What really happened to JFK and America in Dallas?

 I realised some time ago that my students do not understand references to the events of November 1963 in Dallas anymore. So I have been using a break to compile a briefing book on the events, the use of commissions and enquiries to pursue particular narratives, and the embedding of the JFK assassination in American culture. This is the first chapter. It is a very long read. All mistakes are my own. 

Before the Assassination

Lee Harvey Oswald was a US Marine and radar operator at the Atsugi naval base, carrying an elevated clearance. He was also learning Russian and loudly proclaiming his Marxist-Leninist sympathies. These were not investigated or treated as a security risk.[1]

Whilst at Atsugi, Oswald probably became one of a number of American marines in a programme to identify moles within the security establishment. This required him to cut his Marine service short by suggesting that he had to look after a sick mother, and also that he wished to seek higher education at a CIA-connected college in Switzerland. From there, he would defect via Finland to the USSR.

The mole hunting programme worked by sending members of the armed forces, predominantly marines, into the Soviet Union as false defectors. There, they would give limited true and sometimes misleading information to the authorities, who would then seek to check this information, and the status of the defectors, with their higher-level contacts in the American government. There are names and documents of other Marines who followed the same path as Oswald.

The files which could confirm or deny such information were pre-removed from normal processes and under the control of the ‘mole hunters’ led by James Jesus Angleton. A small number of people in the American establishment were aware of or alive to this programme, including William King Harvey, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and, after 1961, Robert F. Kennedy. Robert F Kennedy was highly anti-Communist and had worked closely with Senator Joseph McCarthy in a professional capacity. Anyone who sought access to the files would be immediately apparent to the molehunters.

Whilst Oswald was in the Soviet Union between October 1959 and June 1962, he married the Russian niece of a senior Russian Military intelligence officer. Oswald ‘re-defected’ in 1962, and returned to the United States, where he was helped by the State Department and various CIA-associated charities. During his period in the USSR, the Soviets shot down a U-2, wrecking an international summit between American and Communist leaders. Oswald had been aware of the U-2’s radar patterns and operations as a marine at the Atsugi base.

Whilst he had been away, the FBI and others had documented ‘other Oswald’s’ using Lee Oswald’s name and identity, and these impersonations would continue to occur. These impersonations were almost invariably associated with anti-Castro Cuban exiles and members of the intelligence community, who at the time were attempting to promote the invasion of Cuba and various schemes to assassinate Fidel Castro.

These schemes allowed for the training of anti-Castro Cuban assassination teams, the development of transferable plans, and the emergence of a special executive force. In the Eisenhower administration, Richard Nixon had chaired intelligence groups overseeing such anti-Castro elements, and the names of people involved were familiar to him. Lyndon Johnson was also familiar with gun-runners and mafia groups on the ground, as well as highly placed military sources, from his position in the Senate and from his use of people like Jack Ruby, who had been a former congressional operative, as well as his connection with Bobby Baker.

After a period of drift in Louisiana, where Oswald had a mafia-connected Uncle, and a number of jobs at places requiring reasonably high security, Oswald returned to Dallas. There, he and his family were befriended by anti-communist Russian exiles, CIA-connected businesspeople, and anti-Communist former FBI agents. As in New Orleans, Oswald associated himself with communist and pro-Castro groups, either out of conviction or, more likely, for intelligence purposes, and was involved with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

The circumstances of his activities suggest that he was both a provocateur and interested in becoming closer to Castro-ites. Oswald was, however, familiar with people who were anti-Castro, and worked in Dallas out of offices which were in the same building and floor as those containing such people. There is some suggestion that many of the anti-Castro radical right were also connected to an homosexual and sexualised underworld in which Oswald appeared. In Dallas, he was separated from his family; his wife and children stayed with a couple who have been credibly suggested as part of an intelligence-soaked world, if not as agents of the intelligence community.

During this period, Oswald is alleged to have travelled to Mexico City. The two ‘open cities’ for intelligence agents in North America, where the CIA was nominally banned from domestic US activities, and in which the KGB, MGB, and others could hide out, were Mexico City and Montreal. European Intelligence agencies and sex rings were also associated with the United Nations in New York. In Mexico City, Oswald, or an impersonator, attempted to gain a visa to Cuba, and might also have met with Valery Kostikov, a Soviet spy and assassination expert.

In November 1963, Lee Oswald obtained a job at the Texas School Book Depository overlooking Dealey Plaza. There is evidence that he had used a previous job at a high-security camera firm to manufacture ID cards for himself under the name of ‘Alec Hidell.’ Hidell was in fact the name of a former Marine colleague of Oswald’s, and Alik had been Oswald’s name in the USSR.

Between 1961 and 1963, John F Kennedy was on a path of spiritual and personal growth towards a ‘strategy of peace’ with the USSR. Initially, however, his administration had been chronically disorganised and personally offensive to many in the military and industrial establishments. Kennedy had encouraged an invasion of Cuba and then refused US support for it, at the Bay of Pigs, encouraged confrontation with USSR Premier Khruschev, then reached a deal after saying in private that he would never allow a nuclear war with Khruschev, via a back-channel, in 1962. He had also had affairs with women alleged to have been connected to Soviet spy-rings, and was in 1963 proposing peace, joint operations, the sharing of secrets, and regular communication with the USSR.[2]

In 1963, Kennedy and Khruschev agreed to end atmospheric nuclear testing against the wishes of their own establishments. Kennedy was also, according to aides, preparing to withdraw from military intervention in South-east Asia, having pursued a policy of forcing nationalists and communists together in Laos and musing on the same actions in Vietnam. In Italy, Kennedy had encouraged European socialists and democrats despite a longstanding US intelligence association with clandestine right-wing groups and organised crime, and in France, he had developed a relationship with Charles de Gaulle based in part on their joint distaste for imperialism in Algeria and Indochina.

Kennedy had also presided over a military-industrial complex which gave every appearance of despising him, and had not proceeded with plans, such as ‘Operation Northwoods,’ which suggested that a series of ‘false flag’ physical attacks on American institutions, citizens, and leaders be staged that would appear to emanate from the Government of Cuba so as to allow a military response.

Lee Oswald’s behaviour in 1963 fits into this background neatly if Oswald was recruited or manipulated into a position in which he was associated with Cuba and the USSR, familiar to the CIA and Cuban exiles, and known to the FBI and ONI, but unaware that he was anything more than a provocateur or informant on assassination schemes. Meanwhile, the fantastically corrupt, CIA- and mafia-linked Dallas Police Department was kept away from Oswald. Jack Ruby, a liminal nightclub figure connected with Congressional investigations in the past, a mafia-related figure, and an homosexual who employed an Oswald lookalike, Curtis ‘Larry’ Crafard, was drawn into some form of relationship with Oswald. Ruby, who was Jewish, was also encouraged to believe that antisemitic right-wing elements were plotting against Jewish people.

During this period, Lyndon Johnson, the vice=president of the United States and a figure of towering passion and corruption, who was much closer to the military and intelligence establishment than Kennedy, had increased his personal security. Johnson also made his support for tough, anti-communist action clear in every meeting, including those in which Kennedy restrained such actions, and was close to those who wished to wage war in Cuba and Vietnam. Johnson was hated by Robert Kennedy (as was Johnson’s former neighbour and friend, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.) In 1963, RFK was orchestrating a criminal investigation which had as its final aim the indictment and removal of Johnson.

In the late summer or autumn of 1963, JFK appeared to acknowledge this activity to his personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, by saying that Johnson would not be on the 1964 Democratic ticket as vice-president. Thereafter, Ms Lincoln believed publicly that Lyndon Johnson was involved in campaigns to remove Kennedy from the presidency.

Johnson and his protégé, Governor John Connally, had early in 1963 convinced John Kennedy to make a tour of Texas. The Kennedy brothers agreed to do so, but subverted the wish of Connally and Johnson to exclude their hated enemy, Senator Ralph Yarborough, from the tour. Yarborough was seen in Texas and Washington as a ‘Kennedyesque’ liberal opposed to the dominant Texas faction. On the night before the assassination of John Kennedy, Johnson in fact had a documented screaming row with John Kennedy in his hotel room, to the effect that John Connally should be with Johnson in his car in the morning, and Yarborough should be beside Kennedy in his limousine.

Connally was instrumental in the route which the Kennedy motorcade would take through Dallas, from the airport to the ‘Trade Mart’ a new building full of walkways and vantage points which the Secret Service did not believe to be safe. The original White House preference had been for a trip to the Womens’ Building in Dallas. The Trade Mart route required the motorcade to travel though Dealey Plaza, take a right then left turn, and then move slowly down a slope towards an underpass, past several high-rise buildings and two grassy knolls.

 

November 22-24 1963

John F Kennedy spent his last night alive with his wife in Fort Worth, Texas. After the row with Johnson, he had slept, had breakfast, given a short set of remarks outside his hotel, attended a political breakfast where he delivered more remarks, and had taken the short flight to Dallas in the presidential aeroplane, SAM-300. This plane had the call-sign of Air Force One when the president was on board. Lyndon Johnson had flown in a second plane, known as Air Force Two, and the presidential limousine was transported earlier. A third aeroplane for the press was also included in the small air group.

The 22 November fell on a Friday in 1963. At Dallas, a weekend of bizarre or at least highly anomalous behaviours, many of which are still contested in the witness evidence, began in earnest. Before then, others had occurred.

Most egregiously, the bulk of the Secret Service detail which was meant to protect JFK had abandoned their posts on Thursday night, consumed heavily alcoholic cocktails, after going on hunts for anywhere which could offer them food and coffee, and were sleep-deprived on the morning of November 22. JFK’s regular driver had died in sudden circumstances at Camp David several weeks before, and the Dallas trip (including the new driver) was staffed and led by a group which severely disapproved of John Kennedy as a person.

In addition, the 22 came at the end of an exhausting series of ‘near-misses’ that fall. The Executive Protection Detail had reacted to the appearance of serious attempts to kill Kennedy with high-powered rifles in Tampa, where they moved Kennedy from a motorcade to helicopter, and Chicago, where the route was changed. In Chicago, a plot had been uncovered to kill Kennedy with a sniper-team associated with anti-Castro Cubans, which would have been blamed on a cognitively deficient ex-Marine.[3]

Kennedy had been personally warned about Dallas by a number of political and social figures. The City had seen mob violence directed against the UN Ambassador and former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and was at that time the centre of the far-right in Texas, which was itself then a very conservative State. Kennedy, who had made strides towards embracing the Civil Rights agenda in law associated with Martin Luther King and others was particularly hated by segregationists and anti-Communists in the South.  On the morning of his arrival, Dallas business interests had placed a black-bordered, funeral style advertisement in the Dallas Morning News newspaper accusing JFK of treason, amongst other things.

As Kennedy was deboarding the aeroplane, a decision was made by someone else not to affix a Perspex ‘bubbletop’ to the Kennedy limousine. The identity of the person is disputed, as it is not clear if Kennedy or Johnson men ordered the change.[4] The bubbletop would not have stopped bullets, but it would have made Kennedy less of a target and might have deflected them. The usual order of the motorcade was also changed, so that the press were not behind Kennedy, filming, as usual. A motorcycle escort was attenuated, as the City of Dallas authorities were instructed to do a minimum of security work. Secret service agents were withdrawn from the back of Kennedy’s car, apparently under protest. Others were specifically ordered not to get onto the rider boards on the limousine. The originator of the order is unclear, with some secret service members subsequently claiming that Kennedy had asked servicemen to stay off the car. There is no positive evidence for this request, and a good deal of contradictory evidence which suggests that Kennedy had done no such thing.

The car moved through crowded streets, guided by a lead car in which city and military officials sat. Dealey Plaza was at the end of the route. That morning, yellow bands had been painted on kerbstones between the area in which firing would later take place.  Just before the motorcade arrived at the Plaza, a person was observed to be having what appeared to be a fit, causing the emergency services and an ambulance to be diverted. Windows along the route were not closed, and roofs were not monitored. The president had a minimal motorcycle escort, which dropped back behind the limousine before the Plaza, and neither extra police nor soldiers from the local army base were evident.

The motorcade was late in starting, although the parade route had been published in newspapers. If there were a lone gunman waiting for Kennedy, he would not have known of the late start. This is important because the whereabouts of Lee Harvey Oswald between 12 and 1—the assassination occurred at 12:30—put him in places where a run to or from the sixth-floor window identified as that of the sniper would be difficult.[5] The Book Depository where Oswald worked, for instance, had a mezzanine-type first floor which was reached by a few steps from the ground entrance. Oswald took lunch regularly with the minority groups (Texas was racially segregated at the time) on the first-floor lunchroom, and occasionally went upstairs to the second floor canteen to get a soda drink.

One witness places Oswald in the upstairs canteen, which also contained a telephone, just before the presidential parade arrived. After the shooting, Oswald was encountered by the building manager and a policeman on the second floor, with a coke, and not out of breath. Other employees were on either the fifth or the sixth floor, possibly rearranging boxes in order to eat a chicken lunch, and did not see Oswald. Women on the stairs watching the parade just after the shooting did not see Oswald come past them. The lifts were not working. If Oswald had been a gunman, working to the reported and not actual time of the motorcade’s arrival, he would have had to be in position, in the ‘sixth floor sniper nest’ made of rearranged boxes, by at least 12:15, and to wait there. There were witnesses in the Dallas County jail across the street who saw people in the window, but they did not identify Oswald and of course they saw multiple individuals.

From the sixth-floor vantage point, Oswald would have had a full-on position to fire at President Kennedy and his party. Instead, according to the official narrative, he waited until the presidential car turned to his right, leaned into his rifle, which had a misaligned rusty scope, fired through trees and off a sign with a missed shot, and shot again with a bullet which went through President Kennedy’s back, exited his throat, hit Governor Connally’s back, punctured his lung, penetrated his wrist, and then hit his thigh. A third shot exploded President Kennedy’s head.[6] Oswald would then, in the official report, have walked over to another pile of boxes on the other side of the Depository sixth floor, stowed his rifle, walked down the stairs whilst not being seen by anyone to the second floor, then entered the canteen to get a coke without looking out of breath.

Dallas police rearranged the alleged sniper’s nest and bullet shells which were subsequently found at Oswald’s alleged position when they flooded the building shortly after 12:30. No clip for the rifle bullets was ever found, and one pristine bullet was traced to the rifle. No powder residue was later found on Oswald’s cheek by paraffin test, which was administered after his later arrest.  Oswald was on the first floor shortly after his encounter with a policeman, and almost certainly directed a reporter to a telephone. He then left the building casually.

The policeman Oswald encountered, Officer Marion Baker, along with the building manager, Roy Truly, proceeded to the roof (via the sixth floor) where Officer Baker believed that shots had come from. It is not clear if the lifts had begun operation again during this time, and there are conflicting stories about policemen or others being heard to descend from fire escapes, possibly in the possession of rifles.

Two people who could be mistaken for Lee Oswald-Billy Lovelady and Wesley Buell Frazier—were standing in the doorway of the Book Depository at ground level and caused photographic controversy. Frazier, a friend of Oswald who drove him to work, was taken into custody, did own an Enfield rifle, and by his own account was threatened by a policeman if he did not agree to sign a confession later in the day.

Meanwhile, another policeman, Roger Craig, in the aftermath of the shooting, insisted that he had seen a person who looked very like Oswald come from the back of the Depository onto Elm Street, get into a green Nash Rambler station wagon, and drive away in the company of a dark-complected man and others. Craig held to this inconvenient story ever after, despite being shot in circumstances which he came to believe constituted a warning.  Only one eye-witness placed a man matching Oswald’s description in the nominated window, though he later prevaricated, possibly out of fear of reprisals from conspirators.

 

The Shooting: Controversies

There were doubts about where the bullets which struck Kennedy came from which originated with witnesses on the ground towards the northern ‘grassy knoll,’ observers on the underpass, a witness in the car park behind the northern knoll, and viewers of the film made by Abraham Zapruder which documents Kennedy’s death. As a consequence, various theories have emerged about the position of a gunman or gunmen, some via the police investigation, some from the House of Representatives investigation in the late 1970s and some from private writers, journalists, and analysts.

One eye-witness, James Tague, was struck by what were believed to be fragments from the first (missed) bullet which was either deflected by a sign into the kerb, or which hit the kerb and was then embedded in the grass. This means that, if there were only two subsequent shots, all the wounds of JFK and John Connally have to be accounted for by two bullets. The process is further complicated by Connally’s lifelong insistence that he was struck by a separate bullet from the president. This is troublesome because the Zapruder film, first instance medical testimony, and eye witnesses all indicated that Kennedy raised his hands to his throat before Connally showed signs of reacting to a shot, and that the head shot which killed Kennedy clearly came after Connally was hit. If Connally was hit by a separate shot, there must have been more than one gunman as Oswald could not have fired four shots in the time available. If he was unaware of being hit, and reacted late, a bullet going through Kennedy could have hit Connally with decreasing force four times.

The resolution of the Zapruder film and others taken in Dealey Plaza is not helpful. In the aftermath of the crime, the placement of Connally and Kennedy with regard to each other was mistaken by investigators, leading to the idea that a ‘magic bullet’ which made multiple turns of trajectory had hit both men. In fact, later computer analysis based upon a proper sizing of the car, its jump seats, and their relative positions, did indicate in a replicable way that both could have been hit by one bullet (the ‘single bullet theory.’)

The consequence of the uncertainty about bullets, which also arises from the unsatisfactory nature of Kennedy’s autopsy and the refusal of Connally’s family to examine his body years later for bullet fragments is that several believable theories have prevailed amongst different groups;

·         That Kennedy and Connally were hit from behind, from the Book Depository. There is very strong conjectural evidence involving observed wounds for at least one shot coming from this direction.

·         That Kennedy and Connally, or one of them, were hit from the front right, either from behind a picket fence on the nearest knoll or the underpass in front of them. There is strong evidence from eye-witnesses and the Zapruder film, as well as other photographic and forensic evidence (such as blood and brain spatter) for at least one shot from this direction.

·         That at least one shot was fired from the first floor of the Dal-Tex building, or the roof of either the County Records Building or the Book Depository behind Kennedy’s car. There is good photographic evidence for a disturbance on the first-floor fire escape of the Dal-Tex building. A ‘sabot’ shell, which could have held a bullet traceable to Oswald but fired from another rifle, was found in 1975, under roofing tar-paper on the roof of the County Records Building.

·         That at least one shot was (probably accidentally) released from the secret service car immediately behind Kennedy. This theory was put forward by two separate researchers at different times, and identified George Hickey, who was photographed with an automatic rifle, as having fired the ‘third shot’ which exploded the president’s head. Both of these theories emerged after the event, however, and are vehemently denied by the secret service, as much as they are by most of the evidence.

·         That Kennedy was shot from the left front, either from a concealed gun within a photographed van in stopped traffic, or the car park of the South knoll. The argument against this is that the position of Kennedy and his limousine should mean, were he to have been shot from the left, that a bullet hole or some form of entrance wound would be evident on Kennedy’s left, whereas none was.

In addition, from time-to-time various other suggestions have been made about a member of the public shooting Kennedy with a concealed or specially adapted gun, mafia gunmen firing from storm drains, Kennedy’s own driver shooting him, or even that Kennedy was shot by his wife. These are all, to various degrees, silly and somewhat ghoulish.[7] Nevertheless, oddities do abound—an individual, who was subsequently identified, standing close to Kennedy’s car raising and lowering an umbrella, an unidentified ‘Babushka lady’ with a box camera who has been associated recently with a CIA agent, a recognisable mafia figure, and the outline of policemen and others behind the picket fence have from time to time been noted or included in arguments about a plot to kill Kennedy. In addition, gunsmoke was smelt at street level by other witnesses in the motorcade, and at least one person has come forward claiming to have been on a protection detail on the southern knoll, who argues that he felt that bullets had come from behind him. [8]

Since 1966, beginning with analysis of film, proceeding through acoustic analysis and forensic evidence, but marbled with much speculation, the consensus has been that gunmen, firing from at least two directions, shot at president Kennedy. This consensus developed through persuasive private investigations, the opinions of some of the Dallas police, implied suggestions from president Johnson, the 1967 Garrison Investigation, and the House Investigation. It is now generally accepted by most but by no means all ‘scholars of the case.’

A good case can be made that someone, identified by one witness as Oswald, using Oswald’s gun, fired bullets which can be traced to the gun, from Oswald’s alleged position, which killed president Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally.[9] It is equally possible that a second or third set of shooters, possibly unknown to Oswald or the person in his position, could have been present.

Roy Kellerman was a secret service agent, sitting beside Bill Greer, Kennedy’s driver. He appears to have doubted that a bullet from behind had directly struck Kennedy, since there was a large hole in the back of Kennedy’s head and no damage to his face. There was also some damage to the chrome windshield and front screen of the presidential car. Kellerman speculated that a bullet from behind had somehow ricocheted around the car, before striking Kennedy. This is almost certainly not what happened, but illustrates some of the immediate uncertainties; the exact position of Kennedy on the jump seat at the back of the limousine suggests when correlated with the film, photographs, and limousine dimensions, that Kennedy was struck from behind twice and possibly in front at least once.

It should be noted that Lee Oswald was by 1964 widely believed to have shot rifle bullets, which missed, at a controversial far-right-wing figure, General Edwin Walker, in April 1963. Oswald was never charged, and was not a suspect, but Walker loudly identified him as such on an aeroplane when he heard of the death of JFK, and the Warren Commission subsequently agreed with Walker.

 

The Immediate Aftermath: Evidence

One of the many frustrating issues which arise from the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination is the deliberate confusion of evidence by at least five groups. President Johnson and the FBI, and then the Warren Commission, appear to have been convinced that a Cuban, or possibly communist element was involved in Kennedy’s death and that any revelation of this would result in an escalation of global tension towards nuclear war. It therefore was in their interest to blame Oswald alone as a gunman.

The FBI and CIA were in contact with Oswald before the assassination, and at the very least failed to monitor him or to warn anyone else about him, so it was in both their interests that Oswald, especially after he was killed on 24 November, be blamed as the lone gunman.

The Secret Service failed to protect Kennedy, and had been drinking the evening before the killing, and may even have believed that they could have shot at Kennedy accidentally. Kennedy’s brother and family had reason to cover his illnesses from a proper autopsy, and to direct investigations away from any Kennedy-related attempt to kill Fidel Castro with exile Cubans or organised crime figures which could have rebounded on Kennedy.

Finally, Soviet agents deliberately obfuscated evidence (as revealed in the Mitrokhin papers and elsewhere) to divert attention from themselves, whilst Mafia figures and others claimed a responsibility they could not bear to enhance their own reputation, or in the belief that plots they were involved in could have ‘come off.’

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, however, anomalies multiplied. Lee Oswald went back to his boarding house via a circuitous route. He took a bus, got off it, waited for a taxi, offered it to someone else, got in another one, asked the driver to stop near, but not at, his boarding house, and then got out. Apparently unconcerned, he changed in his room, armed himself with a revolver and went to a cinema. Oswald’s landlady believed that a police car, with markings that belonged to a retired car purchased in another state, blew its horn outside her rooming house as though to attract Oswald’s attention after he left. It was also suggested that she saw one policeman in the car and a police uniform which was initially mistaken for a second policeman, in the window.

In between his boarding house and the cinema, a policeman, J.D. Tippit, was killed in strange circumstances. Tippit was out of his assigned route, and had departed a local record store across from a bus stop on the route of Oswald’s original bus in a hurry. By all accounts, he stopped a suspicious person, who talked to him, then left his car, and was shot several times, including with a ‘coup de grace’ shot to his head. Six witnesses subsequently identified Oswald in a line-up though some maintained that Oswald ‘looked like’ the shooter, whilst others suggested that two people, or people with very different descriptions had been involved in the shooting. Shells for both automatic and revolver weapons were found near him and bullets in him, which were subsequently associated with Lee Oswald. A jacket, which may or may not have belonged to either Lee Oswald or Larry Crafard, was found nearby.[10]  

Oswald was then arrested in a cinema on suspicion of Tippit’s death, and taken out through the front door. He was not arrested as a presidential assassin. A clear description of him had been issued within fifteen minutes of the presidential shooting, without any clear record of where the identification came from. Within a very short time from his arrest, details of his time in the USSR, his family, his discharge from the marines, and his unstable personal life had been released to the press. Some of the press were familiar with Oswald from his appearance on radio debates and films, in which he had taken a public Marxist-Leninist stance on political life in general and Cuba in particular. This has led some to argue that at least one detailed file had been injected into public narrative from a federal or highly informed local level.

There is confusion over when and how Oswald entered the cinema, where he sat, and whether he paid for a ticket. Oswald was also identified as having been nervous on his way to the cinema, and ducking in and out of stores at the sound of sirens.[11]

In the cinema, there was a struggle before he was taken out. Some researchers have suggested that Oswald attempted to shoot one of the arresting policemen, and others have suggested that the policemen would have shot him if they were able to be sure not to hit each other. Some witnesses have claimed that another Oswald-like figure was taken out of the side door of the cinema, and timings as to when and how either entered the cinema have been confused. One witness has suggested that an Oswald lookalike was seen in a red car near the cinema, apparently waiting for a cue before driving away at speed just after Oswald was arrested. At the time, no one identified Jack Ruby as being in the cinema, but others later suggested that he was.[12]

At the police station, Oswald was identified as a possible assassin of President Kennedy, though not (by his own assertion) told this. He was interviewed, but the Dallas Police Department did not own or have access to taping equipment, and did not take consistent notes. We therefore have only scraps of Oswald’s interrogation notes on the 22^nd and 23^rd of November.[13]

During his detention, Oswald was by all accounts uncooperative, surly, and argumentative, though this was also how many acquaintances described him.[14] He protested his innocence, called himself a ‘Patsy’ to the assembled press, expressed some visual shock when the press suggested to him that he had been charged with the murder of the president, which he denied, and complained about the (highly questionable) ‘line-ups’ in which he had appeared before witnesses. Film shows Jack Ruby appearing at the police station on several occasions. In a press conference, Ruby corrected the identification of an Oswald associated group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.[15] FBI, Secret Service, and Post Office representatives were present at Oswald’s interrogations, but these were observers as there was no specific federal crime involved in the killing of a president in 1963, beyond the use of bullets or rifles from across state lines.

In the police jail and during interrogation, Oswald was unrepresented. He wanted a famous New York defender, associated with communists and liberals, John Abt to defend him. This was not possible, although the request was routed in some accounts through Ruth Paine via telephone, who is alleged to have refused to act on it. Dallas lawyers were quick to contribute to a fund for the widow of J.D. Tippit, meaning that they could not objectively act for Oswald. This all might have been a reason for Oswald to be as silent and non-cooperative as possible, especially since the murders with which he was charged carried the death penalty in 1963.

 

Oswald’s gun

On the evening of November 22, police arrived at the home where Oswald’s wife and children were staying, which belonged to Ruth and Michael Paine. Mrs Oswald admitted that Oswald owned a rifle, but upon search, the rifle was found to be missing from the garage. No boxes of bullets or gun oil were found in the garage.

Previously, in the Book Depository, at least one gun had been found hidden on the sixth floor, away from the window from which the sniper was alleged to have fired. One officer who was familiar with firearms identified it as a Mauser of a different calibre to Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano. The latter was subsequently identified as Oswald’s. It had a poorly aligned scope, and had been purchased from a mail-order dealer. Three shells were neatly arranged in a way which would not normally occur on the floor beneath the ‘sniper’s window,’ which were traced to the Mannlicher-Carcano. No fingerprints or palm prints of Oswald’s were found on the rifle until after Oswald was dead.

Another individual, Buell Wesley Frazier, who drove Oswald to work regularly, identified Oswald as taking a package of ‘curtain rods’ into the book depository, though it was one which was too small to be an assembled rifle. Oswald was not found with a screwdriver or any items which would have made reassembly of any gun easy. Frazier, who was similar in age and outlook to Oswald, was threatened with a charge of murder and shown a statement which, it was indicated, he would be made to sign, before Oswald became the only suspect. Frazier did own a British Enfield rifle.[16]

No clip was ever found for Oswald’s rifle, and some controversy has arisen from photographs based around guns in the possession of police who had searched the roof, above the sixth floor, and around whether or not a strap was attached, and how it might have been attached, to a rifle that appeared in photographs of the scene outside the Book Depository in the possession of the DPD.[17]

 

Everyone subsequently Identified in Dealey Plaza

Many films and photographs which could have been of probative use were removed by persons claiming to be from federal or local authorities in the aftermath of the shooting. Most disappeared and were never seen again. Some photographs and film (most famously the ‘Zapruder film’ of Kennedy’s death, taken by Abraham Zapruder from atop a pedestal just in front and above the motorcade) remain. They indicate the presence of people like Eugene Hale Brading, a mafia figure who also appeared at the scene of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination in Los Angeles. Some photos appear to show Gerry Patrick Hemmings, a very tall anti-Castro mercenary. A far-right activist, Joseph Milteer, has been associated with another photograph, watching Kennedy’s car as it turned into Elm Street.

Some controversies diverted serious time from research, however. For example, attempts to identify the presence of shooters behind the picket fence of the northern grassy knoll, have resulted in the forced depiction of people in police uniform (sometimes identified as Roscoe White or even JD Tippit) who are not apparent to the naked eye. Equally, three tramps who have been identified as tramps, and named, were photographed and have been associated with famous undercover intelligence operatives and assassins whom they resembled.[18] Some people have sought to confuse pictures of identified detectives with the future president George H.W.Bush, whilst others have identified a distinctive woman in the crowd as a CIA operative, June Cobb.

Audio evidence is not reliable. Of 90 earwitnesses, 58 have been recorded as believing that at least some shots came from the direction of the northern Grassy Knoll. Dealey Plaza is, however, an ‘echo-trap’ in the form of a three funnelled roads proceeding downward at a 15-degree angle towards a concrete overpass, backed by several tall buildings. A radio recording of the motorcade was wiped, and remade the next day (famously suggesting that ‘something has happened in the motorcade.’) Normal photo technology available to the public did not include sound microphones in 1963, and a police radio dictabelt which was once treated as probative cannot now be relied upon to indicate the sound of shots.[19]

Vast and complicated conspiracies involving exotic weapons, or Zapruder film alteration have been alleged. One researcher has even identified shadows in the Book Depository doorway with Lee Oswald, in a way that briefly convinced Marina Oswald later in her life that they did show Oswald. Very few of these controversies do anything other than waste time. Some are intriguing. For instance, a retired fingerprint specialist has strongly suggested that prints on boxes in the sixth-floor window of the Book Depository are those of ‘Mac’ Wallace, a convicted murderer and agent of Lyndon Johnson, although this has been disputed.[20]

The ’umbrella man’ who stood in front of the motorcade raising a black rainguard up and down has been identified as Stephen Louie Witt, who claimed to be making a protest about Munich-style appeasement of dictators by raising and lowering a ‘Neville Chamberlain umbrella.’  The person beside him whom, it is claimed, can be seen to be holding or pocketing a radio device has never been identified.

 

Events At Parkland Hospital

John Kennedy was effectively dead when he arrived at Parkland Hospital, as at least half his brain, along with a large portion of his right rear skull, had been blasted away. His heart continued to beat for some time, however, and Doctors tried to maintain life. In the course of their treatment, they and nurses observed the large hole at the back and right of Kennedy’s head, though only one seems to have specifically examined it. The rear hole made the idea of a shot from behind complicated, but not impossible given that the Zapruder film and a polaroid photograph taken by Mary Morman show Kennedy at an angle and looking downwards in the limousine at the moment of the shot. X-rays also suggested impacts from behind, despite considerable evidence that the later x-rays were interfered with.[21]

At Parkland, doctors performed a tracheotomy on Kennedy’s throat. This effectively destroyed evidence of a throat shot from the front which at least two Doctors speculated on. Kennedy’s remaining clothing does suggest a shot from the back, where there was an entry wound. Since Elm Street was at an angle downwards and Kennedy was exposed on a jump seat, a shot into his lower back could have emerged from his throat.  His tie and shirt were nicked (outwards), the wound was never properly probed, and no bullet was found. Other people in the car and in the secret service car believed that the shot came from behind. Unfortunately, the moment of impact is not shown in the Zapruder film, as the movie view of Kennedy is obscured by a sign (which was subsequently moved.)

 Somewhere between Parkland and Bethesda Naval hospital, where two post-mortem examinations were performed although only one autopsy was recorded, surgery took place on the head wound which had the effect of obscuring the origin of any bullets.

A heavy bronze coffin was obtained from a Dallas funeral home. The Secret Service then proceeded to remove Kennedy’s body at speed and under arms in the face of the objections of the Dallas Coroner, Earl Rose. It is not clear whether Kennedy’s body was removed in the ornate coffin with armed escort, or in an ordinary funeral shipping casket via a back door. The second casket arrived at the Bethesda naval hospital before the first, more ornate one, and travelled in what might have been presented as a ‘decoy’ funeral car.

The removal in any circumstances was illegal, and under Texas law an autopsy should have been performed at Parkland, but was not. The coffin was taken to air force one, where seats were removed in the rear of the aeroplane to allow it to rest. It was heavy, ornate, and parts had been broken on the outside to allow it to enter the air force one door.

The coffin was monitored and accompanied by the former First Lady at all times, except for the emergency inauguration of President Johnson in the middle of the plane before take-off, which she attended. Johnson had been at Parkland, but was rushed to Air Force One, where he immediately took over the presidential rooms.

The new president did not allow the aeroplane to take off before the former first lady and the body of his predecessor were on the aeroplane, and not before he had been inaugurated. At one point, Johnson was found in a highly emotional state by a military officer in the toilet, claiming that there had been a coup.

Governor John Connally was also treated at Parkland, where his chest, wrist, and thigh, wounds were treated. A bullet was found, either on Connally or Kennedy’s stretcher, which was subsequently traced to Oswald’s rifle. It was partly deformed on one side, but otherwise looked pristine, leading to it’s being dubbed the ‘magic bullet.’

Over the years, various people including a nurse and a secret service agent have said that they found the bullet in different places. Jack Ruby, the local night-club owner and mafia associate who would eventually shoot Oswald, was encountered by credible witnesses at Parkland.[22] Connally would always insist that he had been struck by a separate bullet from the president (which would have made for four shots) but, after Connally’s death, his widow did not allow the extraction of bullet fragments remaining in his body. If she had, the amount and weight of metal might have been probative of a fourth shot. Film evidence is not conclusive.

Outside Parkland hospital, the bubble top was finally installed on the limousine. This was attached with a series of bolts which were held in the boot, or trunk, of the car in a metal bucket. Some witnesses claim that the car was ‘washed out’ possibly because they saw a bucket, though some official sources also seem to suggest that the crime scene was cleaned in some way.

During its being parked, a nurse and others saw a ‘hole’ in the front windscreen, which was also indicated in some photographs. This complicates the issue of where bullets or fragments came from, as a corresponding dent in the chrome above the windscreen on the inside of the limousine was also photographed. The limousine was taken to Washington, photographed in the White House underground car park, cleaned, and then sent to a Ford plant where a new window was installed. It was subsequently repurposed for the use of Presidents Johnson and Nixon.

 

Robert Kennedy’s immediate reaction

Robert Kennedy was at home with his family at Hickory Hill in Virginia when the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, telephoned to bluntly tell him that ‘your brother has been shot.’[23] Kennedy’s first instinct was to check that the CIA had not murdered the president, and noted later that he asked the CIA Director, John McCone to visit him, where he asked him if the Agency had killed JFK, and McCone—an outsider imposed by the Kennedys on the intelligence community—denied any knowledge of such a plot. The Kennedy family also sent William Walton to Moscow later, with the message that they did not believe the Johnson-Hoover line that there was a Soviet element to the plot, but that a conspiracy had happened.

Kennedy also contacted Harry Ruiz-Williams, a close friend in the anti-Castro community, to whom he revealed a belief that a member of the government run anti-Castro operation for which RFK had responsibility had committed the murder.

This certainty was gainsaid by Kennedy’s later use of investigators such as Walter Sheridan to check if the Teamsters Union leader, Jimmy Hoffa, in alliance with organised crime bosses such as Sam Giancana, had been involved. Ultimately, Kennedy’s behaviour suggests that he imposed a paralysing suspicion of guilt on his own activities against organised crime, for Cuban exiles, and against CIA interests, which saw him withdraw from active political activity. After recovering and becoming a US Senator for New York in 1964, Kennedy trod a careful line of distaste bordering on hatred for President Johnson and J.Edgar Hoover in private, and a private condemnation of the Warren Commission, with public support for the government and the Warren investigation.

Jacqueline Kennedy was traumatised by the assassination, and in later life could not recall the shooting, climbing from the car onto the trunk to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull, or the state of his body as the car sped to Parkland. It was her secret service protection agent who climbed onto the car, Kennedy’s having been restrained by their team leader.

Mrs Kennedy was later apparently recorded for the book Death of A President by William Manchester as claiming that Lyndon Johnson was in some way involved in the killing. The family however moved swiftly to embargo the book through legal processes and the full text of Manchester’s notes have not yet emerged. Over the next thirty years, Jacqueline Kennedy would inadvertently refer to the SS agent in the front of the limousine beside the driver, in writing, as ‘Mr Killerman,’ and she also stated on numerous occasions in 1967 and 1968 that, if Robert Kennedy ran for president ‘they’ would get him ‘just like they got Jack.’

On the evening of the 22^nd November, Robert Kennedy was waiting under the tarpaulin of a military truck at the Andrews Airbase for the return of his brother’s body, and for the former First Lady. He behaved contemptuously towards President Johnson from the moment he pushed past him looking for Jacqueline Kennedy, travelled with one of the caskets to Bethesda Naval Hospital, interfered via telephone from a floor above to truncate the second autopsy and decided, after JFK’s head had been rebuilt cosmetically at a funeral home, not to have public viewings of the body.

There is substantial evidence, including photographs, that President Kennedy’s brain, or what was believed to be his brain, was separated from the body, but that it fell into the hands of Robert Kennedy so that he could rebury it with his brother at an evening ceremony in 1964 when the new Arlington Kennedy grave was built.[24]

Kennedy also restrained the discovery and publication of the adrenal and venereal diseases from which his brother had suffered. He ensured a naval ceremony in 1966 at which the ornate Dallas coffin that had supposedly transported his brother’s body to Washington was disposed of at sea, and he worked through Walter Sheridan to limit and suppress the 1967 Garrison investigation into the assassination.

Robert Kennedy eventually ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1968, briefly challenging President Johnson before Johnson stepped out of the race. He then won a number of primaries, including ultimately that of California, before being shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel just after the declaration of his California victory. Sirhan Bashir Sirhan was convicted under highly questionable circumstances of killing Kennedy, despite never having been close enough to RFK to have inflicted his recorded wounds.[25] Several members of the Cuban exile and mafia communities claimed involvement in the organisation of Robert Kennedy’s death. His son, Robert Kennedy junior, has claimed that conspiracies associated with elements of the CIA killed his Uncle and also his father.

 

The Two Autopsies

Once the new and old presidential party, the second aeroplane previously allocated to the vice-president, and the press plane arrived back at Andrews Air Force Base, the former First Lady and the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, insisted on accompanying president Kennedy’s body to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. They believed that the body was in the original Dallas coffin. Two hearses were employed, possibly to divert the press. Staff at the hospital received one ordinary military casket, containing President Kennedy’s body in a body bag, almost half an hour before the Dallas coffin was brought in. It was evident to some of the doctors that there had been surgery of the head on the corpse.[26]

There were in effect two post-mortems of the body, but the original notes were burned and rewritten.[27] A very full autopsy room was chaotically taken over by FBI agents, Air Force Generals such as Curtis LeMay (who smoked a cigar on the wooden bleachers in the theatre) Admirals, and others. The doctors were at vital points restrained, did not trace bullet paths through the body, did not properly identify how much brain had been lost or from which direction bullets had come, and did not investigate the tracheotomy wound.

X-rays were taken which were subsequently interfered with to buttress the claim that Oswald alone shot from behind.[28] One individual claimed to have ‘original film’ but he died in questionable circumstances some time later. The body was eventually given over to a funeral home, which embalmed and cosmetically repaired it, and was then returned to the White House. Drawings, rather than photographs, were offered after a period of time to researchers, but photographs were eventually released. These have been questioned intensely.[29]

Immediately after the second autopsy in the early hours of November 23^rd, John Kennedy’s body was embalmed, cosmetically treated, transferred to a new wooden coffin, and moved to the White House. There, Jacqueline Kennedy and the Attorney General decided after viewing the body that the coffin should be closed and not open for display before burial.[30]

The burial was scheduled for Monday, 25^th November. This was in part expedited because US Marines, by coincidence, had been drilling for a presidential funeral in the week before the assassination.

 

Johnson and Hoover on Saturday 23

On arrival at Washington, President Johnson retreated to his house, the Elms, where he was nearly shot by a secret service agent. The next morning, he occupied the oval office and began the removal of Kennedy’s personal items and Secretary. At 10am he talked with Director Hoover about Oswald. Hoover suggested that the case against Oswald was not great, and that a tape existed of someone who was not Oswald purporting to be him, but whose voice was different, calling communist consulates in Mexico City.[31] Hoover also garbled the sequence of events in Dallas, claiming that Kennedy had turned around to face Oswald, and identified Oswald as a communist. A fourteen-minute gap exists on their call.

Johnson then attempted to reassure Cabinet members before and at a meeting later that he wanted all of their support and was relying on them. Several of the ‘Kennedy people’ reacted badly to this, but pledged immediate loyalty.

The new president then met with members of the military and intelligence community, and issues National Security Action Memorandum 273. Whilst purporting to continue President Kennedy’s Vietnam policies, this Memo confirmed that the president would take a much tougher line on North Vietnam and that advisers were expected to support him in this.

This in itself was a reversal. President Kennedy had said to aides that he would not escalate the war in Vietnam, had begun to withdraw advisers, had been appalled by the elimination of the Diem brothers earlier in November, and had developed the beginnings of a détente with Premier Khruschev in the USSR. To Kenneth O’Donnell, who functioned as a Chief of Staff, Kennedy apparently claimed that he would not reveal his intentions to quarantine or neutralise the Vietnam issue until re-elected in 1964. Kennedy insiders had also suspected that a meeting scheduled for that day with the Ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, would have resulted in Lodge’s dismissal.[32]

There had been a split in the Kennedy administration, with the president (as usual) favouring peace and restraint, and his brother, Defense Secretary, the Joint Chiefs, the vice-president, and others favouring aggressive action. This essentially replicated the pattern of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.[33]

Marina Oswald

Marina Prusakova Oswald Porter is still alive as of 2025, and has enjoyed a long marriage with a Texan businessman after her marriage to Lee Oswald. There is no substantial evidence that she was in any way an active agent of the Soviet intelligence community. There were anomalies in her background—a questionable denomination of her place of birth on a birth certificate, her MVD uncle, her association with Western foreigners in Minsk—which have raised questions. Once in the United States, she became separated from Lee Oswald and close to another woman, Ruth Paine. Paine could best be described as a CIA-adjacent Quaker philanthropist and international aid worker with family connections to the intelligence community.

At the time of the assassination, Marina Oswald cooperated with authorities, whilst her mother-in-law, Marguerite Oswald, did not. Mrs Oswald was depicted as grasping and unstable in the corporate media in part because she insisted loudly, often, and for the rest of her life, that her son had been a government agent and was framed by a conspiracy. Marina, who was the mother of two children at the time and who could have been returned to the USSR only came to doubt Oswald’s guilt in the later 1980s. At the start of that decade, in 1981, she allowed Oswald’s grave grave to be opened and the body examined to refute the allegation that the interred corpse was that of a different, soviet, agent distinct from her first husband. During this examination she removed items which had sentimental violence from the decayed corpse, such as a ring.

In 1963, Mrs Oswald gave damning evidence against Lee Oswald. She verified the ‘backyard photos’ of Oswald standing with a rifle, a revolver, and two ideologically contradictory but clearly marked socialist newspapers, as real. In fact, she said that she took the pictures. She also said that Oswald had a rifle, showed police officers on the evening of the shootings where it was stored in the Paine garage (the rifle was absent) and confirmed that Oswald had shot at General Walker. She presented a picture of Oswald as a volatile, occasionally abusive husband.  She was also more than willing to accept the modern equivalent of $700,000 dollars in donations from well-wishers, and finally became a US citizen in 1989 after 24 years of marriage to a Texan businessman.

Marina Oswald came from what might be called an upper stratum of the Soviet nomenklatura. She would have been used to the presence of guards, who kept her in a hotel-based custody until her twenty hours of Warren Commission testimony was concluded. She was in fact very friendly with the Secret Service, by all accounts.  She was intelligent enough to realise that the FBI was bugging her calls and surroundings during that time. Her departure from the Soviet Union had been quick, but she never showed any personal inclination to return, although she believed that Lee did and went along with his exploration of a return visa.

After the assassination, Ruth Paine’s husband, Michael, was overheard on a telephone saying that he believed that Lee Oswald had shot Kennedy, but ‘we both know who is responsible.’ This statement gave rise to some fevered speculation that Marina was a Soviet ‘sleeper’ or ‘Swallow’ agent, but neither KGB files, nor any pattern of behaviour, nor any other evidence suggest so, and the results of investigations have been negative.

 

Oswald’s Death, Sunday 24

Lee Oswald was arrested within 70 minutes of his leaving the Book Depository and (possibly) shooting JD Tippit. He was taken to the Police and Courts Building, where the Dallas Police Department was based. There, he would be interrogated across different sessions for some 36 hours. No consistent or accurate record was kept of those interviews, but so many people were in the room when interrogations were ongoing that a picture of key moments and a consensus on quotes and behaviour exists. On several occasions, Oswald was taken around the third floor of the police department, which was crowded by members of the local, national, and international press, and also moved up and down from the basement jail cells.

Early in his detention, whilst being escorted to an interrogation, Oswald asserted to the press that he was a ‘Patsy’ who had been arrested because he had lived in the Soviet Union. By this, he appears to have meant that he was either being accused of something that he did not do, or that he was an easy target for the police regardless of guilt. Interrogators and observers, in a somewhat self-serving way, were to remember Oswald as a disputatious but controlled figure, who did not respond normally to questioning. Some believed that he had been trained to deal with interrogation.

Oswald appears to have made numerous allegations during the course of his interviews, such as that the ‘backyard photos’ were fakes, made up of his face and someone else’s body. He also hinted, as he had done from the time of his arrest, that he had different identities, noting at one point that ‘everyone will know who I am now,’ in a way which was not boastful.  

Oswald was visited by his brother and wife in prison. Oswald’s elder brother Robert was confused at Oswald’s calm and distracted attitude, and said immediately afterwards that he neither knew nor recognised his brother from his meeting. Oswald had told his brother not to look into his eyes ‘as you will find nothing there.’ He never admitted guilt, nor did he claim any motive across his time in detention.

Just after midnight on 22/23 November, Oswald was presented to the press, apparently so that it could be shown that he was not being brutalised (although he had sustained a black eye and bruises during his arrest, and attributed the injury to a policeman.) Oswald had been told that he was being held as the suspect in the Tippit shooting, and for the murder of the president, but claimed to the press that he had not been charged, and asked for legal assistance. Many trained and untrained observers have noticed Oswald’s reaction to being told by a journalist that he had been charged with the murder of the president was not so much one of shock as of a mixture of realisation and surprise.

Oswald complained that the line-ups at which he had presented were unfair and that he was distinguished from all the others in the DPD basement who were paraded in front of witnesses. This was correct. A paraffin test was also applied to his face, which it was believed would have indicated if he had fired a gun or not that day. The test was negative. Oswald did not have a lawyer present at his interrogations. At any future trial, these issues could well have steered him towards the dismissal of the case or an acquittal, and it may be that Oswald realised this.

According to a switchboard operator, Oswald made one unexplained attempt at a telephone call, having asked Mrs Paine to contact a lawyer (which she did not do) to a number in Raleigh, Virginia. This number, some researchers say, was associated with an intelligence ‘cut out,’ meaning a person that could pass a message on. This story, like many, has been accepted but not proven in the minds of many students of the case. 

On the Sunday morning of 24^th November, Lee Oswald was taken from the third floor to the basement garage of the police building. He was given a dark sweater as he had complained of cold.[34] He was escorted by two policemen, one of whom suggested to him that he hoped any potential assailant was ‘as good a shot as [Oswald] was,’ to which Oswald replied that no one was going to shoot him. The car which was to take him, rather than an armoured vehicle, became trapped in the melee around the press, and, as Oswald was being led through a path through the press crowd, he was shot by a member of the public, Jack Ruby.

Ruby was a night-club owner and a small-time businessman who was connected to the Jewish and Italian elements of the Mafia in Chicago, New Orleans, and Dallas. He has also been connected, via his real name (Jacob Rubenstein) to a Congressional committee on organised crime as a potential informant in 1947. The significance of this is that it explains why Richard Nixon, who sat on the committee, may have recognised the name. An alternate possibility is that Ruby had briefly met Nixon at the Pepsi convention in Dallas on November 22, where Nixon was representing the soft drinks company and Ruby was seen by a Canadian trade reporter handing out cards for free entry to Ruby’s downtown strip club, The Carousel.

Ruby was well known to the Dallas PD. He offered free drinks to policemen at his club, brought sandwiches for those on long shifts to the Police Headquarters, and kept police informed of his activities. Before the assassination, Ruby made numerous calls to figures in organised crime, and was also involved with gun-running for the Cuban exile community. He was known to figures in Chicago, and to Sam Giancana, Carlos Marcello, and Santos Trafficante, who were prominent mafia warlords, as well as to members of the press, like Seth Kantor, who encountered Ruby at Parkland.

Ruby has been shown on videotape to have been in the police Headquarters from Saturday afternoon. He corrected the Dallas District Attorney, who had stumbled over Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba membership (a membership of one in Dallas). Late on Saturday evening, a telephone call to the police station which was associated by the receiver with Ruby’s familiar and distinctive voice threatened to kill Oswald on Sunday if he was not protected.

On Sunday morning, Ruby appeared in the police station—almost certainly because he was escorted in by friendly officers, rather than, as the US government later claimed, because he slipped down an entrance ramp to the basement—and was present in the crowd when Oswald emerged. He then moved forward, in front of the national television and press, and fired one shot from his revolver into Oswald’s torso, causing massive organ damage and internal bleeding.

J. Edgar Hoover, commenting in Washington, realised immediately that Ruby’s actions deeply complicated the presidential line, reinforced by the acting Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, that the public be convinced that Oswald was guilty. Oswald was rushed to Parkland hospital, where despite the best efforts of doctors, he was declared dead. During the struggle to keep Oswald alive, President Johnson telephoned doctors demanding that they take a deathbed confession in front of FBI agents, which neither the doctors nor Oswald could do.

Oswald was subsequently autopsied, embalmed, and placed in a funeral home. There, US government agents visited, telling morticians that they ‘were not sure who was in the coffin’ and ostensibly seeking fingerprints. They were seen to have brought a package with them. After the visit, Oswald’s palm print was identified on the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle allegedly found in the book depository.

Ruby would go on to be defended by a famous lawyer who was seen as a friend of the likes of James Hoffa, the Teamster Union boss, and organised criminals, Melvin Belli. Belli would put forward the defence that Ruby suffered from a form of neuromotor epilepsy, triggered by grief for Mrs Kennedy’s widowhood and a love of president Kennedy, which caused him to kill Oswald, This did not sit easily with the evidence from the cells of the 24^th November that Ruby was highly agitated until Oswald was declared dead, when he suddenly relaxed. There is also evidence that Ruby came into a large sum of money before the assassination, but tax avoidance and cash business were part and parcel of his sector.

Ruby was convicted and sentenced to death. This was overturned on appeal. Before these events, he claimed to members of the Warren Commission in one meeting that he could not tell the truth of events in Dallas, in Dallas. He also implied to the press that, without Lyndon Johnson, the assassination would not have happened, and claimed that an attempt was being made to blame Jews for the Kennedy killing so as to provoke pogroms or worse. He had apparently not expected that he would be convicted. Ruby’s appeal resulted in the overturning of the death penalty, but not his crime. Before he could seek vindication in a new trial, he died of a fast-acting and hitherto undisclosed cancer in jail.

Ruby’s nightclub and mob connections were a source of intrigue to subsequent generations of scholars. He was well-liked by the women who worked for him as exotic dancers, although he could be violent to customers. J. Edgar Hoover, who was in a long-term domestic relationship with a man, told Walter Jenkins, who was a bisexual who worked for Lyndon Johnson until a gay scandal, that Ruby was an homosexual who lived with a man and who had been seen in the company of Larry Crafard, amongst others. Crafard was also homosexual. Clay Shaw, and David Ferrie, who were identified by the New Orleans DA, Jim Garrison, as figures in a Kennedy conspiracy, were also part of an underground gay ‘scene.’

This was at a time when male homosexuality could break careers and lead to police charges if exposed. Various attempts have been made to link Lee Oswald to such activities, but Oswald does not appear to have been anything but heterosexual, having fathered two children with Marina, been involved with women when he was on military service in the far east, and having had girlfriends in the USSR.  

Ruby, like Oswald, remains a mysterious character. It should be noted that, when and if he encountered JD Tippit, Oswald was on a route which led in the direction of Jack Ruby’s rooming house. The route also led, however, to a bus stop which would have allowed Oswald to get on a bus out of Dallas and in the general direction of Mexico. In any event, Oswald was eventually located at the Texas Theater, which was in the opposite direction. After the event, some claimed that Ruby was in the theater, but again, evidence for this proposition is by no means reliable at all.

 

 Stirring the Pot; Sixties Years of claims and theories

The death of Oswald effectively closed investigations into the actual circumstances of the events of November 22^nd and replaced them with a series of attempts to convert evidence and testimony into a narrative based on the guilt of Lee Oswald as a maniacal, isolated opportunist gunman. The effects of these distortions were profound. Every anomaly or suspicion was at some point or another fixed upon, and woven into a conscious narrative. Facts became part of creative mosaics, rather than leading to conclusions. Waters were muddied and pots were stirred, and, in a manner not uncharacteristic of American life, over the next sixty years everyone talked. Only the dead were silent.

It is therefore quite possible that a lone gunman, a small local conspiracy, or a vast national conspiracy and coup d’etat gripped Dallas and Washington from the 22 November. Kennedy had died at a time of peak, pre-inflation prosperity and when the US, though threatened by nuclear conflict, was at peace. As the Vietnam war, and the debasement of the dollar took a grip, more and more people turned to the events in Dallas as the ultimate solvent of their civic faith, which dissolved quickly in the face of the suspicion surrounding Kennedy’s death.

The actions of key players, in the media, politics, and legal worlds, and the appearance of a corporate refusal on the part of academics, journalists, and aspirant members of the American governing classes to even question Oswald’s apparent guilt—he was never tried, after all—ultimately created links between the counter-culture and everyday perspectives. The idea that America was riddled with organised crime, clandestine organisations, and a duplicitous government, and that it contained murderous enforcers of the official line, was propagated relentlessly.

Instead of following the example of the Declaration of Independence and ‘presenting facts to a candid world’ the American establishment chose to put forward one line, of Oswald’s lone guilt. This line depended on so many elisions, coincidences, anomalies, and curiosities as to be ridiculous, but we must assume that, to many, the alternative of letting the public come to its own conclusions on the basis of all the facts of Dallas and Bethesda was to many in the government and intelligence community, far worse. It is to the sixty-year effort to control the narrative that historians should now turn.

---

[1] The story of the Kennedy assassinations involved intriguing characters, multiple sets of rival ‘canon’ facts, and a great deal of disputation about multiply muddied waters. To save from the overuse of the word ‘apparently,’ I have in this text erred on the side of caution. Statements are based on the evidence accepted by observers, witnesses, and ‘scholars of the case’ but the standard is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That means that I will juxtapose facts and clear logical inferences, but will keep back from pretending that I’m writing a definitive account. Readers should proceed with caution.

[2] There is some evidence that the Vatican, had sponsored communication in 1963 under both Popes John XXiii and Paul Vi, and that this explains why US security clearance is needed for scholars who wish to see papers from that summer and fall in the Vatican archives (this would mean that the papers are effectively unobtainable.)

[3] The secret service agent who subsequently revealed this plot, Abraham Bolden, was the first African-American agent on a presidential detail, having been appointed personally by John Kennedy. He was subsequently accused of corruption on questionable evidence, convicted, and eventually pardoned by President Biden, claiming that he had been made to look guilty by an anti-Kennedy cabal.

[4] Various LBJ aides have been named but no record was kept of who ordered that the limousine proceed without the top, despite morning rain. The trip through Dallas was a political one, however, so it is perfectly possible that the consensus was that the president should be seen by as many people as possible without anyone vocalising it.

[5] At least three witnesses did place a person in the sixth-floor window from where Oswald was alleged to have fired, with one identifying Oswald as the gunman. Most of the Secret Servicemen travelling in the car behind Kennedy also turned to look at the Book Depository building on hearing shots; Governor Connally, who was in President Kennedy’s car and who was also hit, believed that shots came from behind the limousine; and a plurality of ear-witnesses agreed that shots seemed to come from the School Book Depository.

[6] There has been comment over the years that Oswald did not have time to make the shot, and that he was not a good enough marksman to do so. Since he can be expected to have had one bullet already prepared, he only needed time for two shots—which he had—once the first was off. He was also a trained marksman, not good by the standards of the Marines but good by anyone else’s standard. If, of course, he believed that he was participating in a ‘false flag’ he might only have fired one or two shots and then left the window, without seeing the third, explosive shot. Oswald was discharged from the marines under the command of the Navy Secretary at the time, John Connally, so some have speculated that he was actually shooting at the Governor.

[7] The ‘storm drain’ theory was erected by three separate sources—one of whom, Johnny Roselli, was a figure in organised crime connected to the CIA who was murdered before he could testify to the 1970s House Investigation. It is likely that any story of his about being a gunman was deflection, disinformation, or an attempt to gain interview fees. A second source was am early investigative journalist, who physically crawled through tunnels to show that a shot could have been taken from a storm drain. This meshed with echoes from the anti-Castro group, specifically from David Ferrie, that they had contemplated escape into storm drains when planning operations.

[8] One witness saw smoke by the picket fence, but since most modern guns do not leave gunsmoke, and a steam pipe was in the area, the suggestion that the smoke was probative of a shot has been disputed.

[9] When a television ‘trial of Oswald’ was staged, with some of the original witnesses and a small number of expert witnesses, this was the conclusion of the jury. In the Clay Shaw trial, conducted by Jim Garrison, jury members appear to have accepted the case for conspiracy (just not with Shaw.)

[10] Mark Groubert, a private researcher of some note, first pursued the issue of the jacket. In his view, the dry cleaning ticket found in the jacket could be traced to California but nowhere in Texas; Crafard had a similar jacket and had been in California before Texas. Oswald was not in California in 1963. One of Oswald’s wallets, with a known alias (‘A Hidell’) was found at the scene, but when arrested, Oswald was found to be carrying a wallet. Oswald did own several wallets, but photographic evidence shows a Dallas PD member who subsequently worked for the CIA in Vietnam holding the wallet at the Tippit scene.

[11] Timings for Oswald’s trip around the city are very confused. They have resulted in a need for a very ‘tight’ sequence of events which, even if off by one or two minutes, throws the whole narrative. It is not clear, for instance, at what time Oswald left the Book Depository precisely; nor when he took the bus, nor how long his taxi took, nor how fast he was walking between his rooming house and the scene of Tippit’s death, nor when he entered the cinema. The only things which are clear are the timings which have been laid upon those events, often understandably against the recollections of witnesses or assuming that all clocks and watches were synchronised exactly in Dallas.

[12] Among Oswald’s possessions were some torn dollars and a torn piece of a cardboard food container. It has been suggested that the presentation of torn items was a way for intelligence agents to recognise each other, but it was also of course possible for paper money to become worn (todays notes are polymer) and for people to repurpose pieces of cornflake packets and food boxes to write notes on. Oswald also owned a Minox miniature spy camera, which could not be traced to any purchase and which was generally associated with spy craft.

[13] The Dallas Police Department was at the time famed for a very high arrest-to-conviction ratio. This was later revealed to be because the department had a tendency amounting to a rule to ‘find evidence; which fitted cases around suspects, and in later years many convictions were reversed or criticised.

[14] Oswald was recorded as agitated on one occasion, when Roger Craig’s suggestion that he had left the Book Depository with others in a green Nash rambler car was put to him. Oswald interpreted the question as an attempt to draw Mrs Paine into events, which he did not wish to do.

[15] In another part of Texas an Army veteran and suggested CIA agent, Richard Case Nagell, had been in prison since September 20 1963. Nagell fired two shots into a bank ceiling in order to be arrested, and was found with Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets, a Minox camera, ID cards and Mexico tourist visas, one for ‘Aleksei Hidell’ and various other paraphernalia. He claimed at the time and subsequently that he preferred prison to treason and wanted to be nowhere near Dallas.

[16] Late in life, Frazier joined the ‘Assassination circuit with a book and appearances, reversing his view of Oswald’s guilt and claiming to have seen a figure who bundled a rifle into a car having come from the northern grassy knoll. This claim was met was polite scepticism.

[17] The shots which Oswald is alleged to have made were built up by researchers as difficult to the point of being nearly impossible to replicate. In fact, they were relatively easy and have been replicated several times, but if fired from Oswald’s alleged position, would require that he was easy to see if not leaning from the window when taking them.

[18] From time to time, the tramps have been identified with Charles Harrison (Woody Harrelson’s father, a hitman who died in jail), E.Howard Hunt (a CIA operative also involved with the Watergate break-in) and Frank Sturgis (a complicated anti-Castro Cuban exile who was also a Watergate burglar in 1972). The three arrested men, who appear in the photographs, were however identified as Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle, and John Gedney.

[19] One of the reasons that the House of Representative Select Committee on Assassinations Investigation of 1978 argued for multiple shooters in JFK’s death was the existence of what was believed to be a police radio record of the motorcade in Dealey Plaza. The recording, it was claimed, had emerged from a police motorbike radio being left on , so that sound was recorded on a ‘dictabelt’ at the station. This was not the only evidence the House based its conclusions on, but it did convince many. Later scientific and historical enquiry suggests that the evidence was not reliable and that the recording was not from the time of the shooting.

[20] One photograph of the motorcade was purported for many years by some to show Vice-president Johnson ducking into his seat before the shooting began, whilst others suggest that Johnson was simply leaning down to listen to Secret Service updates on the progress of the motorcade towards its goal.

[21] See Mantik, D, Medical Research Archives 2015 vol 3 pp.1-14 ( European Society of Medicine)

[22] Bizarrely, Marvin Lee Aday, known later as Meat Loaf, a popular singer, was a youthful witness of events outside Parkland.

[23] RFK and, to a lesser extent his brother, were famous antagonists of Hoover, who reciprocated. Hoover was very close to Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, and Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s, and was resistant to the Kennedy agenda on organised crime and civil rights. The Director was also in possession of highly compromising sexual material relating to John Kennedy.

[24] RFK’s grave sits alongside that of his brother at Arlington National Cemetery.

[25] A highly suspicious and deeply flawed LAPD investigation largely ignored a Security guard, hired only that night and who was after 1994 to be found in the Philippines living off a large retirement fund, Thane Eugene Cesar. Cesar was in precisely the right position to have shot Kennedy. He bore a great deal of hatred for Robert Kennedy, and his family, had previously worked with Lockheed’s U-2 associated high security programme, and was a supporter of George Wallace’s segregationist populism.

[26] Staff on the presidential plain took hacksaws to cut out seats so that the large coffin, which would not fit in the cargo hold, could be transported. At all times bar the swearing-in of Lyndon Johnson as president, which Johnson insisted upon, there was someone beside the coffin. A military casket could have been transported in the cargo hold, or on Air Force Two. Communication records from Air Force two have mostly been lost, but some radio transmissions are suggestive in their reference of items being on the plane.

[27] Dr James Humes, the lead pathologist, claimed that he did this so that his notes would not be covered in Kennedy’s blood, which the originals were. As with many of the weekend’s event, this was neither the expected professional behaviour, nor was it legal.

[28] Examination of the x-rays by different experts suggests strongly that both double exposures, and the introduction of metallic-style elements produced X-rays which had been interfered with.

[29] As a member of the later Warren Commission, Representative (later President) Gerald Ford altered evidence to move the depiction of a bullet hole in Kennedy’s back ‘nearer to his neck’ so that the American people could have faith in the conclusion that a bullet had entered JFK’s back whilst his limousine was on a downward slope, and exited through his throat. A small industry, based purely on speculation, has also arisen based on the story unearthed by the 1988 Nigel Turner series ‘The Men Who Killed Kennedy’ that a Dallas cosmetician, Malcolm Ligget, had altered Kennedy’s body before it left Dallas or on the vice-presidential aeroplane. There is no reliable evidence for (or against) this at all. Nor is there anything but money-motivated speculation by a self-styled ‘assassin’ Loy Factor, who claimed to have shot Kennedy, that the body or brain of JD Tippit was swapped for that of Kennedy.

[30] Robert Kennedy was heard to say ‘it’s not him’ but this is a common phrase (and reaction) when close friends and family view the bodies of loved ones.

[31] This might be explained by the practice of the US intelligence staff in Mexico City of calling in the name of suspicious characters on Saturdays, to try to find out what they had been doing in the embassy. To complicate matters, however, intelligence agents from the CIA had photographed an individual who they claimed to be Oswald in Mexico City, but who obviously was not. A future Mexican president on their payroll, and the torture by Mexican Security of a female secretary who had knowledge of Oswald’s application for a visa and who had become friendly with him in Mexico City became reasons why the CIA and US Government would not release information relating to these events in the future.

[32] Lodge had been close to the CIA, aggressive military elements, and Nixon’s running mate, as well as orchestrating General Eisenhower’s ascent to the Republican nomination in 1952.

[33] Kennedy ran for office as a Cold Warrior and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 over the Cuban Missile Crisis, but privately cast himself as growing towards a ‘strategy of peace’ and an accommodation with third world nationalism. He mentioned to friends that the military and CIA believed him to have ‘failed’ over Cuba, and told reporters and writers anonymously that he feared a coup. He even vacated the White House so that scenes for Seven Days in May, about just such a coup, could be filmed. Kennedy is on record as noting that, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he would ultimately have refused to destroy the world and that he preferred to be humiliated rather than his children live in a post-nuclear world. Kennedy sought to restrain Israel’s nuclear programme, made the UK dependent on the US Polaris system, and talked of Peace in his Washington University Address of June 1963. In this address, Kennedy claimed that ‘America would never start a war.’ This rhetoric and pattern of behaviour did not go unnoticed amongst elements in Washington and on the Right and far-Right.

[34] In the minds of some this is significant as the sweater would have concealed blood from any wounds inflicted when Oswald was shot soon after.