Remarkable Take on JFK’s Assassination

I had this exact same thought as I was listening to the radio this morning and heard them talking about the dark right-wing, racist atmosphere of Dallas in the 60's, with the implication that this contributed to the assassination. My wife endured my screaming expletives at the radio as I'm wont to do when she puts NPR on in the morning:

From David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy:

This is really amazing to me. The New York Times and the Washington Post each manages to publish a piece on the Kennedy assassination, by two different authors, focusing on what they see as the right-wing extremist environment in Dallas in 1963, and while never saying so directly, implicitly blaming Kennedy’s assassination on that environment. [UPDATE: The Washingtonian magazine is more explicit: "The city of hate had, in fact, killed the President."]

Look, guys. Lee Harvey Oswald murdered JFK. Oswald was a Communist. Not a small c, “all we are saying is give peace a chance and let’s support Negro civil rights” kind of Communist, but someone so committed to the cause (and so blind to the nature of the USSR) that he actually went to live in the Soviet Union. And when that didn’t work out, Oswald became a great admirer of Castro. He apparently would have gone to live in Cuba before the assassination if the Cubans would have had him. Before assassinating Kennedy, Oswald tried to kill a retired right-wing general. As near as we can tell, he targeted Kennedy in revenge for Kennedy’s anti-Castro actions.

The attempt to at best distract us from who the killer was and why he killed JFK, and at worst to pin the blame on entirely innocent people for inciting Dallas opinion against JFK (or perhaps to imply that the right-wingers plotted the assassination), even though those innocents were exactly the type of people Oswald hated, is just pathetic, and theTimes and Post should be embarrassed for publishing these pieces. The Post piece is especially embarrassing because it explicitly links Dallas “right-wing extremism” circa 1963 to the modern “Tea Party,” as if to say, “if the Tea Party had been around in 1963, one of its members would have killed Kennedy.”

And please, assassination conspiracy theorists, stay away from the comments section.

UPDATE: Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that I’ve had at least a mild interest in the assassination since taking a class at Brandeis with Jacob Cohen, a leading scholar of it who has always and correctly (as additional evidence since my college days shows) adopted the “lone nut” theory. His latest piece is on the matter is here.