Reclaiming History (322 page)

In his book,
Loving God
, former presidential assistant Charles Colson, in writing about Watergate, said, “With the most powerful office in the world at stake, a small band of hand-picked loyalists [of President Richard Nixon]…could not hold a conspiracy together for more than two weeks.”
⁵

5. Obviously, the more complicated a plot is, the greater the likelihood that something will go wrong and it won’t work. Everyone intuitively knows this, and hence we can assume that if there had been a plot to kill Kennedy, the plotters would have made it as uncomplicated as possible. But the massive conspiracy envisioned by most conspiracy theorists necessarily would be extremely complex, and this fact is greatly exacerbated by the ineptitude of human beings.

I’m talking about the staggering incompetence at every level of our society, one that normally prevents any group, large or small, including the U.S. government and its agencies, from performing at anywhere near optimum capacity? Indeed, on a scale of one to ten, they normally operate below five. Incompetence is so widely prevalent that I expect it, and when I find competence I am always pleasantly surprised. Let’s look at just one example among a great many, this one at the CIA, the main federal agency conspiracy theorists suspect of being behind the assassination. In 1994, Aldrich Ames, chief of the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence branch, pleaded guilty to the biggest espionage case in U.S. history. Ames furnished the Soviets U.S. secrets in return for more than $2 million. His perfidy led to the deaths of several Russian undercover agents working for the United States in the Soviet Union. Ames told his interrogators it was “really easy” to obtain the top-secret information even after he was transferred to anti-narcotics work in the early 1990s.

In noting that it took an incredible nine years for Ames’s colleagues and superiors at CIA headquarters to catch him, syndicated columnist Mary McGrory wrote that “Ames and his wife did everything they could to arouse suspicion, living it up in the most provocative manner. What G5-14, on a salary of $69,000-plus, pays half a million in cash [$540,000] for a house in Arlington, Virginia, buys a bright red Jaguar [which he drove to work] and runs up Trumplike charges on his credit card?”
⁶
A November 1994 report on the Ames case from the Senate Intelligence Committee found “gross negligence” (“negligence” being a euphemism here for incompetence) at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and reports from both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Select Committee on Intelligence “agreed that the agency [CIA] is in deep disarray,” a condition, they said, that long predated the Ames case.
⁷

I mean, in 1986 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with billions of dollars spent, and the finest scientific minds available, and with the space shuttle
Challenger
right in front of their noses for inspection, and with a defective pressure seal wrongly designed
and about which they had been advised and warned on numerous occasions
, sent seven astronauts to their death because of their dreadful incompetence. Speaking of NASA, on the first day of the
Apollo 8
flight that circumnavigated the moon, when Colonel Frank Borman, the commander of the flight, was sending transmissions back to Cape Kennedy, he referred to the
Apollo 8
flight as the
Gemini 8
flight, a flight he had participated in three years earlier. That’s life in the real world.

While we’re talking about incompetence, let’s look at an extreme example of it in the Kennedy case itself. Established procedure in the Secret Service during a presidential motorcade is to scan not only the crowds but also the roofs and windows of buildings as the motorcade goes along.
⁸
But apparently, and unbelievably, not one of the sixteen Secret Service agents in the motorcade through Dealey Plaza was looking anywhere near the upper floors of the Book Depository Building. If they had, they would have seen (as several Dealey Plaza witnesses who never had any obligation to look for such things did) a figure or a rifle in the window where Oswald was. But there’s no evidence, from any of the reports of the agents, that they saw anything in Oswald’s window, or even saw the three black Book Depository employees in the two windows beneath Oswald’s window. Pardon my pique, but where in the hell were their heads when the president’s limousine passed by the Book Depository Building, other than up the proverbial place? Special Agent Roy Kellerman told the Warren Commission that in the Secret Service detail protecting the president, “when you are driving down [the] street…and you have buildings on either side of you, you are going to scan your eyes up and down” the buildings.
⁹
Can you imagine that? Thirty-two trained eyes belonging to sixteen men whose duty and responsibility was to protect the president, and not one of these thirty-two eyes saw Oswald, or a rifle, or anything worthy of their attention in the sniper’s nest window. But several lay people did, and they were only there to watch the motorcade, not watch over the president’s security.

The question is, How could the vast number of conspirators contemplated by the theorists have pulled off this incredibly complex conspiracy to such a degree of skill—never bumbling or slipping in any way that would reveal or even suggest their existence to one outside their group—that eternal secrecy would be guaranteed? Easy. You see, we know human beings are unable to keep their mouths shut and routinely incompetent, frequently stumbling over their own feet. But the conspirators envisioned by the theorists have their mouths permanently zippered and are extraordinarily competent, even prescient, being able to predict faultlessly all of the many uncontrollable variables in their mission to the point where everything worked perfectly, and with mathematical precision.

As Richard White, professor of history at the University of Washington, and speaking in a generic sense, says, “You can’t trust the government to do anything right—except, of course, to conspire and cover up. Then it becomes diabolically efficient. The very people who are wildest for government conspiracies are often the same people who believe the government is incapable of delivering the mail efficiently.”
¹⁰
In other words, the conspiracists believe that Murphy’s law (whatever can go wrong will go wrong) doesn’t apply to the alleged conspiracy in the assassination and cover-up.

The above deals with the murder and cover-up. But with the many groups supposedly involved in the conspiracy, like the CIA, mob, anti-Castro Cubans, and military-industrial complex, how could they handle all the logistical complexities and inevitable disagreements among themselves over details during the planning phase
leading up
to November 22, without anything they did out of the ordinary (and by definition, they would have had to do things out of the ordinary) coming to the attention of just one person outside their group?

6. If Oswald conspired with anyone, they waited quite awhile to bring him aboard. The conspiracy couldn’t have been hatched before October 1, 1963, when we know Oswald was still in Mexico City desperately trying to get to Cuba. If he had succeeded in getting to Cuba, who believes he would have ended up killing Kennedy? No one I’ve ever heard of. And how believable is it that a plot to kill the president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth, would be born after October 1, just seven weeks before Kennedy’s death? To believe something like that is to be addicted to silliness. The absurdity of the notion that Oswald conspired with others to kill Kennedy can be spotlighted by the fact that on the very day, September 26, 1963, that it was announced in both Dallas newspapers that Kennedy was going to come to Texas on November 21 and 22 and that Dallas would likely be one of the cities he would visit,
¹¹
Oswald was on a bus traveling to Mexico City determined to get to Cuba.

Indeed, since Kennedy’s motorcade route past the Book Depository Building wasn’t selected until November 18,
¹²
and announced in a paper for the first time on the morning of November 19 in the
Dallas Morning News
,
¹³
we not only thereby know that Oswald getting a job at the Book Depository Building on October 15 was unrelated to President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas and the assassination, but it would seem that
any conspiracy involving Oswald as the hit man would have had to be hatched no earlier than November 19, just three days before Kennedy’s death
(i.e., unless the argument is made—which I have yet to hear even the daffy conspiracy buffs make—that
wherever
Kennedy went when he came to Dallas, it was Oswald’s job to track him down and kill him). Surely no person with an ounce of sense could possibly believe that the CIA, mob, and so on, recruited Oswald to kill Kennedy just three days before the assassination.

7. In the same vein, during the five-week period leading up to the assassination, we know Oswald was taking driving lessons from Ruth Paine and was about to apply for a learner’s permit. In fact, we know that as late as November 16, just six days before the assassination, Oswald went to the state’s license examination bureau in Dallas to get his driver’s permit, only leaving because the line was very long.
¹⁴
How likely is it that Oswald would be taking driving lessons and going down to get a learner’s permit on November 16 if he was planning on murdering the president six days later? As mentioned earlier in this book, his leaving nearly all his money and his wedding ring behind on the morning of the assassination clearly demonstrated his awareness of what he could expect his life to be like after he pulled the trigger. The mundane exercise of learning to drive and looking forward to one day having a driving license speaks loudly
for
the proposition that Oswald’s intent to murder the president was formed somewhat on the spur of the moment not long before the day of the assassination, and as a necessary corollary and concomitant to this,
against
the proposition that a group like the CIA or organized crime conspired with Oswald to have him kill Kennedy for them.

Other things Oswald did during the month leading up to the assassination clearly represented a person in the normal, humdrum rhythm of life, not someone preparing, with others, to murder the president of the United States. For example, we already know that on November 1, three weeks before the assassination, he rented a mail box at the Terminal Annex near the Book Depository Building. At $1.50 per month, he paid $3.00 for two months, the rental expiring on December 31, five weeks after the assassination.
¹⁵
The relevance of this is clear since we know that Oswald was very tightfisted with his money, what precious little of it he had. And although to you and me $1.50 is nothing, everything in life is relative, and to Oswald it
was
something. Here’s someone who is paying $8.00 a week in rent, can’t live with his wife and daughters because he can’t afford an apartment for the three of them, and has a net worth of little over $200.00. He never would have just thrown away that extra $1.50 for the second month if he didn’t intend to use the mail box for that month of December, particularly, as I say, when he was notorious for literally watching every penny.

Also, on November 1 he sent a letter to Arnold Johnson, the director of information for the American Communist Party in New York City, in which he told Johnson of his being introduced, by a friend, to the local chapter of the ACLU, and asked Johnson to advise him “to what degree, if any” should he “attempt to heighten [the group’s] progressive tendencies?”
¹⁶
Around that same time, Oswald sent a $2.00 registration fee to the ACLU in New York City to become a new member, the ACLU receiving the $2.00 on November 4.
¹⁷
On November 9, Oswald wrote a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., asking it to “please inform us [him and Marina] of the arrival of our Soviet entrance visas as soon as they come [in],” mailing the letter on November 12.
¹⁸

Indeed, in the late evening of November 20, just two days before the assassination, Oswald took a load of his clothing to a “washateria” (laundromat) near his home.
¹⁹
Though the thought of killing the president had probably already entered his mind, the act of washing a load of his clothing clearly reflects that no final decision (if one at all) had yet been made, and of course it automatically
would
have been made by this time if he had been the hit man in a conspiracy to murder the president. If by Wednesday evening he had already committed himself to killing Kennedy, his state of mind would have had to be that if he got caught, Dallas County would be doing his laundry at least for awhile, and if he was able to flee to Mexico or where have you, like the title of Billie Holiday’s song, he would be “traveling light” while getting there, not carrying a bundle of laundry in his arms.

For all intents and purposes, Oswald’s conduct during the month before the assassination alone precludes the notion of a conspiracy.

8. Again in the same vein, if you’re the triggerman for the mob, CIA, Castro, or anyone else in the biggest murder case in American history, what’s more likely? That on the night before the murder, you’re at your home, apartment, or “safe house” preparing for the following day, and are either meeting with or at least available to your “handlers” for last-minute instructions or consultation? Or that you’re going to be visiting your wife, who is staying at someone else’s home, and begging her to come back home to you?
*
Common sense, which Voltaire tells us is
not
that common, dictates that it’s the former, not the latter.

It is reasonably clear that when Oswald went to visit his wife and two children the night before Kennedy came to Dallas, it was his intention to get his rifle and assassinate the president the next day—as indicated, what other reason would he have had to go there, for the first time, on a Thursday night? It is equally reasonably clear that this intention of his was not irrevocable but conditional. If Marina was willing to come back to him, a possibility he already knew was faint, he was prepared to forego his plans concerning Kennedy. If Marina, then, had agreed to come back to Oswald on the night before the president came to Dallas, it is almost a certainty the assassination would never have taken place.
†