Posted on 11/26/2013 7:40:01 AM PST by cunning_fish
MOSCOW AND BOSTON — Lee Harvey Oswald’s Russian was still shaky in 1961, when he was working as a factory metalworker in the provincial Soviet city of Minsk. It fell to a young student engineer named Stanislav Shushkevich to help him out.
"He was a simple martinet, and I found nothing in common with him. His Russian at that point was passable. We had about a dozen lessons in all, after that we had no contacts,” Mr.Shushkevich told the Monitor in an interview. “My main concern later on was that he would be given the task of fabricating equipment I had designed, because he was such a terrible metalworker.
"When I learned later on about Kennedy's murder, and that Oswald was involved, I was thunderstruck. I even wondered ‘How could I have lost interest in this person? Maybe I don't understand people at all?’ " said Shushkevich, who later became the first president of independent Belarus.
As the US revisits that breathtaking moment on Nov. 22, 1963, attention is again turning to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union – a 30-month period that ended a year before President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a journey that left him with a Russian wife but disillusioned about socialism.
Although any evidence of panic in the Kremlin remains buried in classified Politburo archives, historians say there seems little doubt that Soviet leaders must have scrambled for explanations after Oswald was named as Kennedy's killer. “The Kennedy assassination struck like a bolt from the blue, it shook up both sides,” says Valery Garbuzov, deputy director of the official Institute of USA-Canada Studies in Moscow. “We felt more than regret. We began a long process of dialogue, meetings, and negotiations. Things were not the same after th..
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
He was a loser who was a decent shot with a rifle...and that was all it took to change history.
The story that I got is that Oswald was a vagrant drunk who the cops in Minsk rolled up on a regular basis. I am pretty sure no one liked him in Minsk!
If the Russians were involved, would they admit it? LBJ was quoted as saying that they had gotten a free hit, and in the interests of avoiding nuclear war, he’d overlook that transgression.
Is an 88-yard shot with a rifle such a big deal?
A thought: as between LBJ and Oswald, which one exhibited more pathological behavior that would make him likely to kill JFK?
Seems to me, personally, to be a stretch to pin it on Oswald.
It seems to me not at all to be a stretch to pit in on LBJ. In fact...knowing what we do about LBJ (Caro’s biographies though deficient are excellent in this respect...), it is almost inconceivable that he DIDN’T kill Kennedy.
Once you make the logical jump that LBJ set the whole thing in motion and that he orchestrated the cover up, all of a sudden, the evidence/hearsay/disinformation all starts to make a lot more sense.
That’s my experience anyway.
Oswald comes off as your typical clueless liberal/commie. If you sent any of todays idealistic left-wingers to experience their socialist utopia firsthand, they would very quickly tire of it. This is why that silly "Occupy" movement so quickly lost steam from a few years back. Once these pampered youngsters learned what it was like to live in tents and have to share everything, they very quickly opted to go back to occupying the warm basements of their bourgeois parents.
Maybe there was a conspiracy to kill JFK but it didn't come from the Russians. Most likely it happened from within as Kennedy had many domestic enemies.
As for the Oswald killing, I don't see any conspiracy there at all. That was all Jack Ruby's personal initiative in my opinion. Ruby was always somewhat insecure and fantasized about being a famous hero. As he was familiar with most of the Dallas law enforcement (by way of his nightclub business) and on first name basis with the detective that was escorting Oswald to the armored car, it is not terribly surprising that Ruby was able to gain easy access to where Oswald was being transported. Of course, the Dallas PD was embarrassed over the incident and tried to make it seem like Ruby sneaked his way down there but it's easy to imagine that Ruby got a lot of "How ya doing Jacks!" as he made his way down to the basement that day.
He had the means (the rifle).
Information, the route of the motorcade was published days ahead of time showing it passing by his workplace.
Opportunity, had the 6th floor to himself and set up his sniper nest with time to spare.
Circumstance, Kennedy vetoed having the bullet proof bubble put up and was unable to move out of the way of the 3rd shot because of his back brace.
Of course not; give me a WW2 surplus bolt-action with a cheap scope on it, and I could duplicate that shot all day, as could millions of other Americans.
Try telling that to the conspiracy theorists, though...
Great post. Especially impressed with your comment about the back brace. You’ve clearly done your research as not many people know about how that really contributed to the murder. Bravo.
I had a chance to look through Oswald’s book depository building window at his line of fire before they cordoned it off. It did NOT seem to be a difficult shot.
Deep
Cover
LBJ was a real character, but he was not a killer. His lack of killer instinct was what led to the indecisive back and forth in Vietnam. He crippled our air units and cost us thousands of aircraft losses by requiring visual ID to shoot down Vietnamese aircraft. Rolling Thunder was stupid, and the diametric opposite of the sustained obliteration of North Vietnamese facilities that would have caused them to sue for peace. LBJ was a talker, not a killer.
I toured Dealey Plaza in summer 2012, and spent about an hour sitting at Oswald’s (now glass enclosed) sniper perch. Yeah, he started shooting when Kennedy was just past him, and it was incredibly close. I believe that the final “kill shot” was made at just 88 yards, with the rifle zeroed in at 100 yards.
No one ever trusts a traitor.
Leftists cannot accept the fact that a Commie acted alone.
No. Especially not at a man sized target in a slow moving motorcade. Now, if it had been a running ground squirrel and the rifle had open sights, I'd be impressed.
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