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

I've become a fan of the show Forensic Files, which is about real life murders and how they got solved. It's savage, the monstrousness of it.  Often it's a spouse killing a spouse, a partner killing a partner, or a sexual predator killing his victim.  I, like most people, have a complete aversion to hurting or killing anyone, and it is mindboggling to me that someone could kill a person and then go on with their regular lives. And do what? Hug their kids? How could you kill someone without it weighing on you every moment of every day for the rest of your life? Even if you got away with it, how could you enjoy another day of living? 

The exception, of course, is if someone is on a violent rampage. The young man who recently shot and killed the shooter at the mall in Indiana is not going to be tortured for the rest of his life. On the contrary, he will be forever honored, and he has every reason to feel good about himself. 

But, to kill criminally, to take a human life to gain something, whether it's material gain, or the satisfaction of revenge, or anything else, it's monstrous. and most people have a huge psychological barrier to doing it. You might think it comes from religion, but I don't think so. I think it's inherent in human beings to be revulsed by violence, at least, violence to other humans. Commonly, we are violent to animals because we kill them to eat them. Of course, relatively few humans are involved in the acts of turning animals into meat. Most people buy meat the same way they buy grapefruits, and they don't give it any thought. But, when it comes to killing humans, most people have such a deepseated aversion to it, that they go their whole lives without ever having the urge to do it. Even if you utterly despise someone, you don't contemplate killing them- if you're normal. 

And that brings us to Oswald and the story of how he, supposedly, came to killing Kennedy. The story goes that he was working at the TSBD, and then it was lunch time. So, he went to the domino room on the first floor to eat his lunch, as he always did, and he browsed through the newspaper that was there- either while eating or after eating. And while doing that, on the Tuesday or the Wednesday, he saw the Presidential motorcade route in the paper, and when he saw that it was going to pass the building, he instantly got the thought to kill Kennedy. 

We have a good sense about Oswald's mental perspective at that time in his life. We know that he wasn't happy working at the TSBD, that he wished to find a better job, one that paid better. He only made $1.11/hr. We know that his top priority was to convince Marina to move back in with him with their children. He wanted to get an apartment that would accommodate them all. And, he thought that having a driver's license would increase his employment opportunities, so he was pursuing that, which included getting Ruth Paine to give him lessons. 

Let's observe that there is nothing twisted about any of that. Those motivations and pursuits were normal and healthy; they were entirely rational and appropriate. 

There is absolutely no basis to think or claim that Oswald was in a hostile or violent mood when he sat down to eat his lunch and browse through the newspaper. And there is no basis whatsoever to think that he ever had any hostility to John Kennedy. It was just the opposite. He spoke well of Kennedy. He defended Kennedy. And he apparently admired Kennedy. It's been reported that he read James Bond novels after finding out that Kennedy liked them. 

And note that no one at the TSBD described Oswald as being aggressive, hostile, or belligerent. Apparently, he wasn't very friendly, and he had no interest in making friends there. He was a loner and a recluse. I presume he was polite to Frazier as they rode together to Irving and back. Frazier has never implied otherwise. But, I don't think Oswald really cared to become friends with Frazier. They rode together, but they never did anything else together. They didn't go have beers together or play golf. I don't know that Oswald had interest in becoming friends with anyone. I think that all the evidence shows that, at the time, his focus was entirely on his family and getting them back under his wing. 

So, he was not trying to make friends at the TSBD. The employees there said that he was civil but not friendly and outgoing. But, that tendency does not put one even a small step closer to being violent. 

Let's compare it to the velocity of a car. Let's say that the normal peacefulness and non-hostility of a person is like driving at 10 mph. And let's say that being violent, or on the verge of violence, is like driving at 100 mph. Well, it takes times to go from 10 mph to 100 mph. It doesn't happen instantly. So, if Oswald was in this state of mind of wanting to find a better job and get his family back- if these were his goals- why would seeing the Presidential motorcade route in the newspaper cause him to want to kill Kennedy? Why would that suddenly take over his mind? Why would he get remotely close to having such a thought?

On the basis of what I just described, you can't get there. You can't come up with a plausible explanation for it, based on what is known about human psychology. 

And that is why they had to come up with monster stories about Oswald that preceded this. The biggest one, of course, is that he tried to shoot and kill General Walker. There is NO CHANCE that he did that, and for numerous reasons. I hope I convinced you in my last post that he did not own a rifle. That's a dealbreaker right there. But, the forensic evidence does not support Oswald having done it. They dug the bullet out of Walker's wall, and it did not match the bullets from the Carcano rifle (that Oswald didn't own). Witnesses said there were two culprits involved and that they drove away in separate cars. Oswald had no car, no driver's license, and no friends. The story became that Oswald went to and from Walker's house by bus, but no bus rider ever claimed to see him or his rifle on the bus. There is absolutely nothing linking Oswald to the Walker shooting except for what they got Marina to say, as well as the goofy letter that Oswald supposedly wrote to her in Russian about what to do if he got caught or killed, where the first thing on the list was to go to the P.O. Box. Why on Earth, in such a dire situation, would that be important? According to Harry Hines the postal inspector, the only thing that came to Oswald's P,.O. box were Russian and Socialist newspapers. So again, why would Marina need to get to that box, especially in a time of turmoil?  She wouldn't.  They just wrote the phony letter that way to try to make it seem like Oswald was confirming that he had a P.O. Box. It is so ridiculous, it actually underscores the extremely likely probability that Oswald did not have a P.O. Box. They tried too hard to sell it.

But, you should realize that pinning the Walker shooting on Oswald was an admission that Oswald couldn't go from devoted family man to monstrous killer in a flash. There had to be preliminary monstrous acts, so they came up with one: the attempt to kill General Walker. And they came up with more, such as his intention to kill Richard Nixon in Dallas in April. Of course, Richard Nixon wasn't in Dallas in April; Lyndon Johnson was. Perhaps Marina got her Veeps confused. She was surely coached to say that, but perhaps she inadvertently substituted Nixon for Johnson. And the Warren Commission lawyer tried to get her to say that she meant Johnson, but she wouldn't budge. She stuck firmly to Nixon. And the story went that she prevented him from killing Nixon in Dallas, even though he wasn't in Dallas, by locking Oswald in the bathroom. However, you can't lock anyone in the bathroom because bathroom doors lock from the inside not the outside. You would have to first reverse the lock before you could lock someone in the bathroom. And that was pointed out to her too. So, she changed her story to that she just overpowered him at the door; that he was in the bathroom, and with her brute strength, she held the knob and pulled. And apparently, even though she was 5'2" and normally about 105 pounds, except in this case, she was several months pregnant, that she was stronger. Oswald was at the time 5'9" and 145 pounds, but apparently, he was weaker than her, that for however long they struggled, he could not get out of that bathroom. His little pixie wife Marina trapped him in there with her brute strength. That's the story. Talk about humiliation. 

By the way, the idea of a person locking another person in the bathroom is a story element in my latest film, Joe Haladin: The Case of the Missing Sister. I, however, had the decency to have the character reverse the lock first so that it could actually be done. And we did that on set. My producer, himself, went and dismantled the lock on the bathroom door and reassembled it the opposite way. I hope you'll watch the film when it comes out because it's a rip-roaring tale. But, the idea for that element came to me because of this piece of lore from the JFK assassination. 

Then also, they got Marina to say that Oswald wanted to hijack a plane to Cuba at gunpoint with Marina's help. So, I guess the idea was that she was going to be holding June's hand with one hand and wielding a gun with the other.  I wonder what he expected to happen once they got to Cuba. A private dinner with Fidel? The only thing that's interesting about this is to wonder what techniques they used to get Marina to say such preposterous things. 

Returning to the lunch room with Oswald reading the newspaper and getting the sudden impulse to kill Kennedy, apparently, even the plotters realized that it needed some back story. Even they realized that they couldn't monsterize him on the spot, based on just that. So, they came up with that other stuff, though every bit of it is laughably implausible. 

But, what it really comes down to is evil. And I'm not talking about Oswald being evil. He wasn't. But, the people who killed Kennedy and then killed Oswald, they were evil, and I mean as evil as any of the monsters they feature on Forensic Files. And we know some of their names, such as Allen Dulles, Lyndon Johnson, and J. Edgar Hoover. The good news is that they aren't getting away it. The cat is already out of the bag. There will be justice for Kennedy and Oswald.