On a pet peeve of mine
Well, another anniversary of the Day in Dallas is behind us, and yet again, I've been subjected to endless conspiracy stories about how apparently everybody in the world, except poor, misunderstood Lee Harvey Oswald, the Innocentest Innocent in the History of Innocence, shot JFK. This sort of nonsense used to amuse me. Nowadays, it just irritates the daylights out of me.
For starters, Oswald's shot was by no means impossible, or even particularly difficult, particularly for a trained marksman. Oswald, whatever his other shortcomings, had been a US Marine. They are, one and all, from the Commandant of the Corps down to the lowliest private, required to qualify at a fairly high level in marksmanship with a rifle. By Marine Corps standards, he was middling at best...but those standards are very high indeed. It's like dismissing Salieri as a talentless hack musician because he wasn't as good as Mozart. He wasn't as good as Mozart...but almost nobody in the history of music ever was! (And, that silly movie to the contrary notwithstanding, Salieri and Mozart were actually fairly good friends. They competed for gigs, but that went with the territory in professional music, then as now.)
I've had my brother pace off the approximate distance that the shot was taken at. At that range, even though I'm currently badly out of practice, I could be pretty confident of hitting a man-sized target. I don't know if I could do exactly what Lee Oswald did, but I'm left-handed (which is a handicap when handling a bolt-action), out of practice and my eyes aren't what they were. When I was younger, if I'd had a left-handed version of Oswald's Carcano, I could have done what he did fairly easily, particularly with a rifle I was familiar with and had practiced with.
Most of the accounts that claim that the bullets couldn't have done what they did are based on false reports of the positions of the people seated in the death car. I don't know where these reports originated, but they've propagated like kudzu, and a lot of people read them in fifth- or sixth-hand accounts and believe them as though they were the gospel hot from Sinai.
Many people think that the existence of the "magic bullet" disproves the fact that Oswald did it, somehow or other. Nova did a television program once where they took a very similar rifle to the assassination Carcano and tested it out with ammunition as close as they could get to what Oswald was using. They were able to show that what the Warren Commission reported as the bullet's trajectory was perfectly explicable, and that the bullet's apparently-nearly-pristine condition was quite normal for that particular sort of bullet. (The 6.5x52 Carcano was a very straight-sided bullet, and would not deform nearly as much on hitting flesh as the more rounded types used in, e.g., 30.06 or .308 NATO).
Oswald's own behavior also points straight to him as the killer. Ear- and eyewitnesses put him at the scene of the crime, and he was the only Book Depository employee to leave the building after the shooting, before the Dallas police arrived. When he was accosted by a policeman, he shot the policeman and ducked into a movie theater, hoping to hide in the audience. Yes, he did say "I'm a patsy!" but captured criminals have been known to lie themselves blue in the face to try to exonerate themselves. (I'll pause here so that the easily shocked can pick themselves back up off the floor.)
Before shooting Kennedy, Oswald had spent years trying to be a somebody, instead of the miserable little nobody that he was. He'd tried defecting to Russia (the Soviets, to give credit where it's due, saw right through him), and since crawling back to the US with his tail between his legs, he'd flapped around trying to make himself some sort of a communist big wheel. He'd tried assassinating a retired general known for right-wing views, and was visibly deteriorating mentally.
Most of the theories that postulate "someone else did it" start from the idea that Oswald was innocent and go from there, rather than starting with the known facts and going from there to a conclusion. And the villains of the piece are generally whomever the theorists hate the most. For some reason (I can't imagine why) the KGB and Castro's Cubans generally get overlooked in favor of the CIA, for some insane reason. But if the CIA had wanted Kennedy gone, it would have been very easy to do so in a less iffy, less public way.