I highly doubt that a secret in the caliber of “let’s kill the President” can be kept by so many people for such a long time. In my experience large organizations of people just don’t work that way
I highly doubt that a secret in the caliber of “let’s
kill the President” can be kept by so many people for
such a long time.
However, what if that wasn't the conspiracy?
What if the conspiracy was, "let's avoid war with the USSR"?
If the US Government knew of or suspected USSR involvement in JFK's assassination: their choices were essentially "war with the USSR", "look like fools who bowed down to the USSR", or "pretend that Oswald was a lone, crazy guy."
In other words: not a conspiracy per se where the government was en masse covering up some specific thing they knew to be true. I agree with you that feels implausible. Especially since presumably a significant portion of the government would have been opposed to the assassination or the cover-up.
But it might have been more of a concerted effort to look the other way. Like, "If we investigate Oswald and the investigation too closely, the trail might lead to Russia or one of its satellite states, and therefore war, and therefore nuclear war. So therefore let's all agree that Oswald was a lone gunman because it sure beats war with the USSR."
That does not seem impractical to me.
Remember, the country was still reeling from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the chilling possibility of having narrowly avoided nuclear war.
What I think the US government feared was a public perception that Russia (or Cuba, or whoever) might have been behind it.
That's when swathes of the public and various grandstanding politicians start rattling their sabers and thinking about war. Any official story besides "Oswald was a crazy lone gunman" would have looked awful for the US and increased the odds of war, a recurrence of McCarthyism, etc.
So I don't think the possibility of a second gunman was ever seriously entertained, even though there's some evidence for it.
I think this is a plausible line of thinking. My issue with the official story is that it feels stretched to cover too many datapoints. Like it kind of explains the data but not quite and indeed the obfuscation I’m detecting could just as well be coming from something like that as any new world order coup. tldr; Still fishy though.
However, it seems like the well known facts about Oswald (the communist background) weren't a major issue at the time (at least from what I gathered), so maybe there wasn't anything to cover up
Anyway, if the US government doesn't want to stir the cold war issues around the assassination, is it a conspiracy or just common sense statesmanship?
[edit]: I think I misread you, I do not think the soviets were involved, I think this is an extremely risky move no one would do. I do think there were probably fears it would be perceived as a foreign assassination which drove some actions in the US government.
I do not think the soviets were involved, I think this
is an extremely risky move no one would do. I do think
there were probably fears it would be perceived as a
foreign assassination which drove some actions in the
US government.
But I agree with you: I cannot imagine that Khrushchev or the leadership of the USSR wanted open war. For the same reasons the USA didn't.
There is definitely a middle ground sort of possibility, where Oswald was involved with the USSR to some extent (informant, or whatever) but they truly had no idea he was going to shoot JFK. That seems completely possible.
Of course, the Soviet government was enormous and not monolithic. Maybe some within it wanted war, maybe some thought that they could prod Oswald into an assassination without getting "caught."
Seems possible, but zero idea how likely that is.
The simplest scenario is: Oswald worked in tandem with a second rando guy who had a rifle and wanted the president dead. No shortage of those in America, a land with cheap rifles and ~16 million WWII vets who were trained to use them.
Anyway, if the US government doesn't want to
stir the cold war issues around the assassination,
is it a conspiracy or just common sense statesmanship?
Arguably a conspiracy as well but that depends on our definition of "conspiracy."
The only thing I'm really sure of is that it was in the US government's best interests to sell the idea that Oswald was a lone crazy guy. That was the least-bad scenario for America.
I don’t think large organisations can act in such a coordinated manner at all but they can be manipulated.
Cartels with a lot to lose can take their secrets to the grave, in particular if their constituents have a lot to lose. Everyone else has “unfortunate accidents”.
1. the NSA lost all of its malwares/zero days to the Russians
2. The NSA lost a huge amount of documents detailing a large amount of their billion dollars sigint sources and tech catalog
3. China was able to steal US nuclear weapons design
4. The CIA itself lost its entire internal wiki
5. Top secret documents were on discord for over a month
Yet somehow these omnipotent organizations can keep the secret of how they killed the US president. Without a good answer as to what was their interest to do something so extreme in the first place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
Or the fact that I assume Oswald was crazy and being a megalomaniac did actions that might have started a war?