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.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Two: The Activist

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