In his 15th book, which Reston said he “presents a psychological explanation for the Dallas assassination and not a political one,” he makes the argument that President John F. Kennedy was not, in fact, the main target of Lee Harvey Oswald.

“This is a historical argument that I am making and is totally, profoundly anti-conspiracy,” Reston said.

Reston said it was while writing his commissioned biography on Kennedy that he “got onto the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald had a very intense obsession about Connally himself,” who he asserts was the actual target.

“When they say [Oswald] picked up that weapon that morning to kill JFK, you have to believe he had some deep-seeded animus toward Kennedy, and it was just not true,” Reston said. “His attitude toward John F. Kennedy [was] one of
total admiration.”

Reston based his theory on the “whole trail of evidence about [Oswald’s unexplained dishonorable] discharge no one else had focused on.”

Oswald petitioned to Connally for an explanation for and reversal of his Marine discharge, which changed from honorable to dishonorable without a reason known to Oswald. Connally neglected the requests.

“Sad to say, Lee Harvey Oswald had a good case. He was treated unfairly,” Reston said.

Speaking to Oswald’s possible reasoning, Reston explained that Oswald with “a ninth grade education and a dishonorable discharge” would make it near-impossible to find work upon returning to Dallas. This is where Oswald developed “a very deep-seeded animus toward Connally,” Reston said.

“I know how much I value [my honorable discharge],” Reston said of his own time serving in the army. “[Historians without military background] can’t understand the power of the military experience and the power of a discharge, whatever it may be.”

Reston served as the adviser to David Frost during the Frost/Nixon interviews, and he said that “as a research matter, there is a parallel” between his work on both hot-button political projects.

“[In the Frost/Nixon interviews], I found these hot documents that nobody else had found, and they were used as surprises for Nixon,” Reston said.

Similarly, approaching the Dallas assassination “from an oblique angle and a side angle” allowed him to “move what [he] had seen as a suggestion [while writing the biography] to a level
of certainty.”

Reston said that the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination is an opportunity to revisit and look anew at the evidence of the assassination, and that is partly why he chose to release his book this year.

“[The anniversary] is also a time for discarding a lot of the mythology that had grown up over the Dallas assassination,” Reston said. “[This] is a time for reflection.”