JFK Assassination Forum

Here's a thought exercise for you:

-- JFK, through his brother RFK, was threatening the very existence of several powerful Mafia organizations, especially those of Marcello and Giancana.

-- JFK allowed RFK to humiliate Carlos Marcello by (arguably illegally) deporting him without due process and leaving him stranded in Guatemala.

-- Thus, certain Mafia leaders had powerful motives for wanting JFK dead: revenge and survival.

-- Some Mafia leaders were overheard talking about killing JFK before the assassination.

-- A credible informant reported that Marcello admitted being involved in JFK's death.

In contrast,

-- Oswald had no known motive for killing JFK, and he adamantly denied killing JFK at every opportunity while in police custody.

-- By all accounts, Oswald admired and thought highly of JFK.

-- According to the lone-gunman theory, Oswald tried to kill General Edwin Walker, a fanatical right-winger. It boggles the mind to imagine why someone who wanted General Walker dead would feel any desire to kill JFK, given that JFK had criticized and publicly humiliated Walker, and given that Walker had accused JFK of being a traitor.

Well, no thread stays on track for more than four posts on any forum, so I suppose this was inevitable. My point was not to launch a discussion of the Mafia scenario. I just chose it as a "What if?" example.

You're not telling me anything I don't know, which is why I find the Marcello scenario the most plausible CT scenario. The Mafia, which had assisted Joe Kennedy in the election of JFK, felt betrayed by RFK's zeal for organized-crime busting. Not what they had anticipated. Marcello was personally humiliated by RFK. Those things in themselves are sufficient motive for what would have been a routine hit, notwithstanding that the target was the POTUS. While I don't think LBJ was quite the fiend he is often portrayed as being, surely he would have been expected to be far more Mafia-friendly. If we then add the bonus of the possibility of a made-to-order pro-Castro patsy triggering an invasion of Cuba, thereby opening the door to the restoration of the Mafia's lucrative Cuban empire - well, it's perfect, almost too good not to be true. Marcello would not have needed or wanted the CIA, DPD or any such nonsense. This would have been a tight, closed operation, absolutely a routine hit with zero risk even if Oswald were caught and revealed all about the pro-Castro operation he thought he was involved in.

Probably this didn't happen - but it's the most plausible CT scenario by far. The elaborate scenarios where the Mafia is in cooperation with the CIA and whatnot, and all sorts of elaborate plans and cover-ups become necessary, are simply silly. Marcello would have laughed at any such scenario. (Yes, I know about the relationship between the CIA and Mafia, but Marcello would not have been this stupid when it came to offing the POTUS. A Marcello operation would have been tight and controlled with absolutely no fingerprints left behind and no need for anything resembling a cover-up. Idiot Oswald would have been the built-in cover-up.)

No motive on the part of Oswald? As long as he thought he was involved in a pro-Castro operation, he had a very strong motive. Gus Russo has, I believe, established how well-known in the Cuban community (both pro- and anti-Castro) JFK's and RFK's personal vendetta against Castro was and how imminent were their plans to rid themselves of him once and for all. Castro's own warning about assassination attempts was widely published just a couple of weeks before Oswald went to Mexico City. I always felt Oswald had sufficient motive (complex as it may have been) before reading Russo, but Russo's work has given me great confidence that Oswald had PLENTY of pro-Castro motive, either as a LN or as part of what he thought was a pro-Castro conspiracy. There is no way that on 11-22-63 Oswald still "thought highly" of JFK if he ever did.

Your Walker stuff goes nowhere. Oswald had strong civil rights sensibilities as well as Marxist ones, and Walker was an entirely plausible target when the shot was taken. JFK was an entirely plausible target for pro-Castro reasons when those shots were taken 7+ months later. JFK's and RFK's known anti-Castro plotting would have rendered JFK's actions against Walker completely irrelevant to Oswald. By 11-22-63, all Oswald cared about was Castro and Cuba.

I truly have no dog in the fight - and am not even sure what the fight is - but in the clips on page 6 of this thread it certainly looks to me as though the other women are doing "Yoo-hoo!" waving at something in the motorcade (I suppose LBJ had his fans too) and not pointing up at the sixth floor window. I'll bow out, but it does seem to me that these disputes over what the films and photographs show and what the witnesses said eventually turn into Rorshach exercises.

   One of those Old Women is "Yoo hooing" with a hanky in her hand. I believe a lot of the problem that exists to this day is people are looking at different copies/images of the assassination. The images that have been posted on this thread are Not the best/clearest I have seen. And I do Not have unfettered access to assassination images. I offer to direct people to better/clearer images, and they immediately turn me down. They flat-out refuse to even look at what I offer vs what they swear by. This reveals a closed mind and helps to explain why this murder remains unsolved after 62+ yrs. People such as this are not objective. They are not looking for the truth. They are "dug in".

Were all three shots fired in 5.6 seconds? LOL!

"LOL!" indeed. If one assumes that Oswald was the gunman and that the head shot was the final shot, then the last two shots, both of which were hits, were fired in 5.6 seconds. Yet, not one of the three Master-rated riflemen in the WC's rifle test was able to go two for two with his final two shots.

On their second and third shots, nearly all their shots landed far from the head and neck area and far from the center of mass. Only one of the 14 shots fired at the second and third target boards landed in the head and neck area, and another one of the 14 shots landed about 3 inches below the center of mass. Moreover, the one shot that hit in the head and neck area was on the second target board/second shot. Not one of the shots at the third target board/third shot landed in the head and neck area or in the center of mass.

So the three Master-rated riflemen went one for 14 on their second and third shots, i.e., the one shot that landed in the head and neck area on the second target board/second shot, and two of them took longer than 5.6 seconds for their final two shots. Yet, your alleged lone gunman, who barely qualified in the second of three qualification categories on his best day at the range in the Marine Corps while using a semi-automatic rifle and firing from a level position, supposedly went two for two on his second and third shots in 5.6 seconds.

BTW, Miller's third shot with the iron sights missed the target board completely. That means it missed the target silhouette on the target board and also missed the target board itself. But you guys want us to believe that Oswald went two for two on his final two shots, hitting JFK's head with his alleged third shot while supposedly using the iron sights (because his scope would have been worthless due to misalignment). Yet, a Master-rated rifleman wildly missed the head on the target silhouette with his third shot using the iron sights, even though he was firing from only 30 feet up, not 60 feet up, and was not firing through a half-open window in cramped quarters.

From Jack Childs' account of his meeting with Castro shortly after the assassination:

That's what Castro allegedly told Morris and/or Jack Childs (J. Edgar Hoover's beloved but probably Kremlin-loyal SOLO).

But why would Oswald go to the Cuban Embassy?

He wanted a transit visa to Havana.

You go to a consulate for a visa, not an embassy.

From "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?", PBS Frontline special:

NARRATOR : At a party in February 1963, Oswald was introduced to oil geologist Volkmar Schmidt. The two hunkered down by a window to talk politics.

VOLKMAR SCHMIDT : Lee Harvey Oswald brought up in the conversation with me the fact that he really felt very angry about the support which the Kennedy administration gave to the Bay of Pigs invasion. It turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald really idealized socialism of Cuba, while he was critical of the socialism in the Soviet Union. And he was just obsessed with his anger towards Kennedy.

NARRATOR : Schmidt says he tried to divert Lee's political anger toward a more worthy target. General Edwin Walker was a virulent anti-communist. He had recently been fired by Kennedy for preaching right-wing extremism to his troops.

Mr. SCHMIDT : I mentioned General Walker, who deserved criticism because he was a racist retired general, ultra-right-wing, and who had just a few -- a little time before talked to students at the University of Mississippi who then got so agitated that they shot and killed some reporters.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/etc/script.html