Opinion : A defense of the minority, non-conspiracy view of the JFK assassination

Can one man – no, can a lone scrawny Marxist misfit with no real talent – buy a $21 mail order rifle, move back to Dallas after traveling to Mexico and Russia, find a job in a building overlooking the route in which President John F. Kennedy will ride through that city, then, while telling a colleague that what he was carrying into that building was “curtain rods,” sneak that rifle into his workpace, set up a sniper’s perch in a window more than 60 feet above the street and from there kill a President?

I have spent the past few days lost in the Warren Commission Report.

I now know what Zapruder 313 means, and have seen it way more times than necessary.

I saw the movie “JFK,” which was inspired by the case prosecuted by Iowa-born district attorney Jim Garrison in New Orleans.

I have read college theses by professors who believe that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone to shoot the President with what one professor called a “cheap, flimsy rifle.”

I have heard the audio recordings which inspired the JFK Sub-Committee of the U.S. House Committee on Assassinations to declare in 1979 that Oswald was not acting alone.

After all of this, the fact that I have come to the conclusion that Oswald did, indeed, act alone in assassinating John F. Kennedy puts me in the minority.

Recent polls indicated that anywhere from 59 to 75 percent of Americans still believe that Oswald did – certainly, probably or even just maybe – have help.

My theory does sound absolutely ridiculous, I admit.

Turns out, the answer to the question in the opening paragraph is: Yes. Surprisingly, one guy could do all of those things. By himself.

And, he did.

Officers investigating the JFK assassination heard witnesses say they saw a man with a rifle in the sixth story window of the building where Oswald had begun working a month earlier. They found a 23-year-old Italian-made 6.5 mm Carcano Model 91/38 carbine. 

The purpose of that rifle was killing enemy soldiers; its spec sheet indicates that it had an effective range of 656 yards.

And the fact that it only cost $21 is not that surprising, when you think of the countless thousands – millions, perhaps– of rifles left over after World War II. And countries deep in debt were eager to sell them, and did. One gun advocate web site said military surplus rifles were available for as little as $5. A quick search indicates that for about $200, rifles similar to the one used to kill JFK are available for sale via the internet now.

While it certainly was cheap, the Carcano carbine is anything but flimsy. And the 88 or so yards from that sixth-story window to the open limousine on Elm Street was well within the rifle’s range of 656 yards.

Witnesses described seeing Oswald in the window, with the rifle. When his wife heard that the President had been shot, she ran to where she knew her husband had kept the rifle, just to make sure. She later told investigators that Oswald had told her he had used that rifle to try to kill General Edwin Walker.

The Warren Commission found witnesses and evidence linking only Oswald – who qualified more than once as a U.S. Marine marksman – to every aspect of the assassination. The gun. The location. The escape. The killing of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit.

I have no doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy and that he acted alone.

And I have a theory as to why, according to the polls, most of you disagree with me.

For one thing, it's still impossible to believe that one guy with a $21 gun can bring horror to an entire nation.

But the main reason most of you are still skeptical is this:

In the past 50 years, the federal government, which told us what happened on Nov. 22, 1963, has told us so many things that turned out to be untrue.

LBJ lied (or at least said things that turned out to be quite untrue) about Vietnam; Nixon, about Watergate (and who knows what else); Reagan’s people, about Iran-Contra; Bill Clinton, about almost everything; virtually everyone in Washington, a decade ago, about WMDs; Obama, about health care.

Our national skepticism about the Warren Report simply reflects the fact that we can’t (and shouldn’t) believe everything our government leaders tell us.

But so far, nothing I have read or heard indicates that the Warren Commission was wrong.