Oswald Lives

[Robert]

Lee Harvey Oswald was killed before he could tell the world why he assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Suppose he did live, that Jack Ruby was stopped over never attempted to kill him.

Would he have ever confessed?

What reason would he give?

If, based on his background as a defector to the Soviet Union and pro-Castro activist, Oswald said he killed Kennedy because of his Anti-Communism, what would be the public reaction?

This thread assumes no conspiracy, and he acted alone.

 

[Evil Opus]

He seemed fairly defiant in the short time that he lived following the Kennedy assassination, so I think its fair to assume he probably never confesses. He would almost certainly have been found guilty by a jury and executed.

If Oswald cites Kennedy's anti-communism as the reason he killed him, I think it energizes the anti-communist movement in the United States. Perhaps some new form of McCarthyism takes root in the 1960s, but instead focused on the military due to Oswald's Marine background rather then the news and entertainment industry.

 

[Emperor Norton I]

Oswald was a pompous little man who wanted fame. He would have said that he was innocent, for a time, and that the US government was persecuting him for his beliefs, and he would have used the court case as a soap box for himself and his ideology and to get attention and fame and to get the public to know who he was.
By the way, I always find the supreme odd thing about conspiracy theories is that they don't believe anyone and everyone is lying, but a criminal saying "I didn't do it", that they believe.

He would have been found guilty as he was, given he was a violent man with a psychological need to feel big and important and who had already tried to kill Edwin Walker and killed officer Tippit. I believe the law was such during this period that the Federal government didn't get to prosecute over this, so if memory serves he would have been tried by the state of Texas for murder. And that's not just Kennedy. There would have been a charge for the murder of officer J.D. Tippit, and depending on it's discovery, the attempted murder of Edwin Walker. Oswald would have subsequently been executed, and you would most likely see conspiracists say "They" wanted him executed so he wouldn't tell the truth, and that he could have gotten life in prison but "They" wouldn't let that happen. On the plus side, Jack Ruby, another schmuck, doesn't get made by the conspiracy theorists into some great mafioso connected to organized crime and the cops and Woody Harrelson's dad and LBJ and [insert thing here].

 

[Apollo 20]

Too lazy to do a search, but there was another thread in which I speculated that Oswald might well have wound up being spared the death penalty if he could have dragged his appeals out long enough for the Furman v. Georgia decision.

It's something of a longshot given the fact that Furman was decided in 1972, but very possible if Oswald is actually tried in Dallas. Such a choice of venue would have had a good chance of being tossed on appeal which would get him another retrial and round of appeals. And, the truth of the matter was that finding an impartial jury would have been a very difficult proposition anywhere, so venue isn't the only thing that Texas prosecutors could screw up. And it's likely Oswald would have wound up with a good lawyer -- the last thing prosecutors would want is a conviction tossed on grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. Finding one would have been no problem; it's the trial of a lifetime for a defense lawyer and a quick ticket to fame and a lucrative practice.

The expedient thing from a prosecutorial standpoint would have been to simply try him for Tippit's murder and leave the JFK murder alone as it was an easier case to try and convict on. However, politically, I don't think that could be pulled off as it would look to the nation as though Dallas prosecutors valued the life of a Dallas cop more than that of the martyred President.

So, if Oswald could have dragged out those appeals long enough, there's a good chance he's still around as a lifer at Huntsville. He was 24 when the assassination occurred, so it's not impossible he'd still be alive.

 

[Matt Wiser]

Oswald is tried, convicted of two counts of Capital Murder, and if he doesn't drag out the appeals until 1972, well...he sits down in Texas' Old Sparky down in Huntsville. Simple as that.

 

[unclepatrick]

Oswald is tried, convicted of two counts of Capital Murder, and if he doesn't drag out the appeals until 1972, well...he sits down in Texas' Old Sparky down in Huntsville. Simple as that.

Any prosecutor going to have problems trying to convict Oswell. The Secret Service break the chain of evidence by taking Kennedy Body from Dallas. Second the Secret Service washes out the back of the car that Kennedy was shot in.
So these two things should give any defense lawyer enough of a opening to get a Jury to have reasonable doubt.

The Bad news for Oswell is even if he found not guilty or has a hung Jury on the Kennedy Shooting. He would most likely be found guilty and sentence to Death for the Shooting of Tippit. For that Shooting, Oswell does not have the help of the Secret Service messing with the evident, and he has at least one witness who saw him shot Tippit.

 

[JRay]

If Jack Ruby didn't kill him then the CIA would just find another way to cut the loose end.

 

[Enigmajones]

If Jack Ruby didn't kill him then the CIA would just find another way to cut the loose end.

Tell libbrit I said hi when you get to Coventry.

 

[Emperor Norton I]

If Jack Ruby didn't kill him then the CIA would just find another way to cut the loose end.

The CIA kills Latin American dictators under the direction of presidents. It doesn't kill presidents.

To think Oswald was with the CIA is asinine. He was a loner (or more accurately, alone) who was a Communist. He didn't have really any friends, let alone government connections. The KGB investigated him when he came to Russia to see if he was CIA, and they found he wasn't, so they tried to turn him into a Soviet agent but he wasn't good enough for that either. He returned state side and was put in a FBI or CIA (I can't recall) file alongside other leftists and assorted radicals because of the fact he had gone to the Soviet Union and was a Marxist. Not anyone of extreme interest, but a person of some interest.

And the assassination is not anything you can be competent about reality and call some good plan. He fled the Depository, and people think he was meeting up with his handler. Really? In a movie theater on foot? This iron clad government conspiracy doesn't just pick him up in a car and drive him off making him vanish without a trace, but instead has him run off to a movie theater (according the the CIA conspiracy people in order to meet a handler)? They believe that rather than the fact that it was just that this guy was panicking and fucking up. He ran off, he ran into officer Tippit who he thought might know what he did so he shot him. Two guys saw Oswald shoot Tippit and they chased him down. I believe he hid in a shoe store till they went off and then ran into a movie theatre. Police were called in to take in this suspicious man who they thought had shot Tippit, they went in to apprehend Oswald, and Oswald screamed "This is It!" and they had to fight him to get him to calm down so they could arrest him. And if the CIA was behind it, why did they let Oswald be questioned by Dallas police for hours?

Only conspiracy theories can take someone panicking and having no idea what the hell to do next and turn it into a mastermind plot. That is the problem with conspiracy theories: They make a presumption and then fit the facts to make that presumption work, and they don't care about truth, they care about making a narrative which fits a presumption. And any fact, however small, that supports their presumption, they pick up. And any fact, no matter how large, that disproves it, they ignore.

 

[Cook]

If Oswald cites Kennedy's anti-communism as the reason he killed him, I think it energizes the anti-communist movement in the United States. Perhaps some new form of McCarthyism takes root in the 1960s, but instead focused on the military due to Oswald's Marine background rather then the news and entertainment industry.

McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade started out focused on the military and civil service, only later switching to the media and entertainment industries; his greatest scalp was General George C. Marshall.

It is also worth noting that McCarthy was targeting the military even before the possible communist sympathies were an issue. in 1946, in the former concentration camp of Dachau, former Waffen-SS officers were tried and found guilty of the murder of American prisoners of war during the December ’44 Ardennes Offensive (‘The Battle of the Bulge’), forty-three were condemned to death, twenty-three were sentenced to life imprisonment and eight others received shorter sentences. McCarthy took up the cause of these SS officers in the US Senate, claiming that they’d been treated brutally in order to extort confessions from them. Thirty-one of the death sentences were commuted in 1948, and then the rest in 1951 under a general amnesty; this despite the overwhelming and undisputed evidence that seventy-one US prisoners were slaughtered in a field near Malmedy on the orders of the SS-officers concerned.

I’d say a new McCarthy-esk would be unlikely simply because it would be unnecessary; Kennedy era America was already deeply paranoid regarding the threat of Communism, both without and within; J. Edger Hoover, head of the F.B.I. at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, was seeing Communist conspiracies under every bed while denying the existence of any form of organised crime in America.

 

[Dave Howery]

Only conspiracy theories can take someone panicking and having no idea what the hell to do next and turn it into a mastermind plot. That is the problem with conspiracy theories: They make a presumption and then fit the facts to make that presumption work, and they don't care about truth, they care about making a narrative which fits a presumption. And any fact, however small, that supports their presumption, they pick up. And any fact, no matter how large, that disproves it, they ignore.

to be fair, the whole assassination and it's aftermath was rather bizarre. Oswald kills Kennedy, Ruby kills Oswald, Ruby dies a very short time later. I don't think there was any conspiracy in the whole thing, but you gotta admit, the timing on it all was weird. It's hardly surprising that theory conspiracies abound on it. It's one of those 'sure, it happened in OTL, but if you proposed something like it here as an ATL, everyone would say it was ASB' kind of events...

 

[Glass Onion]

I think this ultimately means conspiracy theories about the will be at least slightly less popular than they are now. I think this will be the case for three reasons. First, regardless of reality, the murder of Oswald probably encouraged a belief in a plot, because we are pattern seeking animals and his death gave the impression of a suspicious pattern. Secondly, this may significantly retard the development of the conspiracy community as we know it. Ironically the Warren Commission, in making so.much evidence and testimony easily accessible to the public, ending up encouraging an army of amatuers to attempt to nitpick it apart. While there were certainly claims of conspiracy more or less immediately, conspiracy critics of Oswald's guilt first emerged as Warren Commission Critics, and actually initially relied upon the Commission's work to make their case. The Dallas Trial transcript will not be as widely available, which means the army of amatuers are not going to have anything to nitpick, no avenues to research. True they might rely on news reports of the Oswald trial, but there is going to be less room for the cottege industry to spring up. Finally, unless he actually is Oswald's lawyer, Mark Lane has no reason to become involved in the case, and if any one individual popularized the conspiracy view that would be Lane. Yes, in the aftermath of a tragedy, conspiracy theories will emerge. But here, you will not have the same instinctual sense of their being a plot, the conspiracy theory industry will at least be seriously weakened, and Mark Lane is not going to be doing his damnedest to convince the public of Oswald's purported innoncence. Conspiracy theories will exist, but it will be a less popular view, and the conspiracies that are popularized are more likely to be John Birch like fantasies of Oswald having killed Kennedy in the furtherance of the "international communist conspiracy" I think it is possible that the conspiracy theories that emerge will not deny that Oswald killed Kennedy, instead they will speculate on why he did it, and on whose behalf.

Ultimatey, I think the most popular conspiracy view will be that Oswald killed Kennedy on behalf of Fidel Castro.

I am writing this on my kindle so I apologize for any weird grammar effects. For some reason it is very difficult to scroll down when I am posting after a point which makes editing much more difficult than it is on a laptop.



U

 

[Robert]

Oswald is tried and convicted, and executed.

The Soviets are more vocal about having nothing to do with the assassination because Oswald was a former defector.

There is an investigation to see who decided to let him back into the U.S., the State Department taking the brunt of the blame.

President Johnson has to face questions on who in the government was responsible for Oswald's return. He fires a few Kennedy people under that pretexted, who fight back fearing LBJ is just putting his own people in place.

The Democrats now have a fight between RFK and LBJ on who is the true heir to the Kennedy Legacy. Pressure is put on LBJ to step aside in 1964 to Bobby can run.

LBJ fights back, and starts to fire more Kennedy people. He loses support in the Northeast, and while he gets the nomination because as President he has control of the party machinery he's damaged in November. He pulls out a narrow victory over Goldwater, and doesn't have the strength to put forth his Great Society agenda.

 

[Dom]

If Jack Ruby didn't kill him then the CIA would just find another way to cut the loose end.

Good heavens, boys, that sounds like a conspiracy theory!

We won't be having any of that sort of riffraff around here.

Banned.

 

[Tom_B]

Oswald Plus vs Oswald Minus

I divide JFK conspiracy theories into Oswald Plus (Oswald fires a rifle at Kennedy but others are involved) and Oswald Minus (Oswald is an innocent fall guy) Oswald Minus has become the more popular version in OTL. In TTL I would see Oswald Minus being much harder to believe but there would still be a cottage industry devoted to Oswald Plus theories.

 

[Cook]

If Jack Ruby didn't kill him then the CIA would just find another way to cut the loose end.

I have never understood how anyone could believe a conspiracy theory that had the C.I.A. assassinating the best patron they ever had in the White House; Kennedy almost doubled the C.I.A. budget the moment he took office and gave them a degree of freedom Eisenhower would never have sanctioned!

 

[Emperor Norton I]

to be fair, the whole assassination and it's aftermath was rather bizarre. Oswald kills Kennedy, Ruby kills Oswald, Ruby dies a very short time later. I don't think there was any conspiracy in the whole thing, but you gotta admit, the timing on it all was weird. It's hardly surprising that theory conspiracies abound on it. It's one of those 'sure, it happened in OTL, but if you proposed something like it here as an ATL, everyone would say it was ASB' kind of events...

Not really. You had a murder and then a revenge murder of the murderer. And the assassin's assassin didn't die shortly after: he died 5 years later. There's nothing odd about that.
Think if it was, say, cowboys in the west, and someone killed some guy he had a grudge against, and then the killed guy's brother killed that murderer. Are you going to say it was a plot by the Comanche and they had a shooter hiding behind a bush and if you look carefully the wound is shaped like a tomahawk?

If it were a conspiracy, it would be an asinine one. Oswald murders the president and you let him run around on foot, he shoots a cop and then he goes to a movie theater to, according to the conspiracy, meet his handler. Somehow the brilliant CIA let's him be questioned for hours. And then it decides to silence him with Jack Ruby. Really? How the hell do you jive the fact that he was questioned by Dallas police for hours with the idea of silencing him? And then Jack Ruby gets arrested and questioned and locked up for five years before they decide to kill him? Really? Give me a break. It happened like it really happened, and conspiracists are trying to impose some secret history onto what actually happened.

 

[Paul V McNutt]

Too lazy to do a search, but there was another thread in which I speculated that Oswald might well have wound up being spared the death penalty if he could have dragged his appeals out long enough for the Furman v. Georgia decision.

That sounds like the Oswald does not ask for a sweater TL I wrote. I think the evidence against Oswald in both murders is well beyond reasonable doubt. Also if Marina decides to get back at her abusive husband by releasing the letter in which he confessed to trying to kill Walker, that also a count of attempted murder. sSo Oswald, who was crazy but not dumb, might have sought a plea bargin. I wonder if granting that plea bargin might have been political suicide for the judge. If he goes to trail I see it delayed until early 1965. I see there being enough pre trail publicity issues that unsuccessful appeals could drag on for a few years. I could see conspiracy theorists filing apeals so Oswald could live seven years after conviction. tThis year he would turn 74 in some mental ward of Texas prison system.

 

[Paul V McNutt]

and he has at least one witness who saw him shot Tippit.[/QUOTE]

There were five who saw him kill Tippit. oOne witness who saw him in the sixth floor window shooting at Kennedy. oOthers who saw a rifle out of a sixth floor window and witnesses on the fifth floor who head the shots upstairs. tThere is also fact that he left work, shoot a police officer and hid in a shoe store and a movie theater.

 

[Apollo 20]

You know, in thinking about this a bit more, I forgot something that greatly increases the chances of Oswald getting a retrial: the 1966 Sheppard v. Maxwell decision, which involved issues of trial publicity prejudicing Sam Sheppard's right to an impartial trial. The Court held that the publicity during the trial was prejudicial and ordered Sheppard retried.

The Sheppard case was notorious in its day, but would have been nothing compared to an Oswald trial. Given the way Oswald was paraded before the media following his arrest, it's not inconceivable that a trial might have been handled much the same way, thereby raising some of the same issues.

Here's the Wiki entry on the Sheppard case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheppard_v._Maxwell