Lone Wolf Terrorism (22 page)

The Kennedy assassination, however, can probably be even better described as that era's 9/11. Although there weren't hijacked planes crashing into buildings, killing thousands of people and launching a global “war on terrorism,” there was an equivalent sense of loss and despair throughout the country as well as a feeling that things were never going to be quite the same again. How all this came about can be seen in the troubled life of a lone assassin and a controversial investigation into the killing of a president.

Lee Harvey Oswald had a lot of things going against him from the moment he was born in New Orleans in October 1939. For starters, his father had died two months earlier, forcing his mother, Marguerite, to make difficult choices regarding Lee and his brother and half brother. Not able to care for them on her own after having to get a job, she put the two older children in an orphanage and would have done the same with Lee except that the orphanage wouldn't take him because he was too young. Marguerite, who was described by Lee's brothers as quarrelsome, domineering, and “not easy to get along with when she didn't get her own way,” had her sister, housekeepers, and babysitters care for Lee, moving to different places five times before finally putting three-year-old Lee in the same orphanage where she'd left his brothers. He was there for a little over a year before Marguerite decided to move to Dallas and took him and her two other sons with her. She then remarried and placed the two older children in a military boarding school. She traveled with Lee and her new husband extensively, since he was required to do so for his job with a utility company.
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Marguerite and her husband, whom Lee had grown close to, fought a lot and eventually got divorced. By the time Oswald was thirteen years old, both brothers had joined the military. Marguerite then moved with Lee to New York, where one of her sons was stationed in the coast guard. It was a difficult time for Oswald, who was teased by other students for his southern accent and shabby clothes. He failed most of his classes in junior high school, which wasn't surprising, since he usually didn't even bother to attend the school. He grew increasingly angry and difficult to control. On one occasion, he pulled a knife on his brother's wife and then punched his mother in the face when she told him to put the knife away.
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On another, he was sent for psychiatric observation, where the examination report stated that he was “an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self-involved and conflicted mother.”
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It was around this time that the seeds were sown for the assassination of President Kennedy many years later. When he was only fourteen years old, Oswald was given a Marxist pamphlet protesting the trial and impending execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were eventually executed in 1953 for passing secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. Oswald, at that young age, “began to see himself as a victim of capitalist oppression,” which he blamed for all his problems.
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He would continue to harbor those sentiments even when, a few years later, he enlisted in the marines. He learned to speak Russian while in the service and was not afraid to express his Communist sympathies.
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It was remarkable that no action was taken against him in the military for his pro-Russian sentiments. It was his behavior, however, that got him in trouble, including his resentment at being told what to do as a marine. He was court-martialed and put in the brig for one month due to disputes he had with his superiors. He eventually obtained an early discharge from the marines, claiming he had to care for his allegedly disabled mother.
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Oswald had no intention of going back to his mother. Instead, he planned to defect to the Soviet Union, believing he would be welcomed there with open arms. He traveled to Moscow, where he tried to convince skeptical Soviet authorities that he had valuable military intelligence to give to them based on his marine experience. He denounced the United States and waited for the Russians to give him a good job and hopefully Soviet citizenship. However, when the Russians told him that he could not stay in their country, he attempted to kill himself by slashing his wrists. He was eventually allowed to stay for a couple years, but he was unhappy with life in the Soviet Union. He returned to America in June 1962 with his Russian wife, Marina, and their infant daughter.
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From that point until the November 1963 assassination, Oswald's life was a dizzying array of anti–US government activity, including walking the streets of New Orleans, where he lived for a while, to hand out pro-Cuba leaflets with the hope of eventually moving to that Communist country. His life also consisted of continual fighting
with his wife, losing a job as a result of what he believed to be FBI harassment, and a failed attempt to assassinate right-wing, former major general Edwin Walker in Dallas in April 1963.
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By November, Oswald was working in the Texas School Book Depository in downtown Dallas, a seven-story warehouse with a clear view of the route President Kennedy's motorcade was to take during his visit to Dallas. It was the moment Oswald had been waiting for his whole life, an opportunity to strike a major blow against the hated US government by assassinating its president and, at the same time, become known around the world.
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Perched by a window on the sixth floor of the warehouse, Oswald fired three shots from a mail-ordered rifle at the motorcade on November 22, fatally wounding Kennedy and also injuring Texas governor John Connally, who was riding in the same open-top limousine as the president. The Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination, concluded that one of the bullets exited Kennedy and struck Connally (the so-called single bullet theory, a finding that critics of the investigation have challenged). Oswald, meanwhile, was captured about an hour after the shooting, hiding in a movie theater after having also killed a policeman who stopped him in the street. Two days later, Oswald was himself shot and killed by a nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, as Oswald was being transferred from the Dallas city jail to the county jail. The killing of Oswald was seen live on television by millions of people.

The role of television during the Kennedy assassination was a watershed for the still-infant industry. For four long days, from the assassination on a Friday to the funeral and burial of the president on a Monday, the nation was transfixed by television coverage of the tragedy. But unlike some terrorist incidents that would unfold on television in later decades and cause great anxiety and fear among the public, the television coverage of the Kennedy assassination actually had a calming effect on the nation. People watching the events unfold on television were able to feel like they were part of the process. Many were comforted knowing that there were others
sharing the same emotions as them. Nobody had to feel alone and isolated.
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As Marshall McLuhan, the famous communications theorist, wrote: “The Kennedy assassination gave people an immediate sense of the television power to create depth involvement on the one hand, and a numbing effect as deep as grief, itself, on the other hand. Most people were amazed at the depth of meaning which the event communicated to them.”
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Most people also refused to acknowledge that a lone wolf assassin was responsible for the shooting. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, only 29 percent of the American people believed that Oswald had acted alone. There was no dearth of possible suspects as far as the public was concerned, with people claiming the assassination was planned by the Mafia, Fidel Castro, the Soviet Union, the far right in the United States, or others.
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Adding to the confusion were conflicting reports on how many shots were actually fired. Some argued that one shot came from the front of the motorcade and not from the back, where Oswald did his shooting, meaning that there was a second gunman on a grassy knoll near where the motorcade passed. There were also disputes over the interpretation of a live film of the assassination and criticism of the Warren Commission. When the Commission, chaired by Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren, reached its conclusion in 1964 (in an 888-page report with twenty-six accompanying volumes) that Oswald acted alone, many pundits criticized the findings. The title of one book summed up best the frustration of the skeptics:
Rush to Judgment
.
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Its author, a former New York State legislator, Mark Lane, claimed that the conspiracy to kill Kennedy involved people, whom he did not name, at the highest levels of government.
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Other factors that contributed to conspiracy theories regarding the assassination included the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, which led to a general distrust of government throughout the country, a reopening of the assassination investigation by Congress in the mid-1970s, and a controversial film by Oliver Stone in 1991,
JFK
, which mixed fact with fiction and portrayed the assassination as a conspiracy.
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The conspiratorial theories will undoubtedly continue, particularly as new interest arises coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in November 2013. Computer reconstruction of the assassination has, however, supported the Warren Commission's finding that a single bullet struck both Kennedy and Connally from behind.
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There has also been no convincing evidence yet presented to refute the view that Oswald alone killed the president. For a new edition of his book, which had argued that Oswald acted alone, Gerald Posner wrote in 2003 that “there has simply been no information or developments during the past decade that have changed the conclusions reached in
Case Closed
. Rather, the release of millions of pages of assassination related documents have bolstered the history originally set forth in the book. My only change for [the title of the new edition of the book]…might be to call it
Case Still Closed
.”
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The impact that a lone wolf assassin can have on a government and a society can clearly be seen in the Kennedy assassination. One brief moment of violence led to the loss of innocence for the American people regarding political violence in the homeland. While there had already been violence associated with those who were opposed to the civil-rights movement of this period, the loss of the young president to an assassin's bullet had a special meaning for many Americans. The image of Camelot that had been built up while Kennedy was in office came crashing down with his death. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy a few years later would drive home the point that the United States was just as vulnerable as any other country in the world to having its leaders and other prominent individuals become the victims of assassins.

But it is in the realm of the Vietnam War that the impact of Kennedy's assassination has been one of the most hotly debated issues among scholars and other observers. The key question is whether the change in leadership from Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson had any significant effect on US involvement in Vietnam, a war that cost more than fifty-eight thousand American and over two million Vietnamese lives and divided American society throughout the 1960s until the
war ended in 1975.
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Princeton historian Sean Wilentz believes it did, arguing that “Kennedy probably would not have Americanized the war in Vietnam, as Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy on reflection have conceded. After the [Cuban] missile crisis, he was embarked on a course to wind down the cold war and stop nuclear testing and proliferation.”
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There does appear to be enough evidence that points to Kennedy having the intention of ending US involvement in Vietnam had he been reelected in 1964. He had approved a plan to withdraw one thousand of the sixteen thousand American advisors by the end of 1963 and most of the rest by the end of 1965—there were no combat troops in Vietnam during the Kennedy years, while there would be five hundred thousand during the Johnson administration.
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This, of course, does not mean he might not have reversed his decision as the situation in South Vietnam deteriorated and the Communist insurgents made significant gains in the country. But the groundwork had at least been laid for a de-escalation of US involvement in South Vietnam before Kennedy was assassinated. Some observers have even argued that no matter what the situation was in Vietnam after 1963, Kennedy, had he still been president, would not have changed his mind on the eventual withdrawal of all American advisors from that country.
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Meanwhile, the man responsible for this nation's grief and all the speculation on what might have been was buried in Fort Worth, Texas, on the same day that President Kennedy was buried. Whereas dignitaries from around the world attended the president's funeral in Washington, DC, and millions of people watched the proceedings on television, Lee Harvey Oswald had only his immediate family (his wife, Marina, their two children, his brother Robert, and his mother Marguerite) and a few other people at his burial. Oswald, who was such a troubled individual in life, would not even have the satisfaction of being able to rest in peace. Marina had his body exhumed in 1981, convinced by conspiracy theorists that it was not her husband in the coffin but rather a KGB agent. When it was determined that it was indeed Oswald, he was put in a new coffin, due to the deterioration
of the original one, and reburied. The funeral home kept the original coffin and sold it at auction in 2010 for more than $87,000. Robert Oswald, who had tried to block the auction, then sued the funeral home, providing yet one more example of the never-ending saga of the Kennedy assassination.

YIGAL AMIR AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRIME MINISTER YITZHAK RABIN (1995)