“In any case, our version of Oswald started becoming the real Lee Harvey Oswald again about a few days too early, so we had to neutralize him before anyone had a chance to interrogate him. What was stuck inside that guy’s head would have had heads rolling from Washington to London,” Heller said.

This explained a whole lot to Jason. He remembered seeing the confused look on Oswald's face after the assassination – he looked genuinely confused. Every documentary he’d ever seen on the event had always shown Oswald looking confused. No defiance. Just confusion. It was the same look you see on someone's face when they wake up at a party in a strange house and have no idea how they even got there. Oswald looked like a guy who'd just woken up and was praying that all these people pushing and pulling him around were just part of a really vivid dream, and that he’d wake up soon enough. A really bad dream that he could shake off and joke about later on. Someone made sure though that Lee Harvey Oswald never made it more than a few steps outside the Dallas police headquarters on November 24th, 1963. Oswald the sleeper was going back to sleep forever to help keep a dirty secret buried.

Jason wanted to know more now – he was hooked. "So Oswald didn't fire the shot that killed Kennedy then?"

Heller shook his head, "No, no. Never, but we’re just glad that people still believe that. The first problem was that Oswald apparently fired three shots in less than ten seconds. That was impossible and they proved it when several trained marksmen couldn't even come close to Oswald’s shooting ability. And that doesn't even cover the skill required to fire three aimed shots at a moving target and in that tiny timeframe. Each shot would have to have been one-in-a-million for that to happen.”

"In fact, it was impossible for him to fire those miraculous shots because of where he was meant to be sitting. There were trees outside the window of the book depository, Jason. He would have been firing through trees at a moving target. The only miracle that happened on 22-11-63 was that people fell for the cover story.”

Heller sat silently for a few moments. There was more coming though and Jason knew it. He mentally buckled himself in for whatever was going to come pouring out of the old man's mouth next. Whatever was going on in the outside world didn’t matter right now.

Chapter 6

“So you’re saying that Oswald was a patsy then? He was telling the truth when he said he had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination,” Jason asked his passenger.

"We just needed Oswald to make some noise, draw attention to himself, and be captured. It was just a distraction crime really. All we needed from him is to dance around in front of a public audience while we killed the president. Fear, confusion, and human nature took care of the rest of that for us. Oh, and people like Jack Rubenstein, too, of course."

Jason's mind flashed back to the image of Oswald being shot live on television. This was the first time the American public has been exposed to a televised murder. It wouldn't be the last time though. For most people, this single event was the beginning of America becoming desensitized to violence - once you've seen it, you can't unsee it, so, in a way, watching someone being executed or assassinated on television became almost acceptable. Jack Ruby had walked out of the crowd and blown Oswald away in front of everyone, not giving a damn who saw him. That either took a huge amount of balls, vast quantities of Dutch courage, or a man who had absolutely nothing left to lose.

Heller interrupted Jason’s train of thought. "There were only a few potential problems we saw with the plan to kill Kennedy, and this included Oswald making a break for it afterward, which is exactly what he did. That wasn't ideal, but, by then, we'd already gotten the wheels in motion for America to hate Oswald, so he was guilty before being presumed innocent. We'd anticipated that Oswald might break from his programming, so we built an 'Alamo' element into his program - that's why he hid in the cinema. Once they hauled him out of that movie theatre, he'd managed to make himself look guiltier than we could ever have hoped. After all, why run if you have nothing to hide? Why hide unless you're afraid of something or someone?"

Jason knew this made sense. After all, by the time they'd cornered Oswald in that cinema, the entire country wanted his blood, whether he was guilty or not. A lone gunman had shot President Lincoln, and now another lone gunman had cut another much-loved President down before his time. The people wanted a gunman, and he was served up to them within hours of Kennedy being cut down in broad daylight. In fact, it looked like the police had managed to track him down in no time. Doesn’t that stuff normally take days or weeks?

"What people have forgotten was that Dallas was a city that was very hostile to Kennedy and his entire family. He had very few friends or allies there, but, being the man he was, he still decided to go there. His advisors warned him against it, but Kennedy wasn't a man who scared easily, Jason. Believe me, we all tried or damnedest to scare that man so we wouldn't have to go through with what we had planned.”

"A lot of people wanted Kennedy out of the picture, and Dallas was the perfect location for that to happen because so many people there hated the guy," Heller said.  "Actually, even if we hadn't taken care of Kennedy then, there was a very good chance some random Texan was going to try doing the job for us, but we weren't leaving anything to chance. We just needed Kennedy to be in a wide open space with lots and lots of witnesses. Dealey Plaza was the perfect location for what we had in mind. All that was left then was planning and training. The wheels were already in motion."

"So you're saying that Kennedy was a dead man regardless, right? He was going to die that day, one way or the other." Jason asked.

"I'm afraid so. He'd just trod on far too many toes in a lot of important places. Kennedy was a very popular president, but to be that popular means that you have to piss some very important people off. The mafia was mad at him because he was cracking down on their businesses, even though there were rumors that some of the bigger mafia guys had helped him get elected in the first place. Long story short, Kennedy was bad for business, and they were looking for some way to either off him or blackmail him out of office. Integrity wasn't something the mafia were used to dealing with. Kennedy had a lot of that, plus, he knew Marilyn and the others would keep their mouths shut to protect him.”

“Then the rumors about Kennedy were true? That whole thing with Marilyn Monroe was legit?” Jason asked.

Heller smiled. “Jason, you have to remember that John F. Kennedy was the most powerful man in the world for several years. Not only was he powerful but he was charismatic, too, and a war hero. Despite his health problems, Kennedy was the kind of guy who walked into a room and got the attention of every single woman sitting there. That kind of power can go to a guy’s head, but, to be fair to Kennedy, he did his best to keep his flings as far away from his family as possible. Kennedy was basically one of the good guys.”

Jason nodded and said, “Not good enough to be kept alive though, right? The mafia wanted him gone, and who else?”

"Well, you had the military industrial complex looking for his head after the ‘Bay of Pigs’ fiasco." Heller said. "Plus, he was doing everything he could to wind down the war in Vietnam. The military guys wanted a president who was more pro-war, but Kennedy wasn't as eager for the slaughter out there as they were. By all accounts, he'd seen enough death and misery to last him a lifetime while he was fighting in the Pacific during World War II. Plus, he'd seen what happened to the French when they got their asses kicked at Dien Bien Phu. That wasn’t warfare, that was a massacre.”