Looking for opinions: What would the result have been if LHO called in sick on Friday ?

[Gil Jesus]

( There's no right or wrong answer, just looking for opinions )

Would Kennedy have still been assassinated ?

[Paul Cummings]

Given the professional hit on JFK, I'm quite sure they had backup plans in place. If they didn't get JFK in DP then the next setup was at the Trade Mart.

[Ken Davies]

 The fix was in. I recall reading somewhere in the mist of time that a bomb near the triple underpass was a backup plan,similar to the murder of Tzar Nicholas' ancestor.

 They may even have been desperate enough to have arranged for a deer hunting accident at LBJ' s ranch later that evening, a la Dick Cheney.

  There was a congressional hearing that day involving LBJ's man, Baker.  Without LBJ to take a lead role in the cover up, things would have been dicey.  

  My humble thoughts after 59 years of pondering.

 

[Vince Palamara]

Or, what happens if Buell Wesley Frazier was unable, unwilling or simply forgot to take LHO to the TSBD (left early, etc.). What happens if BUELL got sick?

Edited October 13, 2022 by Vince Palamara

[Joe Bauer]

Miami got derailed when the Miami PD decided to helicopter JFK in.

Me thinks the Joseph Milteer taping rattled them

Ole Joe sure got a bullseye hit on describing JFK's demise down to the uncanny details to Police informant Willie Somersett...

They will kill him ( JFK ) using a high powered rifle from an office building window. They'll round up a patsy within hours...

And right after the assassination Milteer calls Somersett and says...""Everything ran true to form. I guess you thought I was kidding you when I said he would be killed from a window with a high-powered rifle."

Chicago got derailed too.

LBJ's business dealings corruption trial was just getting underway on 11,22,1963 and so was Carlos Marcello's hearing. 

The LBJ corruption hearings just fizzled out after that.

[Benjamin Cole]

If we assume the JFKA was a mid-level plot by CIA-ers, Cuban exiles, mercenaries attached to the Miami station, then the JFKA would likely have been delayed. They would try again. They might not succeed. 

 

[David Lifton]

13 hours ago, Gil Jesus said:

( There's no right or wrong answer, just looking for opinions )

Would Kennedy have still been assassinated ?

Oswald was the pre-selected patsy, the built in "solution" to the crime.  His supposed guilt provided "closure"  for many.  A way of pointing the finger of guilt at a supposed political leftist.  Without a patsy -- a political scarecrow of sorts -- there would not have been any such closure.  Dallas, without Oswald, would have been just a naked murder -- which is the way it was perceived by many, anyway.   IMHO.   DSL (10/12/22 - 5:45 PM PDT)

[David Lifton]

No text. Sorry.

[Mart Hall]

The powers behind the JFKA will have wanted this taken care of. Any further delay could’ve jeopardised the whole mission.

I think they would’ve gone ahead. Definitely. 

All they needed was to have another patsy in reserve and whoever was picked up for it would be dead before the end of the week. 

[Greg Doudna]

Still would have proceeded, and Oswald blamed for linkage/participation in a plot blamed on Castro even if Oswald never appeared for work that day. The thing never depended on Oswald being at TSBD that day. The connection was via the rifle, a rifle traceable to Oswald, obtained from Oswald not earlier than Nov 11 but before Nov 22, taken into the TSBD not by and unknown to Oswald not later than the night of Nov 21-22, planted or used in the assassination. Doesn't require Oswald in the TSBD, only the rifle. The Oswald-alone interpretation--the explanation that all shots were from Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano from the sixth floor TSBD--was unplanned and opportunistic after-the-fact when lack of knowledge of what had happened was combined with the possibility of explaining all the shots as from the sixth floor Mannlicher-Carcano. Neither Oswald as shooter, nor Oswald-alone, as official solutions to the case were preplanned. A conspiracy which looked traceable to Castro was preplanned. The rifle connected to Oswald, Castro implicated, and killing of Oswald after the assassination, that was preplanned.

As part of preplanning that Oswald be blamed as party to an assassination conspiracy to be pinned on Castro (via the tracing of the rifle to Oswald), there was preplanning to kill Oswald after the assassination. A first attempt would have been outside the TSBD itself in wait for Oswald as he left the building. For some reason Oswald was aware something was seriously not right and that he was in jeopardy and he left the TSBD evasively, eluding a first intention to kill him there. Oswald proceeded to a preplanned or contingency meeting with an intelligence contact, to occur in the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff at 3 p.m., however that plan was known by those intent on killing Oswald. Oswald succeeded in getting to the Texas Theatre, by bus from his rooming house, bought a ticket and went inside, arriving before his contact. On his way there Oswald armed himself with his revolver picked up from his room out of awareness of how seriously he was in jeopardy. Oswald was verified by some means to be inside the theatre by his would-be killers. The killer of Tippit, following a professional execution of Tippit on 10th Street, went to the Texas Theatre to kill Oswald in the theatre. The killer entered the theatre without paying for a ticket and went into the balcony. The killer intended to kill Oswald seated on the main level. This attempt to kill Oswald also failed due to the call to police and rapid police arrival. Police by mistake arrested the wrong man (referring to the man who had killed Tippit and gone into the theatre without paying for a ticket). Following that, Ruby may have made two failed attempts to get at and kill Oswald inside the police headquarters building before he succeeded in killing Oswald Sunday morning during the transfer.

Therefore if Oswald had not shown up for work at the TSBD or if he had missed his ride with Wesley Frazier that morning, it would have proceeded because the rifle traceable to him was inside the TSBD prior to the morning of Fri Nov 22.

Oswald reinstalled the original scope on his Mannlicher-Carcano on Mon Nov 11 in Irving in preparation for a conveyance of that rifle in the original condition in which he had received it, with Oswald and Marina witnessed at the Furniture Mart looking for the gun shop and driving Ruth Paine's car without her knowledge, the only day Oswald could have driven Ruth Paine's car without Ruth Paine's knowledge and the day that did happen and the last day that rifle was in Ruth Paine's garage.

[Michael Griffith]

Dick Russell documents a potential back-up patsy. He discusses him in his book On the Trail of the JFK Assassins. If it wasn't that guy, I'm sure the plotters had a Plan B if Oswald bugged out. 

[Denis Morissette]

On 10/12/2022 at 8:48 PM, David Lifton said:

Oswald was the pre-selected patsy, the built in "solution" to the crime.  His supposed guilt provided "closure"  for many.  A way of pointing the finger of guilt at a supposed political leftist.  Without a patsy -- a political scarecrow of sorts -- there would not have been any such closure.  Dallas, without Oswald, would have been just a naked murder -- which is the way it was perceived by many, anyway.   IMHO.   DSL (10/12/22 - 5:45 PM PDT)

Good stuff for a novel. 

[Denis Morissette]

We would not be here talking about 11/22.

[Denis Morissette]

On 10/12/2022 at 8:48 PM, David Lifton said:

Oswald was the pre-selected patsy, the built in "solution" to the crime.  His supposed guilt provided "closure"  for many.  A way of pointing the finger of guilt at a supposed political leftist.  Without a patsy -- a political scarecrow of sorts -- there would not have been any such closure.  Dallas, without Oswald, would have been just a naked murder -- which is the way it was perceived by many, anyway.   IMHO.   DSL (10/12/22 - 5:45 PM PDT)

The Left has been wearing the shame to have one of theirs killing their own Chief of State. As leftists always do, they blame others. 

[Gil Jesus]

On 10/12/2022 at 7:20 AM, Gil Jesus said:

( There's no right or wrong answer, just looking for opinions )

Would Kennedy have still been assassinated ?

I believe that the assassination would have proceeded as it did without Oswald because Oswald had nothing to do with it.

IMO, The plan "B" would have been to kill the anti-Castro Cuban gunmen and portray them to the world as having been agents of Castro. I believe the gunmen were Cubans because of the descriptions of the witnesses who saw "dark-skinned men" in the sixth floor before the appearance of the motorcade. Add to that the Walter telex warning that a "militant revolutionary group" was planning to kill Kennedy in Dallas and coded military messages sent in advance that depicted the killer as " a Communist or a Negro".

I believe it was in 1971 when the CIA had just such a plan to kill Castro in Venezuela. The plan was to have anti-Castro Cubans pose as TV cameramen. In those cameras were guns. They were supposed to kill Castro after he started giving a speech. They were told they'd be arrested by Venezuelan authorities and then released. But they got cold feet and never made the attempt.

It's a good thing they didn't.

What they didn't know was that the CIA had betrayed them and planned with the Venezuelan police to kill them before Castro's security could take them alive. This would have erased any evidence of the CIA's involvement. 

I believe that this is what would have happened to the Cubans who pulled the trigger in Dallas. They never would have been captured. They would have been killed, those who killed them would have been heroes and history would have shown that Castro killed Kennedy.

It would have been the "Northwoods" operation the CIA and military could only dream of.

As a result, there would have been a "second invasion" of Cuba at the end of November ( as was the talk in the Cuban community at the time ). How Khrushchev would have responded to that is anyone's guess. 

Edited October 14, 2022 by Gil Jesus