“Case Closed” goes into detail about both.

As for elaborate tales about the Mafia, Castro, and the like, Occam’s Razor comes into play here. Nichevo’s point about the rifle is also sound.

Oswald and Ruby operated in a looser, less locked-down era. And Ruby was a hanger-on, friendly with the local cops, prone to bursts of impulse and emotion.

Go to the library and check out that book “Mortal Error”, about the Secret Service man accidentally shooting the bullet that hit JFK’s head. I find that explanation much, much easier to believe than Oswald’s amazing marksmanship.

I have always favored the Single Nut Theory but I have recently come to appreciate that Alvin York or Carlos Hathcock ain’t in it with what the shooter did or was said to have done. If there was a second shooter I’d think we’d have figured it out by now, X-Files aside.

The only thing I can think of is that if it was a plant, they would have made sure it was a damn good rifle, maybe a nice Swedish Mauser or Enfield (or even simpler a Garand or other semiauto), all tuned up and sighted in. Why a crappy Carcano with a sticky bolt and an off-center scope? Even a Mosin-Nagant would play up the commie angle.

Kinda like if the Bush-Cheney-Wolfowitz axis had lied us into war over WMDs, don’t you think have bloody well FOUND some? I.e., planted them.

Even if you conclude that Oswald was the only person who fired all the shots, there still are many mysteries.

One mystery is whether Oswald told anyone that he intended to shoot JFK.

* Gus Russo’s book “Live by the Sword” (I think it’s the best book of all) provides many reasons to think that the Cuban intelligence service knew about Oswald’s intention.

* Dick Russell’s book “The Man Who Knew Too Much” provides many reasons to think that Oswald told a former military-intelligence officer Richard Case Nagell, who warned the FBI.

* Ray and Mary La Fontaine’s book “Oswald Talked” provides many reasons to think that Oswald and Ruby were involved in a CIA gun-smuggling operation and that they met as late as four days before the assassination.

If other people did know about Oswald’s intention, then that opens the possibility that the Mafia learned about that intention too and offered Oswald money to carry out his intention. If so, then perhaps Ruby did silence Oswald for the Mafia.

If other people knew about Oswald’s intention, there also is some possibility that someone else shot at the same time, to make sure that Oswald did not fail.

I think also that there is a good possibility that the bullet that hit JFK’s head was shot accidentally by a Secret Service man in the following car. This explanation is argued by Bonar Menninger in “Mortal Error”, published in 1992. This is an excellent, confounding book. Read it, and you will not be able to dismiss it easily.

The books by Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi arguing against conspiracy explanations are excellent.

By the way, Gerald Posner’s book “Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.” is a superb book, which deserves much more readership than it has received. If you start reading it, you probably will not be able to put it down.

The fact that this guy shoots the president, and then gets assassinated himself in the police station on live tv by someone as hairy as Ruby — just throws the whole thing into crazyland 2.0. His rationale, his emotional condition, all the explanations given, are just too lite — they don’t ring true — there’s too big a gap between the power those motivations would reasonably generate, and the act itself.

It’s akin to those Buddhist monks in 60s Vietnam who set themselves on fire to protest the government — acts of maximum, supreme selflessness by ascetics for whom principle had conquered basic instinct.

But hell, what do i know — maybe Ruby was just nuts.

It was liberals, the media and academics who simply could not accept the obvious, and had to spin all sorts of conspiracy theories in order to obfuscate it.”"”

I was in High School at the time, and was in art class when the news of JFK’s assassination came to us. My art teacher — a caricature of the ultra-liberal if ever there was one — said to me “I guess this goes to show you that the Birchers (the John Birch Society) are better shots than the rest of us!”

I never did get his reaction when the lone assassin turned out to be a Cuba-loving defector to the Soviet Union. As for the “Birch Society” remark of his, Oswald’s first, and failed, target was ultra-right wing ret. Gen. Edwin Walker. What deluded buffoons these lefties be.

There is no mystery. Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, did it because he was a Marxist who hated America, and because he was a nutball loser who wanted to make a name for himself.

Gerald Posner in “Case Closed”, among others, has exhaustively proven this true, and demolished various conspiracists’ claims.

The media, left-leaning even then, was eager to blame it on Dallas segregationists or other right-wingers, and was disappointed to learn otherwise. Ever since it has fostered an artifical confusion and “mystery” about a relatively straightforward event.

I think you are right that he said that, probably to the Warren Commission and maybe also at the trial. He said a lot of things.

Right after he shot Oswald, he yelled something like, “This will show the world that the Jews have guts.”

In the preparations for the trial, there were a lot of legal arguments before the judge about whether that statement should be excluded. As I remember, the prosecution wanted to include it and the defense wanted to exclude it. The judge ruled that it had to be included, and so the defense had to deal with it during the trial. I think the defense would have preferred to argue simply that Ruby had a mental disorder and that his action lacked a rational conscious motivation. Then the defense had to concede he had a motivation but argue it was irrational.

My memory about this might be mistaken. It probably has been more than 15 years since I read the book about the trial.

There is no doubt that declared this Jews-related motivation right after the shooting. Several of the police officers heard it. I think his declaration remains the best evidence of his motivation. He didn’t say anything about the grieving widow at that moment.

As some days and weeks passed after the shooting, he recognized that his shooting of Oswald was condemned much more than it was praised by the public. Since the shooting was so unpopular, he disassociated it from the Jewish motivation. The last thing Ruby wanted to do was to give the public any reason to criticize the Jews because of what he had done.

Therefore his explanation about saving the grieving widow from the trial was given more prominence in his explanations. That consideration perhaps really did play some minor but real role in his furious decision to kill Oswald.