I went to the 6th Floor Museum today. The 6th floor in question is where the sniper was when he shot JFK. Oddly enough, I found it very interesting, and I think one could easily find a Soviet Communist plot behind it all. Here are a few of the fishy things:
1. The three shots were fired within 5.6 seconds, but they were fired from a regular rifle, not a machine gun, so there would need to be time to reload.
2. Lee Harvey Oswald had been trained in the Marines, and held a rank of something like “sharpshooter” in rifle usage. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you if that rank was expert, middle, or immediately above footshooter. Apparently the range made accurate shots extremely difficult, particularly with a moving target (this is from one of my students who was in the army in his home country, and was trained in this kind of thing—part of the tour is where you look out the window to where the car was driving by).
3. Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, and became a Soviet citizen. Yet he was allowed to return to the United States in 1962, accompanied by his Russian wife. Nikita Khrushev had liberalized the USSR to a certain extent, but Russian citizens were still not allowed out on a whim.
4. Oswald was killed by a man who was supposedly enraged by the assassination, and who also wanted to save Mrs. Kennedy the agony of testifying in a trial. This is more believable because his work had made him particularly sensitive towards women’s emotional needs (he owned a strip club). His ties to mafia members just show that mobsters can be patriotic, too.
Now, I do think the museum was set up be people who like conspiracy theories. And unfortunately, they did not give the proofs that one would need to be fairly certain. And it’s true that I really like Communist plots, but I did go into the museum thinking that Oswald killed Kennedy without assistance, so it was a pretty dramatic turn-around.
