Ruth Paine remembers the Assassination

[Charles Collins]

Yeah, Oswald seemed an unlikely candidate to voluntarily give himself up

The real perpetrator of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing hid out in the wilderness, surviving on acorns, bugs, etc. for five years after he had been identified and became a fugitive.

[Bill Chapman]

You have dozens of post here positing this bizarre (to me) theory that the KGB/DGI and Khrushchev or Castro directed Oswald to kill JFK. And then you (correctly) complain about rampant conspiracy thinking going around?

Frankly, your views on the assassination are really not much different than those of Oliver Stone and DiEugenio and Simpich. They just believe that the CIA was behind it all and you think the KGB or DGI was.

Then, to top it off, you've suggested that people here who disagree with you may be Putin's assets? Really?

As Richard pointed out above, Oswald probably didn't give much thought to his act. He retrieves his rifle the day before the assassination, he has zero practice with it, doesn't check it for accuracy and reliability. He has four bullets. He has to get a ride from a co-worker. He has to hope that he'll be alone at the time JFK passes by.

This is not the act of a well-trained assassin who prepares for the act on orders of Khrushchev. This is a desperate, angry man who got tragically lucky.

Lee Harvey Occam-Oswald

[Richard Smith]

The real perpetrator of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing hid out in the wilderness, surviving on acorns, bugs, etc. for five years after he had been identified and became a fugitive.

I don't think Oswald would have had the fortitude to last long eating acorns and bugs.  He doesn't strike me as that type.  From what we do know about him and his actions, he appears to have understood that his chances of pulling this off and getting away were slim to none.  He wasn't delusional on that point.  As evidenced by leaving most of his money and wedding ring with Marina.  So arrest or death was part of his calculation in deciding to commit the act.  That doesn't mean he was going to sit down and give up.  He played out his hand.   At first just trying to move away from a known location after obtaining his pistol.   What he would have done had he not encountered Tippit has to be speculation but we know his objective over the previous months was to gain entry to Cuba.  And that, however unrealistic, was his best and perhaps only hope after assassinating the president.  Castro gave asylum to hijackers and murders from the US including a guy who killed a police officer.   So as fantastic as it might sound it was Oswald's only real hope and consistent with his objectives prior to the assassination.  He knew the drill about going to Mexico from his recent trip.  Maybe in his demented mind if he could get to Mexico City and the Cuban embassy, he might be given asylum by Castro as some type of revolutionary hero.   A fantasy Oswald was cultivating for himself with the BY photos and attempt on Walker. 

[Charles Collins]

I don't think Oswald would have had the fortitude to last long eating acorns and bugs.  He doesn't strike me as that type.  From what we do know about him and his actions, he appears to have understood that his chances of pulling this off and getting away were slim to none.  He wasn't delusional on that point.  As evidenced by leaving most of his money and wedding ring with Marina.  So arrest or death was part of his calculation in deciding to commit the act.  That doesn't mean he was going to sit down and give up.  He played out his hand.   At first just trying to move away from a known location after obtaining his pistol.   What he would have done had he not encountered Tippit has to be speculation but we know his objective over the previous months was to gain entry to Cuba.  And that, however unrealistic, was his best and perhaps only hope after assassinating the president.  Castro gave asylum to hijackers and murders from the US including a guy who killed a police officer.   So as fantastic as it might sound it was Oswald's only real hope and consistent with his objectives prior to the assassination.  He knew the drill about going to Mexico from his recent trip.  Maybe in his demented mind if he could get to Mexico City and the Cuban embassy, he might be given asylum by Castro as some type of revolutionary hero.   A fantasy Oswald was cultivating for himself with the BY photos and attempt on Walker.

I agree, and I believe that if he hadn’t been detoured by the Tippit encounter then captured when he was, that there might have been an attempted hi jack at Love Field made by him that afternoon. And that Cuba was still where he wanted to be.

[Thomas Graves]

You have dozens of post here positing this bizarre (to me) theory that the KGB/DGI and Khrushchev or Castro directed Oswald to kill JFK. And then you (correctly) complain about rampant conspiracy thinking going around?

Frankly, your views on the assassination are really not much different than those of Oliver Stone and DiEugenio and Simpich. They just believe that the CIA was behind it all and you think the KGB or DGI was.

Then, to top it off, you've suggested that people here who disagree with you may be Putin's assets? Really?

As Richard pointed out above, Oswald probably didn't give much thought to his act. He retrieves his rifle the day before the assassination, he has zero practice with it, doesn't check it for accuracy and reliability. He has four bullets. He has to get a ride from a co-worker. He has to hope that he'll be alone at the time JFK passes by.

This is not the act of a well-trained assassin who prepares for the act on orders of Khrushchev. This is a desperate, angry man who got tragically lucky.

Galbraith,

Given the fact that we are now saddled with a pro-"KGB" / anti-CIA president (soon to be dictator-for-life?), whom would you say, in hindsight, benefited more from the assassination of JFK (by an avowed Marxist, no less)?

1) The evil, evil, evil CIA, whose anti-KGB counterintelligence capabilities were destroyed by the combined efforts of Yuri "KGB Had Nothing To Do With Oswald In The USSR" Nosenko, Aleksei "I Duped Hoover For Fifteen Years" Kulak, Dimitri "I Tag-Teamed With Kulak" Polyakov, Boris "KGB Determined The Evil, Evil, Evil MIICC Did It" Orehkov, et al., and useful American idiots (or worse) Kovich, McCoy, Hart, Solie, Colby, et al., ... or ...

2) The humanitarian organization (and Putin's former employer) best known and  remembered as the "KGB" (oh-so-innocuously split into the "SVR" and the "FSB" because, "Hey, you gullible Americans, The Cold War Is Over!") ?

D'oh

--  MWT 

PS. Don't run away now, like you usually do.

PPS  There are oodles and gobs of wishful-thinking Americans who are unwitting (by definition) "useful idiots" of KGB-boy Vladimir Putin.

As I recall, 63 million of then voted for Trump in 2016.

So don't take it so personally, Steve M.

It can happen to any ignorant and/or gullible person.

[John Iacoletti]

Speaking of fantasies, “Richard” is apparently vying for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

[Thomas Graves]

Galbraith,

Given the fact that we are now saddled with a pro-"KGB" / anti-CIA president (soon to be dictator-for-life?), whom would you say, in hindsight, benefited more from the assassination of JFK (by an avowed Marxist, no less)?

1) The evil, evil, evil CIA, whose anti-KGB counterintelligence capabilities were destroyed by the combined efforts of Yuri "KGB Had Nothing To Do With Oswald In The USSR" Nosenko, Aleksei "I Duped Hoover For Fifteen Years" Kulak, Dimitri "I Tag-Teamed With Kulak" Polyakov, Boris "KGB Determined The Evil, Evil, Evil MIICC Did It" Orehkov, et al., and useful American idiots (or worse) Kovich, McCoy, Hart, Solie, Colby, et al., ... or ...

2) The humanitarian organization (and Putin's former employer) best known and  remembered as the "KGB" (oh-so-innocuously split into the "SVR" and the "FSB" because, "Hey, you gullible Americans, The Cold War Is Over!") ?

D'oh

--  MWT 

PS. Don't run away now, like you usually do.

PPS  There are oodles and gobs of wishful-thinking Americans who are unwitting (by definition) "useful idiots" of KGB-boy Vladimir Putin.

As I recall, 63 million of then voted for Trump in 2016.

So don't take it so personally, Steve M.

It can happen to any ignorant and/or gullible person.

PPPS  Oswald wasn't necessarily controlled by the Kremlin. But he was influenced by it (by Marx, if nothing else), or ... gasp ... maybe Pacepa was telling the truth when he said Khrushchev wasn't able to call off the hit!

Regardless, the assassination gave false-defector Yuri Nosenko a great talking point  / "icebreaker" and reason to be "listened to" by the likes of my heroes Anglenton and Bagley and Westin and Miler and Rocca et al., (who already knew from Geneva 1962 that he was fake), and "taken seriously" by the likes of wishful-thinkers Leonard McCoy, HSCA-perjurer John L. Hart, and Bruce "Gum Shoe" Solie, et al.

The latter gang won out in the long run, and as a result, CIA Counterintelligence was decimated and demoralized, and false-defector Yuri Nosenko was not only given a large cash reward, but was actually hired by CIA to help train its recruits.

All of which paved the way for Adrich Ames' getting away with what he did, for so incredibly long as he did.

And for "Popov Mole" Edward Ellis Smith's not being uncovered during his lifetime, and the person in CIA's Soviet Russia Division he probably helped KGB to recruit never being uncovered ...

Etcetera ...

D'oh

--  MWT