Reclaiming History (324 page)

Surely no one believes that Oswald would have agreed to commit the biggest murder in American history as a paid hit man for someone else without getting some real money up front.

Quite apart from Oswald’s not receiving any large sum of money around the time of the assassination as a down payment to kill Kennedy, virtually all conspiracy theorists have alleged that Oswald was an agent of U.S. intelligence during the years leading up to the assassination, many claiming he was even a double agent, helping the KGB. But if this is so, unless the theorists want us to believe he was working free for these agencies (completely unrealistic), where is there any evidence that Oswald, at any point in his adult life, was spending more money than he was earning from his various jobs? To the contrary, all the evidence is that Oswald was always very poor. Poor to the point where he had to borrow money to pay for his and Marina’s transportation to the United States from Russia. To the point where Oswald owned one suit to his name, a Russian-made, poorly fitting garment of heavy fabric that was unsuitable for the warm climate of Texas and Louisiana.
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To the point where Ruth Paine described the Oswalds as “very poor,”
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and Oswald’s aunt, Lillian Murret, said the Oswalds “were practically starving” in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans.
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To the point where, as indicated, their friend in Dallas, Paul Gregory, told the Warren Commission that he would often take them shopping for groceries and he was “amazed at how little they bought,”
⁴⁶
and their friends would bring food and groceries to their apartment.
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To the point where Jeanne de Mohrenschildt didn’t feel she could really judge whether Marina was the type to make a home out of where they lived because “they had so few things,” and you can’t “make a home out of nothing…They were so poor.”
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To the point where near the end Oswald was living in a very tiny 5 × 13½ foot room at a rooming house for which he paid eight dollars a week.

As mentioned in the introduction to this book, no one has studied the assassination more than the late Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg. And as Weisberg confided to me in a letter three years before his death, he had “not found a shred of evidence” to support the position that Oswald was a paid agent for anyone, adding that Oswald “never had an extra penny, so he had no loot from being an agent.”
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*

14. The very rifle that Oswald owned and used to murder the president points away from a conspiracy. One thought that almost immediately occurred to me at the beginning of my research for the London trial was this: Why would whatever group (mob, CIA, KGB, etc.) that was allegedly behind Oswald furnish its hit man with a used, surplus, nineteen-dollar mail-order rifle (one that—get this—had a homemade sling)?
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Not that Oswald’s rifle wasn’t able to get the job done. Safely assuming that Kennedy’s head was the target of whoever pulled the Carcano trigger, one in three shots from the rifle did directly hit the target. But is it sense or nonsense to believe that members of a group like the CIA or mob or military-industrial complex, needing to make sure that Kennedy was killed, would let their hit man try to carry out the biggest murder ever with anything other than a very high-quality rifle? The fact that Oswald used the type of rifle he did is almost, by itself, prima facie evidence that he acted alone and there was no conspiracy. Oh, by the way, the clip on Oswald’s Carcano could hold six live rounds.
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But we know Oswald fired three rounds, and only one cartridge was found in the chamber,
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and the clip was empty.
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So the big group behind the assassination had its assassin set out on the morning of November 22 to kill the president of the United States with a clip that was missing two rounds.

15. Additionally, if some group was behind Oswald’s killing of Kennedy, it obviously wouldn’t have had him use any rifle that was so easily traceable to him, as the Mannlicher-Carcano was, since he would be a link to the group.

16. If, indeed, groups like the CIA, mob, military-industrial complex, or whatever, were behind the assassination, not only would they have made sure their hit man had the best firearm available, but since they wouldn’t want him to be apprehended and questioned, they almost assuredly would have equipped the firearm with a sound suppressor, most commonly known as a silencer. Silencers go all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century, and a firearms expert for the Los Angeles Police Department told me that as of 1963 they were already sophisticated enough to “substantially diminish the report” of the weapon and to “alter or disguise the sound,” such as to make it sound like “the hitting of a pile of wood with a hammer” or “the operation of machinery.” He said silencers are effective, and shots at Kennedy from a weapon with the best silencer then available “probably wouldn’t have even been heard above the background noise of the motorcade and crowd” in Dealey Plaza.
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17. A related reality presents itself, which will take a bit more time to explain. The mere fact that Oswald’s rifle was a
military
rifle (the Carcano was the rifle of the Italian military, the Second World War equivalent of our M-1 rifle) also speaks against a conspiracy for the simple reason that only 6.5-millimeter, full metal-jacketed (FMJ), military-type bullets were ever made for that rifle, not soft-point bullets, the most destructive and deadly bullets by far. Soft-point bullets, a term used by firearms people to refer to partially metal-jacketed bullets with an exposed (unjacketed) lead nose, expand or mushroom upon contact with a human body, thereby causing greater destruction to the victim’s internal organs. (The FMJ-type bullets that Oswald fired have a “closed” nose of metal.) Having unexposed soft lead, they also are much more likely than FMJ bullets to break up into many fragments when they hit bone inside the body, additionally increasing their killing power. With the objectives of making war as civilized and humane as possible, and wounding and immobilizing the adversary rather than killing him,
*
the July 29, 1899, Hague Convention’s “Declaration Concerning Expanding Bullets” (still adhered to by all armies of the world) specifically prohibited the use in international armed conflict “of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body,” since they cause much more pain, suffering, and internal hemorrhaging. (And Article 23 [e] of the “Annex to Hague Convention IV Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land” of October 18, 1907, prohibits the employment of “arms, projectiles, or material of a nature to cause
superfluous injury
.”) Only FMJ military bullets are permitted. These bullets (the type Oswald fired) can obviously also kill, but if they encounter only soft tissue, they can be expected, unlike soft-point bullets, to travel right through the body (as the bullet that struck the president in the upper-right back did) and frequently are not fatal.
†
Indeed, Dr. Malcolm Perry, one of the two principal doctors who attempted to resuscitate the president at Parkland Hospital, thought the president could have survived this wound,
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but the head wound was fatal.

What all of this means is that if a group of conspirators, like the CIA, mob, or KGB, sophisticated in the killing of humans, was behind the assassination—as conspiracy theorists postulate as a certitude—they had their triggerman use the least deadly type of bullet, one that was specifically designed to injure,
not
kill. How nonsensical is that?

It should be noted that, like Oswald, James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Yet, unlike the very cheap, old, mail-order rifle Oswald used, the large-bore deer rifle Ray used to kill King, a brand new .30-06 caliber Remington, cost over seven hundred dollars,
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the equivalent of about a two-thousand-dollar rifle today, and the bullet that killed King was a
soft-point
bullet.
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It may be interesting to the reader to know that the “frontline” people from the HSCA (firearms, photographic, medical, etc., experts who analyzed the evidence, as opposed to the U.S. congressmen on the House Select Committee) whom I worked very closely with on the London trial were not at all confident there was no conspiracy in the assassination of Martin Luther King, whose murder, along with JFK’s, the HSCA also reinvestigated. (The HSCA concluded, “There is a likelihood that James Earl Ray assassinated Doctor Martin Luther King as a result of a conspiracy.”)
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All of them, however, felt there was no conspiracy in the assassination of JFK, that the allegations were all foundationless.

18. Another point is that Oswald, though a good shot, qualified as a sharpshooter and a marksman in the Marines, but never as an expert. He certainly was not the professional shooter with sniper-like accuracy any group of conspirators would have automatically employed to kill the president of the United States. The CIA or mob or military-industrial complex would have chosen someone not only from the expert category, but from among the very best within that special category.

19. If, for instance, organized crime (or the CIA, military-industrial complex, etc.) decided to commit the biggest murder in American history, which would result in a retaliation against them of unprecedented proportions if they were discovered to be behind it, they would select a hit man who not only was exceptionally professional and tight-lipped but also had a very successful track record with them.
Oswald had no track record with them
. Yet they’re going to use and rely on someone like him to kill the president of the United States? Really?

20. Without exception, all the pro-conspiracy books arguing that Oswald was a hit man for some powerful group (as we know, most contend he wasn’t involved in the assassination at all but was framed) promote the notion that Oswald’s relationship with the group went back some time, and for groups like U.S. intelligence and the KGB, at least four to five years. Further, they claim he was being groomed by them as a presidential assassin or for some other very serious mission. But how likely is it that with the biggest murder ever coming up on his plate, Oswald (on his own or with the group’s knowledge and consent) would try to murder some
other
public figure first? (As we know, Oswald attempted to murder Major General Edwin Walker just months earlier, on April 10, 1963.) Would the rationale be that he needed live target practice for the main event? As the expression goes,
please
.

One footnote to this: Whatever group was allegedly behind Oswald, Walker, a virulent right winger who was one of the leaders of the John Birch Society in Dallas, would represent to their interests the exact opposite of what the moderately liberal JFK would. So there wouldn’t have been any commonality between the intended victims.

21. In a similar vein, if Oswald, as part of a conspiracy, was scheduled to murder the president of the United States, how likely is it that his physical, mental, and emotional immersion in, and preparation for, such an extremely important and dangerous mission was so minimal, and his concern about it so little, that just two or so weeks before the scheduled murder, the main thing on his mind was to go into the local office of the FBI in Dallas and threaten to blow up the building if one of the agents didn’t stop bothering his wife?

22. Moreover, if Oswald were about to murder the president in two or so weeks, would he do anything at all that had the potential of drawing anyone’s attention to him, particularly the attention of the FBI?

23. On October 4, 1963, Oswald applied for a job as a “typesetter trainee” at the Padgett Printing Company in Dallas and was turned down because (the bottom of the application reads) “Bob Stovall [the president of Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, where Oswald previously worked] does not recommend this man. He was released [there] because of his record as a troublemaker.” Stovall also informed Padgett that Oswald had “communistic tendencies.”
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If Oswald was the scheduled hit man in a conspiracy to murder Kennedy, why would those behind him (CIA, mob, FBI, etc.) have him apply for a job just seven weeks before the assassination that wasn’t on the presidential motorcade route and would never be? Padgett Printing is located today where it was back in 1963, at 1313 North Industrial Boulevard in Dallas, a boulevard of light industry and no tall office buildings, where large crowds of people would be nonexistent. After the presidential limousine was scheduled to get off Elm Street onto the Stemmons Freeway en route to the Trade Mart, North Industrial Boulevard, to the west of the freeway, would be running roughly parallel to it, including the location at 1313 North Industrial Boulevard. However, per Dave Torok, president of Padgett Printing, the company’s building has always been only one story, and the Stemmons Freeway, he said, “is a good half mile away, and you can’t see it from our building, even from the roof.”
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The point, of course, is that if Padgett Printing Company had hired Oswald on October 4, Kennedy would not have been a target for Oswald to shoot and kill on November 22. And if Oswald were scheduled to be the hit man for the conspiracy to murder Kennedy, why would his employers (CIA, mob, etc.) have him apply for a job that, if he were hired, would eliminate him as their chosen assassin?

But there’s more bad news for the poor, hapless conspiracy theorists, who would gladly settle for anything real, no matter how small, to keep their hopes alive, instead of getting hit with one haymaker after another to their dreams. On October 8, the Texas Employment Commission (TEC) sent Oswald out for a job interview at the Solid State Electronics Company of Texas. He didn’t get the job because the company was looking for a sales clerk, and he had no experience that qualified him for that position. “I sure would like to have the job,” he told James Hunter of Solid State, who interviewed him. “Every place I go they want experience.”
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And again, the problem for the theorists is that Solid State was located at 2647 Myrtle Springs in Dallas, out beyond Parkland Hospital and nowhere near the motorcade route.