Interesting theory about JFK assassination

What if Lee Harvey Oswald only killed J.F.K. because he missed?(Via Glenn Fleishman)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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jjsaul

While I really don’t know what to make of it, considering his self-aggrandizement, E. Howard Hunt did confess to the assassination in a taped death-bed confession witnessed by his own son.
g0d5m15t4k3

Huh, interesting theory!
JamesMason

My guess is real estate manipulation. The book depository building was about to go out of business, what is a crappy building like that EVER going to be used for, UNLESS…

You get Oswald to shoot Kennedy, then later turn it into a museum.

Remember, Oswald did say he was a patsy, and Ruby was a bar owner so there were real-estate connections from that.

The real shame is that the cover-up had to go after JFK Jr. 40 years later.
Amelia_G

Gore Vidal says it was Cuban.

Years ago, on the teevee, I saw a software recreation that supposedly justified the bullet vectors. Can’t manage to google it now.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  The idea that Cuba could pull it off is quaint. It’s like our decades-long national terror that the Soviets were going to take over America, when they couldn’t even run their own country.
EvilCatBucky

Living in Dallas, I’ve come across a couple of old-timers that will flat out refuse to speak about the Kennedy assassination. The fact that one of them was a police officer that was present and won’t even discuss it with his grandkids always gets the conspiracy wheels a-turnin. Of course more than likely it’s all just a painful memory for many of those that were present. I’ve always found it odd how we’ve enshrined the event here. A monument I understand, but people also want to see where Oswald lived, there’s a popular bar called Lee Harvey’s, and the Texas Theatre where Oswald was caught is a popular haunt (and serves great drinks).
- turn_self_off
  
  USA is a large, young nation. As such there are few really big events in its history, and those that exist are far apart geographically. Give it 10 or so generations to fade and things may not be so interesting any more. Still, with the generations appearing to be longer and longer lived, that may take some time.
Anonymous

Amelia_G: what a coincidence you mention Gore Vidal. I was reading an interview with him when he mentioned that it was pretty clear who killed Kennedy and that it was all thoroughly explained in the book ‘Ultimate Sacrifice’ (spoiler alert: it was not Cuban)
Anonymous

Key passage from the linked page:

“But that’s not exactly the way it turned out. On 22 November 1963, while riding beside President Kennedy in a motorcade in Dallas, John Connally, then governor of Texas, was shot through his arm and lung by Lee Harvey Oswald. President Kennedy was shot and killed in the same incident. The history books say it slightly differentlyâ€”that Connally was wounded during Oswald’s assassination of President Kennedy. The assumption is always that Oswald was shooting at Kennedy and that Connally was hit by accident or as a secondary target of opportunity. Could it not, however, have been the other way around? In spite of all the investigations, including that of the Warren Commission, and the continuing fascination with and theories about the event, no one has yet come up with a credible motive for the shooting of Kennedy by Oswald. Against this, we know for a fact that Oswald once asked Connally for help in what may have been a cri du coeur. He was turned down flat.”

The alternative entertained is that Oswald was aiming for Connally.

But there is a third option: maybe he was aiming for both.
buddy66

Boy, that Oswald was sure some misser, wasn’t he? That’s Marine Corps training for you, the best missers in the world. He misses Connally not just once, not just twice, but three times! That was a really great feat of missing, that was.
J.K.

Of the many JFK assassination theories that exist, my favorite is this one:

(1) The intended target was Jackie, whose death was intended as a human sacrifice to power an apocalyptic Death-Sex-Magick spell. Ultra-nationalist Russian immigrants with ties to Aleister Crowley believed that Jackie’s death at the moment of ovulation would regenerate the undead Rasputin; and

(2) although grievously wounded, JFK did not die, but instead was partially cyborgized and installed in the hollow torso of “Big Tex,” the mechanical mascot of the Texas State Fair. In most alternate universes, as well as in our own, JFK was rescued from captivity by Elvis Presley, but the trauma of both the imprisonment and rescue caused a certain amount of psychic “bleed through” that has distorted our communal memory.
jonathan_v

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libra_(novel)

“”" Libra (1988) is a novel written by Don DeLillo. It focuses on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and offers a speculative account of the events that shaped the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The book takes the reader from Oswald’s early days as a child, to his adolescent stint in the US Marine Corps, through his brief defection to the USSR and subsequent marriage to a Russian girl, and finally his return to the US and his role in the assassination of Kennedy.

In DeLillo’s version of events, the assassination attempt on Kennedy is in fact intended to fail; the plot is instigated by disgruntled former CIA operatives who see it as the only way to guide the government to war on Cuba. “”"
- dsullivan
  
  December 1962: Covert back-channel communications from an official high within the USSR reveal that Nikita Khrushchev is planning to assassinate President Kennedy out of revenge of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Top secret messages from the source warn that that the Soviets are unable to remove the mentally unstable Khrushchev from office while he has the support of his Army. It has become apparent that Khrushchev will go to any lengths to kill Kennedy, an event that will likely start World War III. Out of options, Kennedy decides to beat Khrushchev to the punch.
  There was nobody on the grassy knoll, there wasnâ€™t a second shooter. The only conspiracy that took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963 was perpetrated by the President himself.
  The Greatest Patriot is a thought provoking spin on the history of the last five decades that leaves its readers with a serious case of â€œWhat if?â€
  
  https://www.createspace.com/3440956
Toff

Interesting, but are there any records to back up Kerr’s claim? You’d think, if true, there would be.
VICTOR JIMENEZ

Well, it actually makes some sense. I donÂ´t know if itÂ´s real but seems plausible.
Brainspore

The Family Guy already covered this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U5vRuuIkxc&feature=related
Anonymous

Here is a clip of John McCain referring to the JFK assassination as an “intervention”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBAsHTSbkXs

whoops, slip of the tongue.
hairball

Actually, if you believe this, AND if you believe the compelling evidence in the book Mortal Error (which I find hard NOT to believe), then it gets even more convoluted and weird. Kennedy shot by Oswald because Oswald missed his target. Kennedy shot in head because secret service agent fired accidentally. Weird. Could be the most bizarre incident in the history of this corner of the universe.
Anonymous

I’m sure it was anti-castro cubans and George H.W Bush. coup coup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapata_Corporation#Allegations_by_former_CIA_staff
Anonymous

Maybe Texas really is the reason that the president’s dead.
Joe

I prefer the Red Dwarf theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikka_to_Ride
Aleknevicus

I recall reading this theory many, many years ago in a mainstream magazine (Time?). It struck me as being very plausible with one glaring oversight:

If you wanted to assassinate the Governor of Texas, why would you choose to do so when he’s sitting next to the most protected man on the planet?
- FRANKIE
  
  To prove how good you are at being an assassin? Because you think the man next to the most protected man on the planet won’t be all that well protected?
  
  No, all that sounds like BS to me. I figure the shooter (Lee Harvey Oswald) was aiming for Kennedy. It makes a whole lot more sense than all the other loony theories.
- Anonymous
  
  I take it you have not seen the movie “Sniper”
- MB44
  
  “If you wanted to assassinate the Governor of Texas, why would you choose to do so when he’s sitting next to the most protected man on the planet?”
  Ha ha, that’s what I came here to say as soon as I read the story. As if he wanted to make his task 1000x harder than it would be to plug the guy (governor) at a ribbon cutting ceremony or something. Glaring oversight is putting it lightly.
- lewis stoole
  
  because that is when he would be least expecting it?
- Vengefultacos
  
  Or, you know, not in a freakin’ moving vehicle 50 or more so yards away?
anansi133

A good friend of mine likes to say that the assassination of the president was done quite competently, but framing Oswald for it, not so much.

What amazes me about it, is that it didn’t seem to matter how poorly the job was done- Oswald had to have done it, because shuttup that’s why.

Nearly 50 years later, the exact same logic applies to Osama Bin Ladin and his crimes. We know he did it because shuttup that’s why. So much for learning from history.
Anonymous

All this overlooks the fact that the bullet that killed JFK did not come from above where Oswald was, but from in front where the grassy knoll was. Didn’t anyone see the Zapruder film? Anyway, assassinations are represented as accidents whenever possible. That’s standard operating procedure.
- Anonymous
  
  not sure it was the Governor per se that they believe was the target. Just someone close enough to the President to make folks believe he was the target and the shooter missed. Then they would ask “who would want the President dead? The nasty Communists of course” and the whole war would start.
  
  Only they got a guy that wasn’t good enough and he hit the wrong target. Which would have been the right target in the eyes of the folks asking the questions.
Anonymous

Connolly was not the target. Jackie was the target. Fiddle or Faddle were hoping to replace her.
Halloween Jack

Darn–someone’s already mentioned the “he was shooting at Jackie” theory.

As for me, I’d refer people to the afterword of From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, where Moore talks about the evolution of the major Jack the Ripper theories, including his own (that it was simultaneously a cover-up of a forbidden royal marriage and birth, and a human sacrifice meant to perpetuate male-dominated culture), and comes to the conclusion that, between the recession of the events into the past (and the deaths of any remaining living witnesses to those events) and the continued accumulation of details and evidence, it would be impossible to come up with an explanation that accounts for everything.

And so it is with the JFK assassination; aside from the likelihood of another shooter on the grassy knoll (“back and to the left… back and to the left…”), there’s really nothing to most of them. They tend to give credence to the witnesses that support their theory, including the time of day–apparently they all synchronized their watches to the official time, and those watches didn’t run slow–and never mind the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses, but anyone who doesn’t support their theory must be part of the conspiracy, or subverted by them. You end up with elaborate nonsense like Jim Garrison’s theory (I side with the folks who say that, at its heart, Garrison’s theory is a reaction to his horrified discovery that there were gay men like Clay Shaw at the higher echelons of New Orleans society).
omnivore

What if Hitler killed all those jews because he thought they were actually eskimos? History is just the best toy ever.
Anonymous

It wouldn’t be unprecedented. Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was killed as a result of Giuseppe Zangara’s attempt to assassinate Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The theory would be much improved with Ruby shooting Oswald, not because he killed Kennedy, but because he left Connally alive.
Anonymous

Actually, he was going after the driver, who had taken his parking space.
oheso

I, too, read the same article (I’m assuming) as Aleknevicus, many moons ago. It was compelling — which is not to say I swallowed it whole.

To those asking whys in response to this: life is messy. Your questions are rational, but people (even those who aren’t loony-tunes assassins) do not always behave rationally.
Brian

Holistic flow of inane, idle, or nonsensical writing similar to what might be expected from a very young child or an idiot; however, it seems plausible due to the four and five syllable words employed. Plain and simple… Kennedy was killed because * AT THAT TIME * the United States (and that group of confederates who killed him) feared all that crap going on about the Soviet take-over and the ‘Nuclear Scare’ and all that spoon-fed B.S. fed by the many WWII fear mongers of a world take-over from two decades earlier. Nothing much more than that, really. Confederates who, keep in mind, followed much more of a heightened and devout “hear no evil, speak no evil, do no evil” sense of ignorance than we could even fathom today.