#lee oswald

[tampaxultra]

You and me both Oswald.

[tampaxultra]

I feel terrible for Marina. You lose your husband, your kids don't understand, and the country hates him. She got so little comfort.

[sgreffenius]

“Every decent conspiracy demands a saintly cover story.” ~ Ron Chernow on Jay Gould, who conspired to profit from manipulation of gold prices.

You could interpret this aphorism in a number of ways, but let’s apply it to Lyndon Johnson in 1963. Johnson was one of the greatest liars in American history, and that is saying something. One might profit if we compare his style of dishonesty with that of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, but let’s forego that opportunity for the moment. Instead, let’s examine Johnson’s saintly cover story in 1963.

Few people doubt, nearly sixty years after the event, that Kennedy’s killers managed to frame Lee Oswald for the crime. Fewer still believe that President Johnson knew of this plot. He was, after all, the president.

My mention of Johnson’s office after the twenty-second indicates I want to focus on the second half of the plot - the frame-up - not the first half - the murder. The second half was elaborate enough, and deserves separate treatment. Johnson knew enough about the first half to warn President Kennedy of the Big Event planned for Dallas. He did not say anything.

Late on Thursday, November 21, Johnson did try to persuade Kennedy to move Governor John Connally to Johnson’s limousine, second in line behind the president’s as the motorcade rolled through the city. He wanted to save his home-state friend from the fusillade that nearly killed Connally as he sat in front of the president. Kennedy refused Johnson’s request, unaware of the treachery that lay underneath the conversation. Jacqueline Kennedy, with more intuition, said shortly after the conversation, “I don’t trust that man.”

We know little of Johnson’s behavior between 12:30 pm, when the bullet that killed Kennedy tore through his skull, and 2:38 pm, when Texas Judge Hughes administered the presidential oath aboard Air Force One. Researchers tracked Oswald’s whereabouts and actions during this period with care. They have also written detailed accounts of events at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, where President Kennedy died. I have not seen similar accounts of Johnson’s activities during these two hours. What did he do as he prepared to become president?

We know he went to Parkland with the rest of the motorcade. He stayed there until Kennedy’s body, in a so-called travel casket, was driven back to Air Force One. By then, Johnson had made arrangements to take the oath of office on the plane, before it took off for Washington. Jacqueline Kennedy stood by his side during the brief ceremony, her husband’s dried blood still on her pink suit.

Johnson’s ‘saintly cover story’ concerned, you might guess, the commies. That’s right: every conspiracy at the time came back to the communists. They hid everywhere: Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Hollywood directors, union leaders, KGB agents, Lee Oswald. Yes, the feds cast even Lee Oswald as a communist assassin on November 22, the trigger finger at the end of a long arm that extended from Moscow, to Havana, to New Orleans, at last to Dallas. After a plot like that, Johnson would be a saint if he could prevent nuclear war between the two superpowers.

Significantly, that story crumbled as early as Saturday, about when Oswald announced to the world, as reporters pestered him with questions: “I’m just a patsy!” He had sensed since mid-summer that something terrible would happen to him in the fall. He traveled to Mexico City in late September and early October to see if he could escape this web. He failed. Moreover, he wanted to see his family again, so he returned to the States.

Johnson probably did not anticipate how heavily his cover story depended on Oswald’s cooperation. We can see how well Oswald cooperated in this short compilation of film clips from November 22 to November 24, 1963:

The photograph below shows the denouement, the single shot that confirms how accurately Oswald read the situation:

Lyndon Johnson swung into action after Jack Ruby’s pistol shot to Oswald’s gut in the basement of a Dallas jail, under police escort. The president even called Oswald from the White House, as Oswald gradually expired on a gurney at Parkland. No doctors worked urgently to save him, as they tried to save President Kennedy forty-eight hours earlier.

“Excuse me, the president is on the phone for you,” Oswald hears as an attendant hands him the receiver. President Johnson called to urge Oswald to confess. Imagine Oswald’s thoughts, when in the fog of oppressive pain, he grasped the purpose of Johnson’s phone call. He just lay quietly, and did not respond to the president’s petition.

[sgreffenius]

November 22: Fifty-seventh anniversary

We stop for a moment to recall November 22, 1963, fifty-seven years after President Kennedy died in Dallas, Texas, at Parkland hospital. By now we are a half hour into the next day, November 23rd. November 23 is my birthday, not a happy one in 1963, when I turned nine years old. We lived in Valley City, North Dakota, at the time. We moved from Minneapolis to Valley City in September 1959, in time for me to start kindergarten at the local teachers college. We lived just a few houses down the street from the campus. By fall of 1963, I was in fourth grade. Mrs. Teubner was my teacher.

I went to school that Friday morning: crisp, cold weather that time of year up north, a lot chillier than Dallas. We kept a pretty regular lunch hour at Washington Elementary School, probably eleven-thirty to twelve-thirty, though of course school children don’t take an hour to eat. We would go outside and play for a while in back of the school, if the weather was nice enough. The Big Event occurred just as we returned to our desks in Mrs. Teubner’s classroom.

That’s what people in the know called the surprise prepared for President Kennedy and the whole country as plans coalesced that fall: the Big Event. Not some fancy CIA code word, like Operation Catfish - just a euphemism that rolls off the tongue when you want to refer to something that cannot be spoken, because it is unspeakable. If you cannot refer to something in plain language, you find some other way to name it.

Even though Dallas is in the same time zone as Valley City - Central Standard Time - news would not have reached our classroom immediately. Yes, people with their televisions on at home would have heard Walter Cronkite relay the dreadful news from Parkland, but we did not have smart phones in those days, so Washington School would have been in a news-free bubble that afternoon. Everyone says they can remember where they were when they heard the news. I’m afraid I do not. Mrs. Teubner did not announce the president’s death to our class before we went home.

We received only one television station in our house then: CBS. We did not have a television antenna on our roof, so NBC had terrible reception, and ABC had no reception to speak of at all. So our television was tuned to CBS from Friday afternoon until after the funeral on Monday. That’s how isolated Valley City was, tucked into a verdant river valley on the vast Dakota plains. CBS news was our only channel of communication with the rest of the country, except for WDAY AM radio in Fargo. The Valley City Times-Record included short printed summaries of big events from the AP wire.

We seldom had the television on during the day, though we children would watch the USS Sink Not regularly after school in the winter. The television was in our front sunroom. My parents would drift over to the sunroom throughout the weekend, to catch the latest reports. You can’t say a lot after you say, “The president is dead,” except “Lee Harvey Oswald killed him,” and “Jack Ruby killed Oswald in jail.” I guess that’s pretty important news, so I imagine my parents had some curiosity about the aftermath. My younger siblings were seven, five, and three, so we did not follow events in Dallas so closely.

I wonder sometimes, if the people who planned the Big Event had let Lee Oswald go to trial, what might have happened? Would prosecutors have been able to convict him? No historian would want to take on a what-if question like that. A trial is too unknowable. Yet Oswald’s murder only forty-eight hours after an assassin took aim at Jack Kennedy’s temple made assassination skeptics even more skeptical. Moreover, non-skeptics began to question their confident belief in what they heard on the news, even if unaware of doubts at the time. Ruby’s single bullet to Oswald’s gut stands as one of the most notorious contract killings in the history of our country, second only to the murder that took place two days before.

Let me end with a comment about conspiracy theories. We see so many references to conspiracy theories nowadays, as Trump tries hard to convince voters and other influential people that somehow the election was stolen from him. He stated in 2016, and again in 2020, that any election he loses is rigged. Only fraud can explain the defeat. Only chicanery can account for the president’s defeat in the popular vote, and in the distribution of electoral votes. People insist that he present evidence for this position. The federal government, however, does not deal in evidence. If it did, it would not be the federal government.

I add these thoughts about conspiracy theories, together with thoughts about evidence, because it helps us sort out what happened in the years after Kennedy’s death - say through Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw in New Orleans. Skeptics during the 1960s were treated as crazies, people ready to bring down the country with their baseless accusations. Turns out some accusations have more base than others.

The ‘crazies’ who maintain the hit job in Dallas was the work of more than one person assemble and advance persuasive evidence. They began to assemble their evidence shortly after the gunshots at  Dealey Plaza. Of course, those who claim election fraud in 2020 do not have actual evidence behind their accusations. They have merely the president’s desire to stay in office.

Some conspiracy theories are true, others are not. We all have to decide for ourselves what we believe. We all want access to relevant evidence, to make sound decisions about our beliefs. Fifty-seven years after Kennedy’s murder, we still do not have access to relevant evidence, especially information that resides with the CIA. We will not gain access to the information so long as the CIA exists. The CIA will never relinquish it.

Related recording

Here is a link for Bob Dylan’s Murder Most Foul, a reflection on the Big Event. He released the song on March 26, 2020, with these words:

“Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.” - Bob Dylan

Read other comments below the recording. They will make you remember, and know the significance of JFK’s death.

[sgreffenius]

Two films about Lee Oswald

[sgreffenius]

November 22, 1963 - November 22, 1917

November 22, 1963 – November 22, 1917

This day in history:

John F. Kennedy was murdered by assassins as his motorcade rolled down Elm Street in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza. Doctors who examined his body found that bullets entered his throat, his back, and the right front portion of his head. The shot to his head blew his brains and pieces of his skull out onto the trunk of the convertible he rode in. Years later, James Files said he fired…

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[sgreffenius]

When a patriot becomes a patsy: part two

When a patriot becomes a patsy: part two

By late July 1963, Oswald foresaw that he would be whacked, just as Ferrie and Sherman were in 1964. He did not know how or when it would happen, but he knew he was vulnerable as the Castro project reached an inconclusive point, and he worked through possibilities for the future. When he went to Mexico City for six days in September-October 1963, he must have considered whether he should try to…

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[sgreffenius]

When a patriot becomes a patsy: part one

When a patriot becomes a patsy: part one

The Jason Bourne thrillers have a lot of plot elements that pull you in: amnesia and discovery of one’s identity, close calls and exciting escapes. One of the more compelling narrative lines is Jason Bourne’s success as David against the government’s gargantuan criminal enterprise: CIA’s Goliath. He starts out as a patriot, and ends in a simple fight for survival. He foils all of his employer’s…

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