SIXTY YEARS AGO.

Friday was for violin lessons.  Mrs LeMaster, who was no relation of a Milwaukee Braves pitcher (she probably got that question a lot) of the era, was the circuit-riding teacher, and her 1 pm stop was at the now-demolished MacArthur School on the southwest side, to develop our technique at getting musical sounds, rather than scratches and squeaks, out of our instruments.

That Friday, we had heard at lunchtime of President Kennedy being shot, and those teachers who had televisions in their classrooms were demonstrating the note-taking techniques they had been attempting to develop in us.  Sometimes modelling the behavior is the best example, but you still have to know what notes to take, or, in the case of the violin, to finger.  Those of us in the violin class trooped off as required, and we waited.  Around 1.30 that afternoon, Mrs LeMaster walked in:  "he's dead."  She had a car radio, which was still an upscale option in the day, and was listening to the bulletins.  We did a bit of technique all the same.

That weekend, the conspiracy-mongering began, particularly after assassination suspect Lee Oswald was shot on live television, perhaps the first time the news division got to play with the instant replay machinery that was in Dallas for the football games still ongoing that Sunday.

It is the Cold Spring Shops position that Lee Oswald had the motive and the opportunity to do the deed, and that Jack Ruby acted on impulse.  I recommend Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History for the details.  "All evidence points to Lee Oswald as the purchaser of that rifle and as in possession of that rifle on November 22, 1963. Thus, no second shooter. All the evidence of Lee Oswald's life and character precludes his employment by U.S. or Soviet intelligence or by anti-Castro Cubans, or by the Outfit. Much of that part of the book is heavy going, and Mr Bugliosi understandably has announced his retirement from further research and writing about the Kennedy assassination."  I'll offer brief (by my standards 😉) elaborations on that assertion below the jump.

Before The History Channel started injecting woke sensibilities into the Medieval Warm Period or looking for buried treasure in order to free associate about Free Masons, they occasionally essayed serious documentaries, such as The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy, from which they extracted realities.

It's worth watching, particularly for my readers who aren't able to remember what they were doing on November 22, 1963. It uses the latest in computer-assisted modeling to view the events in the Zapruder film from every possible angle, including from the sniper's nest and from a trailing motorcycle escort. That modeling demonstrates, quite conclusively, that the second shot, which wounded the President and Governor Connally, was not a magical shot, and that the fatal third shot came from behind. (Some years ago, Nova (or was it Frontline?) ran simulations that drew the same conclusion although the modeling wasn't quite as compelling.)

More persuasively, the show interviews Lee Oswald's older brother Robert, who, quite simply, states that if he had the least bit of information that others were involved in a plot he would be public with it, and Jack Ruby's brother, who explains that Jack was prone to exaggerating any involvement he had with anything that would add to his fame. One of the dancers from the Carousel Club recalls that Jack Ruby was quite angry and sounding off on the evening of November 22 about wanting to kill the assassin. Both Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby were loners (today one might call Oswald a "throwaway kid") seeking notoriety.

So what happened? A Quaker couple, Michael and Ruth Paine (who appear in the show, looking exactly like Silent Generation Quakers) befriend Marina Oswald, and through a friend find Lee Oswald a job as warehouseman for the School Book Depository. A few days after he starts work, the press reports the motorcade route. Oswald, who envisioned himself an assassin, sees an opportunity.

On Sunday morning, November 24, Jack Ruby goes downtown to wire one of his dancers an advance on her pay. He then slips into police headquarters. Lee Oswald's transfer is running a bit late, and he arrives just in time to commit the first murder to be televised live.

A series of small decisions combine in such a way as to look like a conspiracy. But for a different favor from the friend, or a longer line at Western Union, or a faster transfer ...

The show concludes with a meditation from William Manchester that explains the fascination with assassination conspiracies.

That meditation began with Mrs Kennedy herself, who commissioned Mr Manchester to write The Death of a President, and who could never square the accumulating evidence that some "creepy little Commie" or words to that effect had done the deed.  Great Evils let loose in the world have to have some Significant Cause, or so the thinking goes.  That Lyndon Johnson stood accused of Betraying Camelot gets a lot of people speculating about what might have been different had Oswald missed.  (A Stephen King-worthy horror show?)  That until recently it wasn't clear that Abraham Zapruder was recording a shooting already in progress.  That during the Civil Rights protests, the self-styled progressives wanted to pin any domestic discord on the Right Wing.  (For all the good that has done them lately, as the schism over Hamas shows, but I digress.)

Six decades have passed since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by rifle shots fired by Lee Harvey Oswald, a onetime defector to the Soviet Union, self-described Marxist, and admirer of Fidel Castro, but also a “nut” and a “loser,” according to some who knew him. The event stunned the nation and disrupted complacent assumptions about the stability of the American order. The assassin, no matter his purposes, delivered a blow to the American spirit with disorienting effects that linger today.

That it's easy to lose your capacity for reason.

That the man accused of the shooting described himself as a "patsy."

Listen to the whole clip, and pay attention, dear reader. Mr Bugliosi has documented Mr Oswald's efforts to secure himself counsel, mostly by making late-night telephone calls to New York lawyers.  He then said he was detained because he lived in the Soviet Union.  To use contemporary language, he asserted he was being profiled, one of the usual suspects to be rounded up, if you will.  As he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, he might have thought claiming to be a "patsy" had more purchase.

The assassin was a Communist and hardly a right-winger. He was also one of the biggest “creeps” ever to insert himself into history’s pages, a pathetic figure, even by the standards of assassins. He was haughty, arrogant, and insolent; he beat his wife; he could not keep a job; he was obsessed with politics and revolution. He gave a bad odor to Marxism, if that was possible. Like Richard III, he was “determined to prove a villain/and hate the idle pleasures of these days.” Everyone who knew him agreed afterward that he was entirely capable of carrying out such an attack.

Oswald defected from the U.S. to the Soviet Union in 1959, vowing that he could no longer live under a capitalist system. He pledged to turn over military secrets to Soviet authorities and may have done so. He returned to the United States with his Russian wife in 1962, disappointed with life under Soviet Communism but not disabused of his Marxist beliefs or his contempt for America. By 1963, Oswald had transferred his political allegiance to Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba.

In April 1963, Oswald tried to shoot Edwin Walker, a retired U.S. Army general, as Walker sat at a desk in his dining room. (The bullet struck a window frame, and Walker was unhurt.) Walker was the head of the Dallas chapter of the John Birch Society and a figure then in the news because of his opposition to school integration, his criticisms of President Kennedy, and his demand that the United States overthrow the Castro regime. The rifle Oswald used in his attack on Walker was the same one he used seven months later to shoot Kennedy. Oswald’s wife was well aware that he had taken a shot at Walker and had reason to think he might try to strike again. Dallas police did not identify Oswald as the assailant in the Walker case until after Kennedy’s assassination.

In that excerpt, dear reader, we find two possible explanations for the continued redaction of relevant documents that neither President Trump nor President Biden have seen fit to make public.  One is that U. S. intelligence was running and continues to run a CARDINAL style operation in the Kremlin, and the redacted passages would reveal specifics they'd rather the Russians not know.  Yes, I went all Tom Clancy on you. Deal with it.  The second is more troubling.  We know domestic counterespionage (primarily the FBI) was aware of Lee Oswald and on occasion interviewed him.  Were there recriminations about the Bureau not paying more attention to him the week of the motorcade?  Or are the recriminations about their handling of the Edwin Walker investigation.  The former general lived in part because the shooter, allegedly Oswald's, aim was off, and because the general, who was working on his taxes, chose the moment of the shot to give his eyes a rest.  On such small things reality sometimes turns, as it does in fiction.