A Primer of Assassination Theories
The whole spectrum of doubt, from the Warren commissioners to Ousman Ba
Esquire,
December 1966, pp. 205 ff.
1. SINGLE-BULLET THEORY
Proponents: A 4-3 majority of the Warren Commission (see chart). And most Commission lawyers, notably Arlen Specter, who developed the theory in March, 1964, and Norman Redlich, who advocated it as the only alternative to a two-assassin theory.
Thesis: The first bullet wounded both Kennedy and Connally. A second bullet hit Kennedy in the head and killed him. Another bullet missed the car entirely and was never found.
Selling Point: This is the only theory that explains the assassination in terms of a single assassin. Why? Because films of the assassination show that a maximum of only 1.8 seconds could have elapsed between the earliest point at which Kennedy was first hit and the latest point at which Connally was first hit. Since the bolt of the murder rifle cannot be operated in less than 2.3 seconds, it could not possibly have been fired twice during the time in which both men were hit. Either both men were hit by the same bullet or there were two assassins.
This precise bullet path is essential to
the Commission's theory
that the first bullet went through Kennedy and then hit
Connally (Exhibit 385). Any slight difference would
rule this out and thereby suggest a second assassin.
Drawback No. 1: The single-bullet theory is tenable if and only if the three F.B.I. reports (November 26, December 9 and January 13) are completely wrong on their statements of the autopsy. Why? Because these three reports all state that the first bullet did not go completely through Kennedy and therefore it could not have gone on to hit Connally, who was seated in front of Kennedy.
Retorts: 1. The Incompetent F.B.I. J. Lee Rankin, at the time the Commission’s general counsel, and Norman Redlich, his deputy, have said—after the December 13 F.B.I. Summary Report was published in Inquest—that the “so-called F.B.I. Summary Report” (which the Commission considered of “principal importance”) was “evaluated and discarded” during the inquiry. Redlich further said “the Commission study used the actual (November 26) reports of the F.B.I. investigative agents, not just the summary.” (However, the actual report, just recently found in the National Archives, corroborates the Summary Report.)
2. Time magazine proposes that the F.B.I. was completely wrong on all reports and has long since publicly admitted these errors. (However, the F.B.I. told The Washington Post that its Summary Report was accurate as of when it was prepared, implying the doctors later may have changed their opinion. The F.B.I. declined comment to The New York Times in June, 1966, on the question of whether or not its reports were erroneous. Even to Commission champion Fletcher Knebel, the F.B.I. would only admit that it was possible that their initial reports did not reflect a subsequent decision by the doctors.)
3. The Commission’s Post-Report, reported by Fletcher Knebel, holds that the day after the autopsy, on receiving further information about the throat wound from the Dallas doctors, the autopsy doctors reached the conclusions that the bullet exited from Kennedy’s throat. Aside from the fact that this theory contradicts the version of the autopsy given in The Warren Report, it still leaves unresolved the problem of the bullet wound “below the shoulder” (reported by the F.B.I.), that later apparently moved up to the back of the neck.
Drawback No. 2: Photographs of the President’s shirt and jacket support the F.B.I. report that the first bullet struck Kennedy below the shoulder. If the bullet fired from above did enter below the shoulder it is highly unlikely that it exited through the throat.
Retorts: 1. The Creeping Shirt. Norman Redlich has suggested (after the F.B.I. photographs were published in Inquest) that the President’s shirt somehow rose up a few inches so that the bullet hole in the shirt coincided with a hole in the rear of the neck. Experimentation indicates, however, that raising the shirt over the collar line entails doubling it up, which would produce two holes in the back of the shirt.
Exhibits 59 and 60 indicate that the bullet entered lower than the Commission said it had.
2. Newsweek magazine suggests that Kennedy may have been bent over so far that his shoulder was higher than his throat. But the films of the assassination show that Kennedy was sitting erect, and his back brace, according to the Warren Report “tended to make him sit up straight.”
This photograph of the F.B.I. restaging,
which appeared in several editions
of the Warren Report, not only contradicts the Commission's placement
of the bullet path but shows that if the bullet entered where the hole in
the
jacket is, and then went on to hit Connally, it would have come out
Kennedy's chest, not his throat. And Kennedy had no chest wounds.
Drawback No. 3: Governor Connally says it is in conceivable that he could have been struck by the same bullet that hit Kennedy. He remembers that after hearing the first shot he turned to his right but could not see the President. He then began to turn to his left, and was hit. His story is corroborated by Mrs. Connally.
Retort: Connally was confused. The Commission brushed aside Governor Connally’s testimony (and his wife’s) by declaring that in view of the circumstances he could hardly be expected to recall clearly what happened.
2. F.B.I. THEORY
Proponents: The F.B.I.
Thesis: 1. The first bullet hit Kennedy below the shoulder and penetrated “only a distance of a finger length.” This bullet was “expelled” onto the President’s stretcher when the Dallas doctors applied external heart massage. 2. The second bullet struck Connally. 3. The third bullet entered Kennedy’s head and fragmentized. (The impact of the shot sent a tiny fragment of bone through Kennedy’s throat, causing a small throat wound.) All shots came from the Book Depository.
Exhibit No. 397, the autopsy sketch drawn
by Dr. Humes, shows
a bullet wound lower than the Commission's Exhibit 385 does.
Selling Points: 1. An entry wound below the shoulder would explain the shirt and jacket holes being about six inches below the top of the collar. It would also serve to explain the autopsy sketch showing a wound well below the collar line. And it would explain the Secret Service testimony that it was six inches below the collar.
2. The supposition that the bullet also fell out of Kennedy’s back accounts for the bullet found on the stretcher. (See Planted-Bullet Theory.)
3. The tiny bone fragment accounts for the small throat wound. Also, a bone fragment would explain the absence of metallic traces on the holes in the front of the shirt.
Drawback No. 1: The F.B.I. Theory, by positing that Kennedy and Connally were hit by separate bullets, leads to a two-assassin theory. As one Commission lawyer bluntly put it: “To say that they were hit by separate bullets is synonymous with saying that there were two assassins.”
Drawback No. 2: The Fourth Bullet. Late in the investigation, it was discovered that a bystander, James Tague, had been wounded by one of the shots. The F.B.I. Theory holds that all three shots hit inside the President’s car. Yet it was unlikely that Tague was wounded by any of these shots since he was standing about 260 feet away at the time of the fusillade. This raises the possibility that Tague was wounded by a fragment from a fourth bullet. But only three shells were found in the Book Depository.
Drawback No. 3: If the F.B.I autopsy report is accurate, then the Commission’s autopsy findings had to be purposely falsified. The implications of this are almost too disturbing to imagine. Yet, the fact that the autopsy surgeon, Commander Humes, burned “certain preliminary notes” has given rise to the theory that the “preliminary notes” actually contained the earlier version of the autopsy referred to by the F.B.I. This question is unresolved.
One of the main stimuli for theories that shots came from someplace other than the Book Depository is an amateur eight-millimeter film of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder. In ten seconds of color film, virtually the entire sequence of events is recorded. The Zapruder film shows the motorcade proceeding down Elm Street with the President smiling and waving, then suddenly he reaches for his throat, apparently hit. About a second later Connally grimaces with pain and begins toppling over. A few seconds elapse, then a bullet visibly strikes the President’s head. From the film. the Commission judged that the President was first hit between film frame 210 and 225, and the fatal head shot occurred on film frame 313. By determining the shutter speed of the camera (18.3 frames per second), the Commission ascertained: 1) a maximum of 5.6 seconds elapsed from the first to the final shot; and 2) no more than 1.8 seconds elapsed between the time Kennedy and Connally were first hit. This time bind led directly to the Commission’s Single-Bullet Theory (see above). The Zapruder film also led to four other interesting theories.
3. HEAD MOVEMENT THEORY
Proponent: Vincent Salandria, a Philadelphia lawyer.
Using two slide projectors, and superimposing frame 316 over frame 313, Salandria finds that after the fatal head shot, Kennedy’s head moves sharply backward and to the left, a direction inconsistent with shots from the Depository. Salandria extrapolated the trajectory from the direction in which the head moves and concludes that the shot came from behind the picket fence or the arcade on the grassy knoll. Salandria also suspects that, because of the massive devastation, this second wound, unlike the first, may have been caused by a dumdum bullet—which couldn’t have come from Oswald’s rifle.
4. EARLY HIT THEORY
A group of California theorists has used the Zapruder film to show that the first shot hit Kennedy between film frames 190 and 210. If true, this would be significant because the Commission established that during this interval the line of sight from the sixth-floor window in the Depository was obstructed by the foliage of an oak tree; therefore the shot must have come from elsewhere.
Harold Weisberg also uses the Zapruder film to prove the Early-Hit Theory. Since Zapruder testified that he saw Kennedy hit, and Zapruder’s view was blocked by a traffic sign between film frames 205 and 225 (by which time Kennedy had already been hit), Weisberg concludes that Kennedy was hit before film frame 205.
5. MISSING-FRAME THEORY
The fact that film frames 208 through 211 have been deleted from the black-and-white frame-by-frame photographs published by the Warren Commission (Exhibit 885) and from the color slides of the Zapruder film at the National Archives—and the fact that frames 207 and 212 show obvious splice marks—has led a number of theorists to suspect that Kennedy was shot during that interval and that the four missing film frames were suppressed deliberately.
Drawback: Life magazine owns the original film and according to those who have seen it, the film is complete, no frames are missing, and Kennedy does not appear to have been hit in the sequence. The Archive’s frames may just have been damaged innocently.
6. TRAFFIC SIGN THEORY
David Lifton, a U.C.L.A. graduate student, claims that he can detect stress marks coming from the traffic sign starting at frame 212 and continuing until frame 221. He interprets these as shock waves caused by a bullet hitting the sign. This shot, he figures, could not have been the same one that Oswald is supposed to have fired because of the timing. And strangely, right after the assassination the sign was removed.
7. ENTRY WOUND THEORY
Proponents: Mark Lane, Thomas Buchanan, Joachim Joesten, et. al.
Thesis: Early statements were made by Dallas doctors suggesting that the throat wound was made by a bullet entering the throat. Since films of the assassination firmly establish that the President’s car was past the Book Depository when he was shot, a bullet entering the throat must have come from a point well in front of the Depository. “In front” was at first interpreted to mean the railroad overpass; however, when the Commission showed that a bullet did not in fact pass through the limousine’s windshield, as was believed by the proponents of this theory, “in front” was then interpreted to mean the grassy knoll. Mark Lane states in his latest version that Kennedy was directly facing the knoll when he was shot in the throat, although none of the films indicates this to be the case.
Selling point: The entry-wound theory explains the Dallas doctors’ early statements and the relatively small diameter of the wound, although the doctors later testified that under certain conditions an exit wound would have the same appearance as an entry wound.
Drawback: The entry-wound theory does not explain what finally happened to the bullet that entered the throat. Since no exit wound was found in the President’s back (and no bullet was in the President’s body), the entry-wound theory depends on the assumption that the autopsy and other evidence was changed.
8. OVER THE FENCE THEORY
Proponents: Maurice Schonfeld, U.P.I., Jack Fox, U.P.I., Burt Reinhardt, U.P.I. In the United Press-International film library, a New York hobbyist found an eight-millimeter color film of the assassination made by Orville Nix. One of the frames of the Nix film particularly interested him because it showed an object behind the wall on the grassy knoll. He then employed a film specialist to blow the frame up, and it became clear that the object was in fact a vehicle. On the roof of the vehicle, he discerned a man aiming what appeared to be a rifle at the President’s car. He immediately took his photograph to Dallas and asked eyewitnesses about it.
U.P.I. editors, apparently impressed with the photograph, sent reporter Jack Fox to Dallas to interview witnesses to the assassination.
Lee E. Bowers, Jr. told him that the photograph was “exactly what I saw.” S. M. Holland, who was standing on the overpass and had one of the best views of any eyewitness, told Fox there were four shots: “…the first came from the book building and hit the President. The second came from the same place and hit Governor John Connally….The third shot came from behind the picket fence to the north of Elm Street. There was a puff of smoke under the trees like someone had thrown out a Chinese firecracker and a report entirely different from the one which was fired from the book building…”
According to Holland, the fourth shot came from the Book Depository. When Holland reached the fence he found a station wagon and a sedan. On the bumper of the station wagon there were two muddy marks “as if someone had stood there to look over the fence.” At least seven other witnesses on the overpass saw smoke rising from the same area, and many other witnesses thought the shots came from behind the picket fence. One Dallas policeman, J. M. Smith, even claimed to have “caught the smell of gunpowder” behind the wooden fence.
The Nix-U.P.I. film and partial blowup.
9. EYEWITNESS THEORIES
Eyewitness accounts of the assassination are perhaps the most popular source of two-assassin theories—virtually any armchair student of the assassination, given the Report’s twenty-six volumes of testimony, can develop an interesting theory as to where the shots came from. Right after the twenty-six volumes were made public, Harold Feldman, a writer on the psychology of assassins, counted up the various sources of shots reported by 121 eyewitnesses. His tally revealed that 38 gave “no clear opinion,” 32 thought the shots came from the Book Depository, and 51 though the shots came from the grassy knoll area. Largely on the basis of this analysis, Feldman advanced the theory that there were two assassins: one on the grassy knoll and one in the Book Depository.
Drawback: Eyewitness recollections often conflict: which means that somebody has to be wrong.
The following six theories name Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin.
10. UNDERGROUND MAN THEORY
Proponent: The Warren Commission. The Commission did not reach a final conclusion as to why Oswald killed President Kennedy. Instead, it listed five “factors” (which, a Commission lawyer said, read like clichés from a TV soap opera). They were:
hostility to his environment;
failure to establish “meaningful relationships”;
desire for a place in history;
a commitment to Marxism and communism (a “factor” inserted at the insistence of Commissioner Gerald Ford);
a capacity to act decisively without regard to the consequences.
According to this theory, Oswald had no motive; he acted out of blind resentment.
11. MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE THEORY
Proponents: Some Commission lawyers and members of the C.I.A.
Since Oswald spent considerable time in a Soviet hospital, a few Commission lawyers entertained the theory that Oswald might have been brainwashed and conditioned as a “sleeper” assassin; then he went haywire (i.e., he was accidentally turned on). The Commission decided to send a letter to the C.I.A. requesting information on the “present status of Soviet ‘mind-conditioning’ techniques.” A few weeks later, a C.I.A. agent replied that this possibility was still “a main school of thought” at the C.I.A. on the assassination, and although such techniques were still in a relatively primitive stage, this form of conditioning could be induced by drugs. The theory, however, was not further developed.
12. DOMESTIC QUARREL THEORY
Proponent: Representative Gerald Ford.
Commissioner Gerald Ford, in his book, Portrait of the Assassin, suggests that Oswald was still hedging on the eve of the assassination when he returned home to see his wife, Marina. She spurned him. Oswald then went to the garage. He got his rifle.
13. HORRIBLE ACCIDENT THEORY
Proponent: Marina Oswald.
In her final testimony before the Commission, Marina Oswald advanced her own theory of Lee’s motive. She said she believed her husband was actually trying to shoot Governor John Connally, and missed, and by a horrible accident he killed the President.
14. OEDIPAL THEORY
Proponent: Dr. Renatus Hartogs, coauthor of The Two Assassins.
Dr. Hartogs, a psychiatrist who evaluated Oswald as a thirteen-year-old boy, has recently advanced a theory explaining the assassination in terms of Oswald’s repressed lust for his mother. Hartogs observes that Oswald slept in his mother’s bed long after he should have had a bed of his own, and suggests that inner guilt feelings may have led him to kill President Kennedy. Dr. Hartogs finds it significant that Oswald shot at both Kennedy and Tippit three times, since the number “three” in psychoanalytic thinking symbolizes the masculine genitals. However, Sylvia Meagher points out in her review of Hartogs’ book that Tippit was shot four times.
15. KILLER-INSTINCT THEORY
Proponent: John J. McCloy.
In a secret colloquium between the Commission and three psychiatrists, Commissioner McCloy advanced the “killer-instinct” theory. He noted that Oswald had killed two men and had attempted to shoot at least three others (Governor Connally, General Walker, and the police officer who tried to arrest him). McCloy reasoned that this indicated a pattern of innate violence. By the time the report was written, however, McCloy’s hypothesis seems to have been lost in the shuffle.
The following four theories are based on the belief that Oswald was innocent, that he was framed for both the Kennedy assassination and murder of officer J. D. Tippit by the real conspirators who planted evidence against him before and after the assassination. The logic of these theories inevitably leads to a high-level conspiracy involving law-enforcement agencies. For example, to believe that Oswald did not kill Tippit, it is necessary to assume: a) shells from Oswald’s revolver were planted at the scene by the real murderers; b) the revolver then was planted on Oswald by the Dallas police (the plot obviously could not have depended on Oswald going home and conveniently fetching his pistol; and c) Oswald’s admission that he had his revolver with him when arrested was fabricated.
16. PLANTED-RIFLE THEORY
Proponent: Mark Lane.
Thesis: A 7.65 caliber German Mauser was found in the Book Depository, and later Oswald’s 6.5 caliber Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was substituted for it. This theory is based on testimony (and an affidavit) indicating that the three Dallas law officers first described the rifle as a Mauser. The problem with this theory is that the bullet fragments found in the President’s car ballistically match Oswald’s Carcano, proving that it was employed in the assassination (no matter where or when it was found).
17. PLANTED-BULLET THEORY
Proponents: Professor Richard H. Popkin, Professor Josiah Thompson, Sylvia Meagher, Vincent Salandria, Léo Sauvage, Harold Weisberg, Mark Lane and Ray Marcus.
Thesis: A bullet, which the Warren Report states was found on Connally’s stretcher, was fired from Oswald’s rifle sometime prior to the assassination. Then, after the assassination, it was planted on a stretcher in the Dallas hospital where Kennedy and Connally were treated, thereby framing Oswald.
This theory is based on the fact that evidence developed by the Commission precluded both Kennedy’s and Connally’s stretchers as possible sources for the stretcher bullet. The Commission’s autopsy report stated that the bullet exited Kennedy, therefore it could not have come from his stretcher. And Drs. Finck, Humes, and Shaw testified that more fragments were found in Connally’s wrist than were missing from the bullet, thus ruling out Connally’s stretcher as a source for the bullet. Furthermore, in missing tapes of the doctors’ press conference, which was held after the stretcher bullet was found, Dr. Shaw supposedly says that a nearly whole bullet was lodged in Connally’s thigh. The theorists thus deduce that the bullet must have been planted on the stretcher. The fact that no blood or other organic material was found on the bullet reinforces their argument. Professor Thompson further points out that the only bullet similar in appearance to the stretcher bullet was obtained by firing Oswald’s rifle into a long tube of cotton. He believes that this test indicated that the stretcher bullet was probably obtained by firing the bullet into cotton.
The Commission
claims this bullet pierced Kennedy's neck and
Connally's shoulder, ribs, wrist and thigh. Theorists say it's a fake.
The Commission claims this bullet pierced Kennedy’s neck and Connally’s shoulder, ribs, wrist and thigh. Theorists say it’s a fake.
18. OSWALD IMPERSONATOR THEORY
Proponents: Léo Sauvage, Harold Weisberg, Sylvia Meagher, (See also Popkin’s Two-Oswald Theory).
Thesis: Before the assassination, someone impersonating Oswald planted clues that would incriminate Oswald in the assassination. According to this theory, the impersonator made himself conspicuous at a nearby rifle range, brought a gun into a neighborhood gunsmith, cashed large checks, and acted suspiciously. The impersonator probably took part in the assassination.
Who is this man? A C.I.A. report on Lee Harvey Oswald arrived at the F.B.I. field office in Dallas they day of the assassination. It revealed that Oswald had visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City on September 27, 1963, and included a photograph taken by a secret C.I.A. camera of the man identified as Oswald leaving the Embassy. After the assassination, a problem developed; the man in the C.I.A. photograph was not Oswald! Oswald’s mother added to the confusion by claiming the man in the photograph was Jack Ruby. (Obviously, it isn’t.) Commission lawyers, attempting to find out if the man in the photograph was associated with Oswald or impersonating him, were never able to identify the mystery man. All the C.I.A. would say was that it was a “mix-up.”
19. FALL-GUY THEORY
Proponent: Joachim Joesten
Thesis: That the assassination was the work of a conspiracy involving some officers of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. as well as some Army figures and some reactionary oil millionaires. The conspirators used Oswald as a “fall guy, a red herring, to draw attention while the murderers escaped.” The F.B.I. for reasons of its own, completed the frame of Oswald and covered up evidence of the real conspirators.
The next three theories explain how the second assassin escaped from the grassy knoll.
20. BOGUS SECRET-SERVICE MAN THEORY
Proponent: Sylvia Meagher.
Dallas policeman J. M. Smith ran to the parking lot behind the grassy knoll immediately after the assassination. He suddenly encountered a stranger and pulled his gun. The stranger identified himself as a Secret Service agent and showed Smith his credentials (although Smith later could not recall his name). Smith’s account is corroborated to some degree by two other law officers—Deputy Constable Weitzman and Sergeant Harkness.
Sylvia Meagher, an independent researcher, made a meticulous check of Secret Service records and found that no Secret Service agent was on or near the knoll area at the time that Smith encountered the “agent.” Mrs. Meagher suggests that the assassin may have escaped by using fake Secret Service credentials.
21. TRUNK THEORY
Proponents: S. M. Holland, Richard H. Popkin.
Soon after the shots were fired, S. M. Holland rushed to the picket fence behind the knoll (where he thought he saw smoke) and found a station wagon and a sedan parked near the fence (see Over the Fence Theory). Muddy footprints led from the bumper of the station wagon to the sedan and then mysteriously ended. Holland said: “I’ve often wondered if a man could have climbed into the trunk of that car and pulled the lid shut on himself, then someone else have driven it away later.” Other theorists, like Professor Popkin, have thought it more likely that the knoll assassin simply hid the rifle in the car, then fled on foot.
22. STORM DRAIN THEORY
Proponent: Lillian Castellano.
Mrs. Castellano, a California accountant, located what appeared to be a storm drain in a photograph of the grassy knoll taken at the time of the assassination. However, it could not be located in later photographs of the grassy knoll. Through a contact in Dallas, Mrs. Castellano obtained a chart of the sewer and drainage system surrounding the grassy knoll. Apparently, the drain was filled in after the assassination. Mrs. Castellano suspected that it could have been part of an escape system.
23. OSWALD AS F.B.I. INFORMER
According to Secret Service report 767, Alonzo Hudkins, a Houston reporter, told the Secret Service that he had heard from Chief Allan Sweatt of the Dallas sheriff’s office that Lee Harvey Oswald “was being paid two hundred dollars per month by the F.B.I. in connection with their subversive investigation” and that “Oswald had informant number S-172.” The Commission never called Hudkins or Sweatt to testify.
There are a number of other interesting circumstances surrounding Oswald’s possible relationship with the F.B.I.
Warren De Brueys, an F.B.I. agent who covered both the
New Orleans and Dallas beat, asked Carlos Bringuier to furnish the F.B.I.
information about the activities of his Anti-Castro group. When Bringuier
refused, De Brueys threatened to send an under-cover agent to infiltrate the
group.
Later, Lee Harvey Oswald came to New Orleans from Dallas and tried to
infiltrate Bringuier’s group by pretending he was an Anti-Castroite.
Bringuier, at first, did not think this was a coincidence.
When Oswald was arrested for fighting with Bringuier, he asked to see an F.B.I. agent. An F.B.I. agent visited him in jail and questioned him about the activities of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Oswald’s address book contained the address and license plate number of Dallas F.B.I. agent James Hosty. It was later deleted from the police list of Oswald’s addresses.
Drawback: J. Edgar Hoover categorically denied that Oswald had any connection with the F.B.I. and offered the F.B.I.’s file on Oswald to the Commission. (The Chief Justice refused it, however, on the grounds that it might contain secret information.)
24. OSWALD AS SECRET AGENT
Proponents: Mrs. Marguerite Oswald and Norman Mailer.
Mrs. Oswald suggested long before the assassination, and is still of the belief, that her son was a C.I.A. agent. His trip to Russia was a C.I.A. mission, and so were his later activities. If Oswald was involved in the assassination, Mrs. Oswald suggests, “Now it could have been that my son and the Secret Service were all involved in a mercy killing,” explaining, “If he [Kennedy] was dying of an incurable disease, this would be for the security of our country.”
Norman Mailer, on the other hand, believes that it is quite possible Oswald was an undercover agent for not one, but a number of espionage services (who “tend to collect the same particular small agents in common”).
Mailer wrote in Book Week: “It was all but a comedy of the most horrible sort, but when Kennedy was assassinated, the espionage services of half the world may have discovered in the next hour that one little fellow in Dallas was…a secret, useless little undercover agent who was on their private lists; what nightmares must have ensued.” Oswald was then liquidated by one of his employer-agencies. According to Mailer’s scenario, we hear an Ivy League voice cry out in some unknown council-of-war room: “Well, can’t something be done, can’t we do something about this man?”, and a little later a phone call made and another, and finally a voice saying to our friend Ruby, “Jack, I got good news. There’s a little job…”
25. TWO OSWALDS THEORY
Proponent: Richard H. Popkin.
Thesis: Professor Popkin (Chairman, Philosophy Department, University of California at San Diego) has advanced a rather ingenious theory to explain certain discrepancies in the Commission’s findings. Certain witnesses claim to have encountered Oswald prior to November 22 in places where he could not possibly have been. To explain these anomalies, Popkin suggests that there were actually “two Oswalds”; the second “Oswald” closely resembled the real Oswald. The real Oswald’s role was to be a decoy—that is, he would lead the police astray by becoming the prime suspect. The escape of the second Oswald, who actually fired the shots from the Depository, was thus facilitated. When Oswald’s trial came up, he would undoubtedly produce a surprise alibi, and the evidence would be so confused by the second Oswald’s pre-assassination maneuvers that the Oswald-on-trial would be acquitted. What went wrong, however—and here the theory becomes a mite complicated—was that the real Oswald met Officer Tippit, who knew the second Oswald, and waved him down. In the ensuing confusion, Oswald panicked and shot Tippit.
This theory differs from the Oswald Impersonator Theory in one important way: here, the real Oswald is guilty.
Drawback: The sightings of this “second Oswald” all occurred before it was even known that Kennedy would be coming to Dallas. Thus it seems unlikely that a carefully deceptive plot cold have been underway.
Retort: Oswald and his double were only one of many pairs of assassins being set up all over the country on a contingency basis, should the opportunity for action arise.
26. POST-ASSASSINATION DOMINO THEORY
Proponents: Penn Jones Jr. and Mark Lane.
Penn Jones, the editor of the Midlothian, Texas, Mirror, notes that a number of key witnesses have died under “clouded circumstances” since the assassination and he suggests the theory that people who know too much about the assassination are being silenced.
For example, Jones cites a meeting at Ruby’s apartment at which two newspaper reporters, Bill Hunter and Jim Koethe, were present. Bill Hunter was later killed by the “accidental discharge” of a policeman’s revolver in a police station in Long Beach, California. Jim Koethe was killed by a “karate chop” in his Dallas apartment. The murder is still unsolved. Ruby’s lawyer, Tom Howard, also attended the meeting. He later died of a “heart attack” (Jones notes “no autopsy was performed”). Jones suggests that some important information was divulged at the meeting, and those who heard the information had to be disposed of.
Moreover, Jones’s paper has maintained a death-count on other relevant individuals.
Hank Killam, whose wife was a waitress at Ruby’s nightclub and whose friend lived in Oswald’s rooming house, was found on a Florida street with his throat cut.
Dorothy Kilgallen, the only journalist who was granted a private interview with Ruby, died. Jones points out (erroneously) that her death occurred on the night of the “strange” Northeast Power Blackout. (Jones missed the connection that the announcer of What’s My Line, John Daly, is the Chief Justice’s son-in-law.)
William Whaley, the cabdriver who took Oswald home after the assassination and possibly talked to him, died in a car crash—the first cabdriver to be killed on duty in Dallas since 1937.
Karen Bennett Carlin, another performer at Ruby’s club and the last person to talk to Ruby before he shot Oswald, died of gunshot wounds in Houston, according to Penn Jones. This seems quite strange since she testified to a Commission lawyer after the reported date of her death.
Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper at Oswald’s rooming house who claimed she saw a police car stop in front of the house about ten minutes before Oswald encountered Tippit, also died.
Mark Lane adds the case of Warren Reynolds, a witness to the Tippit shooting, who was shot through the head (but survived); Nancy Money, a former stripper in Ruby’s nightclub who also provided an alibi for the man accused of shooting Reynolds, hanged herself in the Dallas jail; and Lee E. Bowers, Jr., a bystander who saw a car making a getaway from the grassy knoll, was killed in a car accident to which there were no witnesses.
27. RACIST THEORY
Proponents: Léo Sauvage, Hans Habe (author of The Wounded Land).
Sauvage, an American correspondent for Figaro, suggests the theory that Kennedy could have been killed by a conspiracy of Southern racists to prevent him from carrying out his civil-rights program. To turn blame away from themselves and onto Leftists, they methodically framed Oswald (by impersonating him and by planting evidence against him). Oswald’s murder, however, was not part of the racist conspiracy, but a separate plot instigated by the Dallas police to prevent a trial in which he might be acquitted of the crime
28. CUI BONO THEORY
Proponents: Izvestia, Trud, Joachim Joesten, Barbara Garson, Don B. Reynolds, Jack Ruby and others.
Thesis: Although not one shred of hard evidence has been uncovered to prove them right, many people have taken the “Who benefited?” line of pursuit and point an accusing finger at Lyndon Johnson.
The Soviet Government newspaper Izvestia, after condemning The Warren Report as slanderous to Russia, hinted by sly innuendo that President Johnson may have been implicated in the assassination. They cite the soon-to-be published works of Joachim Joesten (seven volumes to be sold by subscription for $200) which argues that Johnson has been covering up. The next day, Trud, the trade-union paper, made the accusations more forcefully.
Californian Barbara Garson has written a satire, based on Macbeth, called Macbird in which L.B.J. and Lady Bird take the parts of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the murder of J.F.K. and Adlai Stevenson (the Egg of Head).
In January of 1964 the Warren Commission learned that Don B. Reynolds, insurance agent and close associate of Bobby Baker, had been heard to say that the F.B.I. knew that Johnson was behind the assassination. When interviewed by the F.B.I., he denied this. But he did recount an incident during the swearing in of Kennedy in which Bobby Baker said words to the effect that the s.o.b. would never live out his term and that he would die a violent death. Reynolds also vaguely suggested that Governor Connally may have called long distance from Washington to Lee Oswald who was staying in a Dallas Y.M.C.A. He had no proof.
A number of letters allegedly written by Jack Ruby and smuggled out of jail were auctioned off by New York autograph dealer Charles Hamilton. Penn Jones, Jr. bought one and published part of it.
"I walked into a trap the moment I walked down the ramp Sunday morning. This was the spot where they could frame the Jew, and that way all of his people will be blamed as being Communists, this is what they were waiting for. They alone had planned the killing, by they I mean Johnson and others.”
“…read the book Texas Looks at Lyndon and you may learn quite a bit about Johnson and how he fooled everyone.”
Drawback: In a letter to J. Lee Rankin, J. Edgar Hoover wrote, “I have not received any information to implicate President Johnson or Governor Connally in the assassination.”
29. DALLAS OLIGARCHY THEORY
Proponent: Thomas Buchanan.
According to Buchanan’s theory, “Mr. X,” a right-wing Texas oil millionaire, had to eliminate Kennedy and Khrushchev to gain world domination of the oil market. He decided to assassinate Kennedy in such as way that Khrushchev would be discredited. Oswald was to be framed as the assassin, then executed by Tippit. With Oswald dead, the Soviet Union would be blamed for the assassination. Oswald, however, outdrew Tippit and was captured alive later. The conspirators then induced Ruby to kill Oswald as a means of silencing him for good. Aside from Mr. X, Buchanan names the following “additional conspirators”:
The assassin on the bridge. (He hints this was Ruby.)
A second assassin in the Depository who was wearing a police uniform.
A police officer involved in Oswald’s arrest (who was, next to Mr. X, the key conspirator).
Tippit.
Oswald.
One of the policemen who missed Oswald as he left the building.
30. CUBA-FRAMED THEORY
Proponent: Fidel Castro.
About a week after the assassination, Castro suggested that the conspirators intended that Cuba be blamed for the assassination. According to this theory, Oswald may have been one of the riflemen, but his prime role in the conspiracy was to ghost a trail that would lead directly to Cuba. Thus, a few months before the assassination, Oswald set up a phony Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans and Dallas, engaged in “brawls” with anti-Castro Cubans, and identified himself with Castro and Cuba on radio programs. Then he went to Mexico where he tried to obtain a Cuban visa. (Castro notes that Oswald had no reason to go to Cuba. If Oswald wanted to go to Russia, as he claimed, it was shorter and easier to go via Europe.)
After the assassination, the plan called for Oswald to disappear. Evidence planted at the scene would identify Oswald as the assassin, and Oswald’s pre-assassination activities and other planted clues would lead to the conclusion that Oswald had fled to Cuba. This, in turn, might serve as a pretext for an American invasion of Cuba.
There is some later evidence which fits in very neatly with the Castro thesis.
On September 26, just before Oswald’s trip to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico, Mrs. Sylvia Odio, a Cuban Refugee leader, claims that three men visited her in Dallas. Two were Latins, possibly Cubans, the third was American. The American was called “Leon Oswald.” After the assassination Mrs. Odio as well as her sister definitely identified this man as Lee Harvey Oswald. The three men said that they had just come from New Orleans (the Commission established Oswald left New Orleans about September 25) and were about to take a trip. They wanted backing for some violent anti-Castro activities, but Mrs. Odio suspected that they might in fact be Castro agents. The next day one of the Latins called Mrs. Odio and told her that Oswald was “kind of nuts” and that he had said Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and that “it is so easy to do it.” Thus, Oswald established himself as a potential assassin traveling with two Cubans.
Two days before the assassination, three people spoke to Wayne January, manager of Red Bird airport in Dallas, about renting a plane. They told him they wanted to be flown to Yucatán Peninsula on November 22. After the assassination, January told the F.B.I. that one of the three persons was Oswald. January later said that he suspected the threesome might want to hijack his plane and go to Cuba, and thus decided not to rent them the plane.
Shortly after the assassination, there were literally dozens of allegations and “tips” that Oswald was closely connected with the Cubans. For example, one Latin American free-lance intelligence agent claimed that he saw Oswald receive $6,500 for the purpose of assassinating Kennedy. (The Commission found these allegations to be false.) However, if Oswald escaped and disappeared, these tips might very well have fed suspicion that Oswald was in Cuba.
31. CRYSTAL BALL THEORY
Proponent: Jeane Dixon.
In December, 1963, prophetess Jeane Dixon “got psychically” an inside line on the assassination. “As I interpret my symbols,” she wrote, “Fidel Castro believed that President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev had gotten together on a plan to eliminate him and replace him with someone more acceptable to the United States and the U.N. Castro, in his conniving way, therefore arranged for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald was the triggerman, but there were other people involved in the plot.”
32. MAFIA THEORY
Proponent: Sergei Groussard.
In a series of articles in L’Aurore, Groussard offers the theory that Kennedy was assassinated in order to forestall a planned crackdown on organized crime. The “Al Capone gang” in Chicago ordered Ruby to set up the assassination. Ruby then sent Oswald (who was in his debt) to Mexico to visit the underworld’s own plastic surgery clinic and other escape facilities; and Oswald agreed to be the rifleman. Tippit was supposed to drive Oswald out of Dallas, but when he learned that Oswald was the assassin he tried to arrest him and Oswald killed him. Ruby then had to finish the job personally.
33. JUNTA THEORY
Proponent: M. S. Arnoni.
The editor of The Minority of One envisions a “titanic power struggle” in the U.S. Government. He postulates that the insurrectionist forces included the C.I.A., the Air Force, relevant defense contractors, and a number of congressmen and that the Junta’s leaders were high-ranking Air Force and Navy officers. The object was to deliver the U.S. into the hands of a “military-industrial cabal.”
Because President Kennedy attempted to oppose the Junta, he had to be eliminated. His fate was sealed when he signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963—which he, according to this theory, “signed in his own blood.”
34. RED EXECUTION THEORY
Proponent: Revilo P. Oliver.
Professor Oliver, in an article for the John Birch Society magazine, advanced the theory that Moscow ordered Oswald to assassinate Kennedy. It seems that Kennedy was threatening to desert the Communists and “turn American.” But the President’s aides persuaded him to go to Dallas where he was “executed.”
Although the assassin’s accomplices escaped, Oswald himself was apprehended by dint of the heroic action of J. D. Tippit, and so it became necessary that “Jakob Rubenstein” eliminate Oswald.
35. EVIL-FORCES THEORY
Proponent: Ousman Ba, Foreign Minister of Mali.
Ba charged in the United Nations Security Council that “Kennedy’s assassination, the murder of Patrice Lumumba and Dag Hammarskjóld’s death were all the work of forces that were behind the recent U.S.-Belgian rescue operation in the Congo.” Ba did not elaborate.