Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

This concerns something that James Richards said. He said he thinks the original plan was to connect Oswald to a pro-Castro network, which meant it could be used as a pretext to invade Cuba and take out Castro. Hence, originally, the plotters wanted it to look like a conspiracy.  

I don't doubt that at all. In fact, the very first stirrings to kill Kennedy probably surfaced that way. But, I think cooler heads soon realized that that was not the way to do it. Invading Cuba meant risking all-out war with the Soviet Union, and they didn't want that. Plus, any kind of conspiracy meant complications. They were going to kill Oswald right away- I'm sure that was baked into the cake- but if he, supposedly, had accomplices, they couldn't kill them too. How would that look? So then, those people would have to be tried, and it would have been a real mess for the plotters. It would not have been like the Warren Commission, where Oswald had no defense attorney. If his accomplices were tried, it would have been like him being tried, in absentia. They would have had defense attorneys. They may have even had a dream team consisting of Mark Lane, Vincent Salandria, and other top lawyers. 

No, no, no; they wanted this thing to be clean. They wanted to tie off all loose ends in a matter of hours. Oswald was supposed to be killed at the theater- and those two days that it took them to get him properly killed really cost them. I'm sure the lone-nut idea was part of the script long before November 22nd.  

But, what James Richards is suggesting is that on the morning of the assassination, the plan was still to make it appear to be a pro-Castro conspiracy, but sometime during the day, somebody got a brainstorm that it was the wrong way to go. And so this person started making calls and pulling strings to get the story changed to lone gunman. 

Well, that is a totally arbitrary assumption, meaning that it's not backed by anything. James doesn't even name the person who got the brainstorm. Was it LBJ? Based on what? And remember that this was before the use of cell phones. Instructions and information couldn't travel as fast then. Changing the plan at the last minute wasn't practical or feasible. It wasn't doable. 

These people weren't stupid. They knew it was much easier to frame one person than several. They knew that the best way to close the book on the whole debacle was to have one culprit and have him killed. They wanted the country to swiftly move on; to accept the new reality; to look forward and not backward. I don't think that before it all LBJ had any intention of appointing an investigative commission like the Warren Commission. He only did that because he was pressured to. He think he hoped that it wouldn't be necessary. 

But, even with the simple story of one crazed gunman who acted alone and told no one and then got killed, it still took nearly a year to conduct the dog and pony show known as the Warren Commission investigation. Imagine if it was a complex plot involving accomplices and even a foreign government. It would have taken forever.  They never would have gotten done. The idea of a complex conspiracy got tossed out very early. Wiser, cooler, smarter heads realized quickly that that was not the way to do it. Killing Kennedy may have started as a means to an end (to take out Castro) but it very quickly became an end in itself. They pulled back and realized that enough was enough, that you don't bite off more than you can chew. 

So, why is James Richards fixed on the idea of a mid-day change of plan? 

It's because of the whole Roger Craig thing. I pointed out that the plotters would NEVER have allowed Oswald to depart Dealey Plaza in a private car because a lone gunman couldn't do that; he couldn't have a getaway driver. It extinguishes the whole idea of "lone." And that's when James said what he did. 

But again, it's arbitrary; it's groundless; it's just a convenient segue. You need concrete evidence to proffer a thing like that. It's much more likely that they had their ducks in a row by the morning of the 22nd and knew exactly what they were going to do and how they were going to do it. You don't change the play after the curtain has risen. Nobody does that. 

Oswald was a puppet on a string. They were playing him like an instrument. They did let him wander around freely in the 45 minutes before the shooting, but that's because they didn't want to upset him or alert him. They also realized that he might spend some time in custody before he could be killed, and they didn't want to give him ammunition to use against them. It was bad enough that he could drop a lot of names and reveal a lot of sensitive stuff, but they didn't want to give him explicit knowledge of what they were doing. He was just the patsy. He was not the patsy plus the guy who opened the door. He was not the patsy plus the lookout. He was just the patsy. He did not have to know what they were doing, and they didn't tell him. They let him wander around freely during the lunch break, but you can be darn sure that somebody was watching him at all times, and you can also be sure that when he stepped out into that doorway that there was someone there to keep him from venturing too far. That person was probably Bill Shelley. 

What this comes down to is my original premise: that they weren't going to allow Oswald to leave Dealey Plaza in a private car because he was the lone gunman. And he had no friends. You hear me, Backes? No friends! No friends! No friends! And that means that he couldn't have arranged any pickup himself. The only way it could have happened was if "they" arranged it for him, but "they" were never going to do that for the reasons given. He was the lone gunman, and not just the lone gunman, but the lone plotter, the lone actor, the lone instigator. 

And that's why the whole idea that the Lee Harvey Oswald we know got into a private car, a Nash Rambler, in broad daylight, and was driven away from Dealey Plaza in plain view just doesn't make sense. Whomever Roger Craig saw- and I'm sure he saw somebody- was not the Lee Harvey Oswald we know. But, I don't doubt that it was somebody who looked an awful lot like him.