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.

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.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part One: The Defector

Follow and Support Us!