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

present a coherent recipe for the alleged conspiracy. The Committee had suspects, but no
hard evidence implicating any individual other than Oswald. The Committee was
divided in its conclusions, and was in turmoil for much of the investigation. In the end,
the Congressmen acknowledged, “the President's assassin [Oswald] himself remains not
fully understood,” partly because the probe refused to look too deeply into whether the
former Marine had ties to the CIA, FBI, or another intelligence agency. 442
In his book The Plot to Kill the President, co-authored with Richard N. Billings,
the chief counsel of the House investigation, G. Robert Blakey, expounded on his theory
about the mob’s involvement in the assassination and its use of Oswald as the assassin.
Blakey’s view of Oswald as a mish-mash of the Warren Commission’s view of the left-
wing, mentally unstable assassin combined with an organized crime and anti-Castro
Cuban conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. Blakey wrote of the “paradoxical character of
Lee Harvey Oswald.”
a devoted husband and father, a family man, who would beat his wife regularly
and disappear from home for days, even weeks, an avowed Marxist, a follower of
Fidel Castro of Cuba, whose fictional hero was Ian Fleming’s James Bond, an
anti-Communist British spy. Oswald was sullen and anti-social, often physically
repulsive by choice, yet he craved approval and public recognition. Finally, he
was a loner who was almost never alone. 443
Blakey tried to weave together these paradoxical characteristics with conspiratorial
threads while downplaying evidence of Oswald’s intelligence connections.
442 House Report, 224.
443 Blakey and Billings, 348.
197