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

There are so many fatal problems with the case against Oswald as Kennedy's killer, and one of them concerns his motive and mental state. 

It's often pointed out that a prosecutor doesn't have to establish motive, but that's just a technicality. Usually, he does try to establish motive because he knows the jury expects him to. And in this case, it's a huge problem because the evidence shows that Oswald liked and admired Kennedy and never said a harsh word about him.  Marina said he defended Kennedy to her relatives. It was reported that he read James Bond novels because he heard that Kennedy liked them. And, there can be no doubt that Oswald's politics were closer to Kennedy's than they were to Johnson's, knowing that Johnson was more hawkish towards Castro and Cuba than Kennedy was. So, why on Earth would he kill Kennedy only to propel Johnson to the White House? One thing that Oswald wasn't was stupid. 

Even Vincent Bugliosi recognized the problem of establishing motive to Oswald. So, what he came up with was the claim that Oswald's hatred was not for Kennedy but for America, that he killed Kennedy as a proxy for America. 

There isn't the tiniest shred of evidence for that. Oswald NEVER formally renounced his American citizenship, and the letters that he supposedly wrote about it are all of dubious authenticity. But, even those letters don't evince enmity. He was never alleged to write or say words that could be interpreted as hatred. Never was he rageful in his words, spoken or written. Hate is an emotion, and he never evinced the emotion of hate. 

Buliosi pulled his claim from out of his ass. It was based on nothing but his desperate need to come up with a motive for Oswald. So, he made one up.

But, there is more that we have to consider about this. Even if hatred exists, and as I said, it is an emotional state, it takes more than just hatred to have the capacity to kill someone. Lots of people are capable of hatred. Hell, I have hatreds. There are people I hate; I admit it. But, there is no chance that I am going to commit violent acts against them. To do that, I would have to be not only be hateful, but mentally deranged. I would have to be out of my mind. Likewise, Oswald would have had to be out of his mind to kill Kennedy. 

Oswald had values, and it appears, that what he valued most was his family. He returned to Dallas. Why? Because his family was there. He took a job at the TSBD because he could do it and still be relatively close to his family. When he wasn't working, it appears that seeing his family was his top priority. He had to cover his own basic needs, but other than that, his money went to his family. And his foremost ambition was to get his family back living under his roof again. These things are not in dispute.  

Even if Oswald hated Kennedy or America- and there is no evidence that he did and no rational grounds to think that he did- how likely was it to commandeer his mind and wipe out all his other values? How likely was it to generate the extreme self-destructiveness that would have been involved in him shooting Kennedy? 

The point is that Oswald would have had to be insane to do it. For anyone to be going along, living their life, and in a responsible manner, and then, on their lunch-break at work, to glimpse a motorcade route in a newspaper, and instantly get the sudden impulse to kill? One would have to be stark raving mad. 

And that idea, that Oswald was stark raving mad, was and is a central component of the official story. It's the reason why the phony story of him shooting at General Walker was fabricated. It's the reason why Marina was drilled with the phony story that he sought to kill Nixon. And there were more phony stories that were added, some of which were meant only to depict him as unstable and brutish, such as having him shoot diagonally at other people's targets at the shooting range. All of this was scriptwriting; storytelling. 

But, at the heart of it was the idea that he was going along, living his life, working a job and being focused on his family, determined to get his driver's license because he thought it would improve his job prospects, and then suddenly, his finding out about the motorcade route flipped an evil switch in his brain and caused him to undertake a deranged, demonic, maniacal, and totally self-destructive course that reached the extreme limits of psychopathy, sociopathy, and insanity.    

This was a fictional character that they made up. The evidence shows that Oswald was less explosive, less mercurial, and less enrage-able than most people. For instance, there is the radio discussion in which Oswald was arguing on the radio with the man who had taunted him in front of the Trade Center in New Orleans, and Oswald never got riled or rankled; he never got agitated. Yes, that's the word: agitation.  Oswald was not one to get agitated. Look at him at the Midnight Press Conference. He was impassioned; even eloquent in his self-defense; but he never evinced agitation. I admit that I have a MUCH higher propensity to agitation than Oswald. There's no doubt about that. But, in my case, it would only translate to physical violence if the other guy initiated physical violence. If he did, I would make the transition to combat instantly.  

From everything we know about Oswald, and what we see and hear of him in the films that we have, there is absolutely no reason to think that he could have been browsing the newspaper while eating lunch, saw the motorcade route, and decided to kill Kennedy. There is no more reason to think that he was capable of that than anyone else that you can name, including yourself. Simply put, it is a preposterous story in a case teeming with preposterous elements. 

To paraphrase myself, the big question is: how long can they keep up the charade that Oswald killed Kennedy? What they have going for them is that Americans have plenty of other woes with which to be concerned, including ones that affect their own lives directly, such as Covid, unemployment, etc. But, a growing number of people realize that the whole case against Oswald is a farce, and it is surely going to collapse like the house of cards that it is. The case against Oswald is going to tumble by the sheer weight of its incredulity and absurdity.