Oswald's Motive: The Theory of Crisis

On November 22nd, 1963, the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, took a political trip to Dallas, Texas. Riding in a topless limousine, the motorcade had gone splendidly. Large and enthusiastic crowds had formed and cheered, the President was set to win the election next November, it was 12:30 P.M, and it was a beautiful day.  Kennedy’s limousine drove down Main Street, right onto Houston, left onto Elm, past the Texas Schoolbook Depository Building. Just as it began, it all ended. 80% of eyewitnesses heard three shots.[1] The first shot missed, the second shot struck Kennedy, exited his body, and then struck Texas Governor John Connally, and the last shot struck the President in the brain, instantaneously killing him.[2] Chaos ensued. At 1:15 P.M. a Dallas police officer by the name of J.D. Tippit was brutally gunned down and executed by a gunshot to the head in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. The Dallas police converged and swarmed the area, finding a twenty-four old male by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald in a Texas Theater after a suspect description of the perpetrator matched him.[3] After arresting Oswald and taking him to the city jail, Lee initiated the process of vociferously pronouncing his innocence “They’ve taken me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union, I’m just a patsy!”[4] Oswald shouted to nearby journalists. While Oswald was denying his criminal culpability, he was transferred from the city jail to the county jail when nightclub owner Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd, shooting and murdering Oswald. Case closed, or is it?

The assassination of JFK has had a profound cultural impact on the United States. Various theories, from Oliver Stone’s movie JFK that the military-industrial complex did the dirty deed to G. Robert Blakey’s theory of organized crime. However, Occam’s razor states that the theory with the least amount of assumptions involved is the most likely correct one, and that theory is that Oswald did it and he did it alone. Yet, this begs the question, one that the Warren Commission nor any other governmental investigation has ever sufficiently answered, why? Why did Lee Harvey Oswald murder John Fitzgerald Kennedy? First, in order to understand motive, one must understand character, and the revolutionary force of nature that was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in October 1939. His father, Robert Lee Oswald, died before he was born and so Lee was raised by his widowed mother Marguerite.[5] Over the course of his tumultuous childhood, Oswald would move, before the virulent young age of seventeen, twenty-one times, attending twelve different schools in total.[6] This rapid change in environment led Oswald to a profound social disconnect from his environment, engendering and exacerbating his latent antisociality. It is this disconnection from his environment that led Oswald to discover a specific book in the Loyola University Library, a book that would revolutionize the logical framework of his thinking, that book being none other than Das Kapital.[7] This book, and the political ideology of Marxism that surrounds it, would shape the mentality and psychology of Oswald for the rest of his life. At the young age of sixteen, after having read Das Kapital, Oswald would write to the Socialist Party of America: “I am a Marxist and have been studying socialist principles for well over fifteen months”.[8]

After joining the Marines in 1956 to escape the yoke of his abusive mother, Oswald would increasingly grow disenchanted and acerbic towards the country of which he was a citizen of. Later Oswald would write to his brother, Robert, on his experiences of the American Empire in action, stating: “I remember well the days we stood off shore at Indonesia waiting to suppress yet another population, when they were having a revolution there in Mar. 1958. I can still see Japan and the Philippines and their puppet governments.”[9] Oswald, assessing the current political situation of the United States and its capitalist economic system, would write: “America is a dying country, I do not wish to be a part of it, nor do I ever again wish to be used as a tool in its military oppressions.”[10] In conjunction with this hostile and antagonistic mentality, Oswald would defect, in 1959, to the strategic enemy of the United States and ostensibly that of capitalism, the Soviet Union.[11]

Oswald arrived in the Soviet Union and was, initially, rejected by the Soviets. Oswald, wanting to force the Soviets to accept him, attempted to take his own life by slitting his wrists (but only partially, ensuring that he would likely live).[12] After such an attempt, and the potential backlash from a self-avowed Marxist committing suicide because of rejection from an alleged Marxist state, the Soviets allowed him to stay and sent him to work in an electronics factory in Minsk. Here Oswald began to truly see the ostensible “Marxist” system for what it was: a façade. Oswald would write in his diary: “The work is drab, the money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling alleys, no places of recreation except the trade union dances. I have had enough.”[13] Oswald had recognized the objective fact that the Soviets had merely replaced one type of ruling hierarchy (the bourgeoisie) with another (the nomenklatura). Oswald, who would later admit he had “not found his ideal”[14] in the Soviet Union, would return to the United States in June 1962.

It is at this moment, the return trip to the United States aboard the S.S. Maasdam, that Oswald would write his most important political writing and one that would mark his revision of the orthodox conception of Marxism. Oswald, seeing the bureaucratic apparatus of the Soviet Union, came to the logical conclusion that any form of centralized state was a threat to the liberty and autonomy of the proletariat, the ostensible beneficiaries of communism and Marxism. It is here that Oswald would write: “As history has shown time again, the state remains and grows, whereas true democracy can be practiced only at the local level, while the centralized state, administrative, political, or superficial remains there can be no real democracy”[15]. In conjunction with this antagonism to the centralization of a state, Oswald would develop what he termed his “Theory of Crisis”[16]. 

Following Marx, Oswald believed in the necessity of overcoming and overthrowing the capitalist system. However, Oswald would develop this belief in the necessity of overcoming capitalism to overcoming communism as well, categorizing them into what he termed the “two world systems”[17]. These two world systems, which were represented by the “imperialist powers”[18] of the United States and the Soviet Union would, because of their innate behavioral predilections towards action such as imperialism and war, combat each other until the crescendo of what Oswald called the “all-finishing crisis”[19], the “total crisis”[20], the “atomic catastrophe”[21]. This crisis would obliterate the cemented world systems of capitalism and communism, allowing for a change in the mentality of humans and for the implementation of Oswald’s political utopia, his “Atheian System”[22] (a form of libertarian Marxism). Oswald would write regarding this how: “It is readily foreseeable that a coming economic, political or military crisis, internal or external, will bring about the final destruction of the capitalist system, assuming this, we can see how preparation in a special party could safeguard an independent course of action after the debacle, an American course”[23]. Connected to this desire to form a special party to safeguard a course of action after the debacle Oswald wrote: “The mass of survivors however will not belong to any of these groups; they will not be fanatical enough to join extremists, and will be too disillusioned to support either the communist or capitalist parties in their respective countries, after the atomic catastrophe. They shall seek an alternative to those systems which have brought them misery…I intend to put forward just such an alternative. In making such a declaration I must say that in order to make this alternative effective supporters must prepare now in the event the situation presents itself for the practical application of this alternative.”[24]

Ernst Titovets, whom Oswald himself referred to, in his “Historic Diary”[25], as a “friend of mine”[26] while in the Soviet Union, and who engaged in Oswald extensively on a political level[27], would later comment on Oswald’s theory of crisis: “Following Marx, Oswald accepted the materialistic concept of history in that capitalism would be replaced by a more advanced economic system. It was central in his thinking. Moreover, Oswald was convinced that capitalism, as it existed in the US, was doomed and was passing through its final stages, its days numbered. According to Marx, the self-destructive intrinsic tendencies in the system grew from within while some or other crisis would finish it off. A nuclear war emerged as one of those possibilities…Oswald was convinced that the impact of a crisis (e.g. nuclear war) on the minds of people would bring about a dramatic change in their mentality so that they would be ready to accept new ideas.”[28] In Oswald’s case, his “Atheian System”.

After the formation of his “Theory of Crisis”, Oswald would consistently fail to stay with any long-term vocations in the United States, seeing them as nothing more than exploitation of his labor-power.[29] After engaging in political activism for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee[30], an organization that had the central precept of anti-imperialism (which was utterly congruent with Oswald’s detestment of imperialism and the American Empire), Oswald, on November 19th[31], very likely saw a newspaper showing the route for the President of the United States’ motorcade through Dallas, which drove right by where he worked at the Texas Schoolbook Depository Building[32]. For Oswald, Kennedy represented that imperialist capitalist world system. Although Oswald had nothing against Kennedy personally, Kennedy, by virtue of his office, represented that exploitative and imperialist world system that had to be opposed, had to be obliterated and overthrown. To support this Oswald would write: “I despise the representatives of both systems whether they be socialist or Christian democracies, whether they be labor or conservative, they are all products of the two systems.”[33] And: “To a person knowing both systems and their factional accessories, there can be no mediation between the systems as they exist today and that person. He must be opposed to their basic foundations and representatives.”[34]

Oswald, however, had far grander goals than merely murdering a representative of a world system. Such an action, per se, would accomplish nothing in generating the “all-finishing crisis” that he incessantly wrote about and held as the springboard from which to decapitate and demolish the two world systems. Connected with this Oswald would write: “We have no interest in violently opposing the U.S. Government, why should we manifest opposition when there are far greater forces at work to bring-about the fall of the United States Government than we could ever possibly muster? We do not have any interest in directly assuming the head of Government in the event of such an all-finishing crisis…Work is the key to the future door, but failure to apply that key because of possible armed opposition in our hypothetical, but very probable crisis, is as useless as trying to use force now to knock down the door…Resourcefulness and patient working toward the aforesaid goals are preferred rather than loud and useless manifestations of protest.”[35] Instead, however, if one could shift the blame for any presidential assassination to the opposing competing world system (in this case, the Soviet Union and the communist world), one could potentially initiate the “all-finishing crisis” and the eradication of the “two world systems”, considering the Cold War environment of the time, the Cuban Missile Crisis having occurred just over a year prior. Indeed, Oswald would write regarding the “imperialist powers” of the United States and the Soviet Union: “The biggest and key fault development of our era is of course the fight for markets between the imperialist powers themselves, which lead to..wars, crises, and oppressive friction…And it is this prominent factor of the capitalist system which will undoubtedly eventually lead to the common destruction of all the imperialist powers”[36]. Ernst Titovets again wrote regarding Oswald’s belief in his theory of crisis and the connection of this crisis theory to a Presidential assassination: “In the worst-case scenario, the assassination of the President of the United States might have brought about a military retaliation against the country that stood behind it. Considering the Cold War situation at the time, one did not need to possess extraordinary analytical powers to infer which country the accusative finger would be pointed at. The war that might have resulted, a nuclear holocaust no doubt, might have been a crisis that Oswald had considered in theory.”[37] It is this adamant belief in the “Theory of Crisis” and the eventual “common destruction” of the “imperialist powers” which represented the “two world systems” and the inexorability that these “two world systems” would clash and destroy each other militarily that propelled Oswald to action that day in Dallas.

After the assassination, Oswald, in legitimately attempting to escape capture, hid his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that he had purchased under a pseudonym and fled the crime scene.[38] After murdering J.D. Tippit to elude capture, Oswald was arrested and consistently maintained his innocence afterwards. In connection with this maintenance of innocence and shifting the blame, Oswald would tell Secret Service Agent Thomas J. Kelley, after Kelley’s request for the “correct story”[39] of events related to the assassination because of Oswald’s stalwart denial of criminal culpability that “he would be glad to discuss this proposition with his attorney”[40]. 

Now, was Oswald’s goal feasible? Would it truly be possible to shift blame to the Soviet Union for the assassination by merely denying guilt and claiming “I’m just a patsy”? Well, listen to this excerpt from a telephone call between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Senator Richard Russel Jr. regarding the formation of the Warren Commission and the potential macroscopic consequences of the assassination of JFK: “[T]his is a question that has a good many more ramifications than’s on the surface, and they’re–we got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that it’s Khruschev and Castro did this and did that…kicking us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in a hour…Well…Chief Justice ought to do anything he can to save America. And right now, we’ve got a very touchy thing, and you wait until you look at this evidence.”[41]

In conclusion, Oswald did not murder Kennedy for Fidel Castro (of which, he effectively admitted to the police that replacing one Cold Warrior, Kennedy, for another Cold Warrior, Johnson, would change nothing about Cuban-American relations[42]), for the international project of communism, for the CIA, for organized crime, or to become an historic figure, he killed Kennedy because he wanted to kill the modern world. Specifically, the two world systems of communism and capitalism that he held as being the ultimate exploiters of the worker and vitiators of democracy. After the assassination, Oswald attempted to shift the blame behind the assassination to the competing world system by denying culpability (more likely than not attempting to force the United States to assume Soviet culpability, which, given the Cold War context and Oswald’s own conception of the aggressive behavior of the “imperialist powers”, was not an unreasonable assumption for Oswald to make), declaring that he was, in-fact, “just a patsy”.

It is inconceivable that Oswald, a man who dedicated and sacrificed his life to the altar of politics, would not factor this obstinate and incorrigible belief in his theory of crisis when shooting and murdering the President of the United States in front of hundreds of people. Indeed, Oswald was intelligent enough to realize the historical inconsequentiality that most assassinations per se have in history (having previously studied assassinations such as that of Huey Long’s[43]). So, Oswald attempted, in essence, a Gavrilo Princip strategy, but one tied to the atomic age. In a novel form of nuclear accelerationism, Oswald attempted to initiate his “all-finishing crisis” by brutally murdering the President of the United States, and then either successfully eluding capture or adamantly denying guilt, attempting to force the “imperialist power” that is the United States to look at the competing “imperialist power” of the Soviet Union for culpability (much how Gavrilo Princip forced the Austro-Hungarian Empire to look for guilt in the Serbian government and, hence, helped initiate a world war, or how Left-Socialist Revolutionary Yakov Blumkin, who assassinated German ambassador Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, did so in an attempt to start a revolutionary war between the Bolsheviks and Imperial Germany). This escalation of the crisis could then lead to the “common destruction” through the “atomic catastrophe” and the liberation of the proletariat from the chains of the “two world systems”, allowing for the implementation of Oswald’s “Atheian System”. In the words of Michael Paine, one of Oswald’s friends after Lee had returned to the United States in 1962: “He 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.”[44]

Sources:

1. United States Congress, Select Committee on Assassinations Appendix to Hearings - Volume VIII, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-Fifth Congress, Second Session, 1979, 140, https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol8/html/HSCA_Vol8_0072b.htm

2. ‌United States Congress, Select Committee on Assassinations Appendix to Hearings - Volume VII, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-Fifth Congress, Second Session, 1979, 175, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol7/html/HSCA_Vol7_0093a.htm

3. President’s Commission, Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, 1964, 176-178. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/chapter-4.html#movements

4. ‌David von Pein’s JFK Channel, “LEE HARVEY OSWALD DECLARES ‘I’M JUST a PATSY.’”, YouTube video, September 1 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbR6vHXD1j0&t=1s.

5. ‌President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume I - Testimony of Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, 1964, 250.

6. John McAdams, “Lee Harvey Oswald Timeline: Childhood and Youth.”,  The Kennedy Assassination, https://www.jfk-assassination.net/oswald1.htm.

7. ‌George de Mohrenschildt, edited by Michael A Rinella, Lee Harvey Oswald as I Knew Him, Lawrence, Kansas University Press Of Kansas, 2014, 9,

8. ‌‌President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XX - Gray Exhibit 1, 1964, 25.

9. ‌‌President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 295, 1964, 816.

10. ‌‌President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume  XVI - Commission Exhibit 295, 1964, 817.

11. PBS FRONTLINE, “Transcript | Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?”, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/etc/script.html.

12. ‌Ibid.

13. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 24, 1964, 101.

14. George de Mohrenschildt, edited by Michael A Rinella, Lee Harvey Oswald as I Knew Him, Lawrence, Kansas University Press Of Kansas, 2014, 121.

15. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 25, 1964, 116, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0070b.htm

16. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 97, 1964, 426, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0225b.htm

17. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 25, 1964, 117, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0071a.htm

18. Ibid, 111, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0068a.htm

19. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 97, 1964, 426, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0225b.htm

20. Ibid, 425, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0225a.htm

21. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 25, 1964, 118, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0071b.htm

22. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 98, 1964, 433, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0229a.htm

23. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 97,1964,  424, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0224b.htm

24. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 25, 1964, 118-119, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0071b.htm

25. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 24, 1964, 94, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0059b.htm

26. Ibid, 101, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0063a.htm

27. Ernst Titovets, Oswald: Russian Episode, 2020, 123.

28. ‌Ibid. 382–384.

29. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume IX - Testimony of Raymond Franklin Krystinik, 1964, 465, https://www.jfk-assassination.eu/warren/wch/vol9/page465.php

30. WSDU News, “WDSU Archives: WDSU Interview with Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963.” YouTube, November 22 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInqL3g6vJw&t=1s.

31. ‌First day that the route of Kennedy’s motorcade was published in the local newspapers. President’s Commission, The Official Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 40, https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/chapter-2.html#motorcade

32. Ibid.

33. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 25, 1964, 120-121, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0072b.htm

34. Ibid, 108, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0066b.htm

35. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 97, 1964, 425–6, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0225a.htm

36. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XVI - Commission Exhibit 25, 1964, 111, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/html/WH_Vol16_0068a.htm

37. Ernst Titovets, Oswald: Russian Episode, Eagle View Publishing, 2020, 390.

38. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XXI - Waldman Exhibit 7, 703, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh21/html/WH_Vol21_0364a.htm

39. President’s Commission, Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, 1964, 630, https://archive.org/details/WARREN_COMMISSION_VOLUMES/WARREN%20COMMISSION%20REPORT/page/n657/mode/2up?view=theater

40. Ibid.

41. Lyndon Baines Johnson, “‘You’re Goddamn Sure Going to Serve’ | The LBJ Telephone Tapes”, Lbjtapes.org, November 29 1963, 2:53–3:17, 3:48–3:51, https://lbjtapes.org/conversation/youre-goddamn-sure-going-serve

42. ‌President’s Commission, The Official Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 1964, 629, https://archive.org/details/WARREN_COMMISSION_VOLUMES/WARREN%20COMMISSION%20REPORT/page/n655/mode/2up?view=theater

43. President’s Commission, Warren Commission Hearings: Volume XXV - Commission Exhibit 2650, 1964, 930, https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh25/html/WC_Vol25_0480b.htm

44. PBS FRONTLINE, “Transcript | Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?”, 1993, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/etc/script.html