The conspiracy theories about Kennedy's assassination, I mean. It's a rhetorical question. Heck, there are still strange stories about Lincoln's assassination that still pop up now and then.
The latest is a German film that resurrects the radical right's pet theory, that Castro did it. His hot new witness is a Cuban defector. Or at least a Cuban refugee who claims to have worked for Castro's secret police and was in on the plot.
A defector, huh? Wow, his evidence must be really reliable! If the German documentary doesn't bring enough attention to his claims, maybe he could get in touch with Ahmad Chalabi and get some marketing tips.
A columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle - I forget which one - about 10 years ago did an hilarious send-up of the Kennedy assassination conspiracies. He told about being in on the cover-up conspiracy. In fact, he said, he himself was present at the stadium when all 10,000 participants in the cover-up conspiracy were there to get directions from an anonymous speaker who was introduced only as "Bobby".
The new film is by a German director named Wilfried Huismann, and the film is called Rendezvous mit dem Tod (Rendezvous With Death). See the articles from Der Spiegel Online: "Nur einer konnte überleben" 05.01.06, ARD-Doku über Kennedy-Mord: Steile These, schwache Belege von Klaus Wiegrefe 05.01.06 (English version : New Film Offers Strong Theory but Weak Evidence), and Did Castro Kill Kennedy? by Michael Scott Moore 01/04/06.
Huismann rolls out the Oswald-in-Mexico story. Now, there are undoubtedly strange things about Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a weird character. But I don't think this Mexico story is exactly sturdy support for a conspiracy theory.
And the Mexico story touches on the "Second Oswald", a theme that was developed by Edward Jay Epstein, one of the more responsible students of the assassination. The Warren Commission Report included references to a mystery man, including the text of a telegram the CIA sent to the FBI, the State Department and the Department of the Navy six weeks before the assassination. It read:
Subject: Lee Henry OSWALD
1. On 1 October 1963 a reliable and sensitive source in Mexico reported that an American male, who identified himself as Lee OSWALD, contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring whether the Embassy had received any news concerning a telegram which had been sent to Washington. The American was described as approximately 35 years old, with an athletic build, about six feet tall, with a receding hairline.
2. It is believed that OSWALD may be identical to Lee Henry OSWALD, born on 18 October 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana. A former U.S. Marine who defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959 and later made arrangement through the United States Embassy in Moscow to return to the United States with his Russian-born wife, Marina Nikolaevna Pusakova, and their child.
3. The information in paragraph one is being disseminated to your representatives in Mexico City. Any further information received on this subject will be furnished you. This information is being made available to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
(Quoted in The CIA and the Man Who Was Not Oswald by Bernard Fensterwald and George O'Toole New York Review of Books 04/03/75 [article is behind subscription].)
As Fensterwald and O'Toole wrote, one obvious problem (which was referenced in a CIA memo of 10/23/63, i.e., a month before the assassination) is that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't fit that description:
But Lee Harvey Oswald was not "approximately 35 years old, with an athletic build"; he was twenty-three years old and slender.
The CIA also had a photograph of this Second Oswald, and it clearly wasn't the Lee Harvey who's face became so infamous. Also, stuff like the following make it understandable that conspiracy theorists would be charged up by this case. Fensterwald and O'Toole:
One can only guess at the confusion caused by the picture. The FBI needed no Navy photograph to establish that the mystery man was not Oswald - Lee Harvey Oswald was sitting handcuffed in a third-floor office of the Dallas police headquarters. The next day Special Agent Bardwell D. Odum was dispatched with the photograph to the motel where Oswald's wife and mother were hidden. He showed the picture to Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, mother of the accused assassin. Mrs. Oswald looked at the photo and told Odum she didn't recognize the man. The following day, however, shortly after her son was murdered in the basement of Dallas City Hall, Mrs. Oswald erroneously identified the mystery man. She told the press the FBI had shown her a picture of Jack Ruby the night before.
Their conclusion is worth keeping in mind if this latest the-Cubans-did-it theory starts popping up among the denizens of Wingnuttia:
If someone posing as Oswald visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in the early autumn of 1963, what implications might be drawn from this discovery? One obvious interpretation is that someone sought to counterfeit a fresh connection between the man who was soon to become the accused presidential assassin and the governments of those two communist countries. But it is not necessary to speculate further. If someone were trying to impersonate Oswald eight weeks before the assassination, the Warren Commission's theory of a lone assassin, unconnected with any conspiracy, is seriously undermined and the case should be reopened.
There could be, of course, an innocent explanation of how the CIA came to misidentify the mystery man as Lee Harvey Oswald: Oswald may actually have visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies. If this were the case, then somewhere in the CIA's files there should be photographs of the real Lee Harvey Oswald departing from the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City. If those photographs exist, their publication would help to settle the question. If they don't, the CIA should now explain why not. In either case, it should also disclose what it knows about the man it wrongly identified as Oswald on two separate occasions. It should explain why it believes that this man was not impersonating Oswald. All these matters should be clarified both by the CIA itself and by the congressional committees that are about to investigate its activities.
This was in 1975, and I don't pretend to beeven close to familiar with the intricate (and seemingly infinite!) details of this endless mystery. But I'll be curious to see what some of the more level-headed researchers have to say about this latest contribution.
I doubt German audiences will be convinced by the Castro-did-it theory. I don't think I've ever met a German or Austrian who wasn't already convinced that the CIA did it. And that was sure that JFK and Marilyn Monroe had an affair.
Okay, I'm a total boring geek on both questions! I admit it, all right? I believe Oswald did it by himself. And I don't believe that Marilyn slept with JFK, either. There, I said it. I'll concede that there is some not-totally-unreasonable basis to think that Kennedy might have had a one-night stand with Marilyn. Yes, I know he slept with that Judith Exner or whatever-her-name is, the brunette that hung out with mobsters, too. The FBI had pictures and contemporary reports of that.
But I just don't buy the Marilyn story. And if there was an assassination conspiracy, Oswald looks good for a CIA agent to me. Plus he was involved with a bunch of rightwing freaks. So, call me a freak, too, but I buy the lone-gunman, no-conspiracy version. There, it's out in the open!
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