[gordian-not]

I look at it like the crazy general in Dr Strangelove that is trying to start a world war

I highly doubt that a secret in the caliber of “let’s kill the President” can be kept by so many people for such a long time. In my experience large organizations of people just don’t work that way

[JohnBooty]

    I highly doubt that a secret in the caliber of “let’s 
    kill the President” can be kept by so many people for 
    such a long time.

Agree.

However, what if that wasn't the conspiracy?

What if the conspiracy was, "let's avoid war with the USSR"?

If the US Government knew of or suspected USSR involvement in JFK's assassination: their choices were essentially "war with the USSR", "look like fools who bowed down to the USSR", or "pretend that Oswald was a lone, crazy guy."

In other words: not a conspiracy per se where the government was en masse covering up some specific thing they knew to be true. I agree with you that feels implausible. Especially since presumably a significant portion of the government would have been opposed to the assassination or the cover-up.

But it might have been more of a concerted effort to look the other way. Like, "If we investigate Oswald and the investigation too closely, the trail might lead to Russia or one of its satellite states, and therefore war, and therefore nuclear war. So therefore let's all agree that Oswald was a lone gunman because it sure beats war with the USSR."

That does not seem impractical to me.

Remember, the country was still reeling from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the chilling possibility of having narrowly avoided nuclear war.

[bluGill]

A lot of those things were cleared up for me when I visited the site in Dallas. People claiming conspiracy are trying to make what he did much more difficult than it really was. He had a job that happened to be in the right place at the time, he had a standard gun anyone could buy, and plenty of time alone (he specifically did not have anything on his todo list for the day done despite being at work for a few hours). There is nothing about this a lone actor would have any trouble with, other than the initial luck of getting a job there in the first place and that type of coincidence isn't unlikely.

[fallingknife]

Why would the USSR assassinate a US president at all? Why would they risk war (and their recent backing down in the Cuban missile crisis shows they really didn't want war) for something that gives them no strategic gain against the US?

[JohnBooty]

I agree with you completely: I don't think Russia tasked an unstable loner malcontent with knocking off JFK and possibly kickstarting WW3 in the process. Russia did not want that.

What I think the US government feared was a public perception that Russia (or Cuba, or whoever) might have been behind it.

That's when swathes of the public and various grandstanding politicians start rattling their sabers and thinking about war. Any official story besides "Oswald was a crazy lone gunman" would have looked awful for the US and increased the odds of war, a recurrence of McCarthyism, etc.

So I don't think the possibility of a second gunman was ever seriously entertained, even though there's some evidence for it.

[rusk]

> What if the conspiracy was, "let's avoid war with the USSR"?

I think this is a plausible line of thinking. My issue with the official story is that it feels stretched to cover too many datapoints. Like it kind of explains the data but not quite and indeed the obfuscation I’m detecting could just as well be coming from something like that as any new world order coup. tldr; Still fishy though.

[gordian-not]

This is very close to my feeling on the matter, and if I remember correctly there was even a case of cover up related to the fact that he visited the embassies (which can also be interpreted as not wanting to divulge their intelligence sources).

However, it seems like the well known facts about Oswald (the communist background) weren't a major issue at the time (at least from what I gathered), so maybe there wasn't anything to cover up

Anyway, if the US government doesn't want to stir the cold war issues around the assassination, is it a conspiracy or just common sense statesmanship?

[edit]: I think I misread you, I do not think the soviets were involved, I think this is an extremely risky move no one would do. I do think there were probably fears it would be perceived as a foreign assassination which drove some actions in the US government.

[JohnBooty]

    I do not think the soviets were involved, I think this 
    is an extremely risky move no one would do. I do think 
    there were probably fears it would be perceived as a 
    foreign assassination which drove some actions in the 
    US government. 

I was vague on that because my post was overlong already and I don't have a clue or guess about who (if anybody) was involved besides Oswald.

But I agree with you: I cannot imagine that Khrushchev or the leadership of the USSR wanted open war. For the same reasons the USA didn't.

There is definitely a middle ground sort of possibility, where Oswald was involved with the USSR to some extent (informant, or whatever) but they truly had no idea he was going to shoot JFK. That seems completely possible.

Of course, the Soviet government was enormous and not monolithic. Maybe some within it wanted war, maybe some thought that they could prod Oswald into an assassination without getting "caught."

Seems possible, but zero idea how likely that is.

The simplest scenario is: Oswald worked in tandem with a second rando guy who had a rifle and wanted the president dead. No shortage of those in America, a land with cheap rifles and ~16 million WWII vets who were trained to use them.

    Anyway, if the US government doesn't want to 
    stir the cold war issues around the assassination, 
    is it a conspiracy or just common sense statesmanship?

Definitely common sense statesmanship.

Arguably a conspiracy as well but that depends on our definition of "conspiracy."

The only thing I'm really sure of is that it was in the US government's best interests to sell the idea that Oswald was a lone crazy guy. That was the least-bad scenario for America.

[gordian-not]

Can’t say I believe there was another gunman.

There may be forensics technicalities that are hard to explain but it seems that in any event that is highly ‘investigated’ people find too many patterns in the noise (9/11 for example)

Like most of those Cold War events, these cover ups look more like protecting intelligence sources and blunders than some large overarching cabal

[JohnBooty]

I think the 9/11 and JFK conspiracy theories are dissimilar, almost opposite.

The official explanation for 9/11 is also the simplest possible explanation: terrorists carried out a very low tech and plausible hijacking attack that exploited some rather obvious holes in our airline security.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories are orders of magnitude more complex than this official narrative.

I don't think the JFK "second gunman" theory is more complex than the official truth. In it's simplest form (Oswald worked with another gunman, but there was no overarching conspiracy involving Russia or Martians or lizardmen or whatever pulling the strings) I would argue it's simpler than the official narrative.

[bluGill]

While it is possible Oswald worked with another gunman, there is no reason for him to do that. Everything done is something anyone with basic gun knowledge could have done alone.

As I said elsewhere, the only evidence of a second gunman is we know Oswald was a good shot with a gun and so needing 3 shots (with a scoped rifle at close range - less than 100 meters) is something to question. But in the end it seems more likely he would have pulled the trigger himself and thus not needed help.

[rusk]

> Arguably a conspiracy as well but that depends on our definition of "conspiracy."

Not a conspiracy in the more surreptitious sense that most people consider. It would bear all the same hallmarks though, and I guess that’s what sets off people’s radars

[rusk]

> large organizations

I don’t think large organisations can act in such a coordinated manner at all but they can be manipulated.

Cartels with a lot to lose can take their secrets to the grave, in particular if their constituents have a lot to lose. Everyone else has “unfortunate accidents”.

[gordian-not]

So, just from the top of my head and rather recently:

1. the NSA lost all of its malwares/zero days to the Russians

2. The NSA lost a huge amount of documents detailing a large amount of their billion dollars sigint sources and tech catalog

3. China was able to steal US nuclear weapons design

4. The CIA itself lost its entire internal wiki

5. Top secret documents were on discord for over a month

Yet somehow these omnipotent organizations can keep the secret of how they killed the US president. Without a good answer as to what was their interest to do something so extreme in the first place

[smegger001]

The key to all of those is they are digital files easily copied and deseminated online. It hard to hack a mechanical typewriter and or to exfiltrate physical documents locked in a filing cabinet in a secure facility. Then distributing them en mass the way the way digital channels like discord can is just not managable unless your a major news paper publisher. Digital information wants to be free, typewriten documents want to be locked in a documents warehouse missfiled and lost forever.

[gordian-not]

That’s the key to the fact they were disseminated online. They still hired people that weren’t fit to keep these secrets and that’s not a new issue

[TheGrassyKnoll]

Don't forget the OPM hack (2015)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...

[overrun11]

Organizations keep secrets all the time. A huge amount of American history is learned after the fact when documents are declassified.

[gordian-not]

So despite countless of soviet spies in the FBI and CIA, the end of the cold war, defectors and open archives

The JFK assassination still remained a secret?

[rusk]

I think there are some secrets that don’t go on file. Often times the most crucial meetings involve subtle cues over a cup of tea.

[squeaky-clean]

Thousands of documents related to it still remain classified, even after a declaration to declassify them. So... Yes.

[DANmode]

Your understanding of geopolitics is (even partially) rooted in fiction.

[gordian-not]

Which part? The fact that a part of the executive branch can’t kill the head of the executive branch and keep it a secret?

Or the fact that I assume Oswald was crazy and being a megalomaniac did actions that might have started a war?