In case you were stuck under a rock this past week, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy came around, exactly to the very weekend that it occured (if this were fifty years ago, Lee Harvey Oswald would be just shaking off his mortal coil, thanks to Jack Ruby). To you millenials in the audience, this anniversary was something that your parents or grandparents probably kept talking about. I was born sixteen years after the event (my mom was four when it happened), so I might have a slightly less distance to the events than most typical blog readers might.
When I was a kid, the conspiracy theories about the murder were just getting going, culminating in Oliver Stone's monumental JFK, released in 1991. The movie, about New Orleans DA Jim Garrison's unsuccessful attempt to convict anyone in the greater New Orleans telephone directory of the crime, is justifiably cited as Hollywood myth and baloney, yet the voice it gave to the conspiracy theorists is hard to beat. It's far sexier to believe that Oswald was a patsy or a pawn of some nefarious group, composed of vengeful anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia, CIA, FBI, and various other alphabet-soup government organizations, and that their conspiracy was so effective that no credible proof has ever surfaced to suggest even a whiff of it being true. It's sexy to believe that, but odds are that it's hogwash.
Now, I understand that it's hard for most Americans (or most anyone, really) to believe that one lone, nutjob gunman could unleash so much havoc and not have a team behind him, funding him and keeping him safe (then silencing him when the prospect of him spilling his guts seemed too close for comfort). But look at the previous presidential assassinations, the successful ones: Garfield and McKinley were gunned down by lone nutjobs, with no hint of any accomplices either before or after the effect. Lincoln's death was at the hands of a conspiracy that, at the least, existed solely among John Wilkes Booth and his collaberators and, at the most, may have been funded by the Confederacy in a last-ditch effort to exact retribution (and subsequently screw itself out of a peaceful and not-at-all-awful period of postwar reconstruction, as would have been the case had Lincoln lived. Instead, Booth did the worst disservice to America by leaving Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans in charge. That did not go well for anyone in the long run). Lincoln's was the first presidential death by violence (no one wonders if someone "got to" William Henry Harrison or Zachery Taylor, the other two presidents to die in office before 1865), and it was proven beyond doubt that it was an orchestrated hit. It's hard to shake that narrative when confronted with the Kennedy murder a little less than a century later.
I have come to the view over the years that, barring the exposure of some long-lost secret file or deathbed confession on the part of a remorseful Mafioso or Cuban operative, Oswald was the primary shooter, if not the only one, and that by all likelihood he was just as alone in his act as Charles Guiteau, the guy who shot McKinley (a whole string of vowels and consonents make up his last name), and John Hinckley Jr (who was clearly barking up the wrong tree when he shot Reagan to impress Jody Foster, if you know what I mean and I think you do). Does this mean I don't think Oswald had help? Of course not, he had "help" in the sense that he got the rifle through a mail-order offer, he got a ride to work that day so he could carry said rifle, and he had plenty of information about the president's route thanks to the local newspaper (the motorcade just happened to pass underneath his workplace at the School Book Depository). Beyond that, it's a mystery wrapped inside of an enigma. What the truth ultimately is is hard to determine, even fifty years after. But my gut is that Oswald most likely acted alone or at the "behest" of someone he was trying to impress (maybe the Soviets, because he had lived in Russia and certainly thought killing the president might get him a ticket back to the Motherland). The guy was crazy, no doubt (most people who take up violence to make a political point are), but he could've pulled it off minus the Cubans, the KGB, or the CIA helping or training him.
I'm not sure if the word "insulting" is appropriate to describe the way most conspiracy theorists seem to view Oswald; after all, the man was a murderer, so you should be insulting him day and night for his crimes. But to say that he couldn't have pulled it off underestimates a crazy man with a gun, and I think the real disservice to the memory of JFK is that his death had become a parlor game of "whodunit" when the real questions are more like "why?" and "what legacy does JFK leave us?" In the post-Watergate world we live in, we can be forgiven for being skeptical about government reports into why things happen (The X-Files could never have happened in a pre-November 22, 1963 America). A little healthy skepticism is a good thing. But to hold everyone and their mother responsible for JFK's death, while ignoring the most likely suspect, is almost criminal in and of itself. Lee Harvey Oswald was many things; I don't believe "a patsy for some grander scheme" to be one of them.
In the time since his death, we've learned that JFK was a womanizer, a sufferer of crippling diseases and ailments that made him a marked man from his early thirties onward, and not quite the shining example of liberal social and foreign policy that many made him to be in the wake of his untimely death. These things don't diminish him; they present a more rounded-out, complicated portrait of an imperfect man who nonetheless was good for the country, in the brief time he had to lead it. Truth be told, I've always admired his brother Robert more, but Robert wouldn't have become the man he did without JFK's death. John F. Kennedy achieved more in death than he might have in life (apart from the Cuban Missile Crisis; that was an obvious example of "president saves the world from nuclear destruction" that Hollywood movies always harp about, usually with Michael Bay in the director's seat). We have not seen another president leave office in a casket in our lifetime, and that's always a good thing. No conspiracy is powerful enough to wreck the foundations of our country. But one lone gunman can bring this nation to its knees. That is the ultimate lesson that gets lost when you think space aliens and Castro worked with ex-Nazis and Soviet dominatrixes to bring down the Kennedy adminstration.
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