On February 26, 1992, the Tampa FBI office caught up with John Gedney in Melbourne, Florida, where he was working as a code enforcement officer for the city. Back in 1976, Gedney had obtained a bachelor of science degree from Northeastern University in Boston. His relation of the events was the same as Doyle’s, though he describes the railroad car they were arrested in as a “flatbed car with large sheets of steel” inside it. After he, Doyle, and Abrams were released, they rode the rails to Fort Worth, then to Arizona, where they picked lettuce, then into Mexico and back to the states to Los Angeles, where the three of them split up, never seeing each other after that time.89*
The following year, 1993, assassination researcher Kenneth Formet located the sister of the third tramp, Gus Abrams, and she identified him from the Dealey Plaza photos, saying he had died in Ohio in 1987. She recalled that in the years around the assassination, her brother “was always on the go, hopping trains and drinking wine,” and speculated he didn’t even know who the president of the United States was at the time.90
From all appearances, and to the satisfaction of the FBI, the tramps turned out to be exactly what people had called them through the years, the conspiracy theorists coming up empty-handed once again.
There is no question in my mind that the search by conspiracy theorists for an assassin or assassins other than Oswald will continue down through the ages.
Motive
One of the biggest unanswered questions that has always bedeviled students of the Kennedy assassination is, Why did Oswald kill Kennedy? What was his motive? Indeed, it was an issue I had to deal with at the London trial. When I say I had to deal with it, I do not mean in a legal sense. It should be explained that motive is not the same as intent, two terms that are sometimes erroneously used interchangeably by those unfamiliar with the criminal law. Motive is the emotional urge or reason that induces someone to commit a crime. It is different from intent in that a person can intend to steal property or kill someone and can be found guilty of that theft or homicide irrespective of what his motive was(e.g., need, avarice, revenge, jealousy, etc.). To say it more succinctly, motive is what prompts a person to act (or fail to act). Intent is the state of mind with which the act is done. Motive, of course, may aid you in determining what one’s intent or state of mind was.
While intent is an element of every serious crime and a prosecutor has to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, motive is never an element of the corpus delicti* of any crime. Therefore, the prosecution never has to prove motive. All it has to prove is that the defendant did, in fact, commit the crime with the requisite intent (e.g., intent to kill, steal, deceive, burn, etc.), not why. I’ve put people on death row without knowing for sure what their motive was for the murder. All I knew for sure was that they had intentionally put someone in his or her grave and had no legal right (e.g., justifiable homicide) to do it.
However, even though prosecutors have no legal burden to prove motive, it is always better if they can, because juries want to know “why.” And just as the presence of motive to commit a crime is circumstantial evidence of guilt, the absence of motive is even stronger circumstantial evidence of innocence. Why? Proving that the defendant had a motive doesn’t mean that others didn’t also. But a complete lack of motive is very powerful circumstantial evidence of innocence because there is a motive, no matter how irrational or even insane, for every crime.
Since Oswald is dead, we will never know for sure why he killed Kennedy.* Ironically, the advertisement for the movie Oswald was watching at the time of his arrest, War Is Hell, just over an hour after he murdered Kennedy, contained these words: “There are some things that only the people that do them understand.” Even if Oswald were alive and wanted to tell us, though he could tell us much, he might not be able to convey all the psychic and subconscious dynamics swirling about in his fevered mind that led up to his monstrous act of murder. Even on a conscious level, his demented mind may have been confused as to the main reason or reasons why he pulled the trigger.† So all we can do is draw inferences from the available evidence, knowing that trying to divine human motivation is a rather unprofitable undertaking, and that our quest is circumscribed by the contradictory reality of trying to find rationality in an inherently irrational act.
The Warren Commission, after saying it had no doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy, considered “many possible motives” he may have had for doing so. It ended up conceding that it could not “ascribe to him any one motive or group of motives.”1 Former President Gerald Ford, in testimony before the HSCA, said, “We were not able to precisely pin down a motive for the assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald of President Kennedy. There was no way of really being definitive as to that motive, and so we could only speculate.”2 “The Commission reached no conclusion on motive,” Warren Commission assistant counsel Norman Redlich said.3 The HSCA in essence agreed with the Commission that many “factors” were involved in Oswald’s decision and that “in the absence of other more compelling evidence,” the ones set forth by the Warren Commission “offered a reasonable explanation of his motive to kill the President.”4
If the Warren Commission and HSCA conceded that they could not nail down for sure why Oswald killed Kennedy, I surely am not so presumptuous as to believe that I can.
One thing, however, we should all agree on. Killing a president and thereby negating a presidential election is the ultimate “political act.” And we know that starting with his reading Das Kapital in his early teens, Oswald’s life was consumed by politics. “Politics was the dominant force in his life right down to the last days…,” the HSCA said. “Although no one, specific, ideological goal that Oswald might have hoped to achieve by the assassination of President Kennedy can be shown with confidence, it appeared to the Committee that his dominant motivation, consistent with his known activities and beliefs, must have been a desire to take political action.”5*
Were Oswald’s political imaginings akin to that of a small-town city councilman? We know they were not. Though he may have been a small man in virtually every way, his thoughts were big and grand, thoughts in which he personally played a historically important role. How many people do you know who call their daily diary a “Historic Diary”? That’s what Oswald called the mundane journal he kept in Russia.6†
Moreover, Oswald viewed himself as a militant soldier of action in the Marxist class struggle to bring about change, not by a slow, evolutionary process but by a violent revolution. The backyard photo of Oswald with a rifle and a pistol and holding two left-wing publications shows this. In a letter from Russia to his brother Robert, he wrote, “I…would like to see the present capitalist government of the U.S. overthrown…I fight for communism…In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American government—any American,” he emphasized, implying he’d even be willing to kill members of his own family.7 Michael Paine, who had several conversations with Oswald about politics, told HSCA investigators in 1978 that it was “Oswald’s belief that the only way the injustices in this society could be corrected was through a violent revolution.”8 Paine told Frontline in 1993 that Oswald “thought capitalism was rotten, it was a fraud, and it needed to be overthrown. Lee wanted to be an active guerrilla in the effort to bring about a new world order…There’s no doubt in my mind that he believed violence was the only effective tool. He didn’t want to mess around with trying to change the system.”9
We know that Oswald’s life was consumed by politics, especially with regard to Fidel Castro, Cuba, Marxism, and the notion of revolution, and among much other literature found in Oswald’s tiny Beckley Street room or stored in Ruth Paine’s garage after his arrest (including twenty Russian-language books, seven Russian-language newspapers, and the American leftist publications the Militant and the Worker) were booklets titled The Coming American Revolution, Cuban Counter Revolutionaries to the U.S., Fidel Castro Denounces Bureaucracy and Sectarianism, Ideology and Revolution, Socialist Workers Party, Speec
h at the U.N. by Fidel Castro, and Continental Congress of Solidarity with Cuba, Brazil; a book titled A Study of U.S.S.R. and Communism Historical; pamphlets titled The End of the Comintern, The Crime against Cuba, The Revolution Must Be a School of Unfettered Thought, The Road to Socialism, and New York School for Marxist Study; 358 handbills titled “Hands off Cuba, Join the FPCC”; and seven photographs of Fidel Castro.10
A person with an obsessive fanaticism for militantly revolutionary politics coupled with personal delusions of historical grandeur automatically removes himself from the general run of men, making a monstrous deed like Oswald’s so much more likely. After all, there’s always much more reason and motivation to do a bold and dramatic thing if that person is not just going to vicariously share in someone else’s reflected glory, but be the principal recipient of the glory himself. And Oswald had such dreams. Recall his telling Marina that someday “he would be prime minister.” She felt he had a “sick imagination” and tried to convince him he was just an ordinary man like others around them and “it would be better [for him] to direct his energies to some more practical matters,” but she said, “He simply could not understand that…His imagination, his fantasy, which was quite unfounded, [was] that he was an outstanding man…He was very much interested, exceedingly so, in autobiographical works of outstanding statesmen of the United States” and elsewhere. “I think he compared himself to these people whose autobiographies he read.”11
No one, of course, knew Oswald better than Marina, and when Warren Commission counsel asked her simply, “Do you have any idea of the motive which induced your husband to kill the president?” she answered, “From everything that I know about my husband, and the events that transpired, I can conclude that he wanted in any way, whether good or bad, to do something that would make him outstanding, that he would be known in history.” Later in her testimony she repeated that her husband “wanted…by any means, good or bad, to get into history.”12 Earlier she had told the FBI something very similar: Her husband had “an obsession to get his name in history. Everything he did was toward that end.”13 In an even earlier interview with the Secret Service, she had said her husband always tried to improve himself, but mostly concentrated on “reading books about the great men of the world, their achievements and their contribution to the world.” She said her husband was “an ego-maniac who wanted to be a ‘big man’ but that in failing to be so he decided to show the whole world who he was by killing the president so that the whole world would know his name.”14
“My general impression [of Oswald] was he wanted to become famous or infamous. That seemed to be his whole life ambition…He just seemed to have the idea that he was made for something else than what he was doing…He seemed to think he was destined to go down in history someway or other,” said Max Clark, a Fort Worth lawyer who had become an acquaintance of Oswald’s when Oswald sought out Clark’s wife, an immigrant from France who was three-quarters Russian and spoke the language fluently.15 Michael Paine inferred from his political conversations with Oswald that Oswald believed that society was bad and had to change, but “he was of the mind that something small, or evolutionary changes were never going to be of any effect…It had to be of a rather drastic nature. Society was all tied together. The church and the power structure and our education was all the same vile system and therefore there would have to be an overthrow of the whole thing. Just how he was going to overthrow it or what he was going to overthrow toward, it was not clear to me.”16 Mack Osborne, who served with Oswald in Marine Air Control Squadron No. 9 in Santa Ana, California, told the Warren Commission, “I once asked Oswald why he did not go out in the evening like the other men. He replied that he was saving his money, making some statement to the effect that one day he would do something which would make him famous.”17 Even those like Volkmar Schmidt, the de Mohrenschildts’ friend who did not know Oswald well but had at least one lengthy conversation with him, came away with the clear impression that he “was extremely fixed on making an impression with his life. [He was] enormously ambitious, ambitious to achieve something beyond the normal.”18
Priscilla Johnson McMillan, the American reporter who interviewed Oswald in her Moscow hotel room in November of 1959 and author of the definitive book on Oswald and his wife, Marina and Lee, wrote in 1964, “If there was one thing that stood out in all our conversation [in Moscow], it was his truly compelling need…to think of himself as extraordinary…the desire to stand out from other men…I believe that Oswald yearned to go down in history as the man who shot the President.”19
Kerry Wendell Thornley was a corporal in Oswald’s Marine unit at the El Toro Marine base near Santa Ana, California, in 1959. As indicated earlier, he told the Warren Commission that in conversations with Oswald he sensed that Oswald “looked upon history as God. He looked upon the eyes of future people as some kind of tribunal, and he wanted to be on the winning side so that ten thousand years from now people would look in the history books and say, ‘Well, this man was ahead of his time.’”20* In other words, Oswald was not someone who wanted to make a ripple or even a wave on this planet. His grandiose dreams were nothing short of changing the tide of history. And as stated earlier in this book, the assassination of John F. Kennedy arguably altered the course of world history.
Conspiracy theorists seek to rebut the argument that Oswald killed Kennedy because he wanted to be known as a revolutionary hero and famous down through the ages, by asking, If this were so, why did Oswald try to escape and, when apprehended, deny that he killed Kennedy? In other words, if Oswald wanted to get credit for the assassination, why did he do everything possible to cover up his perpetration of it? But this is a non sequitur predicated on the belief that his wanting to become famous and his denying guilt right after the assassination are mutually exclusive states of mind. They are only so on the surface. Though Oswald’s leaving his wedding ring and most of his money behind on the morning of the assassination shows he thought he probably would not survive his killing of Kennedy, and was willing to sacrifice his own life, if necessary, to accomplish his plan to murder the president, this is not synonymous with saying he wanted to die. His conduct after the shooting clearly showed that he wanted to survive, to see another day. More importantly, just because he wanted to be famous for his deed doesn’t necessarily mean he wanted this to happen immediately, thus ensuring his apprehension and likely execution. It is much more reasonable to assume that he wanted to disclose his identity on his own terms and at a time and place he, not the authorities, chose, such as in Cuba or Russia. There is no indication that Oswald only wanted to be famous after he died. In fact, his outsized grandiose dreams always imply his living to reap the rewards (e.g., his telling Marina that someday “he would be prime minister”). Knowing Oswald as he did from the Marines, Kerry Thornley told the Warren Commission that because Oswald had killed Kennedy, “I think he probably expected the Russians to accept him…in a much higher capacity than they [had]. I think he expected them to, in his dreams, invite him to take a position in their government…that he could go out into the Communist world and distinguish himself and work his way up into the party, perhaps.”21 Of course, you don’t get that high position if you’ve been arrested, prosecuted, and executed in Dallas.
Oswald’s obsession with and immersion in politics, as we know, was a constant and integral part of his life. More specific was his passion for Cuba and reverence for its leader, Fidel Castro.* We also know that as early as 1959, when Oswald was in the Marines stationed in Santa Ana, he told a member of his squad about his fervent desire to get to Cuba to aid Castro in his revolution.22 His apparently solitary mission to proselytize for Castro and Cuba to the extent of passing out Fair Play for Cuba literature on the streets of New Orleans during the summer before the assassination, and being arrested for his efforts, clearly demonstrates the extent of his commitment. And his attempt to get to Cuba in late September and early October of 1963, and literally crying at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City w
hen he was denied entry, shows that his devotion and ardor for Cuba knew no boundaries. “His basic desire,” Marina testified, “was to get to Cuba by any means, and…all the rest of it was window dressing for that purpose.” Oswald’s “favorite subject,” she said, was “Cuba, and he was…a little bit cracked about it, crazy about Cuba.”23 In late August 1963, when Marina saw Oswald on the porch of their house in New Orleans aiming his rifle, he told her, “Fidel Castro needs defenders. I’m going to join his army of volunteers. I’m going to be a revolutionary.”24 The Warren Commission reasonably inferred that Oswald’s Cuban connection might very well have played a significant role in the assassination, Oswald hoping to thereby “aid the Castro regime, which President Kennedy so outspokenly criticized.”25†
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