Who Killed Lee Harvey Oswald?

By now, it is acceptable to say that President Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald. Thinking otherwise will brand you as a semi-paranoid conspiracy nut, someone who cannot accept reality.

Of course, as the old saw goes, paranoiacs have enemies, too.

Whatever doubt anyone still entertains about Oswald’s being the lone assassin, we know, to a far greater degree of certainty that Jack Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in a Dallas police station. We know it because we watched it happen in real time on national television.

Nowadays, trendy psychological research suggests that human life is a narrative. Yet, when it comes to the Kennedy assassination we are told that we should not narratize the event.

As for the question of why the conspiracy theories still abound, Adam Gopnik explained several years ago that we cling to them because we cannot believe that a single individual could have perpetrated an act that had such outsized cultural and historical resonance.

Of course, when Leon Czolgosz shot William McKinley in 1901, everyone accepted without much difficulty that Czolgosz was a disgruntled anarchist who believed that, by killing the president he was striking a blow against oppression.

Of course, Czolgosz just walked up to McKinley and shot him. He was perfectly willing to be caught and punished. He did not shoot from a great distance and then try to escape.

The murder of William McKinley, like the murder of Jack Ruby was clearly visible to observers. There was no doubt about the identity of the killer.

Yet, right-thinking people notwithstanding, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories continue to fascinate because, as John Cassidy argues cogently:

… the official version of events begs questions; in some aspects, it beggars belief.

Of course, the murder of a president is, ipso facto, a political act. Neither Cassidy nor Secretary of State John Kerry shrinks from the fact that Oswald was a left-wing extremist who used to pal around with Fidel Castro’s agents.

All the theorists, being incipient profilers, always add that Oswald was disaffected and disconnected, a born loser who was trying to make a name for himself.

Of course, it is also true that people who want to make a name for themselves are more likely to shoot from close enough range so that there can be no doubt about their responsibility. If you shoot from a great distance and try to escape, you might have something else in mind.

Cassidy describes the assassin:

 Oswald was a withdrawn misanthrope, whose troubled childhood included being diagnosed as a schizoid personality. A leftist activist and one of life’s unhappy searchers, he fits the popular perception of lone nuts, and his training as a marksman in the U.S. Marine Corps suggests he had the wherewithal to shoot accurately.

But, even if we accept that Oswald was the only shooter, the question remains: did he think it up, plan it, know where to be, set it up, act on it without ever having spoken about the plot with another human being?

As Cassidy says, it beggars belief.

John Kerry raised these questions. Cassidy reported on Kerry's doubts:

Oswald was the lone shooter. But why did he do it, and was he maybe put up to it? It is here that the Secretary of State departs from the Warren Commission’s version of events. In an interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw, Kerry said, “To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.” And, he went on, “I’m not sure if anybody else was involved—I don’t go down that road with respect to the grassy-knoll theory and all that—but I have serious questions about whether they got to the bottom of Lee Harvey Oswald’s time and influence from Cuba and Russia…I think he was inspired somewhere, by something.”

Cassidy continued:

 Almost certainly, we still don’t know all we might about his time in Russia, where he arrived as a defector in 1959; his interest in and support for the Cuban regime after his return to the United States; and his simultaneous links to people active in the anti-Castro movement, some of whom had connections to the mafia. 

Oswald was liked to pro-Castro Cubans and the anti-Castro Cubans. The waters become muddier.

Besides, if Oswald was a disaffected misanthrope yearning for fame, he might have been easily manipulated by others. He might have been instructed to make it appear that he was killing Kennedy to promote Cuban interests in order to throw investigators off the track.

Even if Oswald was a Communist and a Castro sympathizer, it’s difficult to say that either the Soviet Union or Cuba ordered the assassination of President Kennedy.

Either nation, Cuba especially, should have known that if the connection had been discovered it would have been subjected to severe retaliation.

For that reason many conspiracy theorists have blamed the CIA. By their less-than-plausible reasoning, the CIA set up Oswald in order to provoke a wave of anti-Cuban anger that would lead to an invasion and overthrow of the Castro regime.

Also, if the Soviet Union or Cuba had ordered Oswald to murder the president, wouldn’t they have chosen someone whose ties to them were less obvious?

And then there is one giant open question: who was Jack Ruby and why did he murder Oswald?

Cassidy raises the point:

Frankly, I very much doubt that the Soviets, the Cuban government, or the C.I.A. hired Oswald to kill Kennedy. Maybe nobody did. But here’s another question that has always refused to vacate my mind when I’ve been about to close the casebook. If Oswald acted alone, without any outside influence, how and why did Jack Ruby pump a .38 slug into his gut two days later in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters?

He continues:

 And while it’s perhaps not very hard to accept that the first was the work of a deranged individual who wanted to take out his frustrations on the world, register a deadly protest against U.S. foreign policy, or whatever, it’s a good deal tougher to countenance the notion that the shooting of Oswald followed the same script, except that the second lone nut, Ruby, was merely trying to make a name for himself, or was trying to save Jacqueline Kennedy the anguish of going through a trial of Oswald.

The notion that Ruby killed Oswald because he was just another disaffected lunatic or because he wanted to spare Mrs. Kennedy a trial does not pass the credibility test. It feels like nonsense.

Whatever you think of Oswald, Ruby had no real associations with Communism or the radical left. He had no ties to the radical right either. He did have ties to organized crime, however. And, as Cassidy notes, his murder of Oswald more closely resembled an effort to silence a witness, to prevent him from talking:

On the face of it, doesn’t it sound more likely that Ruby, a rakish gambler and strip-joint proprietor with longstanding ties to the criminal underworld, shot Oswald to keep him silent? That’s said to be what some members of the Kennedy family suspected in the immediate aftermath of Oswald’s death, and, fifty years later, it still has some plausibility. It’s hard to see Ruby as the self-sacrificing or altruistic type. A Chicago-born Jewish kid who was in trouble with the law from an early age, he certainly wasn’t a member of the Mafia.

Ruby may not have been a member of the Mafia, but he seems to have had connections. As Cassidy notes, he was neither politically involved, self-sacrificing nor altruistic.

Also, if organized crime had something to do with the assassinations of Kennedy and Oswald they would not have chosen someone who belonged directly to their organization.

The theory has been floating around for decades now. That does not make it wrong, or right.

Cassidy summarizes it:

But the author David E. Scheim demonstrated in his 1988 book, “Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy,” that his contacts with mob figures were a good deal more extensive than had been known previously. For example, Ruby’s sister Eva described Joseph Campisi, a mobbed-up figure in Dallas who ran a steakhouse, as one of his close friends. At one point, Campisi claimed that Ruby visited his restaurant the night before he shot Oswald, but he later retracted this statement.

Also:

It’s an established fact that many senior mobsters were furious at the Kennedy brothers because of Robert Kennedy’s assault on their illicit activities, and that F.B.I. wiretaps captured some of them saying things like, “He ought to be whacked.” Of course, it’s a big leap from these tapes to suggest that Scheim is right, and that the mob used Oswald to rub out the President. No evidence of such a plot has ever been produced. 

And yet, do we believe that Jack Ruby conceived and planned the attack entirely on his own, that he never spoke to another human being about it and that neither he (nor members of his family) had anything to gain.

Imagining that Jack Ruby was so grief-stricken over the Kennedy assassination that he decided to take justice into his own hands does not make sense.

[Addendum: In this article Erin McClam outlines the case that New Orleans mob boss, Carlos Marcello ordered the assassination. She mentions Marcello's confession to an informant, also.]