Bill O'Reilly and the JFK Assassination

Does this look like Lee Harvey Oswald to you?

In his interview with Tucker Carlson that aired Wednesday, Bill O’Reilly said several things about the JFK assassination that are just flat-out wrong. This doesn’t really surprise me since I’ve always found O’Reilly’s activities related to the event to be highly suspect.

Here’s the Link - O’Reilly’s remarks about the assassination begin at about the 22 minute mark.

In case you missed it, O’Reilly actually wrote a book about the event called “Killing Kennedy.” It’s a work of almost complete fiction.

Let’s take his false statements in order:

• “Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy. He did it.” - This is nonsense from an evidentiary standpoint. There is not a single element of the “evidence” the Warren Commission claimed to have arrayed against Oswald that has not been completely debunked 1,000 times over the years. O’Reilly, who spent tons of time as a local reporter at a Dallas TV station supposedly “investigating” the event in addition to writing this book, has to know this. Yet he continues to spread this lie.

• The best evidence related to Oswald indicates he was in fact in the 2nd floor break room having his lunch when the motorcade rolled by. Multiple eyewitnesses place him there, including the building receptionist who told the Commission she had given Oswald change so he could buy a Coke from the coke machine in the break room about 5 minutes before the shooting, and their testimony has never been challenged successfully. Even more, a Dallas police officer told the Warren Commission that he entered the building not more than 45 seconds after the last shot was fired, and found Oswald in that break room, calmly finishing a bottle of Coca Cola.

• To believe Oswald did it requires you to believe that, in just 5 minutes and 45 seconds, Oswald was able to run up 5 flights of stairs unseen in a crowded building, wait until 12:30, take aim, fire off 3 accurate shots in 6.8 seconds with a faulty gun with faulty sights, and, with just 45 seconds left, hide his gun behind a stack of boxes at one end of the 6th floor, run to the stairwell at the other end of the 50-yard long floor, run down 5 flights of stairs, again with no one seeing or hearing him, run into the break room, buy a Coke from the machine, drink half of it and be calm and not out of breath when the DPD officer found him. That’s what O’Reilly wants you to believe.

• No real, believable, evidence exists today indicating Oswald fired a shot. Period.

• O’Reilly is rightly skeptical of George DeMohrenschildt and his role, but always fails to mention that this Russian national who mysteriously befriended the Oswalds almost as soon as they got off the plane in Dallas, was a known crony of George Herbert Walker Bush, and wrote a letter to Bush in 1976 when the latter was CIA Director.

• In that letter, DeMohrenschildt says he is being hounded by federal agents, and begs Bush to, as an old friend, try to call them off. Bush responded with a letter of his own telling his old friend that there was nothing he could do. A few weeks later, DeMohrenschildt was found dead of a shotgun wound to the head, which was ruled a suicide. That was the day before he was scheduled to testify to the Church Committee, which was investigating the CIA.

• O’Reilly claims the CIA followed Oswald to Mexico, and “picked him up” when Oswald was alleged to have gone to the Cuban embassy to apply for a visa to travel there. But he always ignores the fact that photos of the supposed “Oswald” released by the CIA years later showed this man:

That is obviously not Lee Harvey Oswald. O’Reilly always ignores this fact. He is lying about this. The best evidence shows that Oswald in fact traveled to Austin during that time to complain to Texas officials about problems with his driver’s license.

• “Ruby knew he was gonna die. He had cancer.” This a lie, at least as of November 24, 1963, when Ruby killed Oswald. Yes, Jack Ruby eventually died, but not until 1967, when he died not of cancer, but of a pulmonary embolism.

  Ruby did complain to Warren Commission officials when they visited him in 1964 that he thought he had been “injected with cancer” by CIA doctors while in the Dallas County Jail. But on the day when Ruby killed Oswald, he had no known major health problems.

Ruby was, however, well known to be an associate of the Chicago mob. He got involved with the mob as a teenager growing up in Chicago, when he was hired to be a runner for Al Capone. He later served as a bag man for the Chicago Junk Handler’s Union before being ordered to go to Dallas to serve as the mob’s bag man there. He was a well-known associate of both Sam Giancana, and Carlos Marcello, who was the mob boss in New Orleans in the early 1960s.

O’Reilly always ignores Ruby’s phone records, which clearly show that, between the time JFK was killed and the time, two days later, when he killed Oswald, more than 50 phone calls, most of which have been traced to mob-associated numbers in Chicago and New Orleans.

It is patently ridiculous to doubt that Ruby was in fact ordered to kill Oswald by mob figures who had for many years been working with the CIA to undermine the Castro regime, and to train and arm counterrevolutionaries in Cuba.

O’Reilly always has been and remains highly suspect on this topic. I haven’t read any of this other books, so I can’t comment on them. But “Killing Kennedy” is almost entirely a work of pure fiction.

That is all.