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

On Facebook, David Boyer raised an interesting question concerning whether the conspirators may have changed their minds on the afternoon of November 22, not starting the day with the plan of depicting Oswald as the lone nut assassin, but switching to it in a sudden jolt that afternoon. Hence, they could have provided him a get-away car and driver at 12:40 and then soon later, after the sea-change struck someone, the plan changed to depicting him as a lone nut. Is it reasonable and plausible? I say no, and here is how I responded to David:

David, I have to think that by the morning of November 22, they knew exactly what they were doing and how they were going to do it.  By then, the plan to depict Oswald as a "lone gunman' was firmly in place. What I believe is that the plot to kill Kennedy may have started in connection with the anti-Castro operation, to use the assassination as a pretext to invade Cuba. But, over time, killing Kennedy became the end in itself, and Oswald's pro-Castro activities were just for the purpose of providing him a motive. 

Look how they portrayed Oswald's pro-Castro activities in New Orleans. They said that he was the sole member of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. THE SOLE MEMBER! That tells you a lot. That shows you that they didn't want him to be associated with anybody, not even in New Orleans, and that was well before the assassination.   I'm sure they realized that if they tried to link him to Castro or pro-Castro activists that those links would have to be plumbed and exposed. And there really weren't any. Long before November 22, they realized that there would be no easy wrap-up if Oswald was linked, by more than idealism, to Castro and Cuba. 

Besides, when they switched their attention from Castro to Kennedy, they soon realized that Kennedy was a much bigger plum to pick. Whatever thorn in their side Castro was, he was nothing compared to the thorn that Kennedy was. Kennedy was a royal pain concerning Cuba, Vietnam, the oil industry, the banking industry, the steel industry, and perhaps most important, his whole attitude of wanting peace with the Soviet Union, and to end the Cold War, which they considered traitorous. He was even speaking of complete bilateral nuclear disarmament!  With all that, Castro paled into insignificance. 

They knew that there would be a lot of turmoil from the assassination, and it would be plenty enough to keep them busy without heaping a new war on top of it. Besides, their number one priority war-wise was escalating in Vietnam. That took precedence over Cuba. They knew that doing both at the same time was out of the question, and they chose Vietnam. LBJ reversed JFK's memo concerning troop withdrawals from Vietnam the Monday following the assassination. So no, I don't think that in the middle of the afternoon of November 22, someone made a sea-change and ordered a reversal of Oswald's depiction. It was all decided well in advance that Oswald would be the lone gunman. They realized that a lone nut who pulled it off without involving a single other person or even telling a soul about it was the cleanest, neatest, safest way for them to get away with the crime of the century.