Tucker Gets It Wrong Twice (2)

Regarding the latest nonsense about the Kennedy assassination, Tucker makes much of the fact that this was the case of a lone gunman killing the President who was in turn assassinated by a lone gunman. Weird huh, or is it?

It was not the Warren Commission that invented the conspiracy industry but Jack Ruby. But for him, Oswald would have been tried and convicted. Instead, cranks hang on Oswald’s words “I’m just a patsy”. Here are the known facts about the bizarre character who was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Aged just 17, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and was not rooted out in spite of his obvious sympathies with Marxism. He started learning Russian, and would soon become fluent in the language. Oswald served in Japan and became a crack shot but left the Marines before his twentieth birthday then travelled to Moscow by a roundabout route. 

Once there he told the Russians he wanted to defect. Had he been a general, they would have welcomed him with open arms, but recognising him for the mixed-up kid he was, they rejected him. Oswald then faked a suicide attempt in his hotel room, and, fearing an international incident, the mighty Soviet Union bowed to his request. 

Russian officials packed him off to Minsk where he lived a fairly privileged life although he was never totally trusted. There he met the beautiful Marina Pruskova, married her, and sired a daughter. Becoming tired of the workers’ paradise, Oswald applied to emigrate, and the Russians couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. Oswald was born in New Orleans moving with his mother to Dallas then New York. On his return, he moved to Dallas where Marina was befriended by a Quaker family.

Oswald treated his wife very badly, obtained menial work and tried to involve himself in politics at a grass roots level. As well as protesting the blockade of Cuba, he was said to have hated racial discrimination. How would that one have played out if a “racist” rather than an “anti-racist” had assassinated the President?

In March 1963, Oswald bought the murder weapon by mail order. And another murder weapon, one the conspiracy cranks tend to forget. The following month he attempted to assassinate Edwin Walker, a Korean War veteran who was a virulent anti-Communist. Whether or not Walker was a white supremacist, he was certainly a white separatist. Fortunately, Oswald missed, but only just. He told Marina what he had done, comparing Walker with Hitler.

On that fateful November day, Oswald built a sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository overlooking Dealey Plaza where he worked and literally blew the President’s brains out. He fled the crime scene and caught a bus. One would have expected a hired assassin or member of an organised group to have owned a car, but Oswald never did. 

After getting off the bus, Oswald was challenged by a sharp-eyed police officer who thought he looked suspicious. He drew his second weapon and gunned down Officer Tippit in cold blood. There were many witnesses to the shooting, and Oswald fled to a cinema known as the Texas Theatre (English spelling) where he was pursued by a posse, drawing his gun on them but fortunately not shooting anyone. This is the man who was just a patsy?

Oswald left his rifle at the crime scene, it was proven to be his, he had even posed with it in the backyard, yet there are still people who claim not simply that he was part of a conspiracy but that he was totally innocent. This excellent video clip explains how the assassination was carried out, including the single bullet theory.

The subsequent murder of Oswald would never have happened in Britain because we don’t parade murder suspects in public much less invite them to give press conferences. All manner of rubbish has been written about Jack Ruby, but three things can be stated about him for certain: he was or had been a small time criminal, a wannabe/never was; he adored the President; and, most importantly, he was his own man.

Ruby thought he would be hailed a hero for his deed. He was wrong. He died a natural death in prison while awaiting a retrial for Oswald’s murder. He may have been sane and rational when he shot Oswald but went downhill in prison. He died of cancer which had metastasised to his brain. Is it so difficult to believe that a man with brain cancer might not always be entirely rational?

Because of Oswald’s bizarre antecedents and his own murder, there was a feeding frenzy about the assassination from the word go. The New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison was spun a tall tale about the case and doubtless spun a few tall tales of his own. This enabled him to indict the businessman Clay Shaw for the assassination. Shaw was granted bail prior to being put on trial, which is a barometer of how seriously the authorities took Garrison’s claims.

Back to Tucker, with regard to Tara Reade, what we are really witnessing here is Democrat hypocrisy. Kamala Harris said she believed Reade’s claim to be true, then accepted an invitation from Biden to become his Vice President. As for the ongoing official secrecy around the Kennedy assassination, the most likely explanation is that the only secret is the secret itself. Clearly the authorities were keeping an eye on Oswald, but even with today’s mass surveillance it is difficult to monitor people intensely, and as things looked, Oswald was trouble with a very small t. No one could have imagined he would do what he did, even if the opportunity arose. 

Oswald’s older brother summed up the assassination best, it’s good that people take a second look, he said, but when you take a third look and a fortieth and a fiftieth, enough is enough. Including for the bravest man on television.

 Back to Part 1.