Lee Harvey Oswald

posted to www.marxmail.org on November 21, 2003

Last night PBS Frontline aired a fascinating documentary on "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/). This show would have had a special resonance with members of the Socialist Workers Party, past or present. In the course of his determined but questionable attempts to establish some kind of leftist credentials, Oswald subscribed to the Militant newspaper, the organ of the SWP. In one of the most famous pictures of Oswald, you can see him in his backyard with a rifle in one hand and the Militant newspaper in the other: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/glimpse/. Oliver Stone and other conspiracy theorists argue that the photo is bogus, but I have no reason to question its authenticity. It simply strikes me as just one of a number of gestures on Oswald's part to look like some kind of leftist, but with the predictable wrong note--in this case, holding the rifle that killed JFK in all likelihood.

When I applied for membership in the SWP in 1967, it was only 4 years after the assassination of JFK and the events were still very much alive in the party leadership's mind. After I received a notice to report to the draft board for a physical, a meeting was set up between Ed Shaw, the branch organizer in NYC, and me. He was to explain the party's proletarian military policy to me. In 1967 this meant trying to find a way to avoid going into the army, although not out of any moral opposition. We were simply more valuable on the outside. Eventually some SWP'ers did go in and made a big "free speech" stink about the right to have antiwar discussions at Fort Jackson. From that point on, the draft tended to pass us by.

Ed was a lot different than any of the party leaders who would eventually assume the mantle of leadership. He was a merchant seaman during WWII and sported a large tattoo on his bicep. He was also plainspoken and endowed with a salty wit. During the course of our meeting, the question of the Kennedy assassination came up. Ed said that when he returned to his Washington Heights apartment the day of the assassination, shortly after an APB had gone out for Oswald, his building was surrounded by cops looking for him.

I seem to remember Ed saying that Lee Harvey Oswald actually applied for membership, but was turned down because he gave out all sorts of wrong signals. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which the SWP played a key role in forming, also kept its distance from Oswald. As the PBS website points out:

"He shows an interest in guns. But Marxist politics are still his ruling passion and his hero is Fidel Castro. He writes to the leading pro-Castro group in the U.S., the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), offering to start a New Orleans chapter. The committee discourages him, but he ignores them and begins printing his own pro-Castro leaflets and phony membership cards. He asks Marina to help him disguise the fact that he is the only member of his organization."

I can only say that I am not surprised that Frontline can state that "Marxist politics" are Oswald's ruling passion since PBS has only the foggiest notion of what Karl Marx stood for. If hero worship for Fidel Castro and brandishing firearms is supposed to amount to Marxism, I guess I was wasting my time reading all that Leon Trotsky stuff.

There was so much heat on the SWP that party chairman Farrell Dobbs sent Jackie Kennedy a telegram offering his condolences. This defensive and eminently logical move sent youth leader James Robertson into orbit. From his ultraleft perspective, the telegram was something akin to Christopher Hitchens backing the invasion of Iraq. In a couple of years he would bolt from the SWP and start a group called the Spartacist League which is devoted to this kind of batty contrarianism.

When I was in the Houston branch of the SWP in 1974, I had the assignment of forum director. Even then I had an appetite for reaching as wide an audience for socialist ideas as possible--something that clashed with the insular culture of the local party leadership. Since the JFK assassination was always a hot topic for Texans, I had the bright idea to invite somebody down from Dallas who gave talks on Zapruder's film, something that he brought with him and which we showed as part of the meeting. He gave a talk that was in the spirit of Oliver Stone's movie. Afterwards our branch organizer Stu Singer spoke. He made the obvious points about JFK being a capitalist politician who would have dragged us into Vietnam if he had lived, etc., but in such a strident and obnoxious way that anybody considering socialism would have probably run the opposite direction after his presentation.

Last night's documentary tried to straddle rival interpretations of Oswald. Gerald Posner, who wrote a book titled "Case Closed", defended the findings of the Warren Commission. To the show's credit, it did not give a platform to some of the more kooky conspiracy theorists like Mark Lane. It also came up with new documentary evidence that tended to poke holes in some of Posner's claims. For example, Posner states that even though David Ferry (played by Joe Pesci in Stone's film) and Lee Harvey Oswald were both in the Civilian Air Patrol cadets, they never knew each other. Frontline counters that with a photo of Ferry and Oswald at a training session and even interviews two men who were there with them. They affirm that Ferry and Oswald did know each other.

My own view is that Oswald did not act alone, but I would be loath to offer an interpretation. In general, assassinations of heads of state are extreme measures that only take place in conditions approaching civil war. No matter the dislike of elements of the national security state for the president, it is entirely implausible that they would risk everything in a foolish bid to murder him. It is especially foolish to speculate that the CIA had something to do with this since the agency is largely made up of people who saw the world in exactly the same terms as JFK, namely Yale and Harvard graduates who spent their time listening to Schubert string quartets and reading John Updike when they weren't dreaming up ways to subvert the colonial revolution.

I have pretty much the same attitude toward September 11th, 2001. Why would the US government go to such lengths to whip the US population into a war frenzy when it took so little for them to intervene in one nation after another for the past 50 years or so? All you really have to do is claim that a country is a threat to our security and the war machine goes into action. It did not take a suicide bomber attack on a NYC building to justify the wars in Central America after all.

That being said, the bombings in Turkey do raise certain questions, as Emrah Goker's insightful post would lead us to believe. I have no doubt that there is an enormous impetus to push Turkey into sending troops into Iraq given the mounting desperation of the occupying forces. If it takes the lives of 500 or so innocent civilians to accomplish this, that's a small price to pay for maintaining control over Iraq's oil resources--especially when they are only Turks.