Free If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History by Jeff Greenfield Page A

one observer—one highly interested observer—found his thoughts drifting . . . to what he had learned in the first days after he heard the news . . .
    •   •   •
    From his seat in the House chamber, Robert Kennedy joined in the applause and the standing ovations, but his mind was back in Dallas, on what he’d learned as his brother recovered at Parkland Hospital. Someone—maybe more than one person—had almost killed his brother, and from the first moments he had learned of the attack while at his Hickory Hill home, he had compiled a mental list of plausible suspects. It was unimaginable to him that a single insignificant twerp of a man like Lee Harvey Oswald could have struck the most powerful figure in the world. But the more he and his team of investigators looked, the harder it was to fit any of the likely suspects into the facts.
    There was little doubt that Oswald had fired the shot that had wounded Jack. The bullet had been traced to theMannlicher-Carcano rifle that had been found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald worked; the rifle had been bought by mail order under an assumed name Oswald frequently used. His wife, Marina, produced a photograph he had insisted she take, of Oswald posing with the rifle in his backyard. That same rifle, police discovered, had been used in an attempt on the life of retired general and right-winger Edwin Walker. Witnesses saw a man fitting Oswald’s description in the sixth-floor window of the Depository moments before and just after the shooting. And there was the undeniable fact that Oswald had shot and killed police officer J. D. Tippit and had tried to kill the police officer who had arrested him inside the Texas Theatre. But was Oswald the whole story? Could others, with an obvious motive to kill the President, be involved? Fidel Castro surely had a motive: the Kennedy administration, with Bobby the chief enthusiast, had tried for almost three years to remove Castro from power, with tactics that ranged from a (bungled) invasion to subverting Cuba’s economy to outright attempts at assassination. The very day Kennedy was shot, a CIA agent in Paris was awaiting delivery of a poison pen to be used by a Cuban military officer named Rolando Cubela, yet another would-be assassin. Hadn’t Fidel himself warned the United States that
their
leaders might find themselves facing the same kind of threats? Wasn’t Oswald the lone member of the New Orleans branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, who had sought to travel to Cuba two months ago, a vocal supporter of Castro?
    Yes, but . . . Jean Daniel, the French journalist Kennedy had met with shortly before his Texas trip, had been with the Cuban leader in Havana when an aide burst in with the news that Kennedy had been shot. Castro’s distress was palpable; and when the aide returned with the news that he was apparently going to live, Castro exclaimed: “Then he’s reelected!”—and there was no doubt, Danielsaid, that his reaction was genuine. Fidel went on to express the hope for some kind of reconciliation with Washington.
    What about
anti-
Castro Cubans? They’d never forgiven Kennedy for aborting the Bay of Pigs invasion, nor for giving Castro a no-invasion pledge as the price of resolving the missile crisis. Could Oswald have been a double agent, professing support for Castro while acting on behalf of his enemies? Well, Oswald’s only link to the exile community was a clumsy effort to infiltrate their ranks. Everything else about him—his defection to the Soviet Union, his subscriptions to Marxist newspapers and magazines, the strident positions he had taken in arguments with his few friends—suggested a (not very well) self-educated leftist with an inflated view of his political wisdom. And his attempted assassination of General Walker surely spoke volumes about his political leanings and his propensity for violence.
    Organized crime? Yes, the Kennedys’