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

[Martin Blank]

He would have been fired immediately upon his return to work on Monday. guys with jobs like Oswald's didn't get sick days. LBJ would have been forced to sacrifice Ladybird as back up patsy.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

People often assume that the way things are is the way things have to be. In the case of the JFK assassination, critics of the lone-nut hypothesis often assume that everything that happened must have been intended to happen.

Many lone-nut critics over the years have jumped to the conclusion that the events of that day, including some of the tiniest details, were carefully planned in advance, and have concocted a variety of remarkably elaborate conspiratorial scenarios to explain these events.

The more details that need to be explained as part of a conspiracy, the more elaborate and, usually, the less plausible the resulting theory will be. Often, the details that are explained only exist in the lone-nut hypothesis, and don't require a conspiratorial explanation at all.

One such detail is the presence of Oswald in the so-called sniper's nest. We can be reasonably sure that any plan to incriminate Oswald would not have required him to be on the sixth floor himself, since he almost certainly wasn't there. As Greg points out, all that was required was for a rifle, which could be linked to Oswald, to be discovered in the vicinity of the crime scene.

The implausibility of some of these over-elaborate conspiratorial explanations is counter-productive. As well as alienating reasonable members of the public, it allows lone-nut supporters to point out, correctly in some cases, that these claims are more implausible than their own implausible claim.

The practical problem with the 'everything that happened was carefully worked out in advance' idea is, of course, that any carefully worked-out sequence of events is liable to be derailed by one small, unforeseen mishap, such as the predetermined sixth-floor-assassin patsy not showing up for work that day.

If Oswald had phoned in sick, or if Frazier had phoned in sick, or if Frazier's 9-year-old car had refused to start or broke down on the 15-mile journey to work or was involved in a collision en route, or if some domestic emergency had occurred in the Oswald or Frazier households that morning, the patsy can't be placed on the sixth floor and the assassination gets cancelled.

Likewise, if the rain that morning had continued until the start of the motorcade, and the glass roof on the car made a shooting attempt impractical, the assassination gets cancelled.

Unless the assassination was the work of a lone nut or particularly amateurish conspirators, there must have been a Plan B. It could be argued that the Dallas motorcade was itself a Plan B (or a Plan C or D), following the cancelled motorcades in Chicago and Miami and the uneventful motorcade in Tampa. Maybe there was a Plan E, in case the Dallas attempt had to be called off.

But it's also conceivable that the Dallas motorcade itself contained its own Plan B or C or D. After all, there were plenty of tall buildings in downtown Dallas, and it was impractical for every high window to be secured. Other opportunities, not necessarily requiring JFK to be shot, might have presented themselves before and after the motorcade: at the airport and at the Trade Mart.

This scenario has the huge benefit, for any conspirators, of allowing for unpredictable changes of circumstances on the day. If Plan A is ruled out by, for example, the sudden unavailability of your sixth-floor-assassin patsy, go to Plan B, or Plan C. Maybe Oswald himself was the Plan B or Plan C that day. 

There is an uncontroversial historical precedent for this type of scenario. We know of the shooting of a political figure, half a century before the JFK assassination, that took place during a motorcade, in which several alternative assassins were in position along the route: the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.