Fifty years ago in Dallas, Texas, late in the afternoon of Friday, November 22, 1963, Mrs. Marguerite Oswald of Fort Worth was hauled into the Dallas police station, along with Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald’s Russian-speaking wife, and Ruth Paine, the woman with whom Marina and her two children resided in Irving, some ten miles west. Mrs. Oswald’s son had been arrested for two capital crimes that day. A lesser known victim, Officer J.D. Tippit, shot by handgun shortly after 1:10 p.m. would not create as many ripples throughout history as the name of his first victim at 12:30. Of course, we’re talking about President John F. Kennedy. The police wanted to know the facts about a certain Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5mm rifle with a four-power scope, which the FBI were determining had been bought through the mail by Alex J. Hidell. Oswald had been arrested with membership cards signed by A.J. Hidell. He also rented a post office box using this identity and had received delivery of the rifle and a.38 revolver back in April, 1963.
Mrs. Oswald wasn’t a universally liked person. In fact, her son Lee hadn’t even informed her of the birth of his second child at the end of October. He wasn’t on great terms with anybody, but his mother was not close to any of her three sons. There is much written about their poor relationship starting from his infancy until the time he left the very ruffled nest at seventeen to join the Marines. A lot is made of the fact that he slept in his mother’s bed until he was eleven years old. More grist for the psychologist’s mill are the incidents where, as an infant, he was forced to stay locked in his bedroom without toys as a form of discipline. But during questioning by Dallas police about the century’s greatest crime committed by a single individual, Marguerite Oswald came to his defense.
She said to Dallas police that she wanted to speak to the FBI. Soon in the company of two men who both identified themselves as Agent Brown, she said she had something of great importance to tell them and proceeded to explain, “… I feel like my son is an agent of the government, and, for the security of my country, I don’t want this to get out.” She insisted before continuing that she would speak only with agents from Washington. After a bit of wrangling about the geographical purity of their origins she continued, “I want this kept perfectly quiet until you investigate. I happen to know the State department furnished the money for my son to return back to the United States… so please will you investigate this and keep this quiet.” Oswald, an avowed Marxist, had defected to Russia, but after a mere few years had begged the U.S. State department to lend him the money to return. All this notwithstanding the fact that he had slashed his wrists so that he could stay in Russia and later entered the US embassy loudly shouting that he wanted to renounce his US citizenship but a few short years before. Clearly, one could argue that mental problems ran in the Oswald family.
Thus began the Mother of All Conspiracies. Little did Mrs. Oswald realize her words would become the seed for thousands of conspiracy theorists the world over, germinating like persistent weeds among the fertile imaginations of ill-informed couch analysts. She’d be in good company: Jessie James’ mother had claimed a government conspiracy was responsible for her two sons’ murderous behavior almost a century before and the mother of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, of Boston Marathon infamy fifty years later, would claim a similar government plot in spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
In the Kennedy assassination, the first conspiracy theory to gain public favor was the “Magic Bullet”. People reading only the text of the Warren Report postulated that a single bullet traversed Kennedy’s back, exited the throat, made a zig-zag to the right in mid-air, gaining in height as well, and entered Governor Connolly’s right back, broke five inches of rib, exited, turned right then left, entered his right wrist, broke bones, exited his wrist, turned left again and punctured his thigh, only to fall in pristine condition onto a stretcher at Parkland Memorial hospital. Of course, without saying it directly but using a mocking tone, they wished to imply the Warren Report’s conclusion was poppycock. Half a century later, by reconstructing the motorcade and examining the seating arrangements in the limousine, a laser beam proved that this one bullet could have done exactly what was proposed by the official investigators. The Zapruder film shows Governor Connolly twisting his body to the right, lifting his cowboy hat with his right hand at the same time that Kennedy’s arms reached for his throat in abject pain. Further examination of the limousine shows that the back bench was higher than the fold-down jump-seat by three inches, itself also offset toward the center of the car by three to four inches, which lines up the subjects with regard to downward trajectory. All this says that the originator of this theory didn’t have access to, or know the layout of the seats in the limo, didn’t analyze meticulously, if at all, the Zapruder film, didn’t attempt to accurately reconstruct the scene – but essentially formulated a conspiracy of unnamed individuals involving the US government, without ever getting off the reading couch.
The next theory to gain wide acceptance, ‘Six Seconds in Dallas’, postulates that six seconds isn’t enough time for an amateur to have fired three bolt-chambered shots. It incorrectly assumes that the first shot was fired less than two seconds before the one that entered the President’s neck. How could one lone sniper take aim, fire and reload with a bolt-action rifle in six seconds? It postulates that it’s not possible, that another gunman had, on the grassy knoll, fired along with Oswald, the implication being that a conspiracy was required to commit the assassination. Again, we are misguided by investigation techniques that never set foot outside the reading lounge. Examination of the Zapruder film shows that filming of the motorcade down Elm Street began after the limousine had already traveled several yards. Zapruder was saving film because of the cost and short amount of film in cameras back in the day, so it can be determined with reasonable certainty that he only turned on his camera after the first shot had been fired. An investigator in 2011 found archival footage of an FBI crime recreation film shot from Oswald’s window days after the event. He discovered that the traffic lantern had a hole in it. Six floors lower than Oswald’s position as the motorcade passed almost directly below, this would have been the most difficult shot because the rifle required the most motion to follow the target while he had to look through a four-power scope at something only 70 feet away, where it is known that his vision was obscured first by a large tree and subsequently, a traffic lantern hanging from a pole. This meticulous investigation shows that Oswald most likely hit the traffic lantern with his first shot which deflected, hit the pavement, and burst into fragments injuring a bystander in the cheek. The conspiracy theory goes up in smoke when we discover through better investigation techniques that Oswald had almost eleven seconds to fire three shots, not six seconds.
The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories was perpetrated by Jim Garrison, District Attorney in Louisiana, who contended that since David Ferrie (fired for ‘immoral behavior’ with boys) had briefly belonged to the same Civil Air Patrol unit as Oswald in 1954, that since David Ferrie can be proven through witness testimony to have spoken about assassination to two unknown, shady Mexicans or people of such racial lineage and one ‘Leon’, that since David Ferrie also knew one Clayton Shaw, a suspected homosexual and influential local businessman who had offices in the International Trade Mart, the very building in front of which one Lee Harvey Oswald passed out pro-Castro leaflets, that they did conspire to commit the assassination of John F. Kennedy, President of the United States of America. The case, for reasons which would be obvious to first year law students and avid Perry Mason fans, soon fell apart, but this did not stop Oliver Stone from making a sensational movie about it which seems to have captured the imagination of the conspiracy buying public. It’s equivalent to making a case in the following manner: that since mafia men A and B knew low-level peon C who may have met Jack Ruby, who probably killed Oswald to shut him up… etc, etc. After listening to this one, your head is spinning, trying desperately to understand all the conjecture, tenuous associations, and murky motivations.
And lastly the United States government itself is guilty of falling prey to conspiracy mania, a disease of the mind first spawned that fateful day in 1963 by Mrs. Marguerite Oswald. The HSCA in 1979, a House committee to investigate assassinations, concluded that there was a ‘high probability’ that a conspiracy had been responsible for the death of President Kennedy. They based this conclusion solely on the evidence of a taped police motorcycle radio transmission which purports to convey the sound of four shots in Dealey Plaza. Unfortunately, after their determination, a researcher listening to the tape heard faint crosstalk in the background of other police transmissions that only occurred more than a minute after the assassination, a fact which is verifiable and supported by the National Academy of Sciences. In spite of this admission, the HSCA committee did not withdraw its conclusion. By the way, anyone with a microphone clipped to the chest knows that you really shouldn’t emphasize your words when speaking by thumping your chest with your hand, because it will have technicians in the studio ripping off their headsets in pain. The point being that sound can be misrepresented. The sad truth is that many people want to believe in conspiracies. One lone, maladjusted loser with a thirty-five dollar mail-order rifle and cheap scope couldn’t have successfully assassinated the President of the US without help from powerful, connected and sinister co-conspirators, it just defies credulity.
The truth about all conspiracy theories is – they’re just that, unproven theories, calculated misrepresentations of the facts to garner public support usually in order to sell books or make movies, some of the proponents simply wishing to hawk memorabilia to tourists on the grassy knoll behind the book depository for a couple bucks profit, shouting “We know the bullet that killed Kennedy came from right here, right where we’re standing“. Conjecture and association aren’t proof nor evidence, it’s the worst form of justice, rumor mongering of the worst kind which would only be known as ‘evidence’ in countries with secret police and extra-judicial punishments, never meeting burden of proof, never meeting accusers, only finger-pointing and innuendo. Rather than justice, they do a great injustice to craft a story for the purpose of sewing doubt about the fidelity of democratic institutions. It breeds mistrust towards the state and is the ultimate in cynical, unproven indictment, insinuating a nefarious nature to the activities of state apparatus. Conspiracies theorists weave incalculable harm to democracies, fragile abstractions of the mind at the top of our evolutionary thinking susceptible to such malicious and unverifiable charges. Think twice before allowing theorists to gain your support. If you’re a member of government, be very careful before manipulating any truth for your own purposes, you’ll be sewing the seeds for public mistrust which will soon come back in the form of a conspiracy theory. Jay Leno, popular American talk show host, once joked that a survey found 55% of Americans believed aliens had landed, whereas only 35% believed whatever their government tells them. Marguerite Oswald would be proud of her accomplishment.