Jean Davison - Oswalds Game

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Oswalds Game

Jean Davison

Vladimir Ilyich and I recalled a simile L. Trotsky used somewhere. Once when walking, he spotted in the distance the figure of a man squatting on his haunches and moving his hands about in an absurd way. A madman! he thought. But on drawing nearer, he saw that it was a man sharpening his knife on the paving-stone.

Lenins wife, quoted in Bertram D. Wolfes

Three Who Made a Revolution

Introduction

P RACTICALLY everybody who can remember November 22, 1963, remembers the exact moment when he or she heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. I was sitting in a staff office at the University of Georgia, getting ready to teach a class of freshmen, when I saw a knot of students in the hall huddled around a transistor radio. One glanced up at me with the fiercely introspective look survivors of a natural disaster often have and said, Somebody shot President Kennedy.

I didnt believe it. An hour or so later, after news came that he had died, I walked outside the building and noticed the intense green of the lawn and trees and the sudden weight of the air. Down the hill, a long line of cars was backed up leaving the campusall classes had been canceled. The cars moved foot by foot, but very quietly and patiently, like a funeral procession.

People too young to remember may find it hard to credit the degree of shock and disbelief that was the almost universal reaction. No American leader had been assassinated since McKinley in 1901, and Kennedy was no ordinary leader, as even his adversaries agreed. More than a popular president, he was fortunes child, having wit, elegance, wealth, and a style that made his admirers talk, even while he lived, of the Kennedy myth and the legend of Camelot. He had been destroyed in an instant by a bullet to the brain, and for no apparent reason.

At first, because Dallas was a notorious center of right-wing extremism, many people assumed Kennedy had been attacked by a right-wing fanaticsomeone who opposed his civil rights program or his efforts to relax tensions with the Soviet Union. The news that the suspect who had been arresteda 24-year-old named Lee Harvey Oswaldwas a Marxist and a former defector to the Soviet Union struck many as a grotesque twist of fate. When Robert Kennedy told his brothers widow, Jacqueline, that Oswald was a Communist, her reaction was, Oh my God, but thats absurd. It even robs his death of any meaning. A Marxist killing a liberal president made no sense.

Under arrest, Oswald maintained he hadnt shot anybody. Two days later, when the police attempted to transfer him from one jail to another, he was gunned down by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, before a national television audience.

Over the next few weeks the publics impression of Oswald solidified around the bits of information that came out through the news media. Oswald never held a steady job and he had marital problems. He seemed erratic and aimless. Having defected to Russia, he returned to the United States and later tried to go to Cuba. In April of 1963 he had reportedly taken a shot at retired Major General Edwin A. Walker, a prominent right-wingerWalker was one of Kennedys bitterest political enemies. Many editorials blamed the vicious anti-Kennedy atmosphere in Dallas for inciting a confused misfit to violence.

In 1964 the Warren Commission published the results of the official investigationa summary that came to be known as the Warren Report, followed by twenty-six volumes of testimony and exhibits that sold mainly to libraries. The report presented strong circumstantial evidence that Oswald had fired three shots at the motorcade from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, striking Kennedy twice and Governor John Connally once, and that during his attempt to escape he had shot and killed Patrolman J.D. Tippit. Among other things, the rifle found in the School Depository had been mailed to Oswalds post office box, and the order blank and money order bore his handwriting. When he was arrested at a movie theater, he held in his hand a pistol that matched the bullet casings found near Patrolman Tippits bodyand Oswald reportedly exclaimed, Its all over now. But perhaps the most telling was a small symbolic gesture. Before Oswald went to work at the Depository on the morning of the assassination, he took off his wedding ring and left it on his wifes dresser, something he had never done before.

And yet, although the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald shot Kennedy, it was unable to say why:

Many factors were undoubtedly involved in Oswalds motivation for the assassination, and the Commission does not believe that it can ascribe to him any one motive or group of motives.

The Warren Report spoke of his troubled personal life, his hostility to American society, his interest in Marxism, and his alleged propensity for violence. None of this seemed adequate to explain what had been called the crime of the century. It seemed to many Americans that the reason Kennedy was murdered would never be known.

Some felt, in fact, that there was no reason. If Oswald was a lone gunman with no motive, then the assassination was an event without meaning. It was as though Kennedy had been struck by a bolt of lightning, or by a brick that happened to fall from a construction site as the motorcade passed by. In their view, it amounted to the same thing: the course of history had been changed by a freak accident.

Others suspected a conspiracy from the very beginning. They pointed out that the murder of any head of state is a political crime. If the assassin wasnt a raving lunaticand Oswald certainly wasnt thatthen there must have been a political motive. The Warren Commissions critics began asking the old legal question, Cui bono? Who stood to gain by Kennedys death? If Oswald had no obvious motive, there were others who didCIA operatives and Cuban exiles who felt Kennedy had double-crossed them at the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and Mafia dons who were feeling heat from Kennedys Justice Department, to name a few. As many of the critics saw it, one had only to discover the links between these groups and their patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald, to determine a motive. The result would be a multitude of assassination books attacking the Warren Report and offering new theories about how and who and why. The prospect of a widespread, high-level conspiracy entered Americas consciousness, as did a new suspicion about the way our world worked. In these books, Oswald is merely a pawn, and the real assassins are the unidentified men who successfully plotted to control and change American history.