Counter-Currents
Lee Harvey Oswald holding the rifle he would use to assassinate JFK and the pistol he would use to murder Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. He is holding two Communist publications called The Militant and The Worker.[1]
American culture is still spinning wildly from the assassination of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 by a self-radicalized antifa gunman acting alone. American liberals and Leftist sympathizers in particular have had a tough time dealing with the murder. Kennedy’s widow later remarked that “[JFK] didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist.”
Jacqueline Kennedy’s remarks perfectly sum up the snobbery and inability to read data that is essential to the mentality of JFK’s political base. Jacqueline Kennedy could have rightly pointed out that Kennedy died fighting Communism in the same way he’d valiantly lived fighting Communism.
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18 comments
Interesting article. I was watching the TV coverage when Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. It was stunning. I was still in a daze after the assassination two days previous.
I’ve never felt totally convinced. When I visited Dallas in the late nineties and went to the site, the very window, where Oswald shot from, it looked like an easy shot—like if I were standing on my roof and shooting at someone in my driveway. But the whole sequence of events was too far out.
This one guy, by the age of 24, had served a hitch in the Marines, got out and defected to the Soviet Union, married and had two children, repatriated to the US, became a one-man lobby for Cuba, attempted to assassinate a right wing retired general, developed a murderous hatred of left liberal JFK, got a job at a location that had a window where he could set up a steady rest of book boxes unobserved by the other employees, and that just happened to be at the perfect place where a presidential motorcade would slow down for a ridiculously awkward turn someday, when he would kill the president with three shots, one of which might have dissolved into the ether, and then himself was gunned down by a rummy character who was able to force his way through a platoon of Dallas cops and shove a gun right into his abdomen.
Yeah, I’m not buying the lone nut theory either, regardless of what a globalist shitlib queef JFK was.
Great article.
I’m a firm proponent of the lone Antifa creep theory. But it wasn’t always so.
About the mid-1970s, probably due to special Congressional hearings, beginning with the Frank Church Committee, the TV stations started broadcasting the Zapruder Film, which was the first time (i.e., March 6, 1975) that most people had ever actually seen it.
Life magazine was quick to publish color stills from the Zapruder film in 1963, but seeing it in real time or slow motion was a new level of surreal.
The Zapruder film appears to show that the third and final shot, the one that blew out the President’s brains, threw his head to the rear.
Yet Oswald was firing above and from the rear. Was the Warren Commission Report a rush to judgement? More on that later…
Abe Zapruder was an elderly Dallas Jew who thought that Jack Kennedy was the most righteous Gentile to come down the pike since Cyrus the Great. Local nightclub owner Jacob Rubenstein ─ known as Jack Ruby ─ thought so too. Arrested suspect Lee Harvey Oswald came across as incredibly smug on TV.
Zapruder had gone to Dealey Plaza to film the VIP motorcade with his home movie camera that day; the route had been published in advance and nobody in the area had their stuff searched for weapons or explosives by police or the Secret Service. You probably would have had to be openly carrying a main battle rifle to have gotten any attention from law enforcement. One parade protestor, later dubbed the Umbrella Man, carried just such a (harmless) prop symbolizing Neville Chamberlain and appeasement ─ which in retrospect seems weird since it happened to be the day that the President was shot. Some people actually watched the parade from open windows.
Kennedy had been comparatively poor at getting his race-mixing agenda through Congress and was reviled in most of the South. He was kicking off his 1964 reelection in lukewarm Texas with his native Vice President and the Governor and hoped to build increasing steam in friendlier territory until the election came on the next November. When the man-from-Camelot was gunned down, Liberal journalists were quick to opine that “Hate Killed Kennedy.”
The FBI had it figured out fairly quickly, i.e., that in shooting the President twice nobody had taken a shot at the Vice President, and the Governor (who survived) was collateral damage. A misfit employee of the Texas School Book Depository had fled the scene and proceeded to fatally gun down patrolman J.D. Tippit with his .38 caliber revolver for questioning him. The suspect was an ex-Marine with a dodgy Leftist pedigree and was now in custody. There wasn’t any real evidence so far of a grand conspiracy with hostile foreign governments (Johnson’s Cold War fear).
The Warren Commission Report was quick to get a few things wrong and there were some mistakes by omission, but I think it holds up very well.
What JFK filmmaker Oliver Stone calls a Magic Bullet didn’t do anything magical in flight at all but penetrate ─ which is what heavy military bullets are supposed to do. After going through Kennedy’s shoulder and neck area the bullet went through Gov. Connally from his back and out of his chest, then hitting him in the right wrist and then his left thigh, tearing a hole in his pant leg and getting lodged somewhere in the fabric. What Kevin Costner calls a “pristine” bullet was found in the stretcher at the hospital.
https://youtu.be/Th-s3dbboJQ
Contrary to the diagram in the Warren Report, Gov. Connally was not sitting directly in front of JFK but a little to the side and lower on a folding jump seat.
The Magic Bullet path is indeed actually taking a straight line backwards to the 6th floor window above. Yes, it’s keyholing as it enters Connally’s back and hits a rib, deforming slightly, but that is hardly magic nor pristine.
TV investigative reporters from the 1970s have long implied that the best sharpshooters could not make that shot ─ but I would frankly be disappointed with any soldier or Marine who could not make a head shot at less than 100 meters with three tries.
I’m no Private Pyle, but in Army Basic Training I hit most of the pop-up targets at 300 meters on the head with iron sights.
Oswald’s 1st shot probably hit a tree sapling or the traffic light fixture as the motorcade was gliding by and was deflected. James Tague, standing below the triple overpass downrange was hit on the cheek by a piece of concrete or fragments from the ricochet. It drew blood, but in the excitement he did not even notice at first.
The 2nd shot, the Magic Bullet, we have already discussed. Some enthusiasts, obviously with very little ballistics experience, call the bullet found with Connally at the hospital “pristine,” but it was nothing of the sort. In the Zapruder film, Jack is seen clutching his throat as the motorcade emerges into our view from behind the road sign after the 2nd shot. Not commonly known is that Jack was wearing a stiff orthopedic back brace; otherwise he might have actually fallen forward or to the side.
The 3rd bullet or kill-shot glanced JFK at the top right of his skull and broke open a bone plate which flopped over on the right side of his head, still attached only by a flap of skin at the bottom. When this bullet hits, the lights switch out and JFK finally collapses. He does not fall backwards or get thrown backwards by the shot. The limo is starting to accelerate, however.
When viewing the Zapruder film on TV, especially in slow motion, the video shows the moment when the final shot hits and it appears that JFK’s head is launched backwards. This is an optical or cinematical illusion which has launched a thousand ships.
Around the time that Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK was in production or being hyped, media sources were raw-feeding the Zapruder film unencrypted via satellite. Since I was employed as a Broadcast Engineer at a TV station at this time, I made a copy on 1 inch Ampex reel-to-reel videotape. I was able to therefore view the film frame-by-frame in very high resolution.
Kennedy’s head is not thrown back at all; he just goes instant “rag doll” at shot no. 3.
Today, you can check this out yourself as even better quality images of the Zapruder film are available on YouTube and elsewhere. You need to look closely at each frame in succession.
Btw, good luck finding the issue of Life magazine that has the Zapruder film “money shots.” I think that regardless of what Library you visit, souvenir hunters will have already torn out the pages. And, no, it wasn’t men-in-black that did this.
Never underestimate the importance of being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes History just happens that way. Before my office was exiled to a bunker near the roar of jets at the airport, I could look out from a 4th floor window to a collegial garden where Presidents like Bush, Clinton, and Obama each spoke to the throngs in the public square below. The Secret Service walked the halls before the event and said hello to me, but nobody actually looked for rocket launchers inside my desk.
If you can find them in old book stores, Dealey Plaza is featured in encyclopedias printed in the 1950s, long before JFK was an item in Dallas. Public events frequently do happen in plazas like this ─ and Oswald had been warned of the parade by media buzz in plenty of time to bring his rifle and revolver to work that day.
All of this seems implausible only in retrospect. I accidently almost bumped into Nancy Reagan at a 1980 campaign rally once. Our eyes locked for an intense moment as she gauged how nutty I was and whether or not to release the hounds. Shortly after that, some weirdo was tackled by about fifty cops for rushing the stage with “a letter for Governor Reagan.”
If John Hinckley’s 1981 shots had actually killed President Reagan, this would no doubt have been a Bush-Bilderberger CIA plot. Journalists Mark Lane and Michael Collins Piper would have been right on it, LOL.
🙂
I met Mark Lane (he gave me a copy of Rush to Judgment) and I knew Mike Piper. They didn’t just conjure up “JFK conspiracy theories” at will.
If you want to see the original Warren Report LIFE issue from 1964, with Zapruder frames on the cover, the issue is online here. https://bit.ly/3XrOIWf
LIFE did more Zapruder frames years later.
Thanks for the link to the Life issue. I have seen it before of course but it just transported me to better times ─ although I don’t miss the cigarette culture. I just finished mandatory CRT training in the 21st century and would love to go back and buy that 1965 Pontiac in the ads. I started school in Las Vegas in 1966 and it was “Whitopia” even there, so I can remember what it was like outside of Watts or Harlem in those days. Not many could see the danger coming besides George Lincoln Rockwell.
I liked Piper’s book on the Mel Mermelstein lawsuit against the Institute for Historical Review, and I was friends with Ted O’Keefe. I am even mentioned in Mr. O’Keefe’s 2002 “whistleblower letter” when he was fired as editor of the Journal of Historical Review, and Weber shut it down.
I was also a Spotlight subscriber and it made a big impression on me over forty years ago because they ran articles on Holocaust Revisionism and the IHR. There is a place for tabloid journalism, I guess, but it doesn’t make the best historiography, which demands more rigorous epistemology.
I remember Willis Carto’s attorney Mark Lane, though I never met him. His book does not hold up in my opinion. The Dealey crime scene is not that hard to figure out ballistically, and his assertions are simply wrong. Lane is described as a Libertarian, a Civil Rights activist, and an anti-Zionist Jew. I assume that he did good work for Willis Carto, and I always thought that Mr. Carto did good work, but I never knew either one.
My good friend, the late Holocaust Revisionist Fritz Berg had been on the IHR Board of Policy (or whatever) at one time and vehemently thought that Mr. Carto was a crook over the handling of the Edison estate donation, but I can’t speak for that and was never convinced.
I supported Director Mark Weber in the big 1990s IHR split that ousted Carto, but that was mainly because Berg and Prof. Arthur Butz did. Later Mr. Weber cancelled the Journal of Historical Review and I still can’t understand that. Anyway, although Revisionism itself is absolutely not a Movement, per se ─ Truth is inescapable and upstream of ideology or politics ─ I do think that Libertarians are the bane of a White Nationalist movement (possibly even controlled-opposition).
As much as I miss and admire Mr. Berg, he did have some Libertarian blind spots. One of these is related in that he liked and admired Jack Kennedy to the point of devotion ─ and in spite of Berg no longer being a Catholic believer himself.
I will admit that the Kennedys could have been much worse. RFK undoubtedly would have been a better McCarthy legal assistant than Roy Cohn, but not by much. And LBJ was far worse than JFK, but there is a clear pedigree from Joe K. to our own Joe B.
Anyway, Massachusetts pol Tip O’Neill (mentored by Joe K.) strongly believed that Jack Kennedy just didn’t have the Congressional chops to get his Civil Rights package through the Solid South, but Texan LBJ did.
Johnson capitalized on an opportunity presented by lone Antifa weirdo Lee Harvey Oswald ─ but that does not mean that he (nor anyone else) actually had anything to do with it.
There is no need to overthink Jack Ruby either. I have done lots of live shots at TV events like this before there was such a thing as satellite uplinks (or the Internet). The police garage where they were moving Oswald would have been a media circus with engineers stringing cables and whatnot, and lots of unfamiliar faces.
Jack Ruby would have been known to many beat cops who patrolled the downtown nightclub cruise and he at least would have fit in. Ruby was dressed decently by modern standards (and not a broccoli-headed Wall Street Journal “reporter” hoping for a Rosa Parks moment in Phoenix).
Ruby was also conceal-carrying a .38 because he had just delivered a wad of Burlesque show cash to the bank earlier to wire it off. Jack Ruby was an unstable man in the early stages of terminal cancer and he may have been a homosexual. He was certainly a dodgy Jew, one who probably thought that Oswald was a trashy Goy who had just killed his President and deserved to die ─ and then Ruby saw him in person during the televised prisoner transfer and acted in the moment.
There is no need to belabor it. Even good people do not always behave the most rationally.
🙂
Thank you for the extensive reply. Fritz Berg was a friend of mine. We once visited William Gayley Simpson and his wife with an eye to setting up a writers’ retreat on one of their rural properties in the Catskills. I was last in touch with Fritz in 2015, telling him tactfully his website was unbearable and suggesting he should pay me a little to redo it. No hope of that, alas; he’d been very well-heeled in the 1980s and made canny derivatives moves (e.g., sold stock options when the market tanked, Oct. 1987)…but not no more.
BTW Fritz was never Catholic, to my knowledge, though his mother had been, at least nominally, and he had a brief flurry of interest when she passed on in ’86.
I knew the people on both sides of the IHR fracas, and was good friends with Bill and Karen Hulsy. I’ve sung my hosannas about WAC here and elsewhere, and never supposed he was a plaster saint. (I last saw the Cartos in 2015 as well.) Willis was shrewd and played his game close to the vest, mainly because he was older and wiser than the rest of us, and understood operational security. He was also a very tolerant and goodhearted man who gave a modest living to people on both coasts who who were otherwise unemployable. He even kept a sort of boarding-house on Capitol Hill where some of the Spotlight staffers lived (“Harrison Horne,” “Alec de Montmorency” among others). He didn’t care if you were queer or Jewish or nonwhite or manic-depressive or a drunkie, just so long as you did useful work. This unchurched man was never an Elmer Gantry huckster or any kind of snake-oil salesman, just a frank and practical-minded Hoosier.
The 1993 Costa Mesa “coup” and its lawsuits were ill-advised and mismanaged. They turned upon the simplistic notion that the shell corporation which “owned” the IHR was the true legatee of the Jean Edison Farrel millions, and therefore all one had to do was go visit some old duffers on the LSF board and persuade them to vote Willis out. (I recall driving out to El Cajon in late 1992 and sitting around while this retired SDSU professor, an ostensible member of the LSF board, was waiting for his pizza dough to rise.) I’m still friendly with surviving principals, so I won’t comment further on this naïvete, except to note that an underlying motive for the “coup” was that Willis thought holocaustery was done to death, and it was time to move on to other areas of historical investigation (hence The Barnes Review). I believe one of Ted’s “exhibit” letters from 2002 describes this motive as Willis’s desire to turn the JHR into an “explicitly racialist journal.”
As to the JFK assassination theories, I believe they are analogous to holocaustery. They sap a lot of energy better spent on other things, even when pointing out the obvious. There is no doubt in my mind that Lyndon Johnson called the shots. He was thoroughly amoral and ruthless, and this was his last and only chance for the White House. Jackie knew this intuitively and so did Bobby. LBJ knew Jack Kennedy was going to die soon (how exactly frail Jack survived from 1933 to 1963 can only be explained by divine sanction; although Max Jacobson’s shots of methedrine, B-12, and testosterone must have helped him toward the end), so this was a good rationalization for LBJ’s accomplices. There are at least two books by on-the-scene veterans who point the finger at LBJ, as well as books attributed to Roger Stone and others, cribbing other books and secondary sources. LBJ did it. Case Closed.
Thanks for the discussion, Margot. That is very interesting information. I always liked the Barnes Review, and think the acrimony with the IHR was unnecessary.
When Mr. Berg moved to Phoenix and I started doing modest book reviews for the JHR, I had questions about the Carto affair, so Fritz wanted me to get in touch with an elderly guy from the Legion of the Survival for Freedom (LSF) for details, whom he vouched for. I have forgotten his name at the moment, and he is probably dead now, but he was an attorney and an ex-Army officer, if I remember correctly, from the Sierra Vista area not too far from us. I had done a lot of Army training at Ft. Huachuca there so I thought we would get along, but he wasn’t very nice to me. In the LSF guy’s defense, Fritz had a way of annoying people with e-mail Spam, so to him I was probably just more baggage from that.
Fritz wasn’t afraid to provide unflinching Peer Review for Revisionist “Popes” if he felt they got something wrong. Ted O’Keefe told me once that “Fritz brooks little disagreement,” and that was very true, although I was never shy of providing peer review for his work and found quite a few important things of note.
Fritz needed a strong (yet technically competent) editor, and Germar Rudolf was able to do this for awhile, but in the end Germar did not want to admit that Faurisson had written most of the Leuchter Report and that Leuchter was either incompetent himself or plagiarized. Fritz missed that Germar had already published a “Critical Edition” of the LR. Now that Fritz is dead, Germar has finally made that simple admission about the authorship last year on the Jim Rizoli podcast which is worth watching.
This would have saved a lot of bad blood between them when Fritz was dying and brooking even less disagreement. Without a strong and competent editor Fritz’s last book was a disaster. It did not live up to his talents and just resembles an Internet rant. I knew better than to try to get involved with it. I have rarely found that Amazon self-published works are any good, and they have banned Revisionist books now anyway.
Regarding Fritz’s website… Yes, I agree. A few months before he died he asked me to back it up as it would crash as soon as he quit paying the bill. I did so and still have a working URL of it on the dark web if anybody wants it. The problem is that the software changed and Fritz was not able to maintain it properly for a couple of years before that, so the website is an unredeemable basket case and he probably would not want me changing anything either. I would just be guessing what the broken links originally were. Plus, I’m a lot harder Right than he was in any case. I have never been a Libertarian other than a free-speech advocate, and I certainly never admired any of the Kennedys, including the patriarch, Joe.
Fritz and I were atheists and we had distrust of Christianity in common. He was an ex-Catholic and I am an ex-Mormon (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as they now prefer to be called, especially if it is implied that they are not Christians). Fritz wanted to believe in something metaphysical and just could not. How do you base something on made-up dieties? Fritz’s devoutly-Catholic mother (to her credit) had to pull him out of the Catholic school where the nuns were vicious and mean. And in New York just after the war, the Jews really picked on Krauts, and the Catholics gleefully went along with it.
Not being German, and from a later generation, the blood-libel aspect of the Holocaust does not bother me that much. I have always been willing to have rational discussions about mythical Nazi homicidal gaschambers with Jews and anyone over at RODOH or CODOH but they don’t usually reciprocate. I was banned over at Michael Shermer’s Skeptics forum for quoting Napoleon, and I’m semi-banned at TRS. I am willing to discuss, but I call it like I see it.
Fritz’s wife, who I am close friends with, was raised a Lutheran and her father was an elderly minor Nazi official who was brutally tortured by the British. We were with Fritz before he died in the hospice and I will state unequivocally that he was not a Jew in case anybody wants to know. I have never heard of an un-circumcised Jew, LOL.
Anyway, Fritz treated me like the son he never had, and I respect his opinions, but I was never convinced that Willis Carto did anything wrong other than to rub people the wrong way.
With respect to Holocaust Revisionism itself, the subject may have been “done to death” for the purposes of tabloid reporting ─ how far can you really go in that direction with Human Soap & Lampshades, electric floors, diesel engines, the bear and the eagle, Kremawurst, etc. ─ but the Revisionist historiography was just getting started.
When Weber closed down the Journal of Historical Review about ten years after the Carto split and fired editor Ted O’Keefe, the later accused the IHR of selling their mailing list to the ADL. I have forgotten the details and wasn’t an insider. In any case, to Mr. Weber’s great credit, he has kept the archive of the JHR available Online.
Germar Rudolf and Mr. O’Keefe started publishing a Revisionist journal for a while after the JHR discontinued, but when Rudolf was extradited back to the Fatherland and imprisoned there from 2005-2009, his journal immediately folded and Mr. O’Keefe retired and probably just wants to be left alone.
In general, you can criticize Israel (lightly) for muh (brown) Palestinians, but if you cross into actual non-Kosher territory like the Big-H, there will be no redemption nor bags of ZOG cash for you and your outfit. Mattogno and Rudolf have been dynamos in publishing serious Revisionist scholarship, dozens of volumes.
One problem that Fritz never understood as a Holocaust Revisionist was why the Holocaust could never be debunked ─ people must either be stupid or malevolent or both. He reasoned that some sort of new and sexy Madison Avenue approach was needed. He erroneously thought that the house of cards would finally topple over one fine day once you exposed the one key fact or truth.
Revisionist Jürgen Graf used the Biblical metaphor of the Holocaust as “a giant with feet of iron and clay.” That is a better analogy but for the Jews the Holocaust is like the Book of Mormon “Tree of Life.”
In any case, you are not likely to undo superstition easily ─ but careful scholarship towards the truth will go a long way. Two sides may never be reconcilable but honest dialog counters old lies and calumny.
In reality, the Big-H is a massive and leaky ark made of lead and hot-air, which is kept afloat with billions and billions of dollars worth of modern mass-media propaganda and even legislation. Even without Denial or “Hate” laws, only skilled amateurs will be able to do any real Revisionist scholarship because Western universities (not just the academics) are now completely run by Communists (for lack of a better term). And they are expressly dedicated to “undoing Whiteness,” or Hate as others might call it. The science of the Climate has already become more about the politics of “White Privilege” than anything like the Scientific Method or rational public policy.
Anyway, scoped bolt-action rifles are generally preferred for military snipers, although there are exceptions. Oswald fired at ranges less than you sight the rifle in for at the range (100 meters usually). Easy Peasy. And you normally have to sight or calibrate the scope again after the rifle has been disassembled for transport, so I suspect that he actually used the Carcano’s ergonomic iron sights instead of the sketchly-mounted scope ─ possibly after the first miss at Dealey Plaza, or maybe due to missing Gen. Walker’s head by an inch (although a slight breeze will do that at even short ranges). I don’t recall the source now, but the scope on Oswald’s recovered rifle supposedly had an issue that has been much ballyhooed.
Since the Assault Weapon canard has basically fallen flat ─ the one thing besides cutting multinational corporate or rich people’s taxes that the GOP can competently legislate ─ I have been waiting for a new gun-control argument to be floated from the marbled halls that calls for banning scoped bolt-action rifles, ubiquitously used by rural hunters, as “the weapon of choice for White dissident snipers.”
Stephen Paddock in the 2017 Las Vegas massacre (which killed 60) was shooting at the extreme end of the “maximum effective range” of an AR-15 and only relied upon indirect fire. Somebody better skilled than he ─ who perhaps had some actual military training ─ could have done a lot better massacre (fortunately not the case). World War I-era bolt-action rifles like the Carcano typically had adjustable iron sight ranges out to 1000 meters for just such types of fire “aimed” from parapets in the general direction of the enemy’s trenches.
Today, just having pepper spray is enough to get you shot by Antifa, who may not even be prosecuted. I am sure that if Kyle Rittenhouse had not missed the Black “Jump-Kick Man,” he would be sitting in jail with a long sentence today (in spite of it being self-defense). It’s infuriating, and I certainly don’t have all the answers.
🙂
Gee, an awful lot to unpack here. Like many (most?) readers, I do not believe the lone-nut theory, and do indeed believe that Oswald was, in his words, “a patsy.” The Warren Commission report is a whitewash paper that laboriously expands upon Oswald’s upbringing and ostensible conversion to Soviet Marxism, but does not provide any plausible motive or explanation for how and why Lee Harvey Oswald was able to kill the President from a great distance with his mail-order Italian bolt-action rifle. Or why Jack Ruby just happened to be on hand to murder Oswald point-blank at the Dallas County Jail.
Further, the probable involvement of CIA officers and assets is denied by omission. Ruth Paine had CIA connections through her husband and family, but her testimony was mainly used by the Warren Commission to frame Oswald. Pace the above description of Clay Shaw, he was no innocent falsely accused by Jim Garrison. Shaw was, or at least had been, a CIA asset. The CIA chief historian admitted as much in a 1992 memo: “These records do reveal, however, that Clay Shaw was a highly paid CIA contract source until 1956.” “Thus,” concludes one critic, “by the CIA’s own admission, it turns out that Clay Shaw wasn’t the sweet, innocent man that lone-nut theorists in the Kennedy assassination have long portrayed him to be. At the very least, he was a perjurer and a liar, which, of course, taints his entire testimony at his trial.”
This paragraph is funny, I suppose inadvertently:
In late September 1963, Oswald travelled to Mexico City by bus to acquire a visa to travel to Cuba. The Cubans wouldn’t give him a visa without Soviet approval, so he shuffled between embassies until he was thrown out of both. Ironically, the two Communist nations recognized that he was dangerous.
Well now. Obviously the Soviets knew who Lee Harvey Oswald was, and at least suspected he was a CIA asset. What skullduggery would he get up to in Cuba? Even if Oswald was no spy, just a troublemaking kook, he was a headache and a menace. So…no visa for you today, Mister Oswald!
As to the character of Jack Kennedy, the key fact is that he really had little interest in domestic affairs. His focus, going back at least to his years in London and at Harvard, had always been on international relations. His perceived liberalism after 1956 was mainly a strategy to make himself palatable to the Adlai Stevenson Democrats, thereby becoming a nominee who could be (barely) electable as President. As Congressman and Senator from Massachusetts he had been considered a conservative Democrat, unwilling to denounce family friend Joe McCarthy or make cooing noises to the Civil Rights hustlers. When he aimed at the White House he needed to establish his liberal, albeit loudly anti-Communist, foreign-policy credentials. Thus we find him in 1957 denouncing the French suppression of Algerian terrorists: a “safe” anti-colonial position to take, as it sounded high-minded while having little or no relevance to most Americans. But in making home-front policy he was basically interested in being non-divisive. He might say a nice word or two about Martin Luther King (the March on Washington happened late in his presidency), but he would never have pushed for the 1964 Civil Rights legislation. He saw how Ike got burned by the Brown decision and Little Rock, and wanted no part of that.
But now we come to the meat of the article, the Quaker business. I went to a Quaker school when I was little, and was struck by the fact that there isn’t much praying in a Quaker environment, but there’s a great deal of chatter about acting kind and being high-minded. Quakerism is one of those sects that lost its raison d’etre a long time ago. That mainly consisted of being a counterpoint to Anglicanism and Catholicism. Not exactly a compelling principle in an early America where there’s no Established Church. And as they had no real theology (what are the tenets of Quakerism, exactly?) they became a kind of ethical-culture cult, with a focus on social activism in the here-and-now. Very similar to what happened to Unitarianism—began as a sub-sect of a Puritan denomination (Congregationalism), then progressively lost belief in the Trinity, and even God, finally splitting off into a cult of bien-pensant Dale Carnegies, very concerned with virtue-signaling and acting nice and influencing people. So these religions-without-religion naturally gravitated to things like Abolitionism in the early 19th century, and “peace activism” and nuclear freezes in the 20th. Their self-righteous belief in themselves and their chosen causes made it possible for them to do the oddest things without pangs of conscience. Consider Alger Hiss and his wife Priscilla, justifying their Communism, and their unrelenting lies about it. Or the pathetic story of Hiss and Chambers’s friend Noel Field (q.v.), and his family. Or this Ruth Paine person in the article, acting as patron to the dubious and unsavory Oswalds, and then helping the Warren Commission stitch up their story that Oswald shot JFK all by his little self. Like Alger Hiss, she gets to the end of a long life without ever coming clean about her involvement in the CIA/Oswald nexus.
Of course this tendency toward deceit doesn’t characterize all self-identified Quakers (Richard Nixon? Late-life convert Whittaker Chambers?) but Quaker goodthink does seem to enable it. In Guy Fawkes’s day, the Protestant faction accused Catholics of something similar: they would feel entitled to lie and “prevaricate” because they were doing God’s work, and thus were acting morally.
Assassination is a fairly nutty thing to do under any circumstances. One should not expect entirely rational motives.
“was able to kill the President from a great distance with his mail-order Italian bolt-action rifle”
On just this one point, believe me, go to Dallas and see for yourself, it was neither at a great distance nor a difficult shot, more like fish in a barrel. And Oswald might even have trained on a bolt-action rifle in the Marines in the late fifties. In any case, the bolt action has nothing to do with accuracy.
M1 Garand or Carbine in those days. Semiautomatic.
Feasibility isn’t the point. Oswald just didn’t do it. The assassination was staged, planned well in advance, with Oswald being coached to leave little breadcrumbs of history behind him, e.g. the preposterous story of him trying to kill Edwin Walker, his one-man pro-Cuba activism, the tilted-Oswald-and-rifle photos, his very public attempt to get a Cuban visa in Mexico City, his connections to Ruth Paine and her merry band from Spookland…
I’m not going to change your mind, I’m just giving my POV.
MARXMANSHIP IN DALLAS, by Professor Revilo P. Oliver, written in 1964, however the article is still worth reading.
I find it puzzling that there are still people around who believe Oswald did it.
If you read the Warren Report when it came out, and paid half a mind to the controversies afterward, including the documents released 1978-1992, then it’s perfectly clear in your mind that JFK’s shooting was the result of a “conspiracy,” as the House subcommittee stated. From there you go on to easily connect LBJ, Allen Dulles, E. Howard Hunt, Ruth Paine, etc. etc.
If you just have a foggy notion of what went on, and believe that Oswald was a lone nut and excellent marksman, and that Oliver Stone and Jim Garrison were fantasists, then you’ll go with that, and stay out of trouble.
What do you think about the Michael Collins Piper “Final Judgment” thesis?
Never read it but I know the broad thesis. I see it’s available via Unz. Involvement of the Mossad in the assassinations of JFK and RFK is a piquant notion, but there’s the question of motive. The main person who stood to benefit from the JFK assassination was Lyndon Johnson, who was never getting into the White House otherwise. He had a 20-year history of criminal activity, from vote fraud to murder of his own sister, and he wouldn’t have balked at setting up a presidential killing. Particularly not if he had helping hands in the Pearl Street mafia, the CIA, and—okay—maybe even Mossad cutouts as well.
The JFK motive according to Piper is his opposition to Israel’s secret nuclear programme, the RFK motive is that he would have re-opened the JFK case if he had become president. He finds a quite neat way to integrate LBJ into this scheme.
https://www.unz.com/article/jfk-and-americas-destiny-betrayed/
New piece by Guyénot dropped.
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