Evidence indicates that Oswald was not only set up as a patsy in the JFK assassination but that he was not one of the shooters. If this is indeed the case, then shouldn’t his historical reputation be restored?
Following the release of a new batch of JFK assassination documents by the Trump administration, the mainstream media and academic establishment were quick to brush off the idea that the files would offer any new information to challenge the conventional understanding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of JFK.
Harvard history professor Fredrik Logevall was characteristically quoted in The New York Times stating his doubts that the new documents would “overturn our understanding of what happened on that terrible day in Dallas” where, as he believes, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed JFK.
Logevall told the Times that “here’s something comforting about conspiracies. We want to believe, as human beings, that great events have great causes.”
Logevall’s remarks reflect on his function as a gatekeeper who uses his status as a Harvard professor to place himself as being at the vanguard of all information and to dismiss those researchers who have probed deeply into the facts of the JFK assassination and found that Oswald was set up as a patsy.
Logevall may or may not be aware of the fact that the term “conspiracy theorist” was weaponized in the 1960s by the CIA to denigrate truth seekers.
In January 1967, the CIA sent a memorandum (marked “SECRET,” “RESTRICTED” and “DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED”) to its army of media “assets” secretly embedded in virtually every area of U.S. communications entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” which provided guidance for countering “conspiracy theorists” who challenged the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy.
The memo recommended the strategy of smearing critics of the Warren Commission Report by describing them as being financially motivated, or having “anti-American, far-left or communist sympathies,” or being hasty, inaccurate or ego-driven in their research.
Framed, Defamed and Then Murdered
Among those critics smeared by the CIA was Mae Brussell, a Beverly Hills housewife who studied the Warren Commission Report and found it to have been dishonest and part of a government cover-up.
In 1974, Brussell told Playgirl magazine that Oswald was “expendable…a throw-away person [who] was framed, defamed and then murdered.”
Oswald’s innocence is displayed by the fact that Oswald’s boss Roy Truly, the Superintendent of the Texas School Book Depository, and policeman Marion Baker said they saw Oswald, less than two minutes after Kennedy was shot, on the 2nd floor of the Texas School Book Depository—on the complete opposite side of the building from the sniper’s nest on the 6th floor.
According to both Truly and Baker, Oswald was calmly drinking a Coke and not out of breath, which he would have had to have been if he had sprinted across the building.[1]
Additionally, Carolyn Arnold, a secretary at the Texas School Book Depository, saw Oswald on the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository calmly drinking a Coke five minutes before JFK was shot.[2]
Another key witness, Victoria Adams, a Texas School Book Depository employee who was on the stairs at the exact moment Oswald was supposedly making his escape, never saw Oswald.
No witnesses also ever saw Oswald fire a rifle from the Book Depository, nor did anyone see Oswald on the sixth floor at the time of the killing. Oswald’s fingerprints significantly were also never found on the rifle allegedly used in the assassination.
On the day of his arrest, Oswald was given a nitrate test which showed he had not fired a rifle in the previous 24 hours. Initial laboratory tests also did not show the existence of any fingerprints of Oswald on the rifle found on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository.[3]
It would have required a superhuman effort for Oswald, who weighed only 135 pounds, to have stacked 28 50-pound boxes in the sniper’s box in 15 minutes as he is alleged to have done. (In a test, a 268-pound former college football tackle took 21 minutes to move and then stack 40 50-pound boxes).
In addition to this, Oswald was said to have brought the rifle used to kill Kennedy in a brown paper bag, but five witnesses on that day did not see him carrying one. Wesley Buell Frazier who took Oswald to work believes Oswald was innocent and does not believe the bag Oswald was carrying had any gun or broken down gun in it.
Defying the Laws of Physics
The story the Warren Commission sanctioned about Oswald as the killer was further implausible because it advanced the magic-bullet hypothesis postulating that a single bullet caused eight wounds in John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally, who had been riding with him.
Defying the laws of physics, that bullet would have had to have hit Kennedy near the top of his back and come out the front of his neck, gone through Connally’s back, come out of his chest, smashed his right wrist, and caused a puncture wound in his left thigh.[4]
And, after doing all that bone-breaking damage, the magic bullet was supposedly found in pristine condition on a gurney in the hospital, which was not even used to carry either Kennedy or Connally.[5]
The official story also assumed that Oswald killed Kennedy with two perfectly fired shots when he was an average shooter at best in his Marine Corps days and was supposedly armed with an extremely poor quality, antique Italian army-surplus rifle equipped with a defective scope.
No one, including the best “master marksman” in the nation, has ever been able to duplicate the alleged shot-making skill of Oswald, who did not show enough interest in target practice in the Marine Corps to become an expert rifleman. One army contemporary said of Oswald that he was “such a poor shot within the Marines, that it became a pretty big joke.”[6]
The most important documentary record of President Kennedy’s assassination is, of course, Dallas dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the shooting, which appears to show President Kennedy reeling from shots fired from locations other than the Texas School Book Depository, notably the grassy knoll near where Kennedy’s motorcade passed, a conclusion which contradicts the Warren Commission Report’s finding.[7]
Of the 90 witnesses who were asked by police, the FBI or Secret Service where the shots that struck Kennedy came from, 58 said the grassy knoll.[8]
When Carl Renas drove Kennedy’s limousine a few days after the assassination and discovered that the molding strip in the car had been hit with a primary strike—and not simply a bullet fragment—he was told to keep his mouth shut because that would imply that there were more than three shots fired—the number allegedly fired from the Texas School Book Depository.[9]
CIA photographic analyst Homer McMahon told the Assassination Review Board in 1997 that, when he worked on a version of the Zapruder film during the weekend of the assassination, he thought he saw JFK reacting to six to eight shots fired from at least three directions.[10]
Two doctors who treated Kennedy at Parkland Hospital, Malcolm Perry and William Kemp Clark, told reporters at a news conference in mid-afternoon that Kennedy had been shot from the front—which makes the scenario of Oswald as the lone assassin shooting Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository impossible.[11]
The Fix Is In
Dallas police announced Oswald as the lead suspect only 14 minutes after JFK was killed, listing him as being 5’10” tall and weighing 165 pounds—which was his height and weight in government documents created before the assassination based on the description of Marguerite Oswald, Lee’s mother, in May 1960. (Oswald was actually 5’9” tall and weighed 135 pounds.)[12]
This indicated that the police were not going to do a proper investigation, but had been told whom their man was in advance.
When Oswald was apprehended by police at the nearby Texas Theatre, three different wallets of his were found, indicating that he had been set up.[13]
One of the wallets was found at the Tippit murder scene (J. D. Tippit was a Dallas police officer whom Oswald was falsely accused of killing), indicating that it was likely planted there.[14]
Witnesses at the movie theater noticed that Oswald kept switching seats—suggesting that he was there to meet an intelligence contact.[15]
After his arrest, Oswald allegedly tried to call the Nags Head intelligence center number for agents in need of assistance. (Oswald was allegedly trained at this intelligence center in Raleigh, North Carolina, a training base for false Cold War defectors being sent into the Soviet Union to provide the Soviets with false information).[16]
In another sign of an intelligence operation, Oswald impersonators were seen around Mexico City and Dallas, including at the Sports Dome rifle range on the eve of the assassination; and getting into a rambler station wagon near Dealey Plaza.[17]
Yet another Oswald impersonator, dressed exactly like him, was arrested on the balcony of the Texas Theatre shortly after Lee Harvey’s arrest. Afterwards, this impersonator was allegedly flown to an Air Force base in Roswell, New Mexico, on a CIA plane.[18]
Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry admitted in a 1969 interview with The Dallas Morning News that “We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody’s yet been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand.”[19]
Curry further admitted in a videotaped interview with assassination researcher Peter Dale Scott during the late 1970s that the medical and photographic evidence from Dealey Plaza indicated that a shooter probably was firing from the front and that Kennedy was hit with two shots fired from the grassy knoll. When Scott suggested that “the evidence we have…is rather strong evidence that there was another assassin involved,” Curry replied, “that’s right.”[20]
These comments by Chief Curry are consistent with his immediate impression of the shooting, when he radioed the police dispatcher from the official lead car in the motorcade, behind the advance and pilot cars but directly ahead of the presidential limousine. “Go to hospital, go to Parkland Hospital. Have them stand by. Get men on top of that railroad underpass and see what happened up there. Go up to the overpass.”[21]
Oswald—CIA All the Way
Oswald was a 24-year-old former Marine with family mob ties (his uncle who helped raise him was a Carlos Marcello lieutenant) and a background in U.S. intelligence. He had just returned from the Soviet Union and infiltrated the left-wing Fair Play for Cuba Committee as part of his intelligence cover.[22]
To give Oswald a false public identity, Oswald befriended an anti-Castro Cuban named Carlos Bringuier, who interfered with his leafleting and staged a fight that was designed to get Oswald arrested and have his name appear in the papers. The pro-Castro base would in turn see Oswald as a supporter of Castro and he was now identifiable as pro-communist in the public mind.[23]
Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr and Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade claimed to have learned from reliable sources that Oswald was an FBI informant from 1962 until the assassination, and that he was paid $200 per month.[24]
Senator Richard Schweiker (R-PA) said during the Church Committee deliberations that “everywhere you look, with him [Oswald] there are the fingerprints of intelligence.”[25]
Growing up in a fatherless household in New Orleans with a loveless mother and absent brother, Oswald had become fascinated with the TV series I Led 3 Lives, which was loosely based on the life of Herbert Philbrick, a Boston advertising executive who infiltrated the U.S. Communist Party on behalf of the FBI.[26]
As a red-blooded American youth, Oswald loved and adored the Kennedys (unlike Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles), and was also a big fan of John Wayne and Ian Fleming novels that heroized James Bond. The summer before JFK’s assassination, he had read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s profusely anticommunist book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
In 1956, Oswald was tapped by David Ferrie—a CIA asset involved in anti-Castro operations who flew drugs and guns out of Central America and worked in Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club—to join the Civil Air Patrol.[27]
Then in 1957, living out his boyhood fantasy, Oswald was trained for future spy missions into the Soviet Union by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) under the direction of the CIA as a young enlistee in the Marine Corps.[28]
Fluent in Russian, Oswald subsequently worked at the Atsugi Naval Base in Japan, the largest CIA installation in the world, which was used as a launching base for the U-2 reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union.
At Atsugi, Oswald possessed a Minox camera, not yet available to the general public in 1963, but used by spies.[29] He also did special work for the CIA in the Philippines—apparently in connection with the CIA intervention in Indonesia—and in Taiwan, according to his mother.[30]
Oswald’s roommate in the Marine Corps, James Botelho, who became a California judge, said that Oswald was not a communist or Marxist[31]—that was a cover—but was anti-Soviet and was on assignment in the Soviet Union for American intelligence.
James Wilcott, a former CIA finance officer, testified in 1978 before the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he had handled the funding for a CIA project in which Oswald had been recruited as a CIA spy and that Oswald served the CIA as a double agent in the Soviet Union.[32]
Jefferson Morley’s research uncovered that Oswald was involved in at least four CIA covert operations in Mexico, some just weeks before JFK was killed.[33] One involved transporting a bioweapon prepared by a CIA-funded doctor, Alton Ochsner, for use in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro (the weapon was designed to give Castro a fast-acting lung cancer).[34]
When he arrived in Dallas, Oswald became part of a group of White Russian exiles with whom he could converse in Russian.
Oswald’s CIA handler, George de Mohrenschildt, was a geologist and leader in Dallas’s White Russian community who was a member of the Dallas Petroleum Club and had worked for the CIA in Yugoslavia, Venezuela, Guatemala and Haiti.
A friend of George H. W. Bush, de Mohrenschild also worked for Brown & Root, the Texas construction firm with CIA ties owned by LBJ’s top donor.
De Mohrenschild helped Oswald gain employment at a graphic arts company that had contacts with the U.S. Army Map Service and allowed Oswald to do top-secret work for the U.S. Army, including processing reconnaissance photos of Cuba.[35]
De Mohrenschildt, who was asked to check on Oswald by the Dallas office of the CIA, wrote a letter to Lyndon Johnson in April 1963 asking to meet with him. In the summer of 1963, Oswald worked in New Orleans for the Reily Foods Company, which was located at the center of the intelligence community in New Orleans and was owned by William B. Reily, a supporter of the CIA-sponsored Cuban Revolutionary Council.[36]
The Reily Foods Company, significantly, was located next to the offices of William Guy Banister, whose private detective agency functioned as a front for CIA covert domestic operations.[37]
When Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, inquired about Oswald handing out pro-Castro literature, Banister replied: “Don’t worry about him…He’s with us. He’s associated with this office.” The purpose of the leafleting, besides helping to create Oswald’s cover, was to identify pro-Castro elements in New Orleans who were placed on a blacklist of Communist sympathizers that Banister was developing.[38]
Cover-up
The cover-up team understood the importance of controlling the first few hours after JFK’s assassination.
Lyndon Johnson and aide Cliff Carter maintained tight control over the Dallas and Texas state investigations and ensured that the Dallas police turned over all their evidence to the FBI even though they had jurisdiction over the case.
Carter had direct talks with Waggoner Carr, the Texas Attorney General, to short-circuit the state investigations.
Johnson and FBI Director Hoover also dispatched a Justice Department lawyer close to the CIA, Herbert J. Miller, Jr., to Texas to prevent the Dallas police from doing any investigating on its own. To silence Oswald, orders were given for a public transfer of him, which made him a sitting duck for Jack Ruby, a CIA- and Mafia-linked assassin with some kind of debt to pay, who was let into the police building by corrupt elements of the Dallas police.[39]
At Parkland Hospital, to which Kennedy was rushed after the shooting and was then pronounced dead, a team of Secret Service agents announced they were under orders (obviously from Johnson) to prevent an autopsy to coverup the real manner of JFK’s death.[40]
Eventually an autopsy was performed at Bethesda naval hospital, though there is evidence that the doctors were pressured to doctor the results.[41]
Johnson ordered that the presidential limousine be flown to Cincinnati to be cleaned and completely refurbished. No ballistic examination of the seats or dashboard was ever performed.
Oddly, Governor John Connally’s clothing was also sent immediately for dry cleaning and, thus, destroyed as evidence (for bullet entry and exit wounds). Additional important evidence from the crime scene was destroyed.[42]
Immediately after the assassination, Dallas District Attorney Wade, a World War II era roommate of John Connally who was close with LBJ, announced that anyone involved in “the conspiracy” deserved the electric chair.
However, soon afterward, Wade received a call from Clifton Carter in the White House and was told there should be no mention of a conspiracy. Wade later shut up.[43]
Johnson was good friends with Joe Tonahill, Jack Ruby’s lawyer whom Ruby did not trust and tried repeatedly to remove as his counsel.
The FBI eagerly participated in the cover-up because FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ’s Washington neighbor and close friend, hated the Kennedys and was not about to help Bobby find his brother’s killers.[44]
Privately, Hoover believed in a conspiracy, telling Billy Byars, a Humble Oil investor, in 1964: “If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to the country. Our whole political system could be disrupted.”[45]
Marina Oswald—Coerced into Telling Lies
Researchers who suggest that Oswald was the lone assassin point to the testimony of Marina Oswald, his widow,[46] against Oswald before the Warren Commission.
Marina Oswald said that her husband came home one night in April 1963 and said that he had tried to kill right-wing U.S. Army General Edwin Walker—as a prelude to killing JFK.[47]
Oswald’s testimony implicating her deceased husband was dubious because, one week after the JFK assassination, Marina was defending Lee Harvey, saying that he was a good man who loved JFK. If he was guilty and had boasted of trying to kill General Walker, why would she say this?
After a week, Marina was put under the watch of Mike Howard, a Secret Service agent who went on to work for Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird until Johnson’s death. Howard told researcher Robert Morrow in 2023 that he was “given an assignment” by LBJ and “carried it out.” That assignment was to shut up Marina, keep her out of reach of the media and then control what she said afterwards.
Marina subsequently disappeared from public view and started at that time saying Lee Harvey was guilty.
But then in 1988, she changed her story again and said that Oswald was innocent and did not shoot anybody. She told NBC anchor Tom Brokaw the same thing in 1993 and said that evidence had been fabricated against her ex-husband who should be exonerated and pardoned.
Historian Robert Morrow suggests that Marina likely changed her story the first time—to implicate her deceased husband—when she was threatened with deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) unless she changed what she was saying.
If Marina were deported, she would be separated from her daughters Rachel and June.
In 2010, Marina Oswald told Jesse Ventura “would you sacrifice your children for the truth.” This looks to be Marina Oswald’s way of saying “I told a bunch of lies indicting Oswald in 1963 and 1964 to protect the lives of my children and me.”
Oswald’s mother Marguerite was among those who were dismayed by how Marina suddenly flipped from defending her son in the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination to indicting him for trying to kill General Walker a mere month later.
Marguerite Oswald at this time—late 1963 and early 1964—was telling the media that her son Lee Oswald was working for the CIA—which she deduced even if she did not have hard proof. Then the media campaign to discredit Marguerite Oswald as a nutty and dyspeptic woman began in earnest.[48]
The media manipulation campaign was further evident when C. D. Jackson, the publisher of Life magazine and a U.S. government psychological warfare adviser, and former CIA Director Allen Dulles arranged for a CIA publicist, Isaac Don Levine, to have Marina Oswald’s diaries—which gave off the impression of Lee as a Soviet agent—published in Life after the assassination.[49]
Framed Also in Police Officer Killing
After shooting JFK, Oswald was accused of killing police officer J.D. Tippit near his house, although this was impossible because, as the Warren Commission said, Oswald was at his boarding house at 1:03 p.m. (around the time Tippit was killed). and was immediately then seen waiting for a bus, nine-tenths of a mile away from where Tippit was killed between 1:06 and 1:07 p.m., according to witness Helen Markham, and 1:11 according to a suppressed police report.
Oswald could not possibly have traveled that distance in four to eight minutes.[50] The shell casings from the crime scene also did not match Oswald’s rifle and a witness, Acquilla Clemons, stated that two men killed Tippit, neither of whom matched Oswald’s description.[51]
Should Oswald’s Historical Reputation Be Restored?
Lee Harvey Oswald is surely one of the most lied about, defamed, slandered and wrongfully impugned people in American and even world history.
Despite what Harvard historians tell you, the evidence suggests that Oswald was set up as a patsy in the JFK assassination and that he was not one of the shooters.
As such, it looks to be clear that his historical reputation should be restored so that he does not go down in history textbooks as the bad guy in the JFK assassination story.
- The author wishes to thank Robert Morrow for his help in putting together this article.
Thomas Buchanan, Who Killed Kennedy? (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1964), 108; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5P7U1BpLmE. ↑
Barry Ernest, with foreword by David Lifton, The Girl on the Stairs: The Search for a Missing Witness to the JFK Assassination (Elmwood, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2013); Gregory C. Lavin, Chasing Ed: Was Major General Edward G. Lansdale the Mastermind of the JFK Assassination (Tampa, FL: Gatekeeper Press, 2025), 82. ↑
Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins (New York: Warner Books, 1988), xiii; Craig I. Zirbel, The Texas Connection (Dallas: Texas Connection LLC, 2010), 210. Garrison’s book was originally published by Sheridan Square Press, which was founded by Ellen Ray and Bill Schaap, who were also co-founders of CovertAction Information Bulletin. ↑
Phillip F. Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination (New York: Skyhorse, 2013), 459. David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., leading expert on the medical evidence in the case of JFK, performed a simple experiment by plotting the “official” trajectory of the bullet that officials claim passed through JFK’s neck and entered Texas Governor John Connally’s back—and discovered that it is anatomically impossible because cervical vertebra intervene. Craig Roberts points out that the supposed “magic bullet” would have had to have made “two 90 degree turns, and had to pause 1.8 seconds in flight at the same time.” Craig Roberts, Kill Zone: A Sniper Looks at Dealey Plaza (Tulsa, OK: Consolidated Press International, 1997), 61. ↑
Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, 459. Dr. Cyril Wecht pointed out that more grams of bullet were embedded in Connally’s wrist than were missing from the magic bullet. ↑
Buchanan, Who Killed Kennedy? 100, 101; Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, 460, 461; Daniel Borgström, “Ex-Marine Explains Why Oswald Alone Could Not Possibly Have Shot JFK,” CovertAction Magazine, December 20, 2021; Roberts, Kill Zone. Contemporaries said that Oswald was actually a very poor shot who “couldn’t hit the side of a barn.” ↑
Robert Groden, “A New Look at the Zapruder Film,” in Sid Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian, eds., with introduction by Philip Agee, Government by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories from Dallas to Today (New York: New American Library, 1976), 3. ↑
Roger Stone, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2014), 249; Harry A. Yardum, The Grassy Knoll Witnesses: Who Shot JFK? (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2009); Sara Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen,” Midwest Today, 2007; Buchanan, Who Killed Kennedy? 85. Gordon Arnold, a young soldier who had photographic proof of shots from the grassy knoll, had his camera seized by a man dressed in a police uniform who was not wearing a hat and had dirt on his hands. Roberts, Kill Zone, 63. ↑
Stone, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, 257. In October 2023, Secret Service Agent Paul Landis published a book stating that he found a bullet in JFK’s limo, which further discredits the magic-bullet and Oswald-did-it theories. Paul Landis, The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2023). Landis’s story is corroborated by nurse Phyllis Hall, who had previously said that she saw a bullet sitting on Kennedy’s stretcher. ↑
Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit (Berkeley, CA: Hightower Press, 2013), 565. ↑
McBride, Into the Nightmare, 19. The transcript from the news conference went missing for many years and film and sound coverage disappeared. Malcolm Perry was also intimidated.
https://robertmorrowpoliticalresearchblog.blogspot.com/2023/01/5-feet-10-inches-165-pounds-is-absolute.html ↑
- Sara Jordan-Heintz, The Incredible Life & Mysterious Death of Dorothy Kilgallen (West Palm Beach, FL: Page Turner Books International, 2023), 123, 216.
- John Delane Williams, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2019), 174.
- Jordan-Heintz, The Incredible Life & Mysterious Death of Dorothy Kilgallen, 123, 216.
Lavin, Chasing Ed; Emerald Robinson, “New Evidence: Lee Harvey Oswald Was Trained by the CIA,” Substack, January 10, 2022. Oswald was trying to get in touch with a “John Hurt” who had trained him at Nags Head. CIA agent Victor Marchetti said that Hunt was a CIA contact name Oswald was given to call if he was in trouble. ↑
↑
Stone, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, 272; Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, 68; Williams, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination, 158; John Newman, “Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City: Fingerprints of Conspiracy,” in James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X (London: Feral House, 2003), 118, 119.
- Stone, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, 272; Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, 68; Williams, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination, 158; Newman, “Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City: Fingerprints of Conspiracy,” 118, 119; Lavin, Chasing Ed. ↑
- McBride, Into the Nightmare, 28 ↑
Idem.
Idem. ↑
Stone, The Man Who Killed Kennedy. ↑
Williams, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination, 118, 119. ↑
Katz, “Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?” in Government by Gunplay, ed. Blumenthal and Yazijian, 25. Author John Delane Williams suggests that Oswald may even have been trying to alert the FBI about a CIA plot involving David Atlee Phillips, whom an anti-Castro Cuban leader had spotted with Oswald in Dallas. Williams, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination, 156. ↑
Katz, “Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?” Government by Gunplay, ed. Blumenthal and Yzidjian, 25. ↑
Oswald’s girlfriend in New Orleans said that this remained Oswald’s favorite show as an adult. Edward Voebel, Oswald’s best friend, told author David Lifton about Oswald love of John Wayne and the film Sands of Iwo Jime. Voebal said emphatically that Oswald had nothing to do with Marxism or Communism. Author Correspondence with Robert Morrow, December 26, 2025. Lifton told Morrow about his interview with Voebel. ↑
David Ferrie was the initial target of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation into the assassination. Eight witnesses had observed Oswald in Ferrie’s company attempting to vote in rural Clinton, Louisiana. On the night of November 22, 1963, Ferrie made a strange trip to Texas for the alleged purpose of indoor ice skating. Ferrie said at the time of the assassination he was still in New Orleans, employed as an investigator for Carlos Marcello. On February 22, 1967, four days after Garrison’s probe was made public, Ferrie was found dead in his apartment. The coroner concluded that he had died at the age of 49 of a blood clot. ↑
Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, 334-42. According to Victor Marchetti, Deputy Assistant to CIA Director Richard Helms, “Oswald was likely a ‘dangle,’ an American intelligence agent put out there for the Soviets to recruit in the hope that he could penetrate the Soviet intelligence network.” ↑
Bob Katz, “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” in Blumenthal and Yazijian, eds., Government by Gunplay, 15. ↑
Peter Dale Scott, “From Dallas to Watergate,” in Blumenthal and Yazijian, eds., Government by Gunplay, 121. ↑
Botelho told Mark Lane that, if Oswald had been a communist, then he would have “taken violent action against him and so would many of the Marines in the unit.” https://robertmorrowpoliticalresearchblog.blogspot.com/2021/06/james-botelho-lee-harvey-oswalds-1959.html ↑
Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, 385; Williams, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination, 76; Jordan-Heintz, The Incredible Life & Mysterious Death of Dorothy Kilgallen, 192. Wilcott said the CIA hired Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald served in Atsugi. Wilcott gave the House Select Committee on Assassinations the names of seven other people who could confirm Oswald was still paid to do operational work at the time of the JFK assassination. ↑
Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). Jordan-Heintz’s research suggests that these could have been Oswald imposters involved in the covert operations in Mexico. She uncovered a declassified FBI memo from November 23, 1963, which reported that Oswald stated that he had never been in Mexico except to Tijuana on one occasion.” Jordan-Heintz, The Incredible Life & Mysterious Death of Dorothy Kilgallen, 124. ↑
Williams, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination, 118. David Ferrie worked in Ochsner’s lab, along with Judyth Vary Baker, Oswald’s lover, who also worked under the cover of the Reily Foods Company. Ferrie was a liaison to Oswald and his function as a courier. Ochsner was an early proponent of the link between smoking and cancer. Historian John Simkin wrote that “One of Ochsner’s friends described him as being ‘like a fundamentalist preacher’ in the sense that the fight against communism was the only subject that he would talk about, or even allow you to talk about, in his presence.” ↑
Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, 334-42; Katz, “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” 18; Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, 61, 62. After the assassination, de Mohrenschildt—a veteran of French intelligence whose father was governor of the province of Minsk for the Czar before fleeing Russia following the 1917 revolution—stated that Oswald loved President Kennedy, could not have killed him, and was a patsy, and that Texas oil men and U.S. intelligence operatives murdered Kennedy. De Mohrenschildt was found shot to death at his daughter’s house in Florida after he publicly revealed that the CIA had sanctioned his contact with Oswald.
James DiEugenio, “Operation Dragon,” Kennedys and King, September 8, 2021, https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/operation-dragon. Researcher Bob Katz wrote that, in New Orleans, Oswald “moved in a world of right wingers and Cuban exiles that had been tied to the Agency since the Bay of Pigs.” Katz, “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” 26. ↑
Williams, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination, 117. ↑
Sam and Chuck Giancana, Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America (New York: Skyhorse, 2016), 436; Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, 27; Williams, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination, 113, 227. Banister was a former FBI agent with extreme right-wing views who had associations with David Ferrie and New Orleans gangster Carlos Marcello. He had been hired at one time to find radical or even liberal organizations in New Orleans-area colleges to join and penetrate them and was a leader of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. ↑
https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/31208-lyndon-johnson-murdered-lee-harvey-oswald-a-circumstantial-case-against-lbj/. Dallas police detective Don Archer and L. C. Graves specified that it was Washington (i.e., Johnson) that gave the orders for the public transfer. Former Dallas Sheriff Steve Guthrie also said that it was “common knowledge” that either Mayor Earle Cabell or City Manager Elgin Crull ordered Police Chief Jesse Curry to have a very public transfer of Lee Harvey Oswald. https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh22/pdf/WH22_CE_1251.pdf. Johnson and Ruby were allegedly seen together a few months before the assassination at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas with H.L. Hunt, the oilman who was Johnson’s biggest contributor. Ruby’s lawyer, Joe Tonahill, was represented by Sandy Shapiro, who had worked for LBJ’s law firm. ↑
Sean Fetter, Under Cover of Night: The United States Air Force and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, 2 Vols. (New York: Arlington Press LLC, 2023), 56, 274; Jacob G. Hornberger, “Lyndon Johnson’s Role in the Kennedy Assassination,” The Future of Freedom Foundation, April 12, 2023, https://www.fff.org/2023/04/12/lyndon-johnsons-role-in-the-kennedy-assassination/; Jacob Hornberger, The Kennedy Autopsy (Fairfax, VA: The Future of Freedom Foundation, 2015), 1, 2; Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005), 1.
- For more details on problems with the JFK autopsy, see Hornberger, The Kennedy Autopsy; David S. Lifton, Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 1980); Cyril H. Wecht and Dawna Kaufmann, The JFK Assassination Dissected (Jefferson, NC: Exposit Books, 2021).
Judith A. Eisner, “Carmel Closeup: Mae Brussell: Fears ‘hidden government’ planned assassinations,” The Carmel Pine Cone, September 29, 1972. Lee Harvey Oswald’s State Department papers were burned in another aspect of the cover-up. ↑
Barr McClellan, Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 216; Zirbel, The Texas Connection, 18. ↑Robert Morrow, “The LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK.” Johnson’s friendship with Tonahill is detailed in Penn Jones, Jr., Forgive My Grief: A Further Critical Review of the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Volume II (Midlothian, TX: The Midlothian Mirror Inc., 1967), 169.
Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Gollancz, 1993), 383. ↑
According to researcher Mae Brussell, Marina Oswald came from the White Russian aristocracy and had links to the CIA, Defense Industry, and General Reinhard Gehlen’s Nazi-CIA network through the CIA/Greek Orthodox Church. ↑
The Walker assassination was set up as part of a psywar operation that framed Oswald as a pro-communist agent intent on targeting the ultra-right. This campaign was initially advanced by the John Birch Society and right-wing authors such as Billy James Hargis in his book, The Far Left (Tulsa, OK: Christian Crusade, 1964). ↑
https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30789-marina-oswald-would-you-sacrifice-your-children-for-the-truth/page/2/. Howard had also been assigned by LBJ to look after Jackie Kennedy after the assassination, which was LBJ’s way of spying on her since she suspected LBJ in the assassination of her husband. ↑
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 55, 289. For more on Levine and his function as Marina Oswald’s CIA handler, see H. P. Albarelli, Jr., Coup in Dallas: The Decisive Investigation into Who Killed JFK, with Leslie Sharpe and Alan Kent, foreword by Dick Russell (New York: Skyhorse, 2021), 399, 449-51, 453, 454. ↑
McBride, Into the Nightmare; , 11, 12; Robert Morrow, “1994 Larry Harris Video on the Frame up of Lee Harvey Oswald for J.D. Tippit murder,” October 1, 2021, https://robertmorrowpoliticalresearchblog.blogspot.com/2021/10/1994-larry-harris-video-on-frame-up-of.html. The bullets that killed Tippit were never matched to Oswald’s gun. Markham was a waitress who reported all this to the Dallas police 90 minutes after Tippit’s killing. She said that she checked her clock in the laundry room of her apartment which read 1:04 and then walked toward the Tippit murder location which was a two- or three-minute walk from her apartment. She was headed to catch a 1:12 bus, according to researcher Matt Douthit. She witnessed the entire murder—Tippit was shot after getting out of his squad car—describing the killer to police as being short and somewhat on the heavy side, with slightly bushy hair. Later, Markham identified Lee Harvey Oswald in a police line-up, but this was after she had seen his photograph on television. She identified him, she said, because she got “cold chills” when she saw him, which makes no sense. Not a single witness saw Oswald at the Tippit murder scene. The Warren Commission and House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Oswald was last seen at the corner of Beckley and Zang at 1:03 p.m. Either of their times, 13 minutes or 14 minutes and 30 seconds, would place Oswald at 10th and Patton at 1:16 p.m. or later. If he were walking west, as all of the evidence suggested, he would have had to cover even more ground in the same unreasonably short period of time. The Dallas Police recorded that the defendant was walking “west in the 400 block of East 10th.” The Warren Commission ignored the evidence—five witnesses and the official Dallas Police report of the event—and said he was walking east, away from the Texas Theatre. The Commission also gave the wrong time for Tippit’s death—1:15 p.m. The lead detective admitted they had no evidence on Oswald. ↑
Roberts, Kill Zone, 70. Clemons was later told, by men she assumed to be plain clothes policemen, to forget what she had seen or “she might get hurt.” Oswald also was identified as being at the Texas theater at 1:15 PM which would have also made it impossible for him to have shot Tippit. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
