Re: JFK... Whether You Believe It Was A Lone Gunman, Or More... There Were MANY Who Wanted Him Dead

[Bolo Boffin]

43. We don't have to know his motive to know he did it.

And, no, killing a politician and being politically active does not logically exclude all possible personal reasons. As a simple example, a politically involved person comes home, finds a politician in his bed with his wife, and kills him. You may have a gut feeling that this is a purely political crime, but don't confuse that with logic.

And does Oswald strike you as the kind of person who dealt with his politics dispassionately? He doesn't strike me that way. I very much doubt that any one reason will be the sole one. It's more likely Oswald shot Kennedy for a number of reasons, both personal and political. So any solely political motive would not require another actor besides Oswald.

Manipulated into doing it: when? Oswald was as intense a loner as someone living in a house with eighteen people could be. The only phone in the house was a scarce resource and he never used it anyway. He went to his room and shut the door. He never had visitors. The phone at work he could only use by permission. His use of the Paines's phone would have been seen. So the only time he could have had a lengthy conversation with anyone was in between his boarding room and the TSBD. And that's something he would have had to volunteer for. He went off for an ACLU meeting once, I believe. So as little and precious as it was, there would have been time for him to talk here and there with his manipulators. But the vast majority of time he spent in the sole company of his one and true manipulator: himself.

Furthermore, he was at the TSBD by chance. It was a temp job and he was already looking for the next one. This one had lasted longer than normal because the regular employees were replacing the flooring in the building and a rush was still ongoing. His first day at work, his boss arbitrarily assigned him to the Elm warehouse instead of to the other open job at another location which would wind up being off JFK's route. The sheer happenstance way he was on the route argues against any manipulation into shooting Kennedy. The hand of an external manipulator is quite invisible in how he wound up in a place to shoot the president, invisible to the point of being non-existent.

I would argue with the idea that a majority thinks he was manipulated into it. A sizable chunk of that majority thinks he was just a patsy. That's not being manipulated into shooting the President.

Besides all this, I've been thinking about writing a slate-pitchy post extraordinare about how killing Kennedy was the last thing the usual suspects in a conspiracy would have wanted, and killing Oswald was the last thing they'd want following that. I think there's an argument to be made there.

A taste of it: Accepting the proposition that Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam (the reason for his assassination according to the CIA/MIC theory), everyone agrees that he would have done nothing substantial until after the 1964 election. He was going to wait until then to take the political hit. There were far more options in place than just killing him for the CIA and the MIC. He was a great president, but he would fuck any woman in a ten-mile radius. Anyone who wanted him out of the picture could have just exposed his many, many affairs. The American public would have kicked him to the curb. He already had the political liability of being a Catholic, something he'd barely negotiated in 1960. Combine that with serial cheating on his wife becoming public and I don't see how he could have won. Kennedy winning on the ropes: could he have taken the further hit of getting out of Vietnam? Goldwater winning: in May 1964 he openly contemplated using nukes in Vietnam. He tried to walk it back some, but did Kennedy ever do that? The military would have loved having Goldwater around. Killing Kennedy was idiotic of them in this case. All they had to do was sink him in the election and get Goldwater in there.

Killing Kennedy was the act of someone with no other strong options in his life. Here's another motive I didn't include: Oswald killed Kennedy so he would never have to be Lee Oswald, dirt-poor shipping clerk and failed revolutionary, ever again. He had the skill set. He had the rifle. He took his shot.