On the day that marks the 62nd anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, one of the most remarkable developments over the intervening years has been that the American Left has successfully managed to obscure the fact that one of its own, Lee Harvey Oswald, was the person who pulled the trigger on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository.
That Oswald fired the shots that hit Kennedy is the only fact that we can be certain of, and he was the only person arrested having later shot dead a Dallas police officer J.D Tippit as he attempted to escape.
The murder of Oswald himself by Jack Ruby before any of the background to the assassination could be conducted that would have led to a criminal trial has allowed free reign for the conspiracy theorists.
Even where Oswald’s association with the left are admitted, these are framed as evidence for his being used as a “patsy” by any number of candidates depending on which conspiracy theorist you prefer; from vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, to the mafia, Nixon, the CIA and/or FBI, Cuban freedom fighters, aliens, the Ku Klux Klan, or a combination of some or all of the above and more.
Oswald’s apparent psychological issues – he was described in the Warren Commission report as possessing “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies” – are also sometimes cited as part of this. That same description could be applied to any substantial cohort of the far-left.
The Warren Commission also published Oswald’s own declaration of his far leftist sympathies and later evidence revealed his contacts with the Communist Party.
Oswald had joined the Marines – a former Marine acquaintance of mine told me that gunnery instructors used to cite Oswald as an example of Marine marksmanship! – and followed his declarations of support for the Soviet Union while in service by defecting after he left.
It should be noted – including by one of our great “fact checkers” who absurdly conflated the horrors of Soviet Communism and its threat to the United States with “McCarthyism” and the execution of people who stole nuclear secrets for Stalin – that a reverse defection and return would have at the very least led to prolonged torture, a trip to the prison camps and very possibly execution.
Oswald’s first shooting was in April 1963 at the Dallas home of a retired army general who Oswald had decided was a fascist. He was then involved with support for the Castro regime in Cuba, and made contact with the Soviet and Cuban consulates in Mexico of which the CIA concluded: “Although it appears that he was then thinking only about a peaceful change of residence to the Soviet Union, it is also possible that he was getting documented to make a quick escape after assassinating the president.”
It is entirely possible then, that Oswald decided to murder Kennedy in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs landing in Cuba in April 1961. That is lost now amid the obfuscation fed by conspiracy theorists, not least being Oliver Stone’s brilliantly made but historically absurd movie which is a hotpotch of contradictory conspiracy theories.
What the disinformation obscures is that JFK was hated by the left in the United States and elsewhere for having attempted to overthrow Castro. Despite some of the risible comments this week, Kennedy was no admirer of the dictator.
Indeed, much of his election campaign in 1960 had been focused on successfully attacking Richard Nixon for having been part of the Eisenhower administration which Kennedy claimed had allowed a communist regime to be established off the American coast.
Whatever the military and intelligence failings of the Bay of Pigs, in the aftermath Kennedy approved an intensification of efforts to overthrow the Castro gang through Operation Mongoose, which the President authorised on November 30, 1961 and which included covert operations for internal sabotage and plans to kill Castro.
Kennedy had also faced down the Soviets during the missile crisis of October 1962; and in Berlin where he made it clear that the United States would not tolerate any threat, as made by Khrushchev in June 1961, to take west Berlin. A threat that was followed by the building of the wall to prevent more Germans escaping the horrors on the other side; and not least Kennedy’s decision to intensify efforts to protect South Vietnam from the Soviet backed regime in the north.
The Communist Party of the United States of America, which had been in contact with Oswald played a huge part in creating the myth that the man who they despised for his opposition to their masters in Moscow (as conclusively supported by decades of intelligence on the funding of the party and recruitment of CPUSA members as agents) had been murdered by the For Roysh and not by one of their own, albeit a lone wolf extremist rather than one under Party discipline.
In a letter of September 1963, Arnold Johnson of the CPUSA wrote to Oswald advising him to join the Play for Cuba committee in Baltimore where Oswald had told them he was planning to move to, and that “we will find some way of getting in touch with you in that city.”
FBI records also indicate that the CPUSA was terrified that the link between them and Oswald – one which they came to suspect erroneously had been initiated by the FBI – and the fact that it was generally perceived that Kennedy was a staunch and militant anti-Communist might lead to a reaction against them. This was also apparently felt by the CPUSA paymasters in Moscow.
The KGB had nothing to do with the assassination and knew nothing about who had been responsible other than the fact that he had lived in the USSR and had recently made contact with them.
They were not surprisingly therefore quickly alive to the benefits of promoting the conspiracy theory that deflected attention from all of that. .
That was discussed as early as December by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. They decided to back the conspiracy theory and the first book promoting the claim that the CIA and “oil magnates” had been the organisers was a 1964 book by Joachim Joesten published by KGB agent Carlo Marzani, codenamed NORD.
The KGB for several years secretly funded Mark Lane who became the leading proponent of the right wing conspiracy theory. Lane wrote the 1966 best seller Rush to Judgement, and four other substantial books on the same subject. Ironically, Lane had worked for the Kennedy campaign in New York in 1960 and was most likely unaware of the Soviet financial support. Lane denied the claims by former KGB agent Vasili Mitrokhin which have been substantiated on virtually every subject he commented upon by other sources.
The FBI and the CIA certainly withheld information from Warren but the intelligence that was suppressed would have strengthened the conclusion that Oswald was a lone assassin motivated by far leftism. The CIA and FBI were only worried that it might have been shown that they had good reason to suspect that Oswald was an active threat but had ignored the evidence.
So it came to be that the American left with the support of the Soviet intelligence agencies created a myth that still survives. One that has successfully deflected from the fact that, after 70 years of investigation, the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Oswald had acted alone was almost certainly correct.
Oswald’s own life and political activism and recorded views would suggest that if there had been a motivation, then it was that he as a self-declared communist was acting in retaliation against Kennedy for having approved the attacks on Oswald’s beloved Cuba – a sordid impoverished state run by nepotistic gangsters which is an icon of the party that commands the current highest level of support in this state.
The oul Russians were always good at manipulating useful idiots, and there has never been a deficit in that department.