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Post by Graveyardbride on Nov 22, 2013 13:49:55 GMT -5
Did Oswald Kill JFK?A few months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy recorded a series of tapes, which run 8½ hours. One of the things she recalled was the preparation for the Dallas trip in November 1963:
“There are going to be all these rich, Republican women at that lunch,” her husband told her, “wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets. And you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple – show these Texans what good taste really is.” Although Kennedy usually trusted his wife’s sense of fashion implicitly, on this occasion, she spent an inordinate amount of time between her closet and her husband’s room holding up one outfit after another for his approval. Those finally chosen – weather permitting – were all veterans of her closet: dresses in beige and white, suits in shades of blue and yellow, and for Dallas, a pink wool suit trimmed in navy and a pink pillbox hat.
JFK had been warned to cancel the Texas trip. Evangelist Billy Graham had a sense of foreboding concerning the visit and attempted to contact the president to warn him, and Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas begged JFK to reconsider, saying: “Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.” But Kennedy, never one to flinch in the face of perceived danger, ignored the warnings. Ironically, the last words John F. Kennedy heard before he was shot were those of Nellie Connally, who turned from the front seat and said, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” Then the shots rang out and 50 years later, there is still controversy as to who fired those shots and whether or not the shooter acted alone.
Lee Harvey Oswald. Following the shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old employee at the Texas Book Depository, was observed by both his employer and a law enforcement officer on the second floor of the building calmly drinking a Coke. Shortly thereafter, he was one of the first employees to leave the building following the shooting and some claim he was making a getaway. When he was apprehended, he claimed there was no more work for him that day and this was corroborated by his supervisor and co-workers. In other words, he had no reason to hang around. He did not run, or even walk fast, but he did retrieve a pistol and ammunition from his lodgings and this is suspicious. Was he afraid because there had just been a shooting in Dealey Plaza? Or was he preparing for a confrontation with law enforcement?
After obtaining the pistol, Oswald walked several blocks and for some reason, boarded a bus heading back toward Dealey Plaza. When the bus was held up in traffic, he got off and proceeded to a location where taxicabs were parked. He did not seem in a hurry and allowed an elderly woman to take the first taxi. He instructed the driver to stop several blocks away from the building where he was renting a room and continued on foot. All this is documented in the Warren Commission Report, but many deny its accuracy because some of the witnesses were less than credible and the timeline is dubious.
Nevertheless, Oswald’s retrieval of his revolver shortly after the assassination is difficult to explain as the action of someone who had no connection whatsoever to the assassination and it is the nature of this connection that is still open to speculation. Did he arm himself in order to defend himself in a confrontation with law enforcement that he knew was imminent because he had shot the president? Or was he wary because as an avowed Marxist, who had lived in the Soviet Union and was married to a Russian woman, he knew he would be targeted? But this begs the question: If Oswald did, indeed, commit the crime, why didn’t he already have the pistol on his person?
According to the official interpretation of the assassination, Oswald’s motive for committing the crime was his desire to become famous. In the words of Senator Richard Russell, one of the members of the Warren Commission: “He [Oswald] was a general misanthropic fellow ... he had a desire to get his name in history and all.” But if the motivation was to get his name in the history books, wouldn’t he have boasted about his deed instead of denying it? Did he change his mind after he was arrested? Or was he nothing more than a “patsy” as he claimed?
Rifle, Sniper’s Nest and Oswald. A rifle, three empty cartridge shells and one intact bullet were discovered on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Although the origin of the shells was undetermined, ballistic tests allegedly linked them to the rifle and the rifle was plausibly linked to Oswald. Otherwise, the evidence does not indicate Oswald played an active role in the shooting. There is no concrete proof he brought the rifle into the building; two other guns also were discovered in the building and which rifle was discovered where is in dispute. Additionally, at the time the gunman was seen on the sixth floor, Oswald was observed either on the first or second floor. If Oswald brought the rifle into the building, it must have been on the morning of November 22 and on that day, three witnesses saw him arrive and all denied he had been carrying a rifle, or a package in which a rifle could have been concealed. Furthermore, several boxes were moved about on the sixth floor during construction of the sniper’s nest in the southernmost window and although these boxes were dusted for fingerprints, the prints did not match Oswald’s.
There was no credible eyewitness evidence placing Oswald on the sixth floor during, or immediately before or after, the shooting. Several witnesses in the street below saw one or two men in one or more of the windows. One witness described a man that could have been Oswald, but was unable to identify Oswald when face-to-face with him shortly thereafter. Other witnesses described a different man and one TSBD employee, Carolyn Arnold, saw Oswald elsewhere in the building at the same time the gunman was observed on the sixth floor.
Officer Tippit. Helen Markham, the only person with a clear view of the shooting of Officer J. D. Tippit, estimated it occurred at 1:06 or 1:07 p.m. She left her home, about one block from the site of the incident, just after 1 p.m. to catch the 1:12 bus. Officer Tippit’s murder was reported to the police by a witness, who used the radio in the police cruiser. The two witnesses who were involved in making the call said they did so several minutes after the shooting. Domingo Benavides, the nearest eyewitness, watched the gunman as he walked from the scene, waited “a few minutes” for his own safety, checked the fallen officer and tried unsuccessfully to use the car radio. T. F. Bowley came upon the scene, noticed the body of Officer Tippit lying in the road, parked his car and looked at his watch, which indicated 1:10 p.m. He initially attempted to assist Tippit, then took the radio from Benavides and used it to call for help. The dispatcher noticed the call came in at 1:16 p.m.
The only confirmed sighting of Oswald around the time Officer Tippit was shot was by Earlene Roberts, Oswald’s landlady. She saw her tenant at a bus stop outside his lodgings, waiting for a bus heading north. The location of Tippit’s murder was almost a mile to the south (.9 to be exact). Mrs. Roberts insisted she saw Oswald no earlier than 1:03 p.m., a maximum of seven minutes prior to Tippit’s shooting. The FBI and Secret Service independently measured the time it took to walk briskly from Oswald’s lodgings to the site of Tippit’s murder and both agreed it took approximately 12 minutes. So how did Oswald, who was seen at 1:03 p.m. at a bus stop, make it to the location of Tippit’s shooting in three minutes?
Lyndon Baines Johnson. According to Jacqueline Kennedy’s tapes, President Kennedy was so “worried for the country” concerning the prospect that Vice President Lyndon Johnson might succeed him as president that he had engaged in private conversations with Bobby Kennedy and others as to who should become the standard-bearer for the Democratic Party in 1968. “Bobby told me this later,” Mrs. Kennedy said, “and I know Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, ‘Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?’” It seems JFK did not seriously consider dropping LBJ from the 1964 ticket, but was attempting to ensure Johnson did not run for president in 1968, at the end of what would have been Kennedy’s second term. “He didn’t like that idea that Lyndon would go on and be president because he was worried for the country,” she continued. “Bobby told me that he’d had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were planning or who they had in mind. It wasn’t Bobby, but somebody. Do something to name someone else in ‘68.” Robert F. Kennedy never believed the Warren Commission’s report. Jackie was convinced Johnson was behind her husband’s assassination and said so on the tapes she recorded.
In a 2009 Vanity Fair article, Death of a President author William Manchester questioned why two middle-aged Secret Service agents with “slowing reflexes” were assigned to President Kennedy in Dallas and wondered why such agents were not routinely tested. The driver of the limousine was 54-years-old and the agent beside the driver was 48. “They were in a position,” Manchester wrote, “to take evasive action after the first shot, but for five terrible seconds, they were immobilized.” Who decided which agents would be assigned to protect the president on this occasion?
One Last Question. Like many young couples in the early 1960s, Lee and Marina Oswald were obsessed with the Kennedys. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, in her fascinating 1977 account of the Oswalds, Marina and Lee, reports that Marina’s schoolgirl crush on the youthful president – her mooning over magazine photographs of Kennedy strolling on the beach and her insistence that Oswald translate any articles about the Kennedys – was becoming a sore point in their already volatile marriage. “He is very attractive,” Marina Oswald told her husband. “I can’t say what he is as president, but I mean, as a man ....” McMillan writes, “It got so that she would flip through the pages of every magazine she could lay her hands on asking, ‘Where’s Kennedy? Where’s Kennedy?’” Was Camelot destroyed by something of no more substance than male jealousy?
Author: Graveyardbride. Sources: ABC News, Death of a President by William Manchester, 22November1963, Vanity Fair (October 2009), Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversation on Life with John F. Kennedy, and Marina and Lee by Priscilla Johnson McMillan.
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Post by Kate on Nov 22, 2013 21:08:21 GMT -5
Well, this certainly makes you think, doesn't it? Good job!
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Post by kitty on Nov 23, 2013 0:07:14 GMT -5
Gosh! I was all set to believe that he was innocent until that last paragraph. Now, I'm not so sure.
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Post by Sam on Nov 23, 2013 6:07:57 GMT -5
Another excellent article! I kind of wonder if the Secret Service doesn't have some kind of seniority system where the more senior agents get first choice for trips like that.
I had not know about Oswald and his wife fighting about Kennedy. Sometimes, people do things for reasons that other folks can't understand. If whoever was setting up the shooting was trying to find someone who worked in that building to help, Oswald would have been a natural choice because he had been to the Soviet Union and was a Communist, but if he really was upset about his wife liking Kennedy, he could have agreed to help just for that reason even if it sounds crazy.
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Post by jason on Nov 27, 2013 12:59:47 GMT -5
I doubt that Oswald and his wife had such fights about her looking at pictures of Kennedy in magazines that he would have decided to shoot him. After something like this happens, people look for reasons and something that meant nothing suddenly becomes of paramount importance. Oswald was an unstable kook, who was easily drawn into things. He idolized the Soviet Union, but when he got there, it wasn't what he expected, so he came back to the US. But he wasn't satisfied with the US either, so he was passing out "Fair Play for Cuba" flyers. He did some things that can't be explained while in New Orleans and he (or a double) went to Mexico City and tried to get a visa to Cuba, but he was turned down because he was a kook and when he was leaving one of the embassies, someone claimed they heard him say he was going to kill Kennedy because he wasn't granted a visa even though it wasn't Kennedy who denied him the visa. The government spread a LOT of disinformation about Oswald because Johnson didn't want everyone to think there was some kind of Communist conspiracy to kill Kennedy that could have ended up starting World War III like the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand started World War I.
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Post by steve on Nov 22, 2014 14:36:52 GMT -5
I just went back and re-read this because today is November 22nd again and because I saw a an episode of "Bones" where someone asked them to examine some bones that everyone believed were JFK. Agent Booth, the FBI on the show, insisted that there was just one shooter and that the shot came from the school book building and that made me remember this article. After reading it again, I saw that someone said that Oswald was seen drinking a coke AFTER the shooting. To me this means that someone other than Oswald was the shooter in the school book building, so even if the shot did come from the building, it doesn't prove that Oswald was the shooter.
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Post by kitty on Nov 22, 2014 16:14:43 GMT -5
I saw that "Bones "episode just recently. Booth was being a jerk and Bones let him think that the remains weren't those of JFK. But she found something that she said proved that the man had a disease that JFK didn't have, but then at the end, she said that scarlet fever could have caused whatever it was and JFK had scarlet fever as a child.
Since this article last year, I've done some reading about the assassination and I just don't believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who shot JFK.
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Post by madeline on Nov 22, 2014 18:28:15 GMT -5
I saw a video of a presentation about the assassination in which the photo of Oswald with the gun was shown to be false. There were three different photos in which he was standing in different positions, but the face was always exactly the same, which means that someone did a cut and paste job.
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Post by pat on Nov 22, 2014 19:32:47 GMT -5
If there's nothing to hide, why haven't all the documents been released? I read somewhere that they won't be released until 2017 and might not even be released then.
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Post by Joanna on Nov 23, 2014 0:32:09 GMT -5
I agree with Jason that Oswald was a kook who didn't know what he wanted and that made him the perfect patsy. If there was a conspiracy to kill JFK and those involved were looking for someone to blame, Oswald was tailor-made for the role.
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Post by catherine on Nov 23, 2014 3:18:20 GMT -5
What convinced me that Oswald didn't do it was the shooting of Officer Tippitt. The police claimed that they recovered four shells from the scene where Tippitt was shot. But Oswald's gun was a revolver and when you shoot a revolver, it doesn't expel the casings, they remain in the chamber. This would mean that after shooting the man, he stood there, opened the gun, removed the spent cartridges, which would have taken a minute or two because it is assumed that he still had two live bullets in the chamber, dropped them on the ground and took four more bullets from his stash and loaded them into the chamber.
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Post by Graveyardbride on Nov 23, 2014 14:54:16 GMT -5
View from sniper's nest. The Man Who Drove Oswald to WorkBuell Wesley Frazier, the co-worker who drove Oswald to the Texas School Book Depository November 22, 1963, said the first time he met Oswald, his supervisor asked him to teach Oswald how to fill book orders. “After a few days, I put the orders on a clipboard and I told Lee I wanted to find out how much he had learned,” Frazier explained. “Lee was a quick learner, and I enjoyed that. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to teach different people in different kinds of employment. Lee was a great worker who was always looking for something to do on the job. He had a great attitude.”
Frazier explained he got to see a side of Oswald few people ever saw. “When you read about Lee, all you read about are terrible things,” he said. “Lee was very good with children and I know he loved them. I was living with my sister and her husband at that time and they had three little girls. Just listening to Lee talk to the girls and the games he would play around a big oak tree convinced me Lee loved those children.”
He explained that Ruth Paine, the woman Marina Oswald was living with at the time, lived down the block from his sister. “When Lee first started at the Texas School Book Depository, I found his wife lived just down the street in Irving, Texas, from where my sister lived,” he explained. “I didn’t know at the time that Lee was living in a rooming house in Dallas and his wife was living with Mrs. Paine. Very quickly, we came to an agreement. Lee could ride home with me anytime he wanted. Usually, it would only be on the weekends. Lee would ride home with me Friday afternoon and I would take him back to work on Monday morning.”
Frazier explained he did not socialize with Oswald other than to take him back to Irving, Texas, on the weekends when Oswald wanted to visit his wife and daughter.
“Lee was a nice guy,” Frazier said. “He was a fast learner, and it was a pleasure to work with him because he was such a good worker. He wasn’t a big talker, but when he did talk, he impressed me with the words he selected to use. Lee was very smart. Lee like to eat his lunch up in the room where they played dominos, but that room was too noisy for me. I ate my lunch in the basement where it was cool year round. I went down there and sat on a book pallet and would read a book and eat my lunch down there by myself. It was very soothing and relaxing, because when we were working it was fast paced.”
Frazier said that if he could go back and change Novembe. 22, 1963, he would do so. “That day we lost the president; we lost a policeman by the name of J. D. Tippit. That day Mrs. Tippit lost her husband, and her three children lost their father. Most people just think about the Kennedy family, but it was much more than that. I truly believe after the tragedy that day, America began to slide from God’s grace. We are not today the country we were 50 years ago. Today it is very sad that people don’t care about anyone but themselves.”
Frazier also explained that immediately after the JFK shooting, the Dallas Police confiscated from his home a British Enfield 303 rifle that he ordered through the mail and a shotgun.
“Two policemen interrogated me for hours,” he said. “It was like a military interrogation. They asked me questions for hours, and when they got tired, a second and a third set of policemen came in and asked me the same questions over and over. Before they let me go in, Captain Fritz came into the room with a typed confession he asked me to sign that had me admit I was part of the JFK assassination. I told him I wouldn’t sign it. But I was determined and I wasn’t going to admit something I didn’t do.”
He explained that after the Dallas Police allowed him go home, they arrested him again and brought him back to the headquarters where they took mug shots, fingerprinted him and gave him a polygraph test. “I was frightened and I was scared,” Frazier admitted. “But I’m so happy I had the strength and integrity that I did not let them push me and say things that were wrong.”
Frazier said that even today he still does not believe Oswald killed JFK, despite the testimony he gave the Warren Commission that Oswald brought with him a bag Oswald claimed contained “curtain rods.” The Warren Commission concluded Oswald used the bag to hide the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he used to shoot JFK. “There was no way the rifle could have been broken down to fit in that package,” Frazier insisted. “I am convinced Lee Harvey Oswald did not bring with him a rifle to work that day.” Source: Jerome R. Corsi, WND, September 26, 2014.
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Post by steve on Nov 23, 2014 16:46:12 GMT -5
After reading how they badgered this guy, Frazier, and tried to get him to sign a confession, makes me suspicious of what everyone said. A lot of people will just give in and say whatever the police, FBI, or whoever is doing the questioning, wants them to say.
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Post by jane on Nov 23, 2014 18:57:24 GMT -5
People said that they saw Oswald shoot the police officer and wasn't his grave later dug up and it turned out to be Oswald? I know that there are a lot of stories about two Oswalds, but both Oswalds would have had to be in the same place at the same time. I'm not understanding how the other Oswald shot the police officer and then the real Oswald was arrested in the theater.
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Post by steve on Nov 23, 2014 22:04:34 GMT -5
Like others said, Oswald was a kook, who was a communist, had lived in the Soviet Union, and had a Russian wife. So whoever it was who wanted JFK dead set him up. I don't know what his connection was to the shooting, but a woman in Dallas at the employment office swore that she was visited by Oswald two or three times before the shooting, but that they were two different men. They resembled each other, but the real Oswald was neatly dressed and quiet, but the second one was loud and sloppy. She wrote a statement about what she saw, but it was suppressed until after the Warren Commission released their report.
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