Lee Harvey Oswald Quotes

I didn't shoot anybody, no sir . . . I'm just a patsy.

An investigation of the Kennedy assassination was a project I suggested when I first entered the White House [in 1969]. I had always been intrigued with the conflicting theories of the assassination. Now I felt we would be in a position to get all the facts. But Nixon turned me down.

I'd never been interested in the Kennedy assassination until '88, when I read Libra. And from that point, I went out and bought the existing Kennedy theory books, most of which are outlandish. But what DeLillo posits - some rogue CIA guys - is the most dramatically sound, plausible explanation for it.

The work I did on 'Killing Kennedy' was very meticulous and, in some ways, actually tedious. It was hard work because there is so much known about John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. To try to distill that into a clear narrative that's interesting and tells two great stories was a real challenge.

The murder of John Kennedy in broad daylight in the streets of an American city remains, to me, an unsolved crime.

In the [John F.] Kennedy case, I believe the absence of a conspiracy can be proved to a virtual certainty.

The shooting of the suspected murderer by an exhibitionist night-club proprietor is too idiotic to be believed. That the Dallas police should have allowed it to happen is so stupid that the brain reels. Now it will never be satisfactorily proved whether Oswald shot the President or not, and there will be a jungle of rumors …

I wanted to play Zapruder, as he is a man you really don't know much about: a faceless, anonymous figure.

I had been in so many towns and cities in America with John Kennedy, but I was not with him in Dallas, Texas, on November 21, 1963.

Lee Harvey Oswald was boiling over about everything: the American ambassador; the Russians-he was mad at them because they wouldn't let him stay in Moscow. We talked to him for about half an hour, and my Italian friend didn't think the guy was worth filing a story about. Just another paranoid hysteric; the Moscow woods were rampant with those. I never thought about him again, not until many years later. Not until after the assassina­tion when I saw his picture flashed on television.

We took care of Kennedy

I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that-one person knowing all four of those men-must be astounding.

I would say that without any doubt he's the killer - the law says beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty which I - there's no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy.

I must say, to be very honest about it, that I held in my mind during the life of the Commission, that there had been three shots and that a separate shot struck Governor Connally.

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

I believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill John Kennedy. I believe that.

The world has become one big grassy knoll, crawling with lone gunmen who think they're the Warren Commission.

I met Lee Harvey Oswald, in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper cor­respondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I'd mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square.

John F. Kennedy, who seized the White House from Richard Nixon in a frenzied campaign that turned a whole generation of young Americans into political junkies, got shot in the head for his efforts, murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy - maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows?

I was just down in Dallas, Texas...the Assassination Museum...it's really accurate, you know, 'cause Oswald's not in it.

The Kennedy assassination is one of the ghostliest parts of our history. The Kennedy family - that's our royalty. It's fascinating and tragic and just strikes to the heart of our country. Here's the youngest president ever, full of hope and promise, and he made government service seem like it was dignified.

I would not call myself a veteran conspiracy theorist. Or an obsessed one. I pretty much peaked on the whole conspiracy theory thing in the '60s, with the grassy knoll, who really killed JFK, and who ordered the hit on Lee Harvey Oswald.

The police had already found the cartridges and the rifles and the bag in the Texas School Depository and within a half an hour, those facts were known.

I love talking about Kennedy assassination...a great archetypal example of how totalitarian government...sorry, wrong meeting.

The only time I commit to conspiracy theories is when something way retarded happens. Like Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.