Oswald's interest in communism

The argument

This argument explains the assassination by reference to Lee Harvey Oswald's politics and temperament, treating the two as connected. Oswald was known for feeling angry and isolated, and he found comfort in the ideas of communism and Marxism — an ideology that offered both an explanation for his own position and a cause larger than himself to attach it to. His actions followed the commitment. In 1959 Oswald attempted to defect to Moscow, in the USSR, a step that meant leaving the country of his birth for the system he had adopted. The defection was not accepted on his terms; he was rejected and sent to live in Minsk instead, and it was there that he met his wife, Marina. In 1962 he moved back to the United States, having become too paranoid that the KGB was monitoring him to remain — a return proponents read as a break with the Soviet state rather than with the ideology, since he never lost his belief in communism. That distinction is what carries the argument. An ideological conviction which survives disillusionment with the state claiming to embody it, held by a man already angry and isolated, leaves the belief itself as the organising motive and removes the restraint that loyalty to a functioning state might impose. On this reading it ultimately encouraged him to act against politicians whose politics did not align with his ideals. The pattern cited is the point: General Walker, a figure at the opposite ideological pole, and then John F. Kennedy. Because the same conviction supplies a motive in both cases, the argument concludes that Oswald's interest in communism explains the shooting — and that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Political sympathies are not evidence of an act. Very large numbers of people held Marxist views in that period and shot no one, so the inference from belief to assassination would implicate a whole population; a motive of this generality cannot establish who fired the shots. The biography also sits awkwardly with the claim it is asked to support: a man who attempted to defect to the Soviet Union, was refused, and then returned to the United States because he had become convinced the KGB was watching him is not straightforwardly a reliable instrument of communist conviction. The Walker attempt is likewise asserted as his without the evidence that connects him to it, and the two targets fit a single ideological motive poorly — Walker was a figure of the anti-communist right, while Kennedy was pursuing détente and was criticised from that same quarter for it. The position has much stronger support available that this argument does not use: the rifle recovered from the sixth floor of the depository was traced to a mail-order purchase under his alias and carried his palm print; physical evidence placed him at the window; he left the building during the immediate aftermath and shortly afterwards shot a police officer; and he was arrested resisting with a revolver. That is evidence about the act rather than about the man's opinions. Resting the lone-gunman case on inferred belief instead concedes ground to the conspiracy positions in this debate, which trade precisely on the suggestion that Oswald was selected as a convenient ideological fit.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Marxist sympathies and a failed defection establish political views rather than the act, and the same reasoning would implicate the very large number of people who held those views and shot no one. [Rejecting P2] The claim that his beliefs led him to assassinate politicians who did not share them fits the two named targets poorly, since Walker belonged to the anti-communist right while Kennedy was pursuing détente — and the physical evidence that does support the position, including the traced rifle and the palm print, is not cited at all.