Prior to the spring of 1967 and reading Ramparts magazine's article about New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's re-investigation of what actually happened in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, I had neither read Mark Lane's best-selling Rush to Judgement book nor seen the Rush To Judgement movie that Emile De Antonio and Mark Lane had produced, which raised questions aout the accuracy of the Warren Commision Report's assertion (endorsed by the U.S. Establishment's New York Times, CBS News and all U.S. corporate media news departments) that "Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed both JFK and Tippit." And that only irrational "JFK conspiracy theory-buffs" could doubt the truth of the Warren Commision's case against Oswald and the official U.S. Establishment story about how JFK was eliminated and why Oswald was, in turn, eliminated by Jack Ruby.
Because De Antonio's Rush To Judgement movie in the 1960's was not broadcast on any U.S. television channel, whether corporate tv network or PBS-affiliated, and did not seem to be shown in many U.S. movie theaters in the USA during the 1960's, it wasn't until decades later that I actually watched De Antonio's Rush To Judgement movie.
But after reading Mark Lane's book in the late 1960's or early 1970's, I did come to agree with Mark Lane's assertion that Oswald's claim after his arrest, that he was just "the patsy" and hadn't shot either JFK or Texas Governor Connolly on November 22, 1963, was true. After all, if, as Lane's book indicates, Oswald was seen by a Dallas cop sitting in the second floor lunchroom of the Texas School Book Depository with a coke bottle in his hand so soon after JFK was shot, there's no way he could have been the one firing any shots from the 6th floor only minutes before; and if the shots that killed JFK came from the grassy knoll, according to the witnesses closest to the scene of JFK's elimination that Mark Lane discovered, Oswald could not have been the person who, alone and individually, eliminated JFK.
Mark Lane was sometimes seen on televisiion disputing the Warren Commission's official version of JFK's elimination in the 1960's. But, because witnesses and journalists (like Dorothy Kilgallen, for example) who too publicly raised questions about the Warren Commission Report's accuracy seemed to end up dead more frequently than the witnesses and journalists who accepted the official story, during the 1960, people like myself tended to say away from doing much independent research or writing about the "Who Killed JFK?" topic during the 1960's. It then still seemed like a personally dangerous topic to get into or a topic which, even if you were willing to risk your life to research or write about, might quickly cause you to become the victim of "conspiracy theorist-baiting" by Establishment journalists, and even by some politically left-liberal "anti-Establishment" journalists, during that decade.
By 1973 and 1974, however, when Richard Nixon was being more heavily investigated for his role in the "Watergate Scandal," and eventually forced by "The Company" liberals and its corporate mass media to resign the U.S. presidency and be replaced by former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford as U..S. president and Billionaire Nelson Rockefeller as vice-president, a lot more people, especially in counter-cultural newspaper or magazine circles were questioning the Warren Commission Report's conclusions. And it then felt personally safer to assert more publicly that Oswald had been framed and was "the patsy" for what happened on November 22, 1963.
Yet even as late as 1973, when I wrote a folk song titled "Young Oswald" (after reading all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission Report that were in one of the CUNY community college libraries in Queens), which reflected my belief that Oswald was innocent of the allegation that he had fired the shots at JFK and eliminated JFK 10 years before, I still did not then question the Warren Comission Report and corporate media's assertion that Oswald was a "leftist who supported the Cuban Revolution in 1963;" at the time he was apparently framed as being JFK's assassin by Hoover's FBI.
The biography of Oswald that the Warren Commission Report writers and FBI investigators had put togeher and my listening to a vinyl record of Oswald defending the Cuban Revolution on a summer of 1963 New Orleans radio show (when he was portraying himself as a "Fair Play For Cuba" spokesperson in New Orleans), that I had purchased, had led me, prior to 1973, to mistakenly believe that Oswald in November 1963 was (like the Rosenbergs) framed by Hoover's FBI for a crime he did not commit; in order, apparently, to blame JFK's elimination on shots fired from a building where the FBI could then falsely claim there was an authentic U.S. leftist working there who had fired the shots.
And even after JFK elimination conspiracy investigators began publicizing more evidence in 1974 that the pro-Cuban Revolution leaflets Oswald was handing out in New Orleans, when he was interfered with by anti-Castro right-wing Cuban exiles on the street there, indicated an address that linked Oswald, himself, to right-wing CIA-backed anti-Castro exiles and their right-wing U.S. supporters, I still wondered why--if Oswald was a CIA agent or asset who had been posing as some kind of Marxist and leftist, from the time he first "defected" to the Soviet Union until he was eliminated by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963--Oswald, once he realized after his arrest that he had been set up as "the patsy" in JFK's elimination, he didn't immediately scream out to the reporters in the police station that he had been posing as a Castro supporter, on orders from the CIA?
But late in the 1970's, after the Church Commitee's U.S. Senate investigation indicated the degree to which "The Company" was involved with others in illegal plots to eliminate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, etc., however, I began to feel that Oswald might have thought that, despite being the CIA's patsy, it might still be safer for him to continue posing as a leftist/Fair Play For Cuba group supporter, until he was able to speak at length to a lawyer; rather than risk being immediately eliminated by some CIA-aligned gunman, himself, to punish him for possibly revealing his top-secret connection to "The Company"?
After his arrest on November 22, 1963, Oswald may perhaps have failed to realize that appaarently once he told reporters that he was "the patsy" and innocent of eliminating either Patrolman Tippit or JFK earlier that day, there was no way that the men who apparently conspired to eliminate JFK in Dallas on November 22, 1963 were going to risk letting him remain alive to stand trial.
