Who Killed JFK?

Cherchez la femme. And Tchaikovsky.

I heard the news during freshman math class shortly after 8:30 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963. My classmates and I at St. Louis High School in far off Honolulu were at our desks when our teacher interrupted his lesson and said, "Boys, the president has just been shot," and we went on with our studies. A little while later we learned that John F. Kennedy had died, and we were all sent home for the day. Now here we are, 62 years later, and the assassination is once again back in the news:

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) is still searching for a cover-up in the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy — asserting without evidence that an allegedly previously unreleased video could reveal new details of the president’s death, despite the recent declassification of reams of government files on the killing. In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Luna said that she had just been told that NBC has a “never been seen before” video of the shooting that she would be requesting access to. The video, according to Luna, “allegedly” shows presumed gunman Lee Harvey Oswald near Kennedy’s vehicle when the assassination happened.

Oh, please. As author Gerald Posner noted on X: "The Darnell film flap is just one reminder that those who believe that JFK was killed as the result of a vast plot will always look to dismiss any evidence that runs counter to their theories." Although the Warren Commission declared after an extensive investigation that Lee Harvey Oswald, a committed Marxist and a former USMC grunt who had briefly defected to the Soviet Union and then had returned to the United States with a Soviet (and therefore KGB-vetted) bride in tow, had acted alone, their conclusion was challenged by such authors as Mark Lane in Rush to Judgment (1966) and Jim Marrs in Crossfire: the Plot That Killed Kennedy(1989), by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, and filmmaker Oliver Stone in JFK (1991). And in the 60-plus years since the event, "assassination research" has grown to include hundreds of books, thousands and tens of thousands articles and news stories, and has become an industry unto itself.

I myself dove into the JFK pool while researching my first novel, Exchange Alley (1997), published by Warner Books. I visited the pertinent sites in Dallas and New Orleans, attended an assassination-buff conclave in Dallas on the 30th anniversary of the shooting, and even met with Oleg Nechiporenko, the KGB head of station in Mexico City in 1963, who had debriefed Oswald as he tried to get a visa back to the U.S.S.R. via Cuba in September of that year. The novel was a Book-of-the-Month-Club alternate selection, a rare honor for a debut, and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review (another rare honor):

JFK assassination buffs will enjoy bushwhacking their way through this labyrinthine debut. Young Danish cultural attache Egil Ekdahl--engaged in hawking the KGB's file on Lee Harvey Oswald to the highest bidder--turns up murdered in a particularly grisly fashion, and NYPD Detective Francis X. Byrne is given the joyless task of finding his killer... The final 100 pages of this book offer a series of explosive surprises, from the identity of Ekdahl's killer to the truth about Byrne's own heritage.

There isn't much Walsh doesn't know about the JFK assassination, and the background research for this virtuoso novel feels thorough. Weaving from the worst of the Russian prison camps to Manhattan's elite European demimonde, from Brighton Beach's vicious Russian mobs to Little Italy's complacently murderous families, Walsh orchestrates a gripping tale of the horrors that were set in motion the day a president was murdered.

The various JFK "conspiracy" theories -- the Mafia did it, the CIA did it, the Russians did it, right-wing nuts did it, the Pope and Queen Elizabeth, the Masons, and the Rosicrucians acting in concert did it -- all arise not from evidence but from wishful thinking. Oswald was too puny a figure to have brought down a President. If you freeze the Zapruder film (itself proof of a Zionist conspiracy, of course) or blow up to Godzilla-sized proportions any of the grainy black-and-white photos of the event, you can clearly see the Black Dog Man, the Umbrella Man, Badge Man, and two, three, ten shooters lurking in the bushes or on the Grassy Knoll, emerging from the sewers, and hiding under the freeway overpass.

Except you can't. But that hasn't stopped people from trying; even now, after all the files have essentially been released -- except that one memo from LBJ ordering the hit! -- jaws will continue to flap. My initial impression of the files remains: the FBI reports are neatly typed-up by Irish Catholic Fordham graduates, while the CIA memos were clearly scrawled after drunken three-martini lunches at Duke Zeibert’s, whisky splotches included. If you really want to see how appallingly bad the Agency is, check out the JFK files.

In order to refute the most recent nonsense about the murder, you need look further than the two most important books on the subject. The first, Case Closed (1993) is by Gerald Posner, and really is the last word on the subject. Calm, Posner clinically dismantles and refutes the lunacy behind the "research" and comes to the only rational determination, which is that Oswald read in the newspaper that JFK was visiting Dallas the next day and saw a map of the motorcade route, which would take the presidential limo directly in front of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald was employed. He took his rifle to work the next day and, just as Kennedy's car slowed nearly to a stop to make the tight left turn from Houston Street onto Elm Street, he sighted in and shot the president in the back: miss, hit, kill.

Transcripts of conversations recorded secretly between Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover on the same taping system that brought down Nixon show that Johnson's primary concern was whether the Soviets had had a hand in his predecessor's demise; he was desperate for Hoover to tell him there were no Russian fingerprints on the Mannlicher-Carcano. The search for a handy culprit was on from the jump, and one of miracles of the modern media -- right up there with convincing the public that the National Socialist German Workers Party was "right-wing" -- was convincing people that a proud Marxist, Castro supporter, and defector to the USSR from New Orleans, who had only months before taken a shot at the famously right-wing general Edwin Walker, was somehow one of those good-ole-boy Texas gun nuts steeped in a culture of racist violence, who hated Kennedy for his stance on civil rights for blacks.

The antidote to this is the brilliant book by James Piereson, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (2007). Piereson's argument is that the president's senseless murder could only be attributed to a "conspiracy so vast," but one which pointedly did not include any form of leftism or even Marxism (which even then was being embraced as a legitimate field of study on American campuses). The American center-left, says Piereson, was broken by the assassination and effectively pushed decisively into the arms of red-diaper babies' radicalism, as the campus unrest that culminated at Kent State in 1970 almost immediately demonstrated. The JFK Conspiracy theorists, it turns out, are not right-wing lunatics but left-wing nut bags.

Why did Oswald do it? The popular insistence on demanding a motive when means and opportunity are themselves sufficient explanation -- a result of watching too many cop shows and courtroom dramas -- is irrelevant. He just did. Two things can be true: that in his short life Oswald was known to the police in at least two cities, as well as the Marine Corps, the CIA, and the FBI, and at the same time he decided independently to shoot the president.

One possible conclusion: Oswald was a prefiguration of John Hinckley, Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in order to impress his fantasy girlfriend, Jodie Foster. Oswald's marriage to Marina was troubled, they were separated, he was trying to get her attention and win back her love, and so among the things he left for her as he set out for the School Book Depository that day were his wedding ring and his own, imperfect translation of Yeletsky's aria from Tchaikovsky's opera, The Queen of Spades. It went like this.

I love you, Love you immeasurably. I cannot imagine life without you. I am ready right now to perform a heroic deed / Of unprecedented prowess for your sake. Oh, darling, confide in me!

Listen for yourself:

Cherchez la femme. The desire for a woman is one of the oldest motives for murder known to man, and as good a motive as any. Case closed.