Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Castro: 'Oswald Could Not Have Been the One Who Killed Kennedy'

November 20, 2013 at 6:27 PM UTC

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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Fidel Castro shares at least one belief with the majority of Americans: He is convinced that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was not the work of a lone gunman, but rather the culmination of a broad conspiracy. According to a recent Gallup poll, 61 percent of Americans believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in Dallas 50 years ago.

But Castro suspects that Oswald might not have been involved in the assassination at all. He told me -- to my great surprise -- over lunch three years ago in Havana: "I have reached the conclusion that Oswald could not have been the one who killed Kennedy." Castro is of course a confident man, but he said this with a degree of surety that was noteworthy.