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Some 46 minutes after the shooting of Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit stopped a suspicious looking young man less than one mile from the crime. The man gunned down Tippit. The critics ask, "Why did Tippit stop Oswald?" Only Tippit knew. But if a gunman who had just shot the President saw a police car approach, he might well show signs of fright. Oswald was so shaken moments after killing Tippit that a suspicious storekeeper followed him to a theater, where Oswald was arrested.
When caught later, Oswald carried the revolver that ballistics tests showed had fired the four cartridge cases found in a yard near Tippit's body. A witness saw Oswald discard the empty shells there. Six witnesses identified Oswald as the gunman they saw either at the Tippit murder scene or fleeing it.
To accept the conclusion that Oswald killed both Kennedy and Officer Tippit is not necessarily to believe that no one put him up to it. Yet no evidence of a plot has ever been brought forward. The hit man in such a scheme does not wander around, as Oswald did —walking, catching a bus, switching to a cab, picking up a revolver at his rooming house and walking again—with not enough money to travel far from the scene of the crime. He does not call attention to himself ahead of time by barging into the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, demanding immediate visas.
Still, a much-bruited theory is that Cuba's Castro enticed Oswald into killing Kennedy to avenge CIA attempts against his own life. With no more hard evidence than anyone else, Lyndon Johnson thought that Kennedy had been a victim of a Communist plot. "When I took office," Johnson told TIME Correspondent Leo Janos in June 1971, "I discovered that we had been operating a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean. I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he was the one who pulled the trigger."
L.B.J. often told intimates that he suspected that Castro was behind Oswald. As Johnson said: " 'See how it feels to be the target of an assassination?' That was Castro's reply."
Allen Dulles, a former CIA director and member of the Warren Commission, was aware of the CIA attempts to kill Castro; but he never told the commission. Yet that possible motivation for a plot against Kennedy was something the commission was entitled to know.
Some responsible critics of the commission feel that the CIA has not yet revealed everything it knows about Oswald. Republican Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania strongly suspects that Oswald was some kind of intelligence agent, if not for the CIA, then for the Soviet Union. He thinks that there are too many mysteries about Os wald's defection to Russia, his 32 months of life there (from October 1959 to June 1962), his marriage to Marina and his quick acceptance for re-entry into the U.S. with a State Department cash loan and a renewed passport. Schweiker is co-chairman of a subcommittee within Senator Frank Church's Committee on Intelligence Activities, and he is considering holding public hearings on any possible links between Oswald and the CIA or the FBI.