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

evidence against Oswald useless.” The problem for Popkin is Jack Ruby: he offers no
conspiratorial explanation for why Ruby killed Oswald, apparently accepting the official
version that the night-club owner had killed the hated assassin of the beloved Kennedy.
Popkin merely wrote that “Except for the Tippit episode, Oswald’s subsequent arrest and
Jack Ruby’s shooting, it might have been a perfect plot.” 497 Popkin also had a hard time
determining who in fact was in league with the real Oswald and listed a series of
suspects: “Maybe Oswald met some far-right extremist when he went to hear General
Walker on October 23. Maybe some right-wing Cubans involved him in a plot when he
was in New Orleans, or maybe he got involved with some leftist plotters in New Orleans,
Mexico City, or Dallas.” 498 He denounced the Warren Report as “a rush job, a slap-dash
one, defending a politically acceptable explanation.” 499 Popkin called for a new
investigation run by both lawyers and historians since the assassination was both a “legal
problem and a historical one.” 500 Yet, the reader of The Second Oswald is left with as
many questions as before. Popkin did not deal with Ruby, his relation to Oswald, or
many of the details of Oswald’s life, such as his defection to the Soviet Union. Was
Oswald a real leftist, or a right-winger? In the end, Popkin’s theory seems less
believable than the Warren Commission version of Oswald’s life.
497 Popkin, 70.
498 Popkin, 75.
499 Popkin, 75.
500 Popkin, 79.
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