Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  8. Again in the same vein, if you’re the triggerman for the mob, CIA, Castro, or anyone else in the biggest murder case in American history, what’s more likely? That on the night before the murder, you’re at your home, apartment, or “safe house” preparing for the following day, and are either meeting with or at least available to your “handlers” for last-minute instructions or consultation? Or that you’re going to be visiting your wife, who is staying at someone else’s home, and begging her to come back home to you?* Common sense, which Voltaire tells us is not that common, dictates that it’s the former, not the latter.

  It is reasonably clear that when Oswald went to visit his wife and two children the night before Kennedy came to Dallas, it was his intention to get his rifle and assassinate the president the next day—as indicated, what other reason would he have had to go there, for the first time, on a Thursday night? It is equally reasonably clear that this intention of his was not irrevocable but conditional. If Marina was willing to come back to him, a possibility he already knew was faint, he was prepared to forego his plans concerning Kennedy. If Marina, then, had agreed to come back to Oswald on the night before the president came to Dallas, it is almost a certainty the assassination would never have taken place.†

  It is interesting to note that as we saw in the Oswald biography section, Marina herself feels this way. In a narrative written in Russian by Marina at the request of the Warren Commission, and translated by the Commission, she said about the night before the assassination, when her husband virtually begged her to come back to him and she refused to do so, “Of course, if I had known what was going to happen, I would have agreed without further thought. Perhaps, if Lee was planning anything, he staked everything on a card. That is, if I agreed to his proposal to go with him to Dallas, he would not do what he had planned, and, if I did not, then he would.”20

  Oswald’s entreaty to Marina to come back to him on the night before the assassination virtually precludes, all by itself, the existence of a conspiracy.

  9. This book has proved beyond all doubt that Oswald was a highly unreliable, highly disturbed, and emotionally unhinged political fanatic. His own wife, Marina, described him as “not a very trustworthy [trusting?] person.”21 At the London trial, when I asked Ruth Paine, who knew Oswald very well, “Do you feel he [Oswald] was the type one would employ to accomplish a serious mission?” she answered, “No. I would not have employed him for any job. I didn’t see him as stable enough.”

  “He was unstable and flighty?”

  “Yes…He acted from his emotions primarily…rather than working from a set of logical ideas.”22

  To believe that a group of conspirators like the CIA or mob would entrust the biggest murder in American history to Oswald, of all people, is too preposterous a notion for any rational person to harbor in his or her mind for more than a millisecond. How could they possibly have confidence in someone like Oswald to take care of their monumental mission in a way that would involve no problems for them, when he couldn’t even adequately take care of himself (he was living in a virtual closet on November 22, 1963), much less his wife and two children?

  10. Not only wouldn’t any group of conspirators ever dream of putting its entire future into the hands of Oswald, but the evidence is very clear that Oswald himself, being such a loner and someone with a mind of his own who disliked taking orders from anyone, would be highly unlikely to work with anyone else on such a mission.23 As author Jean Davison points out, the ultimate weakness of the conspiracy theorists’ contention that Lee Harvey Oswald was framed is their erroneous conception of Oswald. “In every conspiracy book, Oswald is a piece of chaff blown about by powerful, unseen forces—he’s a dumb and compliant puppet with no volition of his own.”24 But we know from all the evidence that Oswald was the exact opposite of this, in the extreme, that he was anything but meek and malleable. Here’s someone who described himself as having a “mean streak of independence”; someone who for awhile in grade school even refused to salute the flag in the morning with his fellow students;25 someone who, during high school, when ordered to jog around the field with the other players during tryouts for the football team, told the coach, “This is a free country, and I don’t have to do it”;26 someone who, as a fellow marine who was stationed with Oswald in Japan said, “was often in trouble for failure to adhere to rules and regulations and gave the impression of disliking any kind of authority”;27 and someone who, as another marine who was stationed with Oswald in San Diego said, “was an argumentative type of person [who] would frequently take the opposite side of an argument just for the sake of a debate.”28

  There were no exceptions to this perception of Oswald’s independence from those who knew him. A member of the Russian emigré community in Dallas said that Oswald wasn’t “responsible enough to have…anybody above him really telling him what to do.”29* “He resented any type of authority,” another said.30 Still another said, “I just thought he was a person that couldn’t get along with anybody or anyone.”31

  Yet the conspiracy theorists want us to believe that the man who couldn’t get along in school, couldn’t get along in the Marines, someone we know couldn’t even get along with his own wife, was supposedly selected by a group of conspirators to get along with them in committing the biggest murder in American history.

  No one knew Oswald better than Marina, and when she was asked, under oath, by the HSCA, “Can you visualize him working with an accomplice?” she answered, “Personally, I can’t,” basing this on the fact, she said, that “living with a person for a few years you…have some kind of intuition about what he might do or might not.”32 Earlier, before the Warren Commission, when she was asked whether she felt that her husband “acted in concert with someone else,” she responded, “No, only alone.”

  “You are convinced that his action was his action alone, that he was influenced by no one else?”

  “Yes, I am convinced.”33

  Marina’s biographer, Priscilla McMillan, who spent a great number of hours interviewing Marina, writes, “I have often asked Marina whether Lee might have been capable of joining with an accomplice to kill the President. Never, she says. Lee was too secretive ever to have told anyone his plans. Nor could he have acted in concert, accepted orders, or obeyed any plan by anybody else. The reason Marina gives is that Lee had no use for the opinions of anybody but himself. He had only contempt for other people. ‘He was a lonely person,’ she says. ‘He trusted no one. He was too sick. It [killing Kennedy] was the fantasy of a sick person, to get attention only for himself.’” McMillan says that Marina believed that with respect to the assassination, Lee acted on impulse and first thought seriously about killing the President only a day or two before he did it.34

  Not that by itself it would carry great weight, but it should be noted that no evidence has ever surfaced that Oswald, either around the time of the assassination or at any prior time, ever hinted, even accidentally, to anyone, including his wife, that he was working for or associated with any agency or group of people, and the Warren Commission, after an exhaustive inquiry, was unable to find any such evidence. And as to Oswald’s connection to any other individual, such as Jack Ruby, Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter said, “The Commission left no stone unturned to track down Oswald’s background to the maximum extent possible, to see if he had dealings with anyone else who might have been a co-conspirator,” and nothing was found.35

  11. As we’ve seen in this book, at the time of the assassination and Ruby’s killing of Oswald, those who knew Oswald and Ruby well, including family members, rejected the likelihood or notion that either had acted in concert with others to carry out their respective deeds. Yet years later, thousands of conspiracy theorists, not one of whom knew or had ever met either Oswald or Ruby, are convinced Oswald (in those cases where they don’t go further and say he was just a patsy) and Ruby were members of a conspiracy. On this one point alone of familiarity with the subject, who is more likel
y to be correct—those who knew the two men or those who did not?

  12. In a similar vein, we know from common sense and the experience of our lives, that more than anything else, survivors of a murder victim want the person or persons who killed their loved one to be brought to justice. What reason do we have for believing that the Kennedy family is any different? (As President Kennedy’s brother Robert said, “Nobody is more interested than I in knowing who is responsible for the death of President Kennedy.”)36 Yet conspiracy theorists, without any evidence to support their position, are apparently convinced that John F. Kennedy’s survivors are an exception. (Indeed, several are so crazy as to believe that RFK actually knew who killed his brother and joined in the conspiracy to cover it up.)37

  It is noteworthy, then, that the Kennedy family has been supportive of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Because of Bobby Kennedy’s fierce opposition to organized crime, which his brother the president supported, and because of JFK’s efforts, with RFK’s help, to remove Castro from power in Cuba, and with the concomitant dissatisfaction with JFK by the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban exiles over the administration’s failure to provide air support during the Bay of Pigs invasion, RFK’s first instinct—there have been too many reports from various sources to deny this—immediately after the assassination was to suspect a possible retaliatory killing by one of the people or groups he went after. However, after the coffee cooled and the FBI and Warren Commission investigated the assassination, he issued the following statement to the media on September 27, 1964: “I am convinced [Lee Harvey] Oswald was solely responsible for what happened and that he did not have any outside help or assistance. I have not read the report, nor do I intend to. But I have been briefed on it and I am completely satisfied that the Commission investigated every lead and examined every piece of evidence. The [Warren] Commission’s inquiry was thorough and conscientious.”38 RFK, who undoubtedly knew every one of the seven Commission members personally, had no doubt about their integrity in this case, while thousands of conspiracy theorists down through the years, 99.9 percent of whom never knew even one, much less all seven, deeply distrust them.

  Perhaps one thing speaks louder than any words, however, with respect to RFK’s feelings. During the entire Warren Commission period, he was the nation’s attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer in the land with jurisdiction over the FBI, the main investigative arm for the Commission. If at any time he had sensed that the Warren Commission and the FBI weren’t doing enough or the right things, wouldn’t he have automatically put pressure on them to do so? I would think he would do this even if the victim were not his brother—all the more so when it was. But he never did. Does that not speak volumes? Not only did he not do anything, but in a letter to the Warren Commission on August 4, 1964, he affirmatively told the commissioners he could “state definitely that I know of no credible evidence to support the allegations that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy,” adding that “I have no suggestions to make at this time regarding an additional investigation which should be undertaken by the Commission prior to the publication of its report.”

  The president’s youngest brother, Senator Edward Kennedy, told Time magazine in 1975, “There were things that should have been done differently. There were mistakes made. But I know of no facts that have been brought to light which would call for a reassessment of the conclusion. I’m fundamentally satisfied with the findings of the Warren Commission.”39

  What about JFK Jr., the slain president’s son? Since he literally grew up at the feet of his elders in the Kennedy family, if the sense throughout the years was that his father had been murdered as a result of a conspiracy, surely JFK Jr. would have known about it. And just as surely, the late son of the president would look favorably on someone like Oliver Stone, who ostensibly was trying to do everything he could to uncover that conspiracy. But when JFK Jr.’s staff at his magazine, George, asked him to interview Stone to help get the fledgling magazine off the ground in its second issue in November of 1995, thinking it would be a blockbuster commercial success, JFK Jr. balked. When his aides persisted, he agreed to have dinner with Stone at Rockenwagner, a Santa Monica, California, restaurant, and when Stone asked John Jr. rhetorically whether he really believed Oswald alone had killed his father, adding that there had to be a conspiracy, John excused himself and walked away. After he returned, the dinner was politely brought to a close as soon as possible. John later told his aides, “I just couldn’t sit across a table from that man for two hours. I just couldn’t,” and Stone was not interviewed for the magazine. John’s biographer, Richard Blow, who worked with him at the magazine, said that Stone “made John feel like Captain Kirk being stalked by the world’s looniest Trekkie.”40

  It’s instructive, is it not, that the Warren Commission’s conclusion of no conspiracy in the assassination is accepted by the brothers and son of the murdered president, but categorically rejected by thousands of conspiracy theorists who were strangers to the president?

  13. If a group like the CIA or organized crime was behind Oswald’s murder of Kennedy, is it likely that Oswald was so strapped for money at the time he murdered Kennedy that he never had a pot to grow flowers in, having, per the Warren Report, only $183 to his name at the time of his arrest?41* In addition to the $170 he had left for Marina, at the time of his arrest Oswald had a $5 bill, eight $1 bills, a fifty-cent piece, three dimes, a nickel, and two pennies on his person.42 A total of $183.87—a big hit man for the mob or CIA. Right. We know that contract killers get thousands of dollars to eliminate people no one has ever heard of, but to kill the president of the United States the mob or CIA is not going to pay its hit man anything, not even any money up front?

  When, on June 22, 1996, I went to the rooming house where Oswald lived at the time of the assassination, Kaye Puckett, who currently runs the place her family has owned since 1939, and was married with three children and living at the rooming house in 1963, showed me where Oswald’s room was, right off the living room to the left when you enter the home. I was astonished at how small it was. When I said to Mrs. Puckett, “This looks more like a large closet to me than a room,” she responded that at one time it had been used as a telephone room for all the tenants (it had also, at another time, been used as a small library) and was never intended to be a regular room to rent, but it was all that was available to Oswald when he came to the rooming house in October of 1963, the other regular rooms being rented out, and he settled for it. So the CIA or mob or military-industrial-complex conspirators were really taking good care of their hit man, weren’t they?

  Surely no one believes that Oswald would have agreed to commit the biggest murder in American history as a paid hit man for someone else without getting some real money up front.

  Quite apart from Oswald’s not receiving any large sum of money around the time of the assassination as a down payment to kill Kennedy, virtually all conspiracy theorists have alleged that Oswald was an agent of U.S. intelligence during the years leading up to the assassination, many claiming he was even a double agent, helping the KGB. But if this is so, unless the theorists want us to believe he was working free for these agencies (completely unrealistic), where is there any evidence that Oswald, at any point in his adult life, was spending more money than he was earning from his various jobs? To the contrary, all the evidence is that Oswald was always very poor. Poor to the point where he had to borrow money to pay for his and Marina’s transportation to the United States from Russia. To the point where Oswald owned one suit to his name, a Russian-made, poorly fitting garment of heavy fabric that was unsuitable for the warm climate of Texas and Louisiana.43 To the point where Ruth Paine described the Oswalds as “very poor,”44 and Oswald’s aunt, Lillian Murret, said the Oswalds “were practically starving” in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans.45 To the point where, as indicated, their friend in Dallas, Paul Gregory, told the Warren Commission that he woul
d often take them shopping for groceries and he was “amazed at how little they bought,”46 and their friends would bring food and groceries to their apartment.47 To the point where Jeanne de Mohrenschildt didn’t feel she could really judge whether Marina was the type to make a home out of where they lived because “they had so few things,” and you can’t “make a home out of nothing…They were so poor.”48 To the point where near the end Oswald was living in a very tiny 5 × 13½ foot room at a rooming house for which he paid eight dollars a week.

  As mentioned in the introduction to this book, no one has studied the assassination more than the late Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg. And as Weisberg confided to me in a letter three years before his death, he had “not found a shred of evidence” to support the position that Oswald was a paid agent for anyone, adding that Oswald “never had an extra penny, so he had no loot from being an agent.”49*

  14. The very rifle that Oswald owned and used to murder the president points away from a conspiracy. One thought that almost immediately occurred to me at the beginning of my research for the London trial was this: Why would whatever group (mob, CIA, KGB, etc.) that was allegedly behind Oswald furnish its hit man with a used, surplus, nineteen-dollar mail-order rifle (one that—get this—had a homemade sling)?50 Not that Oswald’s rifle wasn’t able to get the job done. Safely assuming that Kennedy’s head was the target of whoever pulled the Carcano trigger, one in three shots from the rifle did directly hit the target. But is it sense or nonsense to believe that members of a group like the CIA or mob or military-industrial complex, needing to make sure that Kennedy was killed, would let their hit man try to carry out the biggest murder ever with anything other than a very high-quality rifle? The fact that Oswald used the type of rifle he did is almost, by itself, prima facie evidence that he acted alone and there was no conspiracy. Oh, by the way, the clip on Oswald’s Carcano could hold six live rounds.51 But we know Oswald fired three rounds, and only one cartridge was found in the chamber,52 and the clip was empty.53 So the big group behind the assassination had its assassin set out on the morning of November 22 to kill the president of the United States with a clip that was missing two rounds.