The Kennedy Assassination is not a whodunit. Cranks and conspiracy adherents aside, it’s clear that Oswald did it and did it alone. Nonetheless there is still a great mystery surrounding the Kennedy assassination—and I’m not referring to Jack Ruby. The mystery is this: Why is it that American liberals have been so unable to assimilate Oswald’s left-wing identity into their account of the assassination?

Consider a recent article in The New Yorker by the staff writer George Packer discussing the intense right-wing climate of Dallas in 1963. “Oswald,” writes Packer, “was an avowed Marxist, which might seem to absolve the city’s right wing of any responsibility in the Kennedy Assassination.” “But,” he continues, Oswald was an “unstable figure breathing the city’s extraordinarily feverish air.” What Packer fails to note is that Oswald spent only ten months in Dallas, less time than he spent in the ussr, and his worldview had long been established.

While in the Soviet Union, Oswald wrote to his brother in the United States: “I want you to understand what I say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I’ve been in the military. . . . In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in