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

The arrogance and hubris of the men who killed JFK was astounding. I mean the brazenness of it. It was so risky to do what they did. It could have gone terribly wrong for them, and it did go wrong in some ways. 

The worst thing that happened was Oswald stepping outside and being captured in images. It wasn't just the Altgens photo. You see him at the beginning of the Wiegman film, and they dealt with that by not just blurring the image but distoring it. In the Towner film, they dealt with it by blackening the doorway. In the Hughes film, they used the girl on the platform and the street signs to hide Oswald. There are others. And it resulted in decades of cover-up, involving false testimonies, phony film clips of Lovelady, and more. It really was a debacle for them. 

The shooting itself didn't go well. They hit Connally, and they didn't intend to. James Tague got grazed by a shot that must have been taken from a low elevation in the Dal-Tex building that missed and traveled down the length of Dealey Plaza. It forced them to attribute one of the three shell casings to it, hence forcing them to adopt the ridiculous Single Bullet Theory.  And it took much more firing than expected to kill Kennedy. It should have been done with one shot.

But, as bad as it went for them, it could have gone worse. If they could hit Connally by mistake, they could have hit Jackie. And that would have been a disaster for them because they needed her standing next to LBJ at the swearing-in ceremony to sanctify the whole thing. 

I'll add that it was despicable of them to subject Jackie to that risk. They could have killed him at an event that didn't include her.  The same goes for Mrs. Connally. 

Then, there was the bad luck of Zapruder taking his film. The original Zapruder film had to be very damning to the Official Story. The Z-film of today is a Frankenstinian monstrosity. The original film had to show that Kennedy was shot in the back high on the hill and rode down the hill manifesting the effects of that one shot. They changed it making it that he was smiling and waving until he passed behind the sign where everything happened except the fatal head shot. It's a complete fabrication. 

There can be no doubt that the Zapruder film is the most manipulated film in the history of filmmaking, and I'm a filmmaker. 

Another thing that went wrong was Mary Moorman capturing her photo. It must have been a doozey, and in the end, they desperately replaced it without another one taken by someone else (Babushka Lady) from a completely different angle (diagonally from behind) and had to put a white thumbprint over it to make it work. Talk about arrogance and hubris. 

So, a lot went wrong, but it could have gone even worse. The men who did this were brazen, very brazen. Even the word "reckless" applies. Where did the brazenness come from? It came from the "group-think"; from the strength in numbers. Like the generals sitting around talking about the operation in Afghanistan, lifting each other up. Consensus does that to people.  If Jim, Joe, and Johnny believe in it, it's got to be good.