[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

Oswald was the lone assassin and was motivated by press reports quoting Fidel Castro as
threatening President Kennedy over the attempts to overthrow and kill him, including the
plots involving the CIA and the mob.
Before the revelations of the mid-1970’s, journalist Albert H. Newman offered an
early version of the Oswald as Cuban avenger theory in his 1970 book The Assassination
of John F. Kennedy: the Reasons Why. Newman dedicated his book to the state of Texas
and the city of Dallas, and he made clear he was not among those like Manchester who
blamed the right-wing climate in Dallas for influencing the alleged assassin. Instead,
Newman cited the periodicals that Oswald read and Cuban short-wave propaganda
broadcasts that he believed Oswald listened to as inciting Oswald to target General
Walker and to assassinate Kennedy. He accepted the Warren Commission’s findings
about how the assassination was committed, but not why. He downplayed psychological
motivations, and emphasized Oswald’s supposed ideological beliefs as a Trotskyite
Marxist.
Newman did not know at the time he wrote his book of the covert CIA campaign
against Castro’s Cuba, but quoted Cuban and other communist propaganda that would
“invent” covert crimes against the island nation. 213 Newman’s attitudes reflected his
place as an American in the Cold War who accepted his government as “good” and the
communists’ as “evil,” with no grey area in between. We now know, of course, that
213
Albert H. Newman, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: the Reasons Why, (New
York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1970), 77.
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