Tuesday, November 22, 2016

James Reston — Lee Harvey Oswald’s little green book shows JFK wasn't the real target

In the hours after the Kennedy assassination, after Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit and was identified as the president’s assassin, a Secret Service officer named Mike Howard was dispatched to Oswald’s apartment. Howard found a little green address book, and on its 17th page under the heading “I WILL KILL” Oswald listed four men: an FBI agent named James Hosty; a right-wing general, Edwin Walker; and Vice President Richard Nixon. At the top of the list was the governor of Texas, John Connally. Through Connally’s name, Oswald had drawn a dagger, with blood drops dripping downward.
Special Agent Howard turned the address book over to the FBI and, ultimately, to the Warren Commission. Only some time later did he learn that the list with its hugely important insight into the killer’s motive had been torn out of the book.

I didn’t hear about Howard until after I published my book “The Accidental Victim” three years ago on the 50th anniversary of the assassination. In it I argue a circumstantial case that it was Connally, not John F. Kennedy, who was Oswald’s target in Dallas. It is the story of a smoldering grudge in which Oswald came to associate Connally with all the setbacks in his disastrous, hopeless life....
Another piece to add to the puzzle.

11 comments:

Six said...

I don't know ... it seems that if Connally was the intended target, wouldn't there be endless easier chances to shoot him other than the time he was riding around with the President in downtown Dallas?

Tom Hickey said...

As I said, add another piece to the puzzle.

If nothing else it provides more reason to think that the investigation was not transparent.

GLH said...

Read Michael Collins Piper's book "Final Judgement" to find out who really killed Kennedy. Download it off of the net, it's free and worth the read.

Tom Hickey said...

@ GLH

Thanks. The thesis sounds plausible.

John said...

Six, I was just about to make the same point. Assassinating Connally would have been a walk in the park in comparison to assassinating Kennedy. The whole thing makes no sense. Connally could have been gunned down a hundred times before and a hundred times after the alleged botched assassination attempt. Why would Oswald not attempt to assassinate Connally on such a difficult day? The only thing that makes any sense is Oswald intended to assassinate Kennedy, and he did. Nothing else makes any sense.

Tom Hickey said...

A major issue is motivation. It was never shown that Oswald had such a motive against JFK personally, while is well established that he hated Connally. It is assumed that it was either on account of the Bay of Pigs, but that was a failure, or else to strike a blow against the US. Or he was just deranged. Anyway, loose ends.

The important contribution of this revelation is that it further questions Oswald's motivation to kill JFK. Maybe he had such a motive. But he also had a strong motive to kill Connally and had the opportunity to do so at the same time. He could easily have gotten another shot off before anyone could react to the first shot. Why did he not?

What is not in doubt is that both the CIA and the FBI were involved in some way with Oswald. The details of this involvement appear to have been covered up and not made available to investigators.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/oswald-the-cia-and-mexico-city/

John said...

Tom,

Oswald had every reason in the world to hate Kennedy. Cuba was the major motivating factor. Oswald rightly concluded that Kennedy would invade Cuba. So he assassinated him.

Why would Dallas be the first opportunity to assassinate Connally. It's relatively easy even these days to assassinate any number of politicians, and Connally would have been easy to assassinate before the alleged botched attempt.

Oswald did get off other shots. All aimed at Kennedy. Hitting Kennedy once and then blowing Kennedy's brains out while aiming for Connally doesn't seem botched. It's the actions of someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Oswald shot three times. One hit Connally by chance while on its way to Kennedy. Two shots hit Kennedy, the second fatally. Once Kennedy was fatally hit, Oswald walked away.

There is nothing particularly strange about the case. It's pretty straightforward. People make a a big deal about the assassination because they think Kennedy was some divine figure who was taken away too soon, when in actual fact he was an unbelievably dangerous and depraved maniac who has had lots of good PR since his death by the liberal media.

As for the FBI and CIA, there may well have been some involvement, but not in any subversive way. They probably thought they were running a double agent or something, when in fact Oswald was playing them all along. That's probably the reason why the case is still classified after all these years. It'll prove how incompetent and gullible the FBI and CIA can be, as a thousand other cases have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Tom Hickey said...

I have no opinion on the assassination other than the investigation was not transparent and the conclusion seems to have been fixed. It is indisputable that the FBI and CIA were not straightforward about it.

It was basically a charade, as were several other high-profile investigations. There are still lingering questions.

Taken together, this has fueled a conspiracy theory mentality in a lot of people and a lot of other people don't trust the government.

John said...

Tom, no question that Washington has not been transparent, but when have they ever been transparent? So why should we expect them to be?

They can't let slip their incompetence that their double agent was in fact a triple agent. How can they possibly admit to this? That their agent/asset took them for a ride and then assassinated the president? They'd never recover from this. Americans would be seething and want these agencies either closed down or fundamentally overhauled - no black budgets, etc.

On top of that, I think there is a good deal of evidence showing that Washington purposely fuels the conspiracy by being opaque and classifying evidence far longer than is normal. If you can get people paranoid about JFK, 9/11, Area 51 and all the other stuff that many Americans are strangely obsessed with, they have less time to devote to real politics and real conspiracies like Vietnam, the jihad in Afghanistan, Iraq, the overthrow of democracies, installing of dictators, etc.

Tom Hickey said...

no question that Washington has not been transparent, but when have they ever been transparent? So why should we expect them to be?

As a result of my radicalization over Vietnam, I made the decision back in the Sixties to choose the red pill, which was spoken of in those days as "turn on, tune, it drop out," which Tim Leary made famous but which he says he got from Marshall McLuhan.

Leary later explained in his 1983 autobiography Flashbacks:

"Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you - externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. "Drop out" suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity"

RRD said...

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