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Chance, Planning, or Both: The Evidence Behind the Assassination
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A chance remark at a kitchen table put Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas School Book Depository — but the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle ordered under a fake identity tells a different story. This episode interrogates the evidence: the route, the window, the single bullet theory, and the sixty-year question that still has no clean answer.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's a Tuesday morning in October, nineteen sixty-three. Ruth Paine is at a neighbor's house in Irving, Texas, at a small gathering of women.
To understand what Oswald brought to that sixth-floor window, you have to trace back further than October nineteen sixty-three. His background isn't straightforward.
Before he ever stepped into the Book Depository, Oswald had already acquired his weapon through a process that tells you something about the deliberateness of his planning. In March of nineteen sixty-three, he ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle by mail.
On November twenty-second, the presidential motorcade moved through downtown Dallas. The route had been selected by the Secret Service.
The Warren Commission, which reported in nineteen sixty-four, concluded that Oswald fired three shots from the sixth-floor window. Two of those shots struck Kennedy.
Abraham Zapruder was standing on a concrete pedestal near the grassy knoll with his Bell and Howell eight-millimeter camera. He filmed the entire sequence of the shooting without fully understanding, in the moment, what he was capturing.
For fifteen years after the Warren Commission report, the official conclusion was singular. One gunman.
Two days after the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, being transferred to the county jail. Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with connections to local law enforcement, stepped out of the crowd and shot him at close range.
Periodic document releases over the decades, including the most recent tranches in the early two thousand twenties, have added detail to the historical record. They've confirmed that various intelligence agencies were aware of Oswald's activities and contacts before the assassination.
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