Last week, I did a Web chat on conspiracy theories, in which I was surprised by the number of questions on the Kennedy assassination.

The most comprehensive book on this subject is the 1600-page book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi, published in 2007. Bugliosi clearly establishes that Oswald acted alone.

From an early age, Oswald was a bitter, angry loner, ill-suited to working with, much less taking orders, from others. At age 13, he told his school psychiatrist “I dislike everybody.” He quit or was fired from every job he ever held, except a factory job he had in the Soviet Union.

Oswald had extreme political views. He defected to the USSR in 1959, requesting Soviet citizenship “because I am a Communist,” complaining that he “lived in a decadent capitalist society, where the workers are slaves.” He tried to commit suicide when the Soviets denied his request.

Oswald was quickly disillusioned by Soviet communism and returned to the United States in 1962, but still idealized Cuban communism. He was not the type of person likely to want to work for the CIA, KGB, or the Mafia, or whom any of these organizations would want to entrust with the most sensitive mission imaginable.

The KGB observed Oswald closely while he was in the USSR and concluded that he was a “mediocre, uninteresting, useless man,” in the words of Vladimir Semichastny, who headed the KGB when Oswald lived in the USSR. Semichastny added, “I had always respected the CIA and FBI, and we knew their work and what they were capable of. It was clear that Oswald was not an agent, couldn’t be an agent, for the CIA or FBI,” noting that “Oswald’s actions in Minsk [where he lived in the USSR] were not those of a foreign agent. His primary interest was in attending dances.”

Bugliosi quotes one of Oswald’s friends when he lived in Fort Worth, Texas, George de Mohrenschildt, who wrote:

I never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important … an unstable individual, mixed-up individual, uneducated individual, without background. What government would give him any confidential work? No government would.

In April 1963, Oswald attempted to kill retired General Edwin Walker, a fierce anti-Communist. This was an act characteristic of an unstable individual, not that of a government agent. In August 1963, he planned to hijack a plane to Cuba — not a likely activity for a secret U.S. or Soviet government agent or a Mafia hit man. In September 1963, he travelled to Mexico City, visiting both the Cuban and Soviet embassies in an unsuccessful attempt to travel to Cuba, where he apparently hoped to defect — again, not the act of someone secretly working for the United States, USSR, or the Mafia.

Bugliosi also points out that Oswald had no help from any co-conspirators when fleeing after killing President Kennedy. He took a bus and then a cab back to his room in Dallas, and then hid in a movie theater.

Oswald only had a total of $183.87 when he killed President Kennedy. He lived in a tiny (1.5 meters by four meters) room, which he rented for eight dollars per week. Nobody had paid him a lot of money to be an assassin.

Oswald was obsessed with making his mark in history. He told his wife that someday he would be “prime minister” of the United States – a job that has never existed. He was a fool but, tragically, made it into the history books, entirely on his own.

I did a Web chat yesterday on conspiracy theories. Topics included the September 11 attacks, the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, the origin of AIDS, why Osama bin Laden is not wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for the September 11 attacks, the Illuminati, and other subjects. Check it out.

London Times columnist David Aaronovitch has written a new book on conspiracy theories: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, published in the UK. It covers the Kennedy assassination, The September 11 attacks, Princess Diana’s death, Marilyn Monroe’s death, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the moon landing, the attack on Pearl Harbor and other popular conspiracy theories.

I haven’t read the book yet, but Aaronovitch published excerpts in The Times on April 29 and gave a talk on this subject at the London School of Economics on May 7.

Aaronovitch makes the point that conspiracy theories assume unworkably complex arrangements. He writes, in The Times, about those who wrongly believe the U.S. government planned the September 11 attacks:

This group of conspirators would have had to suborn, dupe or train 19 hijackers, create elaborate background stories for them, send them to flying schools to be seen around Florida and other parts of the US, before disposing of them either in the crashes or, in the case of Flight 77, in a manner unknown.

… The conspirators would have had to have sent experts in to rig the two main [World Trade Center] towers and WTC7 with sufficient explosives to be sure of bringing the first two buildings down some time after the planes had hit them, and WTC7 whenever it was felt expedient to do so. But the explosives had to be sufficiently inert not to be triggered either by the impacts of the planes or by the thousands of gallons of burning aviation fuel, an especially tricky proposition since no precedent existed for the crashing of a large civil airliner into a 1,000-foot skyscraper. …

Hundreds, if not thousands, would have to have been directly involved in different aspects of the conspiracy. And all of them would have to have been either fanatically committed to the project or else almost unimaginably immoral.

Yet, as Aaronovitch points out, a government that allegedly engaged in such a super-secret conspiracy, with absolutely no leaks, couldn’t accomplish the infinitely easier task of “plant[ing] weapons of mass destruction in the vastnesses of the Iraqi desert.”

Sounds like a good read to me.

I recently saw a Discovery Channel program “JFK: Inside the Target Car,” first broadcast in November 2008. It contains some very interesting material.

The program set up a simulation in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, where the assassination took place, using actors, a replica of Kennedy’s presidential limousine, and a video of the Zapruder film to recreate the exact positions of the presidential limousine, its occupants, and a gunman firing from the “grassy knoll,” a spot from where many conspiracy theorists believe a second gunman fired. The grassy knoll is to the front and the right of where the limousine was when the shots that hit President Kennedy were fired.

Looking from the grassy knoll, at the point when the fatal shot was fired, President Kennedy was slumped over, cradled in his wife’s arms, after having been wounded by the first shot. It is perfectly clear, seeing the positions of the actors, that if the shot that killed Kennedy had been fired from the grassy knoll, it would have killed or severely wounded Mrs. Kennedy because she was positioned directly behind her husband.

As we all know, none of the bullets struck Mrs. Kennedy, so the fatal shot could not have come from the grassy knoll. Nor did the first shot that struck President Kennedy come from that direction. It struck him in the upper back and exited the front of his throat. Given the location of the entrance and exit wounds, it could have only come from the back and above – the direction of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald was.

As Vincent Bugliosi writes in Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy:

We know that among other evidence, a gunman was seen in the sixth-floor window [of the Depository], Oswald’s finger and palm prints were found on boxes and a large bag in the sniper’s nest, and his rifle, as well as expended cartridge casings from the rifle, were found on the sixth floor.

Bugliosi adds:

Every one of the pathologists who examined the president’s wounds and/or photographs and X-rays of the wounds … concluded that there was no entrance wound to the front or right front of the president’s body, thereby eliminating not only the grassy knoll as the source of the bullets but also any other position to the president’s front.

On November 19, Washington Post reporter Charles Krause wrote an account of what happened when he was shot and wounded while accompanying U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan to Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. Ryan’s visit prompted Jonestown leader Jim Jones to murder Ryan and others in his party as well as 909 Jonestown residents, who died in a revolutionary “mass suicide.”

Krause recalls his encounter at that time with Mark Lane, a lawyer for Jonestown and author of one of the most influential conspiracy theory books on the Kennedy assassination, Rush to Judgment. Lane had accompanied Ryan, Krause and others in their visit to Jonestown, but escaped the carnage.

Krause writes:

A few days after the killings, Lane asked me if I had eaten the cheese sandwiches served to us that day before we left for the airstrip where I was wounded and Ryan was murdered. When I said yes, I had eaten the sandwiches, Lane said he had not – because he’d been told they were poisoned. Why hadn’t he told Ryan and the rest of us, I asked. There was no response.

Lane’s ethical lapses are also evident in Rush to Judgment. Vincent Bugliosi writes, in Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, “if the reader checks Lane’s assertions against the evidence produced by the [Warren] Commission … he or she will find that Lane’s contentions are either distortions or outright fabrications.”

Bugliosi notes that Lane says that none of the doctors who treated Kennedy in Dallas observed a bullet entry wound in the back of his head. This would seem to indicate that Oswald, who was behind Kennedy, could not have been the assassin. But Bugliosi says the reason the doctors saw no entry wound is that they did not turn over Kennedy’s body to look at the back of his head. Their concern was treating his visible injuries to try to save his life.

It sounds like it’s not wise to trust either a cheese sandwich served by Lane’s employers or a book produced by him.

In a related historical footnote, when Vasili Mitrokhin, senior archivist for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 with thousands of transcribed summaries of KGB documents, he revealed the KGB had sent Lane, through an intermediary, $2000 to support his work on Rush to Judgment. Lane says he did not know these funds had come from the KGB, although the KGB suspected he might have guessed.