Lee Harvey Oswald

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Last night PBS Frontline aired a fascinating documentary on "Who Was Lee
Harvey Oswald?" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/).
This show would have had a special resonance with members of the Socialist
Workers Party, past or present. In the course of his determined but
questionable attempts to establish some kind of leftist credentials, Oswald
subscribed to the Militant newspaper, the organ of the SWP. In one of the
most famous pictures of Oswald, you can see him in his backyard with a
rifle in one hand and the Militant newspaper in the other:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/glimpse/. Oliver Stone
and other conspiracy theorists argue that the photo is bogus, but I have no
reason to question its authenticity. It simply strikes me as just one of a
number of gestures on Oswald's part to look like some kind of leftist, but
with the predictable wrong note--in this case, holding the rifle that
killed JFK in all likelihood.

When I applied for membership in the SWP in 1967, it was only 4 years after
the assassination of JFK and the events were still very much alive in the
party leadership's mind. After I received a notice to report to the draft
board for a physical, a meeting was set up between Ed Shaw, the branch
organizer in NYC, and me. He was to explain the party's proletarian
military policy to me. In 1967 this meant trying to find a way to avoid
going into the army, although not out of any moral opposition. We were
simply more valuable on the outside. Eventually some SWP'ers did go in and
made a big "free speech" stink about the right to have antiwar discussions
at Fort Jackson. From that point on, the draft tended to pass us by.

Ed was a lot different than any of the party leaders who would eventually
assume the mantle of leadership. He was a merchant seaman during WWII and
sported a large tattoo on his bicep. He was also plainspoken and endowed
with a salty wit. During the course of our meeting, the question of the
Kennedy assassination came up. Ed said that when he returned to his
Washington Heights apartment the day of the assassination, shortly after an
APB had gone out for Oswald, his building was surrounded by cops looking
for him.

I seem to remember Ed saying that Lee Harvey Oswald actually applied for
membership, but was turned down because he gave out all sorts of wrong
signals. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which the SWP played a key role
in forming, also kept its distance from Oswald. As the PBS website points out:

"He shows an interest in guns. But Marxist politics are still his ruling
passion and his hero is Fidel Castro. He writes to the leading pro-Castro
group in the U.S., the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), offering to
start a New Orleans chapter. The committee discourages him, but he ignores
them and begins printing his own pro-Castro leaflets and phony membership
cards. He asks Marina to help him disguise the fact that he is the only
member of his organization."

I can only say that I am not surprised that Frontline can state that
"Marxist politics" are Oswald's ruling passion since PBS has only the
foggiest notion of what Karl Marx stood for. If hero worship for Fidel
Castro and brandishing firearms is supposed to amount to Marxism, I guess I
was wasting my time reading all that Leon Trotsky stuff.

There was so much heat on the SWP that party chairman Farrell Dobbs sent
Jackie Kennedy a telegram offering his condolences. This defensive and
eminently logical move sent youth leader James Robertson into orbit. From
his ultraleft perspective, the telegram was something akin to Christopher
Hitchens backing the invasion of Iraq. In a couple of years he would bolt
from the SWP and start a group called the Spartacist League which is
devoted to this kind of batty contrarianism.

When I was in the Houston branch of the SWP in 1974, I had the assignment
of forum director. Even then I had an appetite for reaching as wide an
audience for socialist ideas as possible--something that clashed with the
insular culture of the local party leadership. Since the JFK assassination
was always a hot topic for Texans, I had the bright idea to invite somebody
down from Dallas who gave talks on Zapruder's film, something that he
brought with him and which we showed as part of the meeting. He gave a talk
that was in the spirit of Oliver Stone's movie. Afterwards our branch
organizer Stu Singer spoke. He made the obvious points about JFK being a
capitalist politician who would have dragged us into Vietnam if he had
lived, etc., but in such a strident and obnoxious way that anybody
considering socialism would have probably run the opposite direction after
his presentation.

Last night's documentary tried to straddle rival interpretations of Oswald.
Gerald Posner, who wrote a book titled "Case Closed", defended the findings
of the Warren Commission. To the show's credit, it did not give a platform
to some of the more kooky conspiracy theorists like Mark Lane. It also came
up with new documentary evidence that tended to poke holes in some of
Posner's claims. For example, Posner states that even though David Ferry
(played by Joe Pesci in Stone's film) and Lee Harvey Oswald were both in
the Civilian Air Patrol cadets, they never knew each other. Frontline
counters that with a photo of Ferry and Oswald at a training session and
even interviews two men who were there with them. They affirm that Ferry
and Oswald did know each other.

My own view is that Oswald did not act alone, but I would be loath to offer
an interpretation. In general, assassinations of heads of state are extreme
measures that only take place in conditions approaching civil war. No
matter the dislike of elements of the national security state for the
president, it is entirely implausible that they would risk everything in a
foolish bid to murder him. It is especially foolish to speculate that the
CIA had something to do with this since the agency is largely made up of
people who saw the world in exactly the same terms as JFK, namely Yale and
Harvard graduates who spent their time listening to Schubert string
quartets and reading John Updike when they weren't dreaming up ways to
subvert the colonial revolution.

I have pretty much the same attitude toward September 11th, 2001. Why would
the US government go to such lengths to whip the US population into a war
frenzy when it took so little for them to intervene in one nation after
another for the past 50 years or so? All you really have to do is claim
that a country is a threat to our security and the war machine goes into
action. It did not take a suicide bomber attack on a NYC building to
justify the wars in Central America after all.

That being said, the bombings in Turkey do raise certain questions, as
Emrah Goker's insightful post would lead us to believe. I have no doubt
that there is an enormous impetus to push Turkey into sending troops into
Iraq given the mounting desperation of the occupying forces. If it takes
the lives of 500 or so innocent civilians to accomplish this, that's a
small price to pay for maintaining control over Iraq's oil
resources--especially when they are only Turks.


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org