What the JFK documents reveal about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald
The March 18, 2025, dump of the JFK assassination documents has been another bust. We learn that they had remained unreleased to cover up the CIA’s extensive undercover operations at home and abroad. Relatively few of the files deal with the JFK assassination itself.
We should not have expected a smoking gun anyway. Underreported has been the fact that the JFK documents have long been open to researchers in NARA’s nearby Maryland facility. How much time have conspiracists spent there, I wonder?
With hope of a decisive smoking gun having expired, it is time to revisit the millions of words of testimony contained in the Warren Report of 1964 and its subsequent releases and to data collections organized by assassination enthusiasts. It is time to give up on flimsy tales of whispered conversations, conspiratorial meetings, supposed deathbed confessions and the like to answer three questions:
First, did Oswald have the skill, resources, motive and killer instinct to kill JFK? In my book, "The Oswalds," I answer this question in a resounding affirmative. I refer the reader to my arguments.
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Second question: Was Oswald’s crouching at the sixth-floor window on Nov. 22, 1963, the result of a coordinated planned assassination or of chance and coincidence?
Third, was Jack Ruby’s killing of Oswald in the basement of Dallas Police headquarters the product of coincidental events or of planned and coordinated efforts to remove Oswald from the scene?
If Oswald were guided by a sinister force inimical to JFK or the United States (Cuba, USSR, the Mafia or CIA?), he would have to be given his marching orders at some point. In the months and weeks leading up to Nov. 22, Oswald was in New Orleans, where he recruited on street corners for Castro. He netted zero recruits and a night in jail.
Next, we find him on a bus to Mexico City in pursuit of a Cuban transit visa. Despite his claims in an earlier letter to the Soviet Washington embassy, Oswald had no desire to return to the USSR. His application for a USSR visa was simply a means to a new life in Cuba. Surely Cuba would be indebted to him for his work in New Orleans.
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In Mexico City, Oswald contacted the Cuban and Soviet embassies, two of the suspected contractors of the Dallas assassination. According to various conspiracy theories, the Cuban and Soviet embassies were the conduits of Oswald’s assassination orders, most likely Mexico.
In Mexico City, he made one visit and placed a wiretapped telephone call to the Soviet embassy. (All entrants to the Soviet facility were photographed with a hidden camera.) His visit to the Cuban embassy reverted to a shouting match when the consular official denied his transit visa. The crestfallen Oswald returned by bus to Dallas. Within weeks he would be arrested in Dallas on charges of killing the president.
If Oswald shot JFK on instructions and orders of Cuba and/or the USSR, it remains unclear what role their instructions to Oswald could have played. Oswald already had tested his mail-order rifle in his narrow miss of Gen. Edwin Walker in his Dallas home. When Oswald was in Mexico City, there was no known plan for JFK to be in Dallas.
Any escape by Oswald from the future crime scene would have been (by Oswald’s practice) by city bus, not in a getaway vehicle supplied by his puppet masters. It was not until the evening before the assassination that JFK’s route was even known. (Oswald got his book depository job from a neighbor, again well before any planned trip by JFK to Texas.)
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Oswald carried out a low-tech assassination that did not require the help of Cuba or the USSR. Doing the assassination "in his way" is a striking illustration of how the "loner" Oswald operated. It also shows Oswald as a classic "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" kind of guy.
Texas and Minsk had been disappointing. No one recognized his genius. It was time to move on and the one place that would welcome him was Castro’s Cuba, so thought Oswald. Oswald remained intent on Cuba even after his disappointment in Mexico City. He continued to badger the USSR Washington embassy for his visa, that is until he learned that the president would pass under his window.
Jack Ruby led the life of a minor Mafia figure. He had few friends, and a bad temper. According to the various conspiracy theories, Ruby was tapped by assassination puppeteers (the Mafia?), to eliminate Oswald before he could spill the beans (on whom?). Ruby was known to the Dallas police, which would have given him a slim opening to kill Oswald.
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If Ruby was part of a (Mafia) plan to silence Oswald, the plan had a glaring flaw. Oswald had been interrogated nonstop in police headquarter since late afternoon of Nov. 22. There was no way for the puppet masters to know how long Oswald would hold out under intense questioning. Despite his call for a lawyer, he had no legal advice.
Dallas police planned Oswald’s transfer to the city jail meticulously with officers stationed in every nook and cranny, but they made a fatal mistake. They had to use the ramp into basement parking to admit the armored car that would take Oswald to the city jail. The passerby Ruby simply walked down the ramp in time to fire into Oswald’s stomach.
With the murder of Oswald by Ruby, could the puppet masters breathe easily? Oswald was gone, but Ruby, whose death sentence was commuted to life, would live another five years to die of natural causes and no hint of a conspiracy. Ruby did not change his story throughout this period. His motive (declared upon receiving word that Oswald had died) was that he could not let Oswald "get away with it." And he needed to show that "Jews have guts." He also testified that he wanted to spare Jackie the trauma of an Oswald trial.
So, have we reached a dead end? Will a strong majority continue to believe that the president of the United States was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald, a troubled misfit in a vast conspiracy guided by domestic or foreign enemies?
The public’s rejection of the 1964 Warren Report’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone ushered in an era of distrust in government which continues to flourish and even intensify to the detriment of our nation. Let’s finally say the truth: Oswald did it and did it alone.