Six seconds in Dallas viewed fifty years later

I first read the Warren Report when I was in seventh grade. This is one of those facts that I should have been legally obligated to reveal to Kim before we got married. Somewhere in the vows after for better or for worse should be “Are you aware of the fact that your potential husband had detailed discussions on the ballistic reports for the Kennedy assassination when he was twelve years old?” That is a pretty large skeleton to have hidden in one’s closet.

I mention this because I just finished reading Gerald Posner’s book “Case Closed” which pushes the mind boggling conclusion that Oswald acted alone and I want it to be clear that I have studied this subject for much of my life. I’ve read numerous books, wrote a research paper on the subject in college (which I still have a copy of) and have had to be forcibly restrained from spending time on vacation in Dallas recreating the steps of the motorcade. I can’t really explain why this is the case other than I grew up in a Kennedy-centric household and the mystery about it caught my attention. The fact that there was this world changing event where no one was quite sure what happened just fascinates me.

So this book was my latest examination of the case and the one that I agree with for the most part. Part of this is the technical details but another, and the more interesting side, is the personal history of Oswald. I had never really examined his life in great detail though I could recount the main points: joined the marines, defected to the Soviet Union, returned to the US, arrested for pro Cuba activities in New Orleans and ended up in Dallas after a strange trip to Mexico City. However, Posner went into other details that really struck me when viewed in the light of other crimes over the past fifty years.

In essence, if you look at the personal life of Oswald you do not see someone who would be a mob hitman or a KGB agent or a part of some wide ranging sinister plot. You see someone who much more resembles the guy who shot Gabby Giffords or some of the other mass shooters. Oswald barely had a high school education and went to like a dozen different schools over the years. He was fascinated by the ideas of communism and Marxism but in the sense that a fourteen year old would be. He grasped the talking points and the propaganda but had no deep understanding of it. He wanted to constantly be the center attention and show his importance but he was basically a nobody. In Russia he thought people would flock to him as an American. In the US he thought people would want to hear his story about his defection. But no one cared and when people questioned his beliefs he became belligerent. He was an abusive husband and paranoid and was against all types of government. You wouldn’t trust him to mow your lawn much less with a plot to assassinate the leader of the free world.

It just really struck me in reading this that I had read profiles of people like this for years and never made the connection. You see the parallels to the Columbine shooters and the Oklahoma City bombers and a number of other lone mass shooters over the years. Someone lost in society, anti-social, paranoid and delusional, who takes advantage of a weapon and an open society to perform a heinous act. One of the reasons that people are drawn to conspiracy theories is that we don’t want to admit that one lone nut can change the world. We want the view that someone, even a massive evil cabal, is in charge and driving the world. We don’t want to believe that one person can cause mass destruction and change everything. But we’ve seen it over and over again.

Once you grasp that then the rest of the assassination is relatively straightforward. Governor Connally has to be shot from behind. While it looks weird in the Zapruder film Kennedy was also shot from behind. We think we know what it looks like when someone is shot but all we have seen is thousands of TV and movie shootings and most of us have no first hand experience (thank god). We know that shots were fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository because three people on the fifth floor heard the shots come from above them. Oswald was the last person seen on the sixth floor. Oswald was the only employee who left the building after the shooting. He was a lone nut with a rifle and a desire to show to the world that he was important. It is a story that we see all too often in history. We would love for everything in life to have a deeper meaning especially in history. But sometimes it is just a car driving past an unstable man with a perverse desire for fame.