John F. Kennedy – Audibly Speaking: A Site of History and Memory

The Warren Commission’s Warren Report, at 888 pages, is a long slog.  For those for whom it is too long, I begin here a series of summaries of each of the chapters in the Report.  Each chapter exhibits the strengths and weaknesses of the Commission’s investigations.  The Commission’s faults can be exaggerated and it accomplishments overlooked.  This series opens with “Summary and Conclusions,” including one of the most controversial, if not the most controversial, sentence in the entire Warren Report.

We have an intermission episode in this series on the JFK assassination, with a personal view of the memories of the host on the assassination and why he was not taken in by conspiracy theories, in contrast to so many of his boomer cohorts along the way.

Today, Audibly Speaking reviews the magisterial book by famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  We revisit the things that make it unique and utterly unanswerable as a riposte to the crazy conspiracy theories that still pollute the writings about the 35th US President.

In this sidebar episode tracing the movements of Lee Harvey Oswald and we step back from the forest to examine the trees of the story. In this politically portentous year of 2024, learn what the conspiracy nonsense can do to help us save American democracy. And begin to learn why the strengths of the Warren Commission and its Warren Report far out weigh the particular weaknesses examined in a previous episode on Audibly Speaking.

Why did Lee Harvey Oswald go east from his boarding house in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, only to go west before his fatal encounter with Police Officer J.D. Tippit on November 22, 1963? The only possible answer was that his plans must have changed, along with his destination, at least temporarily. Ironically, however, his confrontation with Tippit, murderous though it was, may not have changed his destination at all, because he continued his journey west in its wake. An advertisement in the Dallas Morning News, never examined until now, may explain this mystery, as I explain in this episode.

We have now arrived at the critical moments.  What happened as the assassination occurred and what do we know of Oswald’s behavior during these most important of minutes? It turns out we know a great deal–so much in fact that we can even infer what was going on in Oswald’s mind on a minute by minute basis.  In this episode, we also speculate about the most mysterious of all questions. Where was Oswald going when he left his boarding house after the assassination? Here we engage in informed speculation, with an emphasis on the word “informed.”

How to help students understand the overwhelming evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald (and Oswald alone)?  Given the power of the evidence, no help ought be needed! Perhaps a concise run-through will do the trick?  Or a solemn and stately documentary? In a time when facts alone hold no sway, what is an historian to do? The answer is to marshal the evidence one more time, always one more time, until the bell, at long last, rings.  Even though it has been clanging now for more than sixty years, let up look at a day in the life of Oswald, the last day before the assassination, as the camera of evidence before him and before us, followed his every step, and recorded everything we need to know to state the obvious: that Oswald did it, and that he was a man utterly without help along the way.  This is a change of pace in our JFK series, a look directly at only one thing, the evidence against Oswald.

What was Lee Harvey Oswald up to in New Orleans between his failed assassination attempt against Retired General Edwin Walker in April 1963 and his trip to Mexico City in late September in pursuit of a visa to Communist Cuba?  What was the mix of motives that drove Oswald in these critical months prior to November 1963, when the president of the United States unexpectedly came into his sights.  Listen to this podcast episode for some insights into these questions.

In this final part of the three-part podcast series, we look at Oswald’s interior concerns in the days and hours before 12:30 pm CST on November 22, 1963.  In so doing we elucidate the most elusive of questions, the question of motive.

In this three-part series, we go into the mind of the assassin and try to understand Oswald’s motives.  This helps us understand why conspiracy thinking about the assassination makes no sense. If you believe that Oswald lacked motive, ability or opportunity to shoot JFK, a conspiracy seems to be a necessary alternative. In fact none of these three things were lacking in 1963.  There was no need for conspiracy. Oswald, however unbalanced, was actually quite smart.  His plans for greatness, deluded as they were, come down to two. Colored by the Cold War and the politics of a performative president, they gave him motives and opportunities galore to assassinate JFK. The conspiracy shysters don’t tell you about these realities and the politicians and explainers in the 1960s also did not want to talk about the geopolitics of the era, factors that make the mysteries of the assassination disappear, manufactured as they were by storytellers who only wanted to tell part of the story.