know: classic “no puppet, you’re the puppet” rhetoric. But those who try to use the history of the Democratic Party against them like this are either ignorant or arguing in bad faith. First of all, it’s a conspiracy theory at heart, arguing that Democrats have somehow made the world forget that they used to be pro-slavery white supremacists and that they probably still secretly are. And if you accepted this, then you would have to accept that Republicans also must have taken on a kind of secret façade, one that actively promotes voter suppression, denies the existence of systemic racial injustice, rejects the grievances of racial justice protesters, and appears to actively be courting the support of white supremacists. So if Democrats today are secretly the party of racism, this must mean that the GOP secretly supports universal suffrage, stands behind BLM, actually wants schools to teach the history of racism despite all their protests, and only draws the support of white supremacists because those stupid racists have failed to see through the mutual ruse of both parties. It’s absurd, and such gaslighting relies on historical blindness; it only works on someone who doesn’t understand how our dominant political parties changed over the course of the 20th century. Some will try to simplify this change by saying that the two parties are just different parties with the same names, which is inaccurate, or that they merely “switched” or just swapped platforms, but that is not strictly true either. The change was gradual, called a realignment. At the same time as the Populists in North Carolina were giving Republicans the majority they needed, elsewhere, they were allying with Democrats and beginning to change the party. While previously, Republicans had been the party of a strong central government and Democrats campaigned against it, the populist William Jennings Bryan, who would eventually come to control the Democratic Party, argued instead that the federal government should have different priorities, focusing more on social justice. Bryan put Democrats on the path toward Progressivism, and after the Great Depression, the party was nearly unrecognizable. Meanwhile, Republicans were, at the same time, gradually losing Black voter support, and eventually moved away from arguing for a stronger federal government. Surely this was partly rhetorical, to move in opposition to their political rivals, who now advocated for federal programs, but it was also practical. As historian Eric Rauchway has pointed out, the Republican Party has always been the party of big business interests. Early on, those business interests profited from the federal programs the Republicans pushed for, like the creation of a national currency and the institution of protective tariffs, but later, their big business supporters favored a less intrusive federal government, and the Republicans adjusted their principles accordingly. The realignment according to racial justice issues can be most clearly observed in the politics of the 1950s and ’60s, when it was Democrats who finally delivered significant civil rights legislation, and when Republicans achieved increased political influence in the South through their Southern Strategy, effectively becoming the new party of Southern white supremacy. So to sum up in a simplistic way, Republicans used to be socially progressive, but now Democrats are, and Democrats used to be the party of racism, but now Republicans are. Through it all, however, Republicans have remained the party of the rich. So when someone suggests that you should decide which party’s candidates to support based on what their parties used to represent, remember that it makes a lot more sense to support a party because of what it stands for now, or better yet, to support candidates based on their personal convictions.

Back to Wilmington in 1898, we have Democrats looking for a path to reclaim power from the Fusionist alliance of Populists and Republicans, and we have white residents resenting the social and political equality awarded to the city’s Black majority. Having learned from the actions of anti-Reconstructionists elsewhere in recent decades, some Democrats planned out a White Supremacy Campaign ahead of the election that would deliver them everything they had lately lost to the Fusionists. And I’m not just calling it a “white supremacy campaign” because it was white men wanting to take free Blacks and their allies down a few pegs. No, that’s what its orchestrators called it, proudly, in capital letters. Devised by North Carolina’s Democratic Party chairman, Furnifold Simmons, and Raleigh newspaper publisher Josephus Daniels, the plan was first and foremost to inflame resentment among white residents throughout what they called the “Negroized East” of North Carolina, with especial focus on the Black Belt counties, including Wilmington. This meant a focused propaganda campaign in his and other white supremacist newspapers, lamenting the suffering of poor Southern whites under so-called “Negro domination,” and arranging for public speakers to whip up the white populace to a fever pitch. If their propaganda campaign was successful, they correctly surmised that they would be able to command their own private army of enraged white supremacists come election day and would be able not only to carry the day through intimidation and fraud, but could even go further than that in the days after the election. As they commenced with their plan, using the printed word as well as political cartoons, what Simmons and Daniels found was that they needed to stir up more than just resentment over Black residents voting and holding positions of authority. They needed to spread fear throughout Cape Fear country, make it live up to its name. Following Daniels’s lead, white supremacist newspapers fell back on the age-old specter of the Black man as a beastly rapist. They printed story after lurid story about affairs between Black men and white women, which they presented as rapes, for the prevailing sentiment was that intercourse between the races cannot possibly be consensual. It got so ridiculous that he would report on complete non-events, like a white woman noticing a Black man cross her yard or a teen girl who felt uncomfortable in passing two Black teen boys in the street, and he would report them as narrow escapes from rape with headlines like “No Rape Committed; But a Lady Badly Frightened by a Worthless Negro.” He focused his reporting on Wilmington in order to demonstrate what he called “the result of Negro control in the city.” And make no mistake: he was not in earnest. Josephus Daniels knew what he was doing. In a later memoir, he admitted “that the Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality,” remarking that, “The propaganda was having good effect.” It succeeded in winning white Populists and even some Republicans to their cause because of deeply ingrained racial tensions, but also because the manipulative and false reporting was not robustly challenged. In one case, a Black newspaper editor did have the courage to challenge the propaganda, and it cost him everything.

White supremacist newspaper propagandist and orchestrator of the Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898, Josephus Daniels.

Alexander Lightfoot Manly was the publisher of a respected weekly Black newspaper in Wilmington, the Record, and he had long tried to follow in the tradition of Abraham Galloway before him, advocating for equality and justice for the Black citizens around Cape Fear. When he stirred the pot, he even made some enemies with certain ministers and upstanding figures in the Black community who preached accommodation, urging the Black residents of Wilmington to keep their heads down and avoid confrontation with whites at all costs. And none of Manly’s editorials upset them and enraged white supremacists as much as his challenges to the notion of Black men as insatiable, beastly rapists. Manly had the courage and honesty to point out the double standard, remarking on how frequently white men raped Black women without consequence. He suggested that if they were to condemn all rape, and seek to prosecute rapists whether they were Black or white, they would find the Black residents of Wilmington their greatest allies in such a crusade against this heinous crime. And he further challenged claims about the frequency with which Black men raped white women, rejecting the doctrine that white women could not possibly be consensual paramours of the Black men who may be caught with them. While Manly may have believed his editorials could do some good, speaking truth to power as good journalists should, in the hands of Josephus Daniels’s and Furnifold Simmons’s White Supremacy Campaign, it became little more than fuel for the white hot fire they were stoking. They reprinted his most damning editorial over and over, suggesting that it was a provocation and an admission that Black men openly intended to ravage their white women. White supremacists threatened to haul Manly out of his newspaper office and lynch him, but Josephus Daniels discouraged such mob action. After all, it was only August. He much preferred to keep stoking resentments until Election Day, so he pressured the Republican Governor, Daniel Russell, to condemn Manly’s editorial. With white advertisers ceasing to do business with him, this was the beginning of the end for Alexander Manly in Wilmington.

During the next leg of his White Supremacist Campaign, Josephus Daniels kicked his fake news propaganda machine into high gear. He began to report on supposed rumors that the Black residents of Wilmington were planning an uprising. Never mind the fact that he and Furnifold Simmons and certain secret societies in Wilmington were planning their own uprising, which of course he did not report on. No, he reported unconfirmed rumors about Black women intending to burn down the white homes in which they were servants, of the entire Black populace intending to embark on a murder campaign house to house if the Democrats won the day. It was all part of the white supremacists’ plan to gaslight, to obfuscate, to project. Such that, when they finally chose their moment to enact violence, they could say they were defending themselves. And it worked. The white citizens of Wilmington began to stockpile an arsenal of revolvers and Winchester rifles. They even acquired a rapid-fire gun that they placed on a tugboat just off shore, and they invited certain Black leaders to a demonstration of their artillery piece just to intimidate them. Unsurprisingly, some Black citizens, fearing for their safety, also attempted to acquire guns, and the white gun sellers refused to fulfill their orders and informed Josephus Daniels, who reported on it as proof of the Black conspiracy to rise up in armed revolt, writing, “The Dark Scheme Has Been Detected.” In October, at a white supremacist rally called the Great White Man’s Basket Picnic, Red Shirt brigades from other regions travelled to put on a show. These mounted terrorists in red shirts showed how a terrifying brigade of armed white supremacists could intimidate Black and Republican voters. And the keynote speaker, Pitchfork Tillman, former governor of South Carolina and rabid white supremacist, spoke of his successful campaign to intimidate Black residents in his home state. He wore a scowl and an eyepatch as he recounted his involvement in the Hamburg Massacre, in which he and his Red Shirts oversaw the murder of six Black men, an event that set off a series of similar attacks and an estimated 100 further murders leading up to the election of 1876, in which the Democrats took power, or “redeemed” the state. Following the Great White Man’s Rally and Picnic, the white supremacists of Cape Fear began wearing red and forming brigades of their own, and the lynchings of Black men steadily increased.

Amexander Manly, editor of the Black newspaper the Daily Record, and a courageous voice against white supremacist propaganda in late 19th-century North Carolina.

This was not the first time that false rumors of a forthcoming Black rebellion resulted in indiscriminate violence in North Carolina. Back in 1831, just north of North Carolina’s border with Virginia, Nat Turner initiated his bloody rebellion, killing more than fifty white residents of Southampton County, including women and children. While he and his followers remained at large, similar rumors began to spread south of the border, in North Carolina, that slaves were planning a large scale uprising. As in Wilmington more than 60 years later, the newspapers fanned the flames of this panic, falsely reporting that armies of fugitive slaves were marching into North Carolina, murdering white families and freeing their slaves to add to their numbers. It was the most horrific nightmare of slaveholders throughout the South, every Southern white man and woman’s secret terror, and whites in North Carolina, including Wilmington, reacted to their worst fear coming true without questioning its veracity. They rounded up Black people who had the misfortune of being out on the street or away from their plantations, many of whom had not even heard about Nat’s Fray, as it was called, and they whipped them, tortured them, burned them at the stake, beheaded them and placed their heads on posts as warnings to the other rebel slaves, who didn’t actually exist. In fact, there was not a single instance of a slave killing a white person in North Carolina at the time, or for some time afterward. The newspapers, in warning about a massacre of white residents, had incited the massacre of Black men and women instead. In 1898, when Josephus Daniels ratcheted up his White Supremacy Campaign to lie to the public about Black plans for an armed uprising, he was tapping into that same fear. And he certainly was knowingly misreporting, for accomplices in his campaign had hired Black detectives to infiltrate the community and report back on what the Black residents of Wilmington were up to, and these detectives had reported that the Black residents were not up to anything besides fearing for their lives. By this time, Daniels’s and Simmons’s White Supremacy Campaign had determined to foment real violence after Election Day, so we can assume that when he began to spread rumors of this so-called Dark Scheme on Cape Fear, he was counting on his white readers having the very same reaction as they’d had in 1831. He would not be disappointed. Join me for Part Two to hear more about how this disinformation campaign led to voter intimidation, election fraud, armed insurrection, and massacre.

 Further Reading

“Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.” Reveal, 24 Oct. 2020, https://revealnews.org/podcast/remembering-a-white-supremacist-coup/.

Rauchway, Eric. “When and (to an extent) why did the parties switch places?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 May 2010, www.chronicle.com/blognetwork/edgeofthewest/when-and-to-an-extent-why-did-the-parties-switch-places.

Zucchino, David. Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.