Was JFK Killed by Right-Wing "Hate" – or by a Commie's Bullet?

Note: I’ll be talking about JFK’s foreign policy on
Huffington Post Live at about 12.25pm ET today.
Go here to watch. The channel’s program “What if JFK had
lived?” starts at noon ET.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein asks the obvious
question after reading various attempts to blame the assassination
of John F. Kennedy on a generalized “atmosphere of hate” pervading
Dallas, Texas in the early 1960s. Was Dallas a hotbed of right-wing
paranoid fantasies back then? Sure was. But – and this is really
kinda important – it wasn’t the likes of nutjub Gen. Edwin Walker
who plugged the president. It was Lee Harvey Oswald, a Castro
supporter who had defected to the Soviet Union out of a mix of
Marxist idealism and anti-Americanism.

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.

More here.

For more on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder, go here.

And watch our recent interview with Roger Stone, author of The
Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ. I ain’t buying the
conspiracy theory – though I did literally buy his book and found
it a really captivating read, right up there with Don DeLillo’s
novel on “Oswaldskovich” (the nickname given Oswald by his fellow
Marines because he wouldn’t shut up about how great the USSR was),
Libra.