The Lost Empire of Tartaria

You have heard of the ancient lost civilizations of Atlantis. Perhaps you’ve also heard about the lost continents of Lemuria and Mu. You’ve heard me talk about beliefs in the lost cradles of civilization Hyperborea and Ultima Thule. But have you heard about the lost empire of Tartaria? Depending on your interests and thus the calibration of your YouTube recommendation and search algorithms and the pages you find promoted to you on Facebook, you may have learned a great deal about this globe-spanning mega-civilization in recent years. For example, you may have been surprised to find out that this ancient civilization, which originated in central Eurasia as a vast kingdom encompassing most of Siberia, was so successful that it spread around the world, even into the Americas, and that even today we can see the remnants of the civilization’s grand architecture. Your surprise may have turned to wonder and dismay as you learned of a great worldwide catastrophe, a flood akin to Noah’s but composed of mud that destroyed most evidence of this magnificent civilization. Your wonder and dismay likely further turned to shock and outrage as you learned of a global conspiracy to suppress the history of the Tartarian Empire, to cover up the existence of this mud flood, and to claim the impressive accomplishments of their advanced culture as our own. So throw out everything you know about the history of the world, disregard everything you think you understand about ethnology, geography, architecture, and geology, and prepare to be awakened from the sleep of ignorance, liberated from the herd of the sheeple, and initiated into the mystery of Tartaria!

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If you’re still reading, I’ll come clean. I don’t actually believe this claptrap. But there is something very satisfying to me about the idea that some proponent of the Tartarian Empire conspiracy mythos might stumble upon or seek out this blog post and think at first that I’m promoting this nonsense, when actually this is perhaps the most absurd pseudohistorical conspiracy delusion I’ve ever heard. It cannot be taken seriously, making it a perfect topic for my April Fools episode. However, there are other reasons I feel compelled to address this somewhat obscure claim now. First, it is new and growing. Some have likened it to Qanon because of its agglomeration of other conspiracy claims, and while it is still in its infancy, it seems important to make the public aware of it and its rather surprising implications. According to Brian Dunning, whose Skeptoid blog and podcast covered it briefly about a year ago, the Tartarian Empire claims exist solely online, having first appeared on Youtube conspiracist channels around 2016 and gaining traction in 2017 and beyond on Reddit, Facebook, and elsewhere. He confirmed this using Google Trends (though when I tried to reproduce his findings, I was seeing it spike more in 2018). A quick search of word frequency in publications using Google Ngram corroborates that the topic became more common in the mid- to late 2010s but also suggests that it was not a purely online phenomenon, although any early conspiracist publications could very well have been inspired from online content, rather than vice-versa. However, the reliability of these tools in determining the origin of such pseudohistories and conspiracy claims is decidedly questionable. For example, it is entirely possible that these conspiracy claims crossed over into the English-speaking world from foreign language publications that aren’t mined in an Ngram search, or from online content in another language that, if I understand the tool correctly, wouldn’t show up in a Google Trends search, even if it were set to conduct a worldwide search, because the keyword used is in in English. This appears to be the case with the claims about a global Tartarian Empire, as there is good reason to believe this pseudohistory originated in Russia and may have spread to the West as online propaganda or disinformation. So, surprisingly, this ridiculous topic is actually very relevant to current events, particularly the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in the Ukraine. But I will get to that. Let us start with a simple refutation of the Tartaria mythos.

Historical map designating most of Inner Eurasia and Siberia as “La Grande Tartarie”

It has been suggested that the entirety of the Tartaria conspiracy myth can be blamed on conspiracists looking at historical maps and getting confused because of their ignorance of certain aspects of history. In truth, there appears to be something far more insidious behind this conspiracy myth than simple misunderstanding and well-meant speculation, but let’s have a look at this explanation just the same, as we will have to address the name Tartaria anyway. So the idea goes that the whole thing is due to the fact that many old maps label massive swathes of inner Eurasia as Tartaria, or Tartary. It is claimed that, lacking the knowledge of what this term referred to, conspiracists jumped to the conclusion that there must have been a huge kingdom or nation-state called Tartaria that has since disappeared. From there, the theory goes, they let their speculation about this presumably lost civilization run wild. It is certainly true that these old maps using the label of Tartary or Tartaria are frequently raised as evidence for these outlandish conspiracy claims, and their proponents do indeed reject the simple and historically accurate explanation for why these regions were called Tartary. Prior to the 18th century, the West lacked much knowledge about the peoples and societies within Siberia and Central and Inner Asia and simply called all of them “Tatars”, which then became “Tartars,” and their lands “Tartary.” It was a blanket term, similar to the way ancient Greeks called all the lands northeast of Europe Scythia, and any nomadic people from that vague area came to be called Scythians. Some scholars suggest the initial name “Tatar” derived from a Chinese word, dada, which dated to the 9th century C.E. and was used to refer to any nomads north of China. Indeed, it was the bellicose northern peoples of the Eurasian Steppe that the Chinese had built the Great Wall to keep out who would eventually come to be called “Tatars” by the West, such as the Manchu and Mongol peoples, as well as Turkic tribes. As mentioned in my episode on Prester John, a legend that somewhat coincides with Tartaria claims since it talks of a magical kingdom in the same region, the term “Tatar” appears to have become “Tartar” because of a racist pun. According to Matthew Paris, King Louis IX of France, hearing news about the hellish ravages of Mongol forces invading Europe, said of the so-called Tatars, “Well, may they be called Tartars, for their deeds are those of fiends from Tartarus,” which of course was the Latin name for Hades. Thus the corruption “Tartars” was supposedly coined, basically calling the Mongol hordes demons from hell. As the West did not have much concrete knowledge of the political geography of the region from whence these hordes had come, European cartographers indiscriminately slapped the name Tartary, or Tartaria, onto vast tracts of land. In subsequent centuries, the label was persistently applied to a wide range of distinct peoples and regions, such that later maps might distinguish Lesser from Greater Tartary, or Eastern from Western Tartary. Eventually, as ethnological knowledge of the region’s peoples grew, further distinctions had to be made, such that those in Manchuria were called Manchu Tartars, and those in the eastern reaches of the Russian Tsardom were called Muscovite Tartars. Gradually, the term was dropped altogether, with only the occasional remnant to be found. As will be seen, the origin of the Tartarian Empire conspiracy claims found online today are not the result of simple ignorance of the story behind some old cartographic labels, but this ignorance is clearly exploited by or feeds into the conspiracy claim, providing plenty of fodder for supposed primary source evidence that may seem convincing to a lay person who encounters these conspiracy claims online. 

It is because of such out of date and inaccurate maps, along with a heaping portion of racial stereotyping, that the belief in a Tartarian Empire in the Americas can be found. That’s right, we are not only talking about an inner Eurasian lost civilization. As I indicated in the beginning, believers claim the remnants of a lost Tartarian Empire can be found all over the United States as well. As evidence, they will cite maps from the 17th century that happen to have the word “Tartorum” near the Bering Strait and visually group North America with Eastern Asia according to the same color. With a simple translation of the Latin, they would be able to tell that the blurb with the word “Tartorum” is describing the Mongol tribes on the other side of the strait, not in North America, and describes a simple rural life that is very different from the technologically advanced civilization they imagine Tartaria was. Likewise, they will bring up a 19th century map of the “Distribution of Races in the World” that, again, color codes sections of Eurasia and much of North America to indicate the presence of the same culture. This racist 19th century map chooses the color yellow for Asia and these portions of North America, and tellingly, it labels these areas Mongolian, not Tartarian. The cartographer appears to have mistakenly conflated Mongolian and Inuit cultures, as the portions of North America identified as Mongolian are predominately north of the Arctic Circle. Of course, in the distant past, Native American peoples likely did migrate across the strait and were distantly related to Eurasian nomads. Specifically, ethnologists recognize that the Yupik aboriginal peoples dwell in both Alaska and Siberia. But again, we are talking about rural nomads, not an advanced civilization that, according to believers, is responsible for the construction of architecturally magnificent edifices. Nevertheless, to the proponents of the Tartarian Empire fiction, these cherry-picked maps are evidence that Grand Tartary, the mythical civilization that they have built up in their minds to Atlantean proportions, was present in the Americas, and though their own false evidence would suggest it could only be found above the Arctic Circle, they claim it was present everywhere. As proof, they point to almost any ornate building constructed in any architectural style other than modern, and they say that must have been a Tartarian structure, because we don’t build things like that in our culture. This may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. They really do point to any pre-modern structure that is especially impressive and elaborately decorative, and they claim it was not built, could not have been built, by builders of our culture.

Racist 19th century map asserting Mongolian cultures are present in North America.

In some ways the conspiracist proponents of a global Tartarian Empire are traditionalists, or nostalgists. They seem to value only an old-fashioned or ancient style of building and reject all modernist architecture as ugly, nondescript, and thus inferior. One Norwegian Youtuber focused on Tartaria, Joachim Skaar, lumps all of modernist, and therefore non-Tartarian, architecture together under the label of Brutalism, although that is a very specific offshoot of Modernist architecture that emerged in the 1950s and declined in the 1970s. However, the name and the aesthetics provide a striking counterpoint to what he and others call Tartarian architecture, which again lumps together many known styles, from Classical, Baroque, Gothic and Renaissance to Beaux Arts, Neoclassical, Second Empire and Greek Revival. Again, any sufficiently ornate building, with columns supporting entablatures with carved friezes and cornices with scrollwork, or any building with an especially elaborate roof like a mansard or a cupola or a large dome, seems, in their fevered imaginations, to be a relic of this lost civilization. As evidence, they hold up old photos from 19th century America, in which can be seen such grand edifices, usually municipal buildings like city halls or state capitols, rising above simple wood frame houses and shacks, or on otherwise empty stretches of dirt fields. To them, these are evidence that 19th century Americans were living among the ruins of this vanished civilization, when in fact the photos depict nation building. With a basic grasp of the fact that the construction of such government buildings was well funded, and that architects were specifically sought out and well paid to design impressive architectural structures, it’s quite clear why such projects were initially surrounded by empty space and simple A-frame clapboard hovels. But like most conspiracists, the Tartarian Empire proponents believe there are secrets to uncover in almost any old book or photo they pore over, no matter how widely available they might be. They find beautiful old buildings that no longer exist, and they decide they have uncovered another clue about the destruction of Tartarian structures. For example, the Chicago Federal Building, whose dome was larger than the U.S. Capitol’s dome, but which was demolished after about 60 years, or the slender, 27-story Singer Building in New York City, which for a time was the tallest building in the world but was leveled in the 1960s. Their speculation about the ancient and mysterious origins of such buildings simply disregard their known history. To wit, the head of the Singer Manufacturing Company, makers of the famous sewing machines, commissioned the Singer building as their New York Headquarters and hired architect Ernest Flagg to design it. Such historical details, to the Tartaria conspiracists, are just more lies covering up the truth.

Perhaps the most absurd claim they’ve made is that the impressive temporary complex of ornate facades built out of straw and plaster of Paris for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—the so-called White City—was actually a grand Tartarian metropolis that “they” have pretended was not real. Much of their idiotic claims boil down to not just ignorance of history, but amateurish misunderstandings about architecture that I imagine would really gall any actual architects. They point to the fact that grand buildings of certain distinct styles can be found all over the world, but of course that is because architectural trends spread internationally. They claim that the shift away from these ornate buildings that are so aesthetically pleasing to them, and the movement toward the concrete and steel architecture of modernism, is a clear sign of the disappearance of the Tartarian culture, when in fact, there are plenty of books written by Modernist architects and city planners like Le Corbusier that expound on their reasoning and argument for moving away from more classical styles. And finally, they claim that our culture simply couldn’t have produced such beautiful structures, and yet plenty of New Classical architects design such buildings even today. Take for example, the neo-Gothic Whitman College at Princeton, built in 2002, or the Classical Greek architecture of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center built in Nashville, the so-called Athens of the South, in 2006. Simply put, one gets the impression that these Tartarian Empire Youtubers and Reddit posters are just basement dwellers in boring towns who have only recently discovered the beauty of fancy buildings and simply cannot believe such structures are American. Instead, they envision a massive mega-culture of advanced builders. Joachim Skaar, the aforementioned Youtuber, has been quoted as claiming, “The same people that built the Capitol in Washington built the pyramids in Egypt,” and that gives us a sense of the great depths of ignorance displayed by these conspiracists.

An image of the State Capitol of Iowa, with less impressive buildings surrounding it. Just the sort of image that looks like proof to a Tartarian Empire believer.

Equally absurd are their explanations for why there does not exist ample archaeological evidence of this widespread culture, aside, from, oh, say, all the surviving buildings they claim are artifacts of the culture and all the photographs of their buildings that are no longer standing. Well, they say there was a worldwide catastrophe that destroyed much of their culture. It was much like the Flood of Genesis, in that it swept into every Tartarian city across the globe, destroying the inhabitants and their records and monuments. They call it the “great reset.” Unlike the biblical flood, though, this was a “mud flood,” and in its wake, entire grand Tartarian cities were left entirely or partially buried. Just what would cause such a global flow of mud is not typically clarified. Some have suggested that it was the result of a worldwide volcanic event, caused by mud volcanos. Mud volcanos are real, and instead of producing magma flows they produce slurries of warm mud. However, even some cursory research into mud volcanos would reveal that they are typically small and don’t cause mass destruction. In fact, they are often identified more as hot springs, and can be enjoyed as natural mud baths. It’s pretty clear some Tartaria “researcher” went looking for a feasible reason for the “mud flood” they invented, found mention of a mud volcano, and said “Bingo!” not bothering to read much more into the topic. But of course, anyone who would believe in a global mud flood isn’t thinking too hard about the science of geology or the analysis of strata performed at any dig site that could handily disprove their “theory.” But they still find supposed evidence for their mud flood, once again in old photos. They bring up black and white photos from the 19th century that show people digging, whether employing hand shovels, mule teams, or steam shovels, especially if there is a fancy building around them. Of course, civic engineering requires a lot of digging like this, even today. Hills must be flattened and depressions filled in order to make streets flat. It’s no great mystery. But Tartarian Empire conspiracists go further, pointing to photos of Gilded Age buildings with windows at ground level and saying that they all appear to be sunken into the ground. Again, these “theorists” seem woefully unfamiliar with buildings generally, but maybe they aren’t basement dwellers after all, since if they were, they would easily recognize these as basement windows. But perhaps the most ridiculous thing about this mud flood aspect of their claims is that, since they’re using photos from the 1800s as evidence, they played themselves and had to place their supposed worldwide mud flood catastrophe in the 19th century. That’s right. These geniuses claim that a global catastrophe happened sometime between the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, and there is no record of it anywhere, and they don’t even bother explaining how it only seemed to affect the Tartarians and us lousy non-Tartarians escaped it just fine.

But hold on! The other element of the so-called “great reset,” besides the global destruction caused by the mud flood, was the purposeful erasure of Tartarian history. Or at least, that’s what they claim. In fact, believers in Tartaria claim that most major armed conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries were actually about Tartaria. They say Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia was really a war against Tartaria, and that after the mud flood, the World Wars of the 20th century were all actually just excuses to destroy all remaining traces of Tartaria. What is their evidence of such a cover-up? Well, they too use Google Ngram, and they find it suspicious that use of the words “Tartaria” and “Tartary” plummet to nonexistent following the 19th century. But of course, we know why that is. It’s because we stopped using an inaccurate blanket term that was actually a pun suggesting they were from hell and instead started calling them Mongols or some other more accurate name. However, never let it be said that conspiracy speculators aren’t ingenious, for they managed in their blindly focused keyword searches to turn up an obscure declassified CIA report on “National Cultural Development under Communism.” In it, there exists a paragraph that is presented as smoking gun evidence of a cover-up of Tartaria’s history. It reads as follows:

…let us take the matter of history, which, along with religion, language and literature, constitute the core of a people’s cultural heritage. Here again the Communists have interfered in a shameless manner. For example, on 9 August 1944, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, sitting in Moscow, issues a directive ordering the party’s Tartar Provincial Committee “to proceed to a scientific revision of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalistic character committed by individual writers and historians in dealing with Tartar history.” In other words, Tartar history was to be rewritten—let us be frank, was to be falsified…

The obvious problem here, of course, is that the CIA appear to be condemning Communist revision of “Tartar” history, which simply isn’t in keeping with the idea that the erasure of Tartarian history was a global conspiracy, which likely would have to involve the CIA. But the real issue is that this oft-used quote is taken entirely out of context. Only this paragraph in the entire report mentions “Tartaria,” and this is only because they are quoting a Communist committee that uses the term. The rest of the report makes it clear that the CIA is talking about Communist attacks on Islam and the Muslim peoples within their authority. Furthermore, if they even gave enough context to quote the entirety of the last sentence, it would be revealed that the history of these Muslim people was being rewritten, or falsified, “in order to eliminate references to Great Russian aggressions…so that the Russians always appear in a good light.” And this, the fact that Russians have long been engaged in a revision of history, producing a pseudohistory intended to serve their political purposes and falsely burnish their image, leads us to what may be the true origin and sinister purpose of this batshit crazy conspiracy claim.

Mud Volcanoes at Gobustan State Reserve. Not exactly a global threat. Image credit: Nick Taylor, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The way that the Tartaria conspiracy claims blithely do away with massive parts of world history somewhat reminds me of the claims of chronological revisionists that I previously discussed at great length in a three part series. Indeed, searching Google Trends for Tartaria, one sees Phantom Time, the chronological revision theory of Herbert Illig that I spoke about in my series, listed as a related query. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the origins of the Tartaria claims can actually be traced to the chronological revisionist writings of Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. I encourage listeners to go back to my Chronological Revision Chronicles series, specifically Part One, The Fomenko Timeline, to hear more about this figure and his theories. In brief, Fomenko claims to use statistical analysis and astronomical data to prove that entire eras of accepted history didn’t actually occur. Instead, he argues that much of accepted history is actually duplicated from medieval history. He has been nicknamed The Terminator due to his penchant for finding reasons to delete vast swathes of history, and his rewriting of biblical history has drawn the ire of the Russian Orthodox church. But Fomenko found popularity and success in writing about history, with his “New Chronology” book series, History: Fiction or Science, bringing him far more fame than he had ever earned as a mathematician. He claims to be politically impartial, but historians and critics of his work, especially Konstantin Sheiko, who wrote extensively about the implications of Fomenko’s claims in his PhD thesis, point out that Fomenko’s work fits clearly into an ethno-nationalist tradition of producing pseudohistory and alternative history that presents the Russian people and their history in certain favorable ways. As the CIA report I referenced indicates, this historical negation, denialism, and revisionism had been perpetrated by the Soviets, but as Sheiko describes, it continued, in a somewhat different vein, after the fall of the Soviet Union, as Russia sought out some post-Soviet identity. Among these pseudo-historians, Russian identity, its greatness, is in its power and control of space on the world map, thus they find reason to suggest that a great Russian Empire existed long before the Soviet Union or the Tsardom of Rus. Others in this category see Russian identity wrapped up in racial heritage, and they trot out the old myth of an Aryan people. Though he feigns academic impartiality, Fomenko’s work is at the forefront of this movement to forge a false ethno-nationalist historical identity for Russia. When he eliminates entire periods of history, he typically claims that they are duplications of Russian ancient history. The Holy Roman Empire? Well that is just the appropriated history of a great Russian Empire. His alternate history is at its heart, one in which the accomplishments of Russia are far greater, and its greatness has been stolen from it and attributed to other regions and historical periods. According to Fomenko, the Mongols, formerly known as Tatars or Tartars, did not exist, as such. Instead, he claims that there existed a vast Slav-Turk Empire, not a Mongol Horde but rather a Russian Horde. In this way, he and other Russians can deny that they ever came under the Mongol Yoke. The Mongol invasion, he claims, was a myth invented by the Romanov Dynasty and the Church. In fact, Genghis Khan was a Russian, complete with European features. So under it all, all the mathematical reasoning, the elaborate statistical and astronomical proofs, behind Anatoly Fomenko’s New Chronology, we see the ugly head of Aryan mythology, of white supremacy, rearing.

Is the Tartaria nonsense actually the New Chronology repackaged? In turn, is it just Russian ethno-nationalist propaganda as the work of Fomenko is revealing itself to be? Well, you could describe both as the myth of a vast Siberian / Inner Asian empire whose history has been stolen and erased. Tartarian conspiracy nuts also scrutinize old portraits of Genghis Khan and speculate that he may have been more European-looking, more white, than he is otherwise portrayed. In their reaction against the historical distortions of Tsarist and Church propaganda, Communists initiated their own revision and falsification of history, as the CIA observed in the aforementioned report, and after the fall of Communism, a new false history has emerged, still intent on painting Russia in the best light, and justifying its geopolitical powerplays. Just as Vladimir Putin today justifies his invasion of the Ukraine with falsehoods, claiming that it has always been a part of Russia and has no historical right to independence, his nationalist rhetoric is validated by, or perhaps inspired by, the pseudo-historian Anatoly Fomenko, who claims that Ukraine has no identity apart from Russia, for its people were always only part of his “Russian Horde.” This pseudo-history tacitly justifies war crimes. So what am I arguing? I suppose I am arguing what others before me have argued: that the Tartarian Empire conspiracy myth originates from Russian disinformation, spread online to the Western world by professional Russian propagandists, and transforming along the way, through a weird digital version of the telephone game, to something almost unrecognizable. This may itself sound like conspiracy speculation, but the fact that Russian propaganda programs are active in spreading disinformation through bots and puppet accounts run out of troll farms is well known. We also know that they are involved with the encouragement of the growth of conspiracy claims. Hell, that goes back a long time before Qanon and COVID-19 conspiracies on social media. Back in the 1980s, the KGB ran a disinformation campaign aimed at encouraging the baseless conspiracy claim that the U.S. government was responsible for the creation and spread of HIV/AIDS. Now, there is a fast-spreading conspiracy theory about the existence of an ancient, suppressed mega-empire that originated in their region, and it is remarkably similar to the ethno-national propaganda Russia’s president spouts as a pretext for expansion, asserting the Russians are just reclaiming what has always been theirs. Tell me that doesn’t sound like there is a connection. What’s really scary is if Putin starts to assert that the ancestral claim of the Russian people extends all the way to America, where the Tartarian Empire is said to have formerly reigned.

Anatoly Fomenko, mathematician and ethnonationalist propagandist masquerading as a legitimate historian. Don’t @ me.

As with that other conspiracy mythos, Qanon, that has likely been encouraged every step of the way by Russian disinformation campaigns online, the Tartarian Empire hoax has grown to become a mega-theory as its proponents take a buffet-style approach, incorporating into the myth complex any pet theory or crazy notion they fancy. One can imagine that it’s especially hard to control a conspiracy narrative once it has been fed to the conspiracy nut community. Thus we see claims about the Illuminati come in to explain the worldwide cover-up, or of the Jewish World Conspiracy, which isn’t that surprising considering its connection to Russian claims of Aryan supremacy. To further explain why the existence of Tartaria had to be covered up, conspiracists have incorporated elements of the fantastical claims about Atlantis or hollow earth civilizations: namely that the Tartarians had advanced technology, free wireless energy technology to be more specific, and that the powers that be conspired to hide this from the energy dependent masses. And then, there is the doozy—that Tartaria was actually peopled by giants. Never mind that all the buildings they identify as Tartarian are made for regular size people. They found a few photos of grand, oversized doors, and of course they found statuary and paintings depicting, you guessed it, giants. They link the existence of giants in the lands of Tartary through the tales of Gog and Magog, which have historically been associated with Mongolians, as I discussed in my episode on Prester John. And from there, it just devolved into photoshopped hoaxes of gigantic bones. But the argument against the historical existence of giants deserves to have its own episode and would be too much of a digression here at the end of this one. To conclude, let’s just hope that the fringe nutcases who have taken up the Tartarian standard and run with it online continue to take the idea in such ridiculous and fantastical directions that it becomes ever more laughable, and thus, if we’re lucky, useless as Russian propaganda.

 Further Reading

Dharma, Nagato. “Tartary / Tartaria — The Mystery of an Empire Lost in History.” History of Yesterday, 2 July 2020, historyofyesterday.com/tartary-tartaria-the-mystery-of-an-empire-lost-in-history-a99abb5cc9b6.

 Elliott, Mark C. “The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 2000, pp. 603–46, https://doi.org/10.2307/2658945.

 Mortice, Zach. “Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture.” Bloomberg, 27 April 2021, www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-27/inside-architecture-s-wildest-conspiracy-theory.

“National Cultural Development Under Communism.” Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, 11 Nov. 2016, www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-02771r000200090002-6.

Sheiko, Konstantin. “Lomonosov's bastards: Anatolii Fomenko, pseudo-history and Russia's search for a post-communist identity.” (PhD thesis) School of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, 2004. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/222.

“Tartaria: The Supposed Mega-Empire of Inner Eurasia.” Reddit, uploaded by u/EnclavedMicrostate, www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/ieg2k0/tartaria_the_supposed_megaempire_of_inner_eurasia/.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Four: The Vigilante

At the moment the first shot was fired on Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963, a motorcycle cop named Marrion Baker, recognizing the sound of a rifle shot from on high, looked up toward the Book Depository and saw some pigeons take flight from the building. While other authorities were engulfed in confusion, looking first at the grassy knoll, Baker sped over to the Depository, ran inside, and demanded to know where the elevator was. The building manager, Roy Truly, led him to the elevator, but it appeared to be unresponsive. Truly afterward came to believe that Oswald had purposely left the elevator’s grate open so that it could not be called back down. If this is the case, then it was poor planning. While it meant that authorities could not take the elevator to investigate his sniper’s perch, it also meant they would have to take the very same stairs that he was taking. After firing his three shots, Oswald exited his sniper’s nest between the stacks of books, rushed to the staircase, ditched the rifle, and began his descent. However, as he approached the second floor, he heard the sound of other footsteps on the stairs below and exited toward the nearby lunchroom. That was when Officer Baker, who had given up on the elevator and taken the stairs, saw him “hurrying” off, and called out for him to stop, which Oswald did. Officer Baker, presuming that the presidential assassin must not be an employee at the Depository but rather someone who had gained entrance to the building for the sole purpose of taking a sniper position in its upper windows, asked the building manager with him if he recognized Oswald. Roy Truly answered that indeed, Oswald was an employee, and Baker let him go. This left Oswald in a perfect position to establish the alibi he would later provide police—that he had been in a lunchroom at the time of the shooting. He bought a soda pop from the machine, and lingered momentarily. If he had remained in the building, it certainly would lend some weight to the notion that he had been framed and knew nothing about the assassination, provided one ignores the physical evidence on the 6th floor and the witness testimony that shows his premeditation and planning of the murder. However, he did not stay in the building. Instead, he fled, and his flight is further strong evidence of his guilt. After buying his Coke, he walked through the second floor offices toward a different staircase, and he was seen by another Depository employee as he passed near her desk. She said something about the President being shot, and he mumbled an indistinct reply. She found the encounter “strange.” Then he went down the front stairs and out the front doors of the Depository, which had not yet been locked down as only three minutes had passed since the fatal head shot and chaos still reigned on the Plaza. Later, when the police had the building locked down, they gathered all of its employees for questioning, and Oswald was the only one missing. And even later that day, when giving his alibi, he gave the lame excuse that he had immediately left, without checking with his boss, because he assumed work would be canceled for the day because of the assassination. Outside, his movements indicate not the leisurely trip home of a man unexpectedly given a half day off, but rather a man trying to get away from the scene of a crime. He would normally have waited for a bus on Dealey Plaza, but on this day, he walked resolutely east on Elm, away from all the commotion, in the opposite direction from his boarding house. Ten blocks away, he ran up to the door of a bus in transit and pounded on it to get it to stop and let him on. On the bus, unnoticed by Oswald, happened to be one of his former landladies, who later described him as looking “like a maniac” when he boarded the bus. Sirens increased, and traffic kept the bus from continuing on, and Oswald suddenly rose and demanded a bus transfer, exiting the bus and walking to the station two blocks away. However, instead of boarding another bus at the station with his transfer, he instead hopped into a taxi cab, something he later admitted himself that he had never done before, a further indication that he was in panicked flight. Also telling is that he directed the taxi driver to take him not directly to his boarding house, but some blocks away from it. After walking the remaining distance to his room, he entered, and a couple minutes later, he left again. A housekeeper who saw him said he was “in a hurry” and “all but running.” Though it was warm, he left with a jacket on, because he was carrying his revolver in the waist of his pants.

*

In this final installment of the series, I want to tell Oswald’s story to the end, which means also telling Jack Ruby’s story, but I also want to address some of the larger logical flaws of conspiracy claims generally, as well as the difficulties inherent in refuting them. Many conspiracy proponents will not even attempt to exonerate Oswald, since the evidence of his involvement is so overwhelming. But there are those who will try to assert that he was a complete patsy. As one of my sources, JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy by John McAdams, observes, one can talk until one is blue in the face about Oswald’s psychological and ideological predisposition toward political violence—as I have in this series—and all it does is help make the case that Oswald would have been a perfect patsy, since he was just the sort of person one would expect to take a shot at the President, and therefore the perfect person to frame for it. Those conspiracists who attempt to find corroboration for Oswald’s alibi—besides requiring their audience to disregard witness statements about Oswald smuggling his rifle into the building, to doubt physical evidence that the rifle found was Oswald’s and that he had been in the improvised sniper’s nest, and to disbelieve testimony that placed Oswald on the sixth floor at the time of the assassination—rely instead on outlier witness statements that are easily discredited. For example, the secretary of the Depository’s vice-president, Carolyn Arnold, claimed she had seen Oswald in a booth in the second-floor lunchroom at 12:15pm. Never mind the fact that Oswald’s actual alibi claimed he had been eating in the first-floor lunchroom and had only gone to the second-floor lunchroom to buy a soda. The fact is that numerous workers who were in both lunchrooms have stated that Oswald was not present in either location, and Ms. Arnold never started saying she had seen him there until 15 years afterward, when a conspiracist author questioned her. In statements to the FBI not long after the assassination, she said she wasn’t sure whether she might have seen him fleetingly in a hallway, and then that she certainly had not seen him. We see this time and time again. Conspiracy speculators get a witness alone in a room and somehow, magically, get them to remember entirely different details years after the fact. Others claim that Oswald could not have been in the stairwell immediately after the shots were fired, before Officer Baker saw him rushing toward the second-floor lunchroom, because those critical witnesses who had been in the fifth floor window below his sniper’s nest, Junior Jarman, Bonnie Ray Williams, and Harold Norman, had afterward taken the stairs themselves and not encountered him. However, according to those men’s testimony, they remained upstairs for ten to fifteen minutes. Other employees who said they had been in the staircase following the shooting also can be confirmed not to have been in there until several minutes after Oswald would have taken them and then ducked out upon hearing Officer Baker’s footsteps approaching from below. But more than any of these refutable claims, Oswald’s shocking actions after leaving his boarding room with his revolver prove beyond any doubt that he was no innocent on that day.

The soda machine from which Oswald bought a Coke following the assassination in the Book Depository’s second floor lunch room.

The armed Oswald waited at a bus stop, but seeing no buses, he got impatient and started walking. He still had the bus transfer, and after walking about a mile, he was only a few blocks from catching a bus that would have connected him to a Greyhound headed for Mexico. We can’t know for sure that that was where he was headed, though, because he never made it. A Dallas police officer in a patrol car, J.D. Tippit, saw Oswald walking hurriedly and, probably recognizing that he matched the description of the assassin being broadcast to all police units based on witness statements, he pulled over and stopped him. Police had done this numerous times elsewhere in Dallas that day as the manhunt for the gunman unfolded. Numerous witnesses saw what happened next. Oswald said something to the officer, and Tippit got out of the vehicle and came around toward him. That’s when Oswald brandished his revolver, shot Tippit dead, leaving four slugs in his body, and fled down the street, emptying his spent shells as he ran. The witnesses to this murder include a woman waiting nearby for a bus, two women in their nearby home who came to the front door upon hearing the shots, and a cab driver parked nearby eating his lunch. All picked Oswald out of a lineup that day. A man driving a pickup only about fifteen feet away saw the entire thing, and though he was not brought in for a lineup—a failure of the police that conspiracists claim means he could not identify Oswald—he later, with high certainty, identified Oswald as the shooter from photographs. Numerous further witnesses saw Oswald fleeing the scene as he ran past some used car lots, and identified him in lineups and from photographs. As he ran through a gas station, he even dropped his jacket, which his boardinghouse’s housekeeper identified as the one he had left wearing, and which Marina identified as one of the only jackets he owned. Moreover, the shells he emptied were recovered and later matched ballistically to his revolver, to the exclusion of all other weapons. One of the slugs recovered from Tippit was also matched conclusively to his weapon, which would be on his person when he was apprehended not long later. The evidence in the Tippit murder case was just as clear and conclusive as that that of the assassination case, but of course, conspiracists still find reason to speculate. They ignore the wealth of witness and ballistic evidence, instead investigating Tippit’s personal relationships and suggesting he was actually murdered by someone else in retaliation for a torrid affair he was having. Or they suggest Tippit was part of the conspiracy—since conspiracies can apparently be as massive as one needs them to be, so why not?—insinuating that he may have been there to aid Oswald’s getaway but then turned on him, or that he may have been sent to kill the patsy but Oswald got the drop on him. When conspiracist writers find Oswald’s murder of Tippit too problematic, they sometime just gloss over it, mentioning it only in passing, and presenting it as an unresolved murder that can’t be conclusively tied to Oswald. As you can see, though, that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

Still fleeing from the scene of the Tippit murder, Oswald entered a shoe store. Sirens were in the air, and the shoe store manager saw Oswald enter the lobby of his store, looking scared, and staring out at the street. After some squad cars passed by, the manager watched Oswald walk back outside, look toward where the police had gone, and then head the opposite direction. He felt Oswald was acting very suspiciously, and since he had been listening to the radio broadcasting reports about the assassination, he began to suspect it could be the assassin. He followed Oswald, who ran toward the nearby entrance to the Texas Theater, and when the clerk in the box office wasn’t looking, walked inside without paying. The shoe store manager spoke to the ticket clerk, making her aware that a man had just gone in without paying and voicing his suspicions that the man was running from the police. After ensuring that the exits were secure, they called Dallas police, who arrived shortly, entered the theater, and as officers with shotguns fanned out, they raised the lights. When the officer walking up the aisle scrutinizing the filmgoers came to Oswald, he told him to stand. Oswald stood, raised his hands, shouted, “Well it's all over now,” threw a punch into the policeman’s face, pulled out his revolver, and pulled the trigger. Thankfully, it failed to fire. Oswald was subdued, handcuffed, and taken to a patrol car. The police found his ID on him as well as his false ID with the name Alek Hidell, the one he had made himself. “Which one are you?” they asked him, and he smirked, replying, “You figure it out.” At the station, Oswald was interrogated on and off for twelve hours over the course of about 45 hours, during which he lied about everything, saying he had no knowledge of the name Hidell, even though he had a fake ID with that name on him, claiming the Marines had never given him an undesirable discharge, that he’d never lived at the address where he’d taken photos with the rifle, that he’d never handed out leaflets for Fair Play for Cuba, and that he’d never been to Mexico. Conspiracists who want to believe the alibi he gave during those interrogations just tend to gloss over all the other lies he told, or they suggest that nothing in the interrogation can be trusted, claiming it is highly suspicious that the police did not record any of their questioning of Oswald. In fact, there is nothing suspicious about this at all if you investigate the practices of the Dallas police in 1963. At the time, an early version of Miranda rights was state law in Texas, and according this law, any statements made during interrogations had to be produced in writing and signed by the person being questioned before they could be used in court. So their questioning of Oswald was purely for informational purposes, since even if he confessed on tape, they would have had to get him to sign a confession before they could use it. Because this law effectively made the recording of interrogations pointless, from their view, the Dallas police did not even have a tape recorder at the time. But regardless, the record of Oswald’s statements during his interrogation have been corroborated by more that twenty-five detectives, district attorneys, Secret Service Agents, and FBI agents who participated. Hell, some postal inspectors were even present, questioning him about his use of post office boxes, and confirmed the statements made during interrogations. So I suppose this vast conspiracy implicates even the U.S. Postal Service, if we’re to believe a veil of secrecy was kept over his interrogations as part of the plot.

The murder scene of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Image courtesy University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

The Dallas police were somewhat overwhelmed by the press during the weekend they had Oswald in custody. At one point, over three hundred journalists had gathered on the third floor, making it nearly impassable with all their equipment and wires. The police were walking a tightrope between ensuring security and granting press access to the biggest story in history. When it came time to transfer Oswald, they weren’t sure how to manage it. At first they wanted to use an armored car, but the two cars that they acquired were either too small for Oswald and his guards, or too tall to pass through the ramp to the basement from which they intended to depart. Eventually, they settled on using the armored trucks as decoys and simply hustling him out in an unmarked car. They cleared the basement of everyone but about 30 members of the press, and posted a guard at the top of the ramp, but just before Oswald was brought out, the guard at the ramp left his post to direct traffic as one of the decoy vehicles departed, giving the opportunity for someone to descend the ramp from the street and blend in with the press unnoticed. Oswald was brought down the stairs and out before the bright lights of the reporters, and then a man pushed through the crowd and fired a pistol into Oswald’s abdomen. The shot was fatal, and the act of vigilantism would forever ensure the common belief that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and that the conspirators had sent someone to silence Oswald. The shooter was a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, and entire books have been written just focused on him and his supposed involvement with a conspiracy. Conspiracists will claim he knew Oswald, that he had been on Dealey Plaza during the assassination, that he had ties to the mafia. To place the endcap on this entire story, and to evaluate the claims about Oswald’s murder, we must know who Jack Ruby was, why he was there, and why he did what he did.

Jack Ruby’s birth name was Jacob Rubenstein, born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Chicago. Like Oswald, he was of below average intelligence according to IQ tests and his educational attainments—he only ever finished the 6th grade. Also like Oswald, he may have suffered some psychological disturbance, some of which can be traced back to his parents. His father beat his mother and was frequently arrested on assault and disorderly conduct charges. After their separation, his mother beat him regularly. Eventually, she was deemed unfit, and Ruby was placed in foster care. She would later be committed to a mental institution. Whether inherited from his father or instilled in him by years of abuse at the hands of his mother, Ruby developed a problematic temper and violent tendencies, earning a reputation as a street fighter in his youth. In his twenties, after a few years in California working menial odd jobs, he returned to Chicago, where he found work through a friend as a union organizer. Many conspiracists suggest this shows he was involved with the mafia, but in fact, when he had been working for the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union there, it had been legitimate. Later, the local mafia did take over the union, at which point Ruby lost his job with them. After that, he went into business for himself, selling novelty items like plaques, keychains, salt and pepper shakers, bottle openers, etc. He was never successful, and after serving in the Army Air Force in World War II, he ended up moving to Dallas, where his sister Eva ran a nightclub. For the talkative Ruby, who loved to be in the middle of the action and make acquaintance with anyone he came across, it was the perfect industry, and he threw himself into it. Some conspiracists believe he was a mafia front man, bringing the Chicago mob’s business interests to Dallas, but in truth, he was never solvent. By 1963, he was running two nightclubs with his sister, but over the years he had been involved with six and lost money on all of them. FBI investigators who were intimately familiar with all aspects of organized crime in Chicago actually questioned informants after the assassination, both low level and high ranking, and none even knew who Ruby was. Some Dallas mafia figures sometimes attended his clubs and knew Ruby, but so did a great many police officers. In fact, one Dallas mafia figure actually visited Ruby in jail after his murder of Oswald, which actually seems to prove that the Dallas mafia had nothing to do with Oswald’s murder, as a mafia leader would not go and visit one of his hitmen in jail after they were caught. Finally, some of Ruby’s business dealings prove he had no ties to the mafia. During the years leading up to the assassination, he was having problems with a stripper’s union, the AGVA, which was itself involved with the mafia. So the clearest link between him and the mafia puts him at odds with them. Finally, those who knew Ruby best insist that the mafia would never have wanted anything to do with him because he was a snitch, always ingratiating himself with the Dallas police, inviting them to his clubs, and running his mouth in conversations with them.

A young Jack Ruby in his Army Air Force Uniform. Image tweeted by TheSixthFloorMuseum

Understanding the aspect of Ruby’s character that drove him to befriend police officers is important to understanding why he was there at the police station, likely having walked down the ramp just as the officer posted there had left it unguarded. After he shot Oswald, he said, “I am Jack Ruby. You all know me,” and it was true. Most did know him. In fact, he had been in and out of the police station over and over since Oswald’s capture, drawn to the center of this historic moment and trying to make himself useful to those who were present, whether they be policemen or reporters. Again, like Oswald, he seemed to relish any attention. For years he would loiter around police stations and newspaper offices, offering help to these professionals and inviting them to his clubs for free drinks. Many thought him a “kook,” a “creep,” or a “psycho,” while others viewed him as a colorful character, which seems to be how he viewed himself as well. In addition to his efforts to befriend police officers by offering information about petty crime, he frequently gave tips to newspapers, and their description of him gives a clear sense of his activities: “He is just a guy that calls on the telephone, and he knows everybody in town,” according to a newsman who took his tips. There is some sense that he actually thought, in his simple way, that he was an amateur reporter. That is certainly one of the ways that he gained entrance to the police station during the weekend that Oswald was being interrogated, and according to those who observed his activity in the station, he was just being his awkwardly amiable self, inviting people to his club, attempting to help people where he could, and chatting with people about his hatred for the “lousy Commie” who had murdered his President. Those who knew him afterward described his tendency to seek publicity and be attracted to centers of important activity. “He was a known goer to events,” said Seth Kantor, a member of the press corps who saw Ruby on the day of the assassination hanging around Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy had been taken, and thought it was “perfectly normal to see Jack Ruby standing there.” Another reporter who knew Ruby told a researcher, “If there was one Ruby trait that stands out, it is that he had to be where the action was. He was like horseshit, all over the place.” This perfectly describes his activity between the assassination and his murder of Oswald. After learning of the assassination, and by all accounts being severely shocked and dismayed about it, it appears he may have driven directly to Parkland Hospital, and later that evening, on two separate occasions, he managed to get onto the third floor of police headquarters, even standing outside the room where Oswald was being questioned and at one point trying to enter but being stopped by police. The next day, Saturday afternoon, he was again seen wandering around among the press and police, handing out passes to his nightclub. To many, this appears to be a concerted effort to infiltrate the police department. But most there knew him, and he was introducing himself to those who didn’t. And it simply makes no sense for Ruby to have been part of a longstanding plot to kill the President’s assassin, or the patsy taking the blame for it, since if Oswald’s capture had gone any differently, if he had been arrested by state troopers or the FBI or anyone but the Dallas police, Ruby would not have been to able to get so close to him. Also, if Ruby had been tasked with murdering Oswald and intended to do so despite his own certain capture, he had an opportunity to do so on the night of the assassination, when Oswald was led past him, passing just a couple feet away from him. It appears, based on a lump in his jacket visible in photos of him that day, that he was likely carrying his pistol the entire time. Ruby later denied carrying his pistol and also denied his frequent presence within the police station that weekend, but witnesses and photographs refute him, and he was probably lying because he intended to fight the charge of premeditation in court, and all this seems to show he was stalking Oswald. But was he?

On the morning of Oswald’s transfer, Ruby was at a nearby Western Union office, wiring money to one of his dancers. The clerk who helped him did not believe he seemed in a hurry. In fact, he could have had no idea when Oswald was to be transferred because it had been delayed by some further interrogation and because Oswald had asked to change his clothes at the last minute. When he walked over to the police station afterward and made his way down the unguarded ramp toward the press gathered there, according to him, the opportunity just kind of presented itself to him. In his own words, it would have had to have been “the most perfect conspiracy in the history of the world” to work as precisely as it did. Conspiracists claim that such coincidence is impossible. They point to discredited witness statements claiming Ruby knew Oswald, or placing him at Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, even though numerous witnesses have sworn that Ruby was in a newspaper office placing an ad for his nightclubs when the assassination occurred. Whether or not it was a premeditated or an spontaneous act, his true motives are clear. Witness after witness describe his terrible dismay and grief at having learned of Kennedy’s assassination. During his visits to Parkland and the police station, it was all he could talk about. He was openly crying throughout the weekend, despite reportedly not being the type of person to cry in public. Between his visits to the police station, he was at his nightclub, which he decided to close indefinitely, despite his dire financial situation, out of respect for the President and his family, and his employees said that he was inconsolable and incoherent in his anger and depression. His sister, who he sat and watched news reports with on Friday between visits to the police station, said he was crying so hard he was “sick to his stomach.” She described him as “a broken man,” and quoted him as saying, “I never felt so bad in my life, even when Ma and Pa died…. Someone tore my heart out.” In numerous conversations that weekend, people spoke about how someone ought to take Oswald out, and it has further been stated that Ruby was highly suggestible. After killing Oswald, when police asked why he had done it, he said, “Well, you guys couldn’t do it. Someone had to do it.” And finally, his sister further described his great sadness upon reading a newspaper article that said the First Lady may have to return to Dallas to attend Oswald’s trial. Many statements by Ruby suggest he thought he would be treated as a hero, and felt persecuted when he was afterward not released from jail and instead tried for murder. So was there premeditation? Had he been hanging around the police station hoping to take Oswald out? Or did all these feelings and motivations just overwhelm him in that moment when he saw Oswald, and his well-established temper flared when, according to what Ruby’s brother Earl claimed Ruby told him, “there was a smirk on his face, and he thought, Why you little s.o.b.” Regardless of what the truth may be about premeditation, what seems apparent is that it was a classic case of vigilantism.

One of many images capturing Ruby’s murder of Oswald taken. Via Dallas Morning News

Even if we were to disregard the evidence that Ruby had no connections to the mafia, to Oswald, or to a larger conspiracy, simple logic tells us that there was little point in sending someone to silence Oswald. By the time Oswald was killed, he had already been interrogated for 12 hours. He’d had plenty of time to spill the beans on any conspiracy about which he might have had knowledge. Likewise, the many claims about those with special knowledge being silenced by murder squads just doesn’t hold up. Conspiracists claim there are more than a hundred suspicious deaths related to the assassination. More than half of these died of natural causes, and more than half also died more than ten years later, which gives them ages to have divulged anything they might have known. It’s the same problem with the idea that George de Mohrenshchildt was silenced in the 1970s, a decade and a half after he testified before the Warren Commission. Of those supposedly mysterious deaths that occurred within a year of the assassination, some were even convinced of Oswald’s guilt, which makes it seem like there was no reason to silence them, and many had very minor connections to the case. There is the further problem of selectivity. For example, one witness of Oswald’s murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit would be shot dead by an intruder in his home a few months later. The claims that this was an act of a conspiracy to silence a witness begs the question why this one witness was brutally murdered while a dozen others who saw the same thing were allowed to live. Furthermore, we must ask why none of the plethora of witnesses on Dealey Plaza are included on this list of witnesses that had to be silenced, while many of them are simply journalists who afterward published about the case. This just illustrates the central problem with most conspiracy speculation: the refusal to acknowledge coincidence. My source JFK Assassination Logic by John McAdams highlights numerous logical problems with conspiracist thinking just like this. Conspiracy speculators rely on cherry-picked, outlier testimony that is demonstrably less credible than other witness claims, they engage in the creation of false memory in leading interviews with witnesses years after the fact, they mislead readers by presenting evidence stripped of important context, and they present an argument that suggests most evidence points to conspiracy, when if that were the case, official investigations would have come to far different conclusions. Finally, they demand that believers suspend disbelief in the face of truly odds-defying scenarios. Simply put, large-scale conspiracies are not plausible. As McAdams demonstrates, even if the odds are extremely low that one member of a given conspiracy might betray the rest and reveal the plot publicly, for any number of reasons, the more people involved in the conspiracy, the higher the probability it will be revealed to the world. Conspiracists like to point to real, genuine conspiracies in their efforts to demonstrate that their claims hold water, but any conspiracy that really occurred stands as evidence against the believability of their claims, since all such genuine conspiracies have been uncovered by whistleblowers and journalists.

After the release of the first part of this series, I was accused of playing down the events surrounding the JFK assassination, of taking a “nothing to see here” point of view. This from conspiracy believers, perhaps unsurprisingly, began to think that I myself have something to hide, that I am engaging in cover-up. I’d like to conclude this series by addressing this. Of course I’m not saying there is “nothing to see here.” This is the longest series I have ever produced on one topic for this podcast. There is a ton to see here. I’m saying that what there is to see here is far different from what many have been led to believe. And far from suggesting that the Dallas police and the FBI have done nothing to contribute to this confusion, they have given the public real reason to be suspicious of them. For example, the night after the assassination, while Oswald was being questioned and Jack Ruby was slapping backs around police headquarters, an assistant district attorney leaked to the press that they intended to indict Oswald for killing Kennedy “in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy.” Later, he invented another story to anonymously provide the press, that Oswald was an FBI informant. In explanation, the attorney, Bill Alexander, explained that he “never much liked the federals” and put out the phony stories to keep them occupied. It’s things just like this that have led to many thinking massive conspiracy is more likely than any mundane explanation, and distrusting authorities who insist the opposite. Then there is the FBI, who appear to have genuinely engaged in a cover-up after Oswald’s capture. Before the assassination, the FBI agent tasked with looking into Oswald after he turned back up on their radar had gone to the Paines’ house and spoken to Marina. Oswald had been so upset, continuing to believe the FBI was hounding him, that he went to the FBI office in Dallas and left a note for the agent (whose name he misspelled) demanding he leave his wife alone. After Oswald death, this note was destroyed. According to the FBI, this was because there was no need to keep it if Oswald could no longer be tried in court, having been killed. In truth, though, this appears to have been a genuine cover-up. Far from a wide-reaching conspiracy, though, the simpler explanation is that Dallas special agent-in-charge J. Gordon Shanklin ordered the note’s destruction just to cover his own butt. J. Edgar Hoover was already certain that Oswald was guilty, and it appeared there would be no need of the evidence, so the only purpose it might serve would be to indict Shanklin and his office as having dropped the ball and not recognized Oswald as the threat he was. So am I convinced law enforcement never acted improperly or was never negligent in this case? Absolutely not. But for all the reasons I’ve given over the course of this series, a massive conspiracy to murder the President is simply not supportable. Of course, it makes a great story, though, and when told by a competent, if unscrupulous, storyteller, it can even convince someone who knows better. That is the case with Marina, Oswald’s wife, who knew her husband better than anyone, and whose testimony demonstrates so clearly that Oswald was a desperate and disturbed individual acting alone. Today, the 80-year-old Marina, despite everything she knows about his temperament, his attempt on Walker’s life, and his behavior the last time she saw him, believes that her husband was innocent, because “[t]here are just too many things,” things conspiracist writers have told her and convinced her are true. In the 1980s, in fact, some conspiracist writers convinced her to approve of Oswald’s exhumation in an attempt to prove that a KGB impersonator had been buried in Oswald’s place. Unsurprisingly, forensic pathologists confirmed using medical and dental records that the remains in his grave were indeed that of Marina’s husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

“Exhumation of Lee Harvey Oswald's casket at Rose Hill Cemetery (Fort Worth) for examination of the body in Dallas, Texas.” (1981) Courtesy Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. UTA Libraries Digital Gallery, https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/10009894.

 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 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.