Posner: Oswald Acted Alone

Nov. 20 -- Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, believes Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed President John F. Kennedy. He says every conspiracy theory fails to connect Oswald to the conspirators.

In addition, he says a fatal flaw to many conspiracy theories, especially those that revolve around the medical evidence, is the vast number of people that would have had to be involved in such a conspiracy — and that was something only Hollywood could dream up.

The following is an excerpt of ABCNEWS' interview with Posner:

ABCNEWS: Who killed John F. Kennedy, and was there more than one person involved?

Gerald Posner: The overwhelming evidence, credible evidence, is that one person and one person alone killed John F. Kennedy and that's Lee Harvey Oswald. No other assassins at Dealey Plaza that day. No extra shooters. No one else shooting from the grassy knoll, or from another building. Just Lee Harvey Oswald, who with one gun, ended the life of that president.

I think that one of the things the American public misses here is they have no concept of why Oswald would have killed Kennedy. It was his own bit of anarchist political philosophy. He's not a true communist. The Lee Harvey Oswald that I came to understand could have been on the 6th floor of a building in downtown Moscow shooting Nikita Khrushchev. He wanted to throw a cog in the machinery of government.

ABCNEWS: What are the leading conspiracy theories?

Posner: The conspiracy theories on the Kennedy assassination have changed over time. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the leading theories were that it had been done either by the KGB and the Soviets, or maybe by Castro. It was a communist plot. That Oswald, an obvious communist, had been used by them to kill the president. Over time, that was dropped completely, and it became more of a U.S. must have done it. Oswald was really a patsy set up to look like a communist, so it was the FBI — J. Edgar Hoover hated Kennedy terribly.