It’s important to remember that Oswald was a 10th grade drop out, a bad student, and while not stupid exactly he was not real bright either. At the age of 10, he scored 103 on an IQ test. Several years later he did better, managing a 118 after being admitted to Youth House in New York. However he was antisocial, an under achiever, disruptive and withdrawn. At 14 he was diagnosed with “personality pattern disturbance.” He was hardly the type anyone would want as a confederate in murder or espionage. Likely he had no real plan of escape. It is noteworthy that he was the ONLY employee of the Texas Schoolbook Depository that left early that day, and did so on his own initiative, without telling anyone he was leaving.
Furthermore when traffic jammed he ditched the bus he was in and hailed a cab. This was unusual for Oswald because he was such a miser. He was desperate to get home. He had the cabbie drive PAST his residence, an obvious attempt to make sure the coast was clear before walking the three blocks BACK to the boardinghouse. There he grabbed a gun and a jacket to hide it in. Thus his desperation to get there. He knew the cops would be after him.
Oswald was the classic example of the “lone nut.” Nuts don’t reason things out. He was smug and uncooperative with the police. In his nutty mind he may have thought the Castro regime would somehow bail him out. Who knows what he was thinking when planning to shoot the President.
If there was a conspiracy, it probably included finishing off Oswald before he could be fully interrogated. And, of course, that is what happened, courtesy of -- no, I am not making this up -- a strip club owner with mob ties who is said to have been moved by Jackie Kennedy's grief. Officially, we are assured, one lone nut assassin was thus killed by another lone nut assassin.
I suggest that for conspirators, Oswald's oddball personality, his record as a defector, and open communist sympathies would have helped make him useful as a disposable gunman or as a patsy, whichever he was.
In the context of the Cold War, Oswald's background and his visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico raised ominous possibilities and a risk of nuclear war that precluded responsible officials in the US government from pursuing evidence of a conspiracy.
From time to time, to intimates, LBJ whispered that his view of the assassination was that Kennedy tried to get Castro, but that Castro got him first. Bobby Kennedy, who thought LBJ had been the prime mover of the assassination, would have recognized LBJ's remarks as a double barreled threat that going public with claims of a conspiracy would have raised both a risk of war and a threat to tarnish JFK's reputation by revealing his murder plots against Castro.
Within days of the assassination, Bobby Kennedy sent word to the Soviets that he knew the assassination to be the result of a domestic conspiracy. Bobby also explained to close allies that he could not address leads that indicated that there had been a conspiracy behind his brother's assassination unless he first became President and had the power to pursue those involved. Other things happened first though and it was not to be.
Just to make clear, I am not a Kennedy admirer. He was reckless and compromised by a squalid personal life, dependence on methamphetamine, and solicitation of cash bribes. His liaison with an East German spy and secret dealings with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis raised serious questions about his trustworthiness.
Kennedy is our most over-rated President, but he deserves credit for his personal charm, genuine love for the country, and a surprisingly innovative and daring tax cut that helped spur a boom and set an example for Reagan and the GOP to follow.