He is at the core of one of America's darkest mysteries, yet the case can be made that Lee Harvey Oswald isn't all that hard to understand.
He was a habitual outsider who carried with him big dreams but, like so many of us, lacked the gumption and/or talent to turn them into reality. He was hypersensitive yet prone to seeking out conflict, and capable of harboring resentments more than he was of holding a job.
Add to this more than a smattering of sociopathy inherited from a crazy mother and a resilient dash of Marxism, and you have the recipe for the man who killed the 35th President of the United States all by his lonesome.
Add to this more than a smattering of sociopathy inherited from a crazy mother and a resilient dash of Marxism, and you have the recipe for the man who killed the 35th President of the United States all by his lonesome.
At least that's the version offered by Gerald Posner in his fascinating examination of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an examination that makes its strongest impression by focusing on Oswald.
Who was he, really? Legend has made him into something of a Janus figure, the Mordred who killed Camelot even though most Americans seem to view him more as manipulated patsy. A Gallup poll conducted in 2013, 50 years after Kennedy's murder, shows 61% still believing he was killed by a conspiracy, more than twice those who think Oswald acted alone.
Maybe Posner's book has had some effect on the situation; the percentage believing in a conspiracy is lower now than it was in almost every poll Gallup has taken since 1963. But it remains a stubborn belief, and no wonder. How could some guy, a "complete nothing," as a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby was heard to ask the day after, do such damage? There had to be more to it, no?
Posner's book says no. He makes the case that those who knew Oswald best had the least trouble believing in his guilt. He interviewed dozens of Oswald's closest associates, including his wife, his brother, his co-workers, and fellow Marines. With their words Posner weaves a pattern to account for just how such a man might have acted in so deadly a manner, and why acting alone came naturally to him.
Michael Paine was the husband of the woman who was boarding Oswald's wife and children just outside Dallas, and had the opportunity to talk to him several times about his politics, which he like everyone else in the book describes as very left-wing. He even took Oswald to a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union, to try and show him it was possible to be a committed liberal and still participate in American society. Oswald, he tells Posner, was unconvinced.
When Paine saw his wife's house guest on television, being talked about as the suspected killer of his president, he tells Posner he was "too angry to visit him."
"I knew him well enough to see he looked like the Cheshire cat that had just swallowed the canary," Paine tells Posner. "He had the smug satisfaction of knowing that he had struck a bold stroke for his cause. He had thrown a definite monkey wrench in the wheels of the capitalist cabal."
Posner's Oswald is one nasty piece of work. As a boy, he bullied his younger schoolyard peers and even hit his mother for not having food ready when he was hungry. He beat his wife Marina so regularly that friends became used to seeing black-and-blue marks on her face. He tended to ignore the people around him, not speaking even when spoken to. All of this suggests a sociopath, not a very functional one at that.
According to Posner, as well as the famous official investigation that culminated in the Warren Commission report, Oswald had even tried killing a public figure before, a right-wing agitator popular around Dallas named Edwin Walker. Using a rifle very much like the weapon that killed Kennedy, he fired a shot that very nearly took out the troublesome ex-general as he sat at his desk working on his income tax. Oswald escaped that time, but according to Posner, his failure to kill his mark left him deeply frustrated.
Who was he, really? Legend has made him into something of a Janus figure, the Mordred who killed Camelot even though most Americans seem to view him more as manipulated patsy. A Gallup poll conducted in 2013, 50 years after Kennedy's murder, shows 61% still believing he was killed by a conspiracy, more than twice those who think Oswald acted alone.
Maybe Posner's book has had some effect on the situation; the percentage believing in a conspiracy is lower now than it was in almost every poll Gallup has taken since 1963. But it remains a stubborn belief, and no wonder. How could some guy, a "complete nothing," as a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby was heard to ask the day after, do such damage? There had to be more to it, no?
Posner's book says no. He makes the case that those who knew Oswald best had the least trouble believing in his guilt. He interviewed dozens of Oswald's closest associates, including his wife, his brother, his co-workers, and fellow Marines. With their words Posner weaves a pattern to account for just how such a man might have acted in so deadly a manner, and why acting alone came naturally to him.
Michael Paine was the husband of the woman who was boarding Oswald's wife and children just outside Dallas, and had the opportunity to talk to him several times about his politics, which he like everyone else in the book describes as very left-wing. He even took Oswald to a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union, to try and show him it was possible to be a committed liberal and still participate in American society. Oswald, he tells Posner, was unconvinced.
When Paine saw his wife's house guest on television, being talked about as the suspected killer of his president, he tells Posner he was "too angry to visit him."
"I knew him well enough to see he looked like the Cheshire cat that had just swallowed the canary," Paine tells Posner. "He had the smug satisfaction of knowing that he had struck a bold stroke for his cause. He had thrown a definite monkey wrench in the wheels of the capitalist cabal."
Posner's Oswald is one nasty piece of work. As a boy, he bullied his younger schoolyard peers and even hit his mother for not having food ready when he was hungry. He beat his wife Marina so regularly that friends became used to seeing black-and-blue marks on her face. He tended to ignore the people around him, not speaking even when spoken to. All of this suggests a sociopath, not a very functional one at that.
According to Posner, as well as the famous official investigation that culminated in the Warren Commission report, Oswald had even tried killing a public figure before, a right-wing agitator popular around Dallas named Edwin Walker. Using a rifle very much like the weapon that killed Kennedy, he fired a shot that very nearly took out the troublesome ex-general as he sat at his desk working on his income tax. Oswald escaped that time, but according to Posner, his failure to kill his mark left him deeply frustrated.
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| Oswald in Dallas police custody after the assassination, November 1963. Was he showing the press his handcuffs, or making a clenched-fist statement that he mattered after all? Image from https://fiftiesweb.com/pop/lee-harvey-oswald/oswald-custody/ |
But why kill JFK? Posner makes the case that Oswald deeply admired Fidel Castro, Cuba's communist leader, and was agitated by reports of CIA sabotage operations against the island nation, which had been a thorn in America's side since before Kennedy's inauguration. (Later, it would become public knowledge that the CIA even hatched plots to assassinate Castro, though it wasn't reported at the time and Oswald presumably knew nothing about it.) So caught up was Oswald in Cuba's struggle that, according to Marina, he even wanted to name his second child "Fidel," over her objections. Fortunately for her and the child, it turned out to be a girl.
Posner's book is at its strongest and most readable when it pits its version of Oswald against those of various conspiracy theorists, who argue Oswald got caught up in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy he knew next-to-nothing about. Much of these conjectures, he observes, were taken up by the Warren Commission and found wanting.
The fact Oswald was working at the Texas School Book Depository at the time of Kennedy's killing is often cited as an example of a conspiracy at work. There were few places along the President's motorcade route that day which afforded a better view for a sniper. But Posner points out Oswald got the TSBD job before Kennedy's visit to Dallas had even been arranged. Moreover, Posner cites the testimony of the man who hired him, as well as another employer to whom Oswald applied for work at the same time, unsuccessfully. If there was a conspiracy, Posner points out, they would have to have been players in it as well.
Posner presents the situation more simply as a crime of opportunity committed by a bitter and dangerous man, upset at growing marital turmoil and inspirited by the realization fate had suddenly handed him an opportunity to lash out at the system that held him down. He happened to have a rifle, and his place of work happened to be right where the presidential motorcade would pass. Shooting Kennedy was well within his abilities as a trained Marine Corpsman.
Occasionally, Posner pushes his points with excessive ferocity. The story of Sylvia Odio gets warranted scrutiny as she testified, often and with convincing force, that Oswald, in the company of two anti-Castro operatives, paid a visit to her apartment in Dallas at the same time the Warren Commission has him in Mexico, trying to arrange a visa to Cuba. Posner attacks her state of mind rather cruelly and needlessly to my mind, by bringing up her divorce proceedings and psychiatric visits. "A doctor who was called to treat her once for 'an attack of nerves' discovered she had made it up to get the attention of her neighbors," he writes.
Other witnesses whose testimony runs counter to the Warren Commission findings get similar treatment. Case Closed is so well argued in the main that these excursions into character attacks seem unwarranted. Posner would no doubt counter that the disinformation from the other side runs so thick you need to wade into the case with a machete more than a scalpel, but an opportunity for more objective analysis seems lost. It also makes the book read at times like a reductive prosecutorial brief rather than a broader historical examination, which limits it.
The book also spends considerable time with the other "lone nut" in this case, Jack Ruby. Like Oswald, he was in Posner's account gripped by a burning desire to matter, somehow. Conspiracy theorists argue Ruby, suspected of having various underworld connections, was given the job of shutting Oswald up permanently after Oswald was taken into custody.
Posner counters that Ruby was no mobbed-up hit man but merely a strip-club owner who tended to get excited easily and was overcome with emotion by the Kennedy murder. He takes down the notion of Ruby as Mafia henchman, and asks why, if he was the designated assassin of Oswald, he was out sending a moneygram to one of his strippers just four minutes before appearing in the Dallas police garage where Oswald was being carted away. If Oswald himself hadn't asked for a change of clothes, Ruby wouldn't have been on the scene to shoot Oswald on live television. Does that make Oswald a co-conspirator in his own killing?
I agree with Posner's central premise, that Oswald acted alone. Too much time has passed without any compelling evidence offered as to the existence of a conspiracy, and everything we know of Oswald, so much of which Posner relates in this book, makes him an unlikely participant in a vast conspiracy, whatever its origin. Whatever can be said about the "lone nut" theory, including the undeniable fact most people still think it wrong, Oswald fit his place in it to a tee.
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