JAMES PIERESON: Martyr of the Cold War.
These were the myths that grew up around Kennedy’s death and, curiously enough, remain widely believed. Many who doubted Oswald’s guilt traced the assassination to a “climate of hate” created by right-wing businessmen, religious leaders, and a few media figures. This became the prevailing interpretation of the assassination.
The facts pointed in a different direction: President Kennedy was a martyr (to the extent he was a martyr of any kind) in the Cold War struggle against Communism. Kennedy spoke often and clearly about the threat Communism posed to the United States and free nations everywhere. He emphasized foreign policy and the Cold War in his inaugural address in 1961. He was an articulate Cold Warrior before he became an outspoken civil rights advocate.
The assassin was a Communist and hardly a right-winger. He was also one of the biggest “creeps” ever to insert himself into history’s pages, a pathetic figure, even by the standards of assassins. He was haughty, arrogant, and insolent; he beat his wife; he could not keep a job; he was obsessed with politics and revolution. He gave a bad odor to Marxism, if that was possible. Like Richard III, he was “determined to prove a villain/and hate the idle pleasures of these days.” Everyone who knew him agreed afterward that he was entirely capable of carrying out such an attack.
Oswald defected from the U.S. to the Soviet Union in 1959, vowing that he could no longer live under a capitalist system. He pledged to turn over military secrets to Soviet authorities and may have done so. He returned to the United States with his Russian wife in 1962, disappointed with life under Soviet Communism but not disabused of his Marxist beliefs or his contempt for America. By 1963, Oswald had transferred his political allegiance to Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba.
In April 1963, Oswald tried to shoot Edwin Walker, a retired U.S. Army general, as Walker sat at a desk in his dining room. (The bullet struck a window frame, and Walker was unhurt.) Walker was the head of the Dallas chapter of the John Birch Society and a figure then in the news because of his opposition to school integration, his criticisms of President Kennedy, and his demand that the United States overthrow the Castro regime. The rifle Oswald used in his attack on Walker was the same one he used seven months later to shoot Kennedy. Oswald’s wife was well aware that he had taken a shot at Walker and had reason to think he might try to strike again. Dallas police did not identify Oswald as the assailant in the Walker case until after Kennedy’s assassination.
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