LEE HARVEY OSWALD: NOT GUILTY! THE PAPER BAG EVIDENCE

This paper bag was supposed to have hidden the killer rifle, but the rifle was carried out by itself...what is inside this paper bag? The Mauser rifle that was first described? (But wait--the Italian bullet HULLS found in the sniper's nest didn't match a German rifle! Another rifle had to take the Mauser's place --an Italian one. The Mauser 'morphed' into a Mannlicher-Carcano. )LEE HARVEY OSWALD: NOT GUILTY!
AGAIN AND AGAIN, EVIDENCE PROVING LEE HARVEY OSWALD WAS FRAMED has been ignored by the bought-and-sold media. It’s in the ‘conspiracy’ books they don’t want you to read. remember, if Oswald was framed and a cover-up was conducted, the government was responsible. Even after decades, the government still pretends Oswald is guilty.
THE PAPER BAG THAT THE PUBLIC WAS TOLD HID THE ‘KILLER RIFLE’ IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE KIND OF PLANTED EVIDENCE THAT WAS USED. WHAT’S INSIDE THAT BAG? THE ‘KILLER RIFLE’ WAS TAKEN OUT SEPARATELY. NOBODY KNOWS WHAT’S HOLDING THE BAG UP, BUT WE KNOW THAT THE FIRST RIFLE FOUND WAS A MAUSER, IDENTIFIED AS SUCH BY TWO SEASONED DALLAS POLICE OFFICERS (ONE OF THEM, ROGER CRAIG, A FORMER POLICEMAN OF THE YEAR IN DALLAS, LATER ‘KILLED HIMSELF’ BUT DESPITE THREATS AND HARASSMENT INSISTED THE RIFLE WAS A MAUSER. HE KNEW HIS FIREARMS AND COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MISTAKEN. BUT THE HULLS FOUND, LINED UP IN A ROW, AT THE SNIPER’S NEST, DIDN’T FIT THE MAUSER. THEY FIT AN ITALIAN RIFLE. SO THE MAUSER ‘VANISHED’ AND AN ITALIAN RIFLE APPEARED — A RIFLE ONLY APPROXIMATELY LIKE THE ONE IN THE ‘BACKYARD PHOTOS’ OF OSWALD THAT CONVINCED THE PUBLIC OSWALD WAS GUILTY, AS IT’S SEVERAL INCHES SHORTER AND HAS A DIFFERENT SLING MOUNT. (See YOUTUBE — and information from researcher Jack White)
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR PHOTO ON THE COVER OF LIFE MAGAZINE, HOLDING A RIFLE YOU NEVER OWNED, BUT TRACED TO YOU THROUGH A FAKE NAME AND YOUR FAKED HANDWRITING? HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE YOUR HEAD PASTED ONTO SOMEBODY ELSE’S BODY, AND WHEN YOU PROTEST THAT THE PHOTO ISN’T YOU, NOBODY LISTENS?
I KNEW LEE OSWALD. I AM DEDICATED TO PROVING HIS INNOCENCE. VISIT HTTP://WWW.JUDYTHVARYBAKER.COM TO LEARN MORE.

<img src="John F. Kennedy, JFK, Dealey Plaza, grassy knoll,” alt=”This schematic proves Lee Oswald was framed!” />Go to http://i452.photobucket.com/albums/qq248/DRoberdeau/th_DISASSEMBELEDrifleBAG_121204.gifto see the full-sized schematic proving Oswald was framed.

MEANWHILE, JUST TO GET STARTED– READ ABOUT THE PAPER BAG ‘EVIDENCE’ USED TO FRAME OSWALD:

==THE PAPER BAG==EVIDENCE PROVING OSWALD WAS FRAMED
THANK YOU TO JOURNALIST AND BEST-SELLING AUTHOR JIM MARRS FOR PERMISSION TO PRESENT THIS EVIDENCE TO THE PUBLIC, FROM HIS BOOK CROSSFIRE, THE PLOT THAT KILLED KENNEDY, WHICH WAS THE BASIS FOR THE OLIVER STONE FILM “JFK.”
TO SEE MORE EVIDENCE PROVING OSWALD WAS INNOCENT, VISIT GOOGLE GROUPS “LEE HARVEY OSWALD FACT-CHECK COMMITTEE.” THE MATERIAL PRESENTED BELOW COMES FROM THAT SITE:
——————————————-

The Paper Bag (described as having hidden the killer rifle)

Here is the Frazier-paper bag issue as I presented in my book “Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy.”
Jim

Another major piece of evidence against Oswald was a brown paper bag reportedly discovered in the Texas School Book Depository on the afternoon of the assassination‑although it is not depicted in any of the crime scene photographs. The Warren Commission claimed the bag was used by Oswald to transport the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a home in Irving, Texas, to the Depository on the morning of November 22, 1963.
If this bag indeed belonged to Oswald and if it could be traced to the Depository, it becomes strong evidence of Oswald’s guilt. But again, upon closer inspection, this piece of evidence becomes highly questionable. First, while the Oswald rifle was found to be well oiled, there is absolutely not trace of gun oil on the paper bag.
Second, federal authorities claimed to have found cloth fibers on the bag that matched those of a blanket used to wrap the rifle at the Irving home. However, a Dallas police photograph of assassination evidence shows the bag touching the blanket, thus producing the incrimination fiber evidence. To add credence to this idea, the FBI found no traces of paper bag particles on the rifle.
When the Dallas evidence was shipped to the FBI laboratory early on November 23, there is no mention of the paper bag. Instead, Dallas FBI agent-in-charge J. Gordon Shanklin mentioned the blanket, which he suggested was used to carry the rifle into the Depository.
Both Wesley Frazier and his sister, Linnie Mae Randle, testified that Oswald took a paper bag to work with him on the morning of the assassination. However, both said they did not believe the bag they saw was like the one showed them by the Warren Commission. Frazier said Oswald told him the bag contained curtain rods for his room in Dallas. Frazier also said Oswald carried the package into the Depository tucked under his arm, with one end cupped in this hand and the other under his armpit.
Since the disassembled rifle measured thirty-five inches long, it would have been impossible for someone of Oswald’s height to carry it in this position.
Jack Dougherty, a Depository employee who saw Oswald arrive for work, said he had seen no bag.
Yet the paper bag was a necessary piece of evidence, for if Oswald did not carry the rifle into the Depository on November 22, then it must have gotten there in some other manner. This possibility opened too many areas of investigation. But if Oswald fashioned the bag from wrapping paper at the Depository—as the Warren Commission concluded—how did he get it to the Irving home, where he spent the night before the assassination?
Frazier, who drove Oswald to Irving, repeatedly said Oswald had no package with him at that time. The Commission decided Oswald must have hidden the paper bag in his jacket, although there was no reason to do so and despite the discomfort and rustling noise sure to have been made by a 42-inch-by-18-inch folded paper bag.
This whole issue is further clouded by the discovery of a duplicate FBI report that claims two opposite facts concerning the paper bag.
In a November 29, 1963 report released with other FBI documents in 1968, Agent Vincent Drain wrote:

This paper was examined by the FBI laboratory and found to have the same observable characteristics as the brown paper bag shaped like a gun case which was found near the scene of the shooting on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.
This paper was examined by the FBI laboratory and found to have the same observable characteristics as the brown paper bag shaped like a gun case which was found near the scene of the shooting on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.

In 1980, researcher Gary Shaw discovered what appeared to be this same FBI report in the National Archives. It bore the same dates and the same identification number—Dallas 89-43.
However, in this version of Drain’s report, it stated: “This paper was examined by the FBI laboratory and found not to be identical with the paper gun case found at the scene of the shooting.”
When pressed for an explanation of the two opposite versions of the same report, William Baker, the FBI’s assistant director of the Office of Congressional and Public Affairs, told researcher Edgar F. Tatro the version that states Depository paper and the paper bag are not the same was “inaccurate.” Baker said the inaccuracy in Drain’s original report was caught at FBI headquarters and the Dallas office was instructed to “make corrections at that time.” He added that the “inaccurate” report was mistakenly passed along to the Warren Commission. Baker concluded: “We hope the above explanation resolves the problem.”
Far from resolving the problem of identical FBI reports that state opposite facts, this incident raises the question of how many other assassination documents stated one thing and were subsequently “revised.” And if there do exist “revised” documents in federal files, how would anyone know’ unless the originals accidentally slip out, as in this case?
Considering all of the above and considering that not one of the lawmen who searched the Depository mentioned finding the bag in their testimony, the evidence of the paper bag must be viewed skeptically.
——————————————
IAN GRIGGS WROTE A FINE PIECE ABOUT ‘THE PAPER BAG THAT NEVER WAS.’ BELOW IS A LENGTHY EXCERPT:

The Paper Bag that Never Was
by Ian Griggs

* * *

An examination of the evidence which suggests
that the paper bag in which Lee Harvey Oswald
is alleged to have brought a rifle into the
Texas School Book Depository never existed

——————————————————————————–

Mr Ball: “Did you ever see a paper sack in the items that were taken from the Texas School Book Depository building?”
Detective John Hicks (DPD Crime Lab): “No, sir; I did not.” (7H 289)
Mr Belin: “Was there any long sack laying in the floor there that you remember seeing or not?”
Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig: “No; I don’t remember seeing any.” (6H 268)

Mr Ball: “Does the sack show in any of the pictures you took?”
Detective Robert Studebaker: “No; it doesn’t show in any of the pictures.” (7H 144)

“The Dallas police did an extremely capable job of documenting with photographs the crime scene that had just been discovered.” (Extract from First Day Evidence by Gary Savage: The Shoppe Press, Monroe, Louisiana; 1993 – pages 145/146)

Mr Ball: “Did you see Oswald come to work that morning?”
Mr Jack Dougherty (TSBD employee): “Yes – when he first come into the door.”
Mr Ball: “Did he have anything in his hands or arms?”
Mr Dougherty: “Well, not that I could see of.”
Mr Ball: “In other words, you would say positively that he had nothing in his hands?”
Mr Dougherty: “I would say that – yes, sir.” (6H 376/377)

“Lt Day recalls that on evening of 11/22/63, about 11.30p.m. one of Captain FRITZ’ officers requested that he show this thick brown sack to a man named FRAZIER. Lt. DAY said that FRAZIER was unable to identify this sack and told him that a sack he observed in the possession of OSWALD early that morning was definitely a thin, flimsy sack like one purchased in a dime store.” (FBI memo, 29 November 1963)

—–
The Importance of the Paper Bag to the Warren CommissionThe final verdict of the Warren Commission (and I use the word ‘verdict’ deliberately) was that “the shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.” (1) An essential part of the Commission’s conclusion revolves around Oswald bringing his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle into the Texas School Book Depository unnoticed on the morning of the assassination.
The sworn testimony of two people, Buell Wesley Frazier (2) and Mrs Linnie Mae Randle (3), was enough to satisfy the Commission that Oswald had concealed the rifle in a long paper bag (or sack) which he had carried to work that morning when he was a passenger in Frazier’s car. No other means of bringing the rifle to the book depository was ever suggested or explored, either by the Warren Commission or by anybody else in the official investigative field. Had the matter ever come to court, that paper bag would have been as essential an item of real evidence as anything else in the entire case.

Without the paper bag as a means of transportation and, as importantly, of concealment, the prosecution would have been hard-pressed to suggest how Oswald could have brought the rifle from its alleged hiding place in the Paine garage at Irving to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. The evidential value of the paper bag was equal to that of the rifle itself. Perhaps it was of even greater value. I feel that we can confidentially go as far as to say that without the paper bag, there would be no rifle – certainly no rifle in the possession of Lee Harvey Oswald. Where would that have left the prosecution case against him?

Dallas Police Lieutenant J C Day and the Finding of the Bag on the Sixth Floor
The fact that there is no photograph of the paper bag in situ immediately raises suspicion as to whether or not it was found where the Warren Commission said it was found. On the face of it, this should not prove an insurmountable problem. It is surely a simple task to refer to the testimony of the police officer who first saw it. Here, however, we encounter another problem. There is no way of establishing exactly who that may have been. According to the Warren Commission Report: “At the time the bag was found, Lieutenant Day of the Dallas police wrote on it, “Found next to the sixth floor window gun fired from. May have been used to carry gun. Lt. J.C.Day”” (4).
There is nothing in that brief statement to indicate either when the bag was found or, more importantly, by whom. As is so often the case, however, there is far more information to be gained from a study of the 26 Volumes of Hearings and Exhibits than from the incomplete and often ambiguous conclusions of the final Warren Report.

Lieutenant John Carl Day, head of the Dallas Police Department Crime Scene Search Section, testified before the Warren Commission at the offices of the Commission at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Building, 200 Maryland Avenue NE, Washington, DC on 22nd April 1964. The vast majority of his examination was conducted by Assistant Counsel David W Belin but there were also occasional questions from Commissioner John J McCloy (5).

When Mr Belin began to question Lieutenant Day about the paper bag, there was considerable confusion as to which paper bag was being discussed. At first, Lieutenant Day appeared to be referring to a lunch bag – presumably the one which had been found to contain fried chicken. Mr Belin then asked him: “What other kind of sack was found?” Lieutenant Day’s reply was a strange one: “A homemade sack, brown paper with 3-inch tape found right in the corner, the southeast corner of the building near where the slugs were found.” (6). To me, as a former operational detective with formal training and experience in investigative techniques, this seems very much like a ‘prepared’ response which gives far more information than the question asks. The word ‘slugs’ is an obvious error and was quickly corrected by Mr McCloy who intervened to seek confirmation that Lieutenant Day meant ‘hulls’ (empty or spent cartridge cases).

Mr Belin next showed Lieutenant Day a photograph of the interior of the southeast corner of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository – that area which later became known as the ‘sniper’s nest’ (7). Mr Belin said: “I will first ask you to state if this picture was taken before or after anything was removed from the area.” Lieutenant Day dutifully replied: “The sack had been removed.” No explanation was offered – and none was sought.

Who Actually Found the Paper Bag?The simple truth is that we do not know who found the paper bag. Furthermore, there was only one person who has said that he saw the bag where the dotted outline on CE 1302 says it was. That person was Detective Robert Lee Studebaker – the man who, at the request of firstly an unidentified FBI Agent (8) and then of Warren Commission Assistant Counsel Joseph A Ball, actually drew that dotted outline (9). More of Detective Studebaker later.
Let us examine the testimony of some of the other law enforcement officers (Dallas Police Department and Dallas County Sheriff’s Department) who would have been in a position to have seen the bag.

Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Luke Mooney
The Warren Report describes a very important find as follows:

“Around 1 p.m Deputy Sheriff Luke Mooney noticed a pile of cartons in front of the window in the southeast corner of the sixth floor . Searching that area he found at approximately 1:12 p.m. three empty cartridge cases on the floor near the window. When he was notified of Mooney’s discovery, Capt. J.W. Fritz, chief of the homicide bureau of the Dallas Police Department, issued instructions that nothing be moved or touched until technicians from the police crime laboratory could take photographs and check for fingerprints. Mooney stood guard to see that nothing was disturbed. A few minutes later, Lt. J.C. Day of the Dallas Police Department arrived and took photographs of the cartridge cases before anything had been moved.” (10).

Those few sentences inevitably raise a series of relevant questions, each of which seems to have two possible answers:

Why is there no mention of Mooney finding or seeing the paper bag during his search of that area? Two immediate possibilities spring to mind: either Mooney failed to notice it because he was standing on it – or perhaps it was not there.
Captain Fritz ordered that nothing be disturbed but when that scene was photographed, why does the bag not appear in any photograph? Again there are two possibilities: either the photographer (who may or may not have been Lieutenant Day himself) failed to realise its relevance and moved it himself (an unlikely possibility) – or perhaps it was not there.
Is it possible that one of the police officers present either ignored or misunderstood Captain Fritz’ orders and did remove the bag? The two possibilities are that either someone committed one of the most serious errors ever in the history of crime scene preservation – or perhaps it was not there.

Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Roger Dean CraigWhen Deputy Sheriff Craig gave his testimony to Assistant Counsel David W Belin in Dallas in the early afternoon of 1st April 1964, there was some initial confusion as to which bag (or sack) was being discussed. This was not a unique situation. We have already seen it in the case of Lieutenant Day’s testimony. The testimony of several witnesses was subject to similar problems. Remember, there was supposed to be a large paper bag (said to have contained a deadly rifle) and a small paper bag (said to contain the remains of a dead chicken).

Mr Belin established that Craig had gone to the southeast corner of the sixth floor immediately after the finding of the spent cartridges. Craig confirmed that he had noticed: “the kind of paper bag that you carry your lunch in” laying on top of a box. Mr Belin then asked: “Was there any long sack laying in the floor there that you remember seeing, or not?” Craig’s reply was both instant and uncompromising: “No; I don’t remember seeing any.” (11).

Perhaps because Craig’s answer to that had been so positive, Mr Belin did not press the point and he never returned to the question of the longer bag during the remainder of Craig’s questioning.

Dallas Police Sergeant Gerald Lynn Hill
Sergeant Hill testified before Mr Belin in Dallas on the afternoon of 8th April 1964. Like Deputy Sheriff Craig, he described seeing a “paper sack which appeared to have been about the size normally used for a lunch sack” on top of a stack of boxes in the southeast corner of the sixth floor (12). He did not mention any other paper sack or bag in the area and the subject was not reintroduced until much later in his testimony when Sergeant Hill came out with the following in reference to a previous conversation with Mr Belin:

“You were asking Officer Hicks if either one recalled seeing a sack, supposedly one that had been made by the suspect, in which he could have possibly carried the weapon into the Depository, and I at that time told you about the small sack that appeared to be a lunchsack, and that that was the only sack that I saw, and that I left the Book Depository prior to the finding of the gun. Or the section, if it was found up there on the sixth floor, if it was there, I didn’t see it.” (13)

Dallas Police Detective John B Hicks
Since he had been mentioned by Sergeant Hill, it is logical to examine what Detective Hicks, a member of Lieutenant Day’s Crime Scene Search Section, had to say about the finding and existence of the long paper bag. Detective Hicks worked in the Crime Laboratory and he testified before Assistant Counsel Joseph A Ball in Dallas on 7th April 1964.

Toward the end of his testimony, during an examination of his actions and functions within the Crime Lab, the following exchange took place:

MR BALL: “Did you ever see a paper sack in the items that were taken from the Texas School Book Depository building?”
DET HICKS: “Paper bag?”
MR BALL: “Paper bag.”
DET HICKS: “No, sir; I did not. It seems like there was some chicken bones or maybe a lunch; no, I believe that someone had gathered it up.”
MR BALL: “Well, this was another type of bag made out of brown paper; did you ever see it?”
DET HICKS: “No, sir; I don’t believe I did. I don’t recall it.”
MR BALL: “I believe that’s all, Mr Hicks.” (14)

TO SEE THE ENTIRE ARTICLE, VISIT http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/15th_Issue/pbag1.html

COMMENTS WORTH NOTING FROM RESEARCHERS:
Walt View profile
More options Aug 28, 4:58 am

Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk
From: Walt
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:58:36 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Fri, Aug 28 2009 4:58 am
Subject: Re: The Paper Bag Oswald Used on 11/22/63
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On Aug 27, 2009, 12:16 pm, daytonac…@webtv.net (Neil Coburn) wrote:

> There was no saw-dust on the rifle or the paper bag or the blanket found
> on the floor of PAINES GARAGE. Yet everything else on the floor was
> covered with saw-dust. Strange place that garage.
> Neil

Yes indeed, Neil….. What’s really strange is the LNer’s believe
that the rough finshed rifle picked up a few fibers from that blanket
and then shed ALL of those fibers in that paper bag.
—————
How utterly absurd!!….. If the rifle had been wrapped in that
blanket and transported from New Orleans to Irving Texas and handled
many times in the move it would have been literally covered with
blanket fibers. But the FBI did not find a SINGLE blanket fiber on
that rifle!!

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LEE HARVEY OSWALD WAS INNOCENT: A BIOGRAPHY

Lee Harvey Oswald joined the Marines as soon as he could.  He came from a military family. He served as a spy for our government, making him a 'perfect patsy' to blame when Kennedy was killed.

Lee Harvey Oswald joined the Marines as soon as he could. He came from a military family. He served as a spy for our government, making him a 'perfect patsy' to blame when Kennedy was killed.

Lee Harvey Oswald: An Updated Biography

NOTE: This biography offers an alternative to the “official version” that typically presents Oswald not as the accused assassin, but as if he were already guilty. This biography presents additional information sometimes excluded from other biographies. For example, the Wikipedia biography fails to mention that Lee Oswald obtained his GED while in the Marines, only saying he never obtained his high school diploma and was a high school dropout. The Wikipedia biography does not mention that Oswald left high school to join the Marines a few days after he was able to qualify by age. Such omissions characterize many “official” Oswald biographies.
This biography contains both officially verified facts and new evidence about Oswald not necessarily included in ‘official’ biographies, but which should be included in order to remove bias and to update the findings of the Warren Commission in 1964. decades have passed, and much more is now known about Oswald.
This biography has been created using the usual information, but has been updated to provide the latest information not included in official versions decades old. Evidence has been revealed which is often ignored by the official biographies. There are good reasons why the American people have doubted the official theory, even though the media continues to support the official theory. You can find a few of those reasons here, alongside all the official information found elsewhere. After reading this biography, you will be better equipped to answer the question, yourself, as to Oswald’s true character. And you will be able to surf the internet more widely, with more understanding, rather than having to rely only on websites supporting the official version.

Lee Harvey Oswald

Also known as:

A.J. Hidell, Alek Oswald, Lee Oswald,
O. H. Lee,
Harvey Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963). Father: Robert Edward Lee Oswald, Sr.; Mother: Marguerite Claverie Oswald; Brothers: John Edward Pic (half brother – born 1931), Robert Edward Lee Oswald, Jr.; Wife: Marina (Nikolayevna Prusakova) Oswald; Children: June Lee Oswald (born Feb. 15, 1961), Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald (born Oct. 20, 1963).
Oswald was the officially accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, who was shot on November 22, 1963. Oswald was presumed guilty shortly after his arrest, and no hunt for any other gunman took place. Oswald was also presumed guilty of shooting Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit the same day. Two subsequent government investigations of Oswald’s life and actions minimized concerns about a conspiracy, despite certain troubling witness statements, planted evidence in the case, and allegations by CIA and FBI agents that Oswald had worked in some capacity for the CIA and FBI. A majority of Americans have always believed Oswald was innocent, or at least, not the sole assassin, despite consistent media efforts to convince the public otherwise. The persistence of the public’s opinion should be respected. Therefore, this site seeks to present a truly balanced and unbiased biography of Oswald, based not only on information provided by the two official government investigations (The Warren Commission, and later, The House Special Committee on Assassinations) but also on additional verified evidence, much of it released decades after the official investigations were concluded due to an outcry of the people after the 1991 Oliver Stone film, JFK, showcased how much the case, and Oswald, had been mishandled.

INTRODUCTION TO THE CASE
In 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald, a former United States Marine, defected to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, arriving in Moscow just before his 20th birthday. He returned nearly three years later to the United States with a Russian wife and baby, without being arrested. Less than two years later, Oswald, age 24, was arrested an hour and a half after Kennedy was shot, on suspicion of killing Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit (shot and killed thirty-four minutes after Kennedy’s assassination). Within 24 hours, Oswald was arraigned for both murders. Subsequent government investigations ruled Oswald was the sole assassin, but, as Dallas author and reporter Jim Marrs testified before the ARRB (Assassinations Records Review Board — assembled after the Oliver Stone movie “JFK” forced the release of hundreds of thousands of secret documents related to Oswald):

“…consider yourselves detectives. You arrive on the crime scene and here is the victim’s body.
The uniformed police present you with four suspects. By the way, they tell you, we caught Suspect
Number 4 destroying evidence, withholding evidence, altering evidence, fabricating evidence and
intimidating witnesses. Now who are you going to believe committed the crime? Suspect Number
4. In this case Suspect Number 4 represents persons within the Federal Government of the United
States. The crimes mentioned have been documented. So the government that we turn to for
information on this case includes some of the very suspects in the case.”

Marrs’ statement exemplifies the problems encountered in assigning “guilty” or “innocent” to Oswald regarding his role in the death of Kennedy, and why “conspiracy theorists” find the Kennedy assassination case so intriguing. If the fox killed the chicken, can he be trusted to guard the henhouse?
To briefly present a few salient examples of questionable evidence used to present Oswald as guilty, there are at least two “killer rifles” involved, both identified as “the” rifle owned by Oswald that killed Kennedy. One “killer rifle” — an Italian carbine — is on display at The National Archives. It measures 36″ long. But the famed “backyard photos” purport to show Oswald with the “same” rifle, but that Italian carbine measures 40″ long. The two rifles even have different sling attachments. The “backyard photos” also show Oswald’s chin as square — clearly not his chin. Oswald himself protested, when shown one of these photographs, that his head had been pasted onto someone else’s body (see photo, sidebar). In another example, Oswald, unshaven, beaten, and wearing torn clothing, was placed in lineups with three well-dressed office workers wearing ties and jackets. Oswald’s request to at least be allowed a shower, and to be given a jacket to wear, was denied. A third example of mishandling the suspect and the evidence is that, stunningly, no written or recorded records of anything Oswald said during over 12 hours of interrogation were ever made, though a pool of stenographers worked for the Dallas police department, and tape recorders were available. The Warren Commission had to rely on what the Dallas police, the FBI and the CIA interrogating officers reported, but even so, everyone agreed Oswald never confessed to the crime, despite relentless pressure to do so. Decades later, FBI agent James Hosty, who interrogated Oswald part of that time, presented a few scribbled notes for examination.
“I emphatically deny these charges,” Oswald told reporters. “I’m just a patsy!” Within forty-eight hours —before he could be brought to trial, while being transferred under heavy police custody from the city jail to the county jail—Oswald was shot, mortally wounded by nightclub owner, police-fixer and mafia associate Jack Ruby. The murder was viewed by millions on live television. As Oswald lay dying, having been taken to a small room in the garage where the shooting took place, police urged him to speak some final words of confession. Oswald shook his head, then lapsed into unconsciousness. He was taken by ambulance to Parkland Hospital a few minutes later — the same hospital where President Kennedy had died two days earlier. There Oswald expired, during a frantic operation to repair massive internal injuries from the bullet. Oswald’s was the first live murder in television history.
In 1964 the Warren Commission, whose members were appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, published The Warren Commission Report on September 24, 1964, with 26 volumes of investigative material and interviews. It concluded that lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of Kennedy and the wounding of Texas Governor John Connally, who was in the same car with Kennedy. The findings have since proven controversial and have been both challenged and reaffirmed.

Because such evidence has been suppressed, or ignored, by defenders of the official version, and because many records still withheld will not be released until almost every witness will be deceased, and in consideration of the suspicious deaths of a number of witnesses who were speaking out, or might have done so, conspiracy theorists, noting how frequently the murders of leaders have occurred elsewhere in the world, have concluded that a Coup d’ Etat may have taken place, with government officials cooperating with those responsible to keep the country from falling into chaos. With the knowledge that an Official Version of Oswald’s biography has been widely circulated as the “only” trustworthy version, when it is well known that much new evidence, and the statements of new emerging witnesses, have not been adequately addressed, or that such have even been suppressed or distorted by proponents of the Official Version, Oswald’s biography will be presented here using a balanced viewpoint, taking into consideration both the Official Version and newer sources of information that have emerged in the decades since Oswald died.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD: BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

EARLY LIFE
Birthdate: October 18, 1939,
Birthplace: The Old French Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.
family members: Lee Oswald was the third child and third son of New Orleans native Marguerite Claverie, by her second marriage, to Robert Edward Lee Oswald (married 20 July, 1933). Lee Oswald’s full brother, Robert, was born April 7, 1934. Lee’s oldest sibling, a half-brother (John Edward Pic) was born January 17, 1932, after Marguerite’s previous marriage to Edward John Pic, Jr ended in divorce. Marguerite described her marriage to Robert E. Lee Oswald as a happy one, but he died on August 19th, 1939, two months before Lee Oswald was born. He was named Lee after his father; Harvey was his paternal grandmother’s maiden name.
After two years, Marguerite, financially and emotionally stressed, placed her sons in a Lutheran orphanage, Bethlehem Children’s Home, Lee at first being kept by his affectionate Aunt Lillian (Marguerite’s sister) and his Uncle Charles Murret until he was old enough to enter the orphanage, where he remained with his brothers for about a year. Their mother visited them on weekends. Then Marguerite’s third marriage, to Edwin A. Ekdahl, an electrical engineer, allowed Lee to return home, to Dallas, TX. where he was treated as a son by Ekdahl, while Lee’s brothers were sent to Chamberlain-Hunt Military Academy at Port Gibson, Miss, their tuition there paid by their mother. After they moved to Fort Worth, TX, the marriage deteriorated when Ekdahl committed infidelities, and the couple had a bitter divorce in June, 1948.
Lee and his mother moved often in the ensuing years, each move making it more difficult for Lee, who suffered from dyslexia, to catch up on his studies and make friends. Nevertheless, Lee managed to pass his classes and did not fail any grades, and his general behavior was not considered erratic or violent, though there is no doubt that he was a thoughtful and quiet child, whose deep interest in reading, despite his disability, along with a lifelong interest in politics, classical music and chess, would serve to set him apart.
Incidents of concern in his early teens included truancy while living in the Bronx, New York, where he and his mother moved in 1952, to the extent that he was remanded to Youth House, a reform school, which was a brutalizing experience. A psychiatrist there concluded Lee had emotional problems. There is a report from John Pic that Lee threatened his wife with a knife. But Lee may have found an anchor in his troubled seas: he reported to his lover, Judyth Vary Baker, in 1963 that he found a ’cause to live for’ when he viewed TV episodes of “I Led Three Lives” featuring the true, secret life of Herbert Philbrick, a double agent for the FBI who had penetrated a Communist cell in New York. New evidence comes from the Charles Thomas family, that Charles Thomas, a Customs agent in Buffalo, New York, who later moved to Miami, befriended Lee and may have influenced him. Thomas, a decade later, was described as meeting Lee Oswald in New Orleans after his return from the Soviet Union, for the purpose of expediting the processing of Lee Oswald’s passport, which he received, though a ‘defector’ to communism, and with a passport application that presented an intent to return to the Soviet Union and other suspect countries, in only 24 hours.

NEW YORK, HERBERT PHILBRICK, AND DAVID FERRIE
Lee Oswald told at least two other persons (his mother and his older brother) that Philbrick became a hero in his eyes. At this time, at age 13, it is known that he began studying both communism and capitalism intensely, reading Marx, Lenin, Hobbes, Hume, Huxley, and the works of American founding fathers, with the intention, Baker said, of becoming a double agent himself. Lee’s family reported that Lee memorized his older brother Robert’s Marine Manual, and that he wore his brother’s Marine ring (the ring was removed from Oswald’s left hand when he was arrested in Dallas on November 22, 1963).
Fearing her son would be returned to Youth House after a brief reprieve, during which Lee Oswald seemed to be doing well in school, Marguerite returned to New Orleans with Lee in 1954. Notably, Lee then took on a paper route and earned money for a Civil Air Patrol uniform. He attended CAP meetings in New Orleans, which stressed patriotism and pre-military training, especially flight training. A photo of Lee in the company of notorious CAP Commander and professional pilot David W. Ferrie was discovered in 1993 and published on PBS Frontline. Ferrie was later be implicated in the Kennedy assassination by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, but died only days after he protested he would now be killed: the official autopsy said death occurred via natural causes, but two unsigned suicide notes and other difficulties obscure a final decision on the matter; Ferrie was unveiled as an Oswald associate, CIA asset and cancer researcher in the book “Dr. Mary’s Monkey” (by Edward T. Haslam).

LIFE IN THE MARINES
In New Orleans, and later in Fort Worth, Texas, Lee would attend five different schools in the next few years, finally dropping out a few days after his 17th birthday to join the Marines (both his siblings had already joined military organizations), his longtime dream. After finishing Boot Camp, Lee next obtained a GED in the Marines, a matter rarely mentioned. He was also trained in marksmanship, but scored in the lower levels. Between October 1956 and October 1959, Lee was trained at Jacksonville, Biloxi, and El Toro. He then served on the U.S. S. Bexar, during which time friends noticed he was studying Russian. He was sent to Atsugi, Japan (an MK-ULTRA and U2 spy station); he later saw duty in the Pacific, and in the South China Sea. By September, 1959, Lee had taken a test in Russian and had a thorough knowledge of Russian culture, music, and literature. Fellow Marines called him “Oswaldovitch.” That they tolerated his apparent proclivity for all things Russian remains an unexplained paradox.
Reports from officers and peers at this time vary as to Lee’s character, whether he received covert training, and if he was a good Marine: some officers praised him, while others thought him lazy or derelict. Lee was court-martialed twice during this time, and other incidents of concern also occurred, but researchers, who argue over what remains of Lee’s military record (many files were destroyed or ‘lost,’) haggle over evidence that Lee might have been specially trained to enter Russia as a fake defector. To be convincing as a disgruntled former Marine, he may have had to be ‘dirtied up.’ It is known that Lee consorted with expensive and beautiful Japanese courtesans at the Queen Bee lounge, who were suspected of being involved in espionage activities. His small Marine income would have made such activities financially impossible, and is in conflict with official statements that Lee was able to save plenty of money for his later trip to the Soviet Union from America.
By September 20, 1959, Lee Oswald came and left Texas after a visit to his mother lasting only a few days, proceeding to New Orleans. He had removed himself from active duty, using the excuse that his mother needed him due to an injury (which was only to her nose), becoming a Reserve Marine with an honorable discharge from active duty (the discharge would later be changed to ‘undesirable’: though Marine records supposedly cannot be altered after discharge, Oswald’s were).

THE DEFECTION
By October 10, Lee was in London, and by Oct. 16, 1959, at the height of the Cold War, Lee Oswald became America’s youngest and most enigmatic defector, not yet 20 years old. How he paid for the trip, the letters he sent to universities, and his utilization of a little-known military route to Moscow (through Helsinki), with precise timing for visas, suggest a well-planned scenario.
Close scrutiny of Lee’s life in the USSR, beginning with his taking an expensive suite at the luxurious Metropole Hotel in Moscow, and his actions there, which included cutting his left wrist in a “suicide” attempt that required four stitches to close, when he was first denied entry as a defector, as well as copious accounts from eyewitnesses, reveal many troubling factors, beginning with his actions at the US Embassy in Moscow.
Lee Oswald supposedly ‘tried to renounce his citizenship’ and actually handed over his US passport at the Embassy, stating he planned to reveal classified information learned as a radar operator at the U2 base at Atsugi. So important was this information that testimony exists showing the codes concerning the U2 spy planes were immediately changed. That Lee Oswald was then allowed to leave the US Embassy, to go mingle with the Russians, defies explanation, despite defensive comments later made that Lee was just a young fellow who didn’t really mean what he threatened. Lee Oswald should have been detained, not allowed egress from the Embassy.
Further, at the end of nearly three years, Lee Oswald returned to the US Embassy and picked up his passport, still kept at the Embassy; he also received a loan to pay for his and his family’s expeditious return to the US (Oswald repaid the loan quickly), and with comparatively little difficulty, he returned to the US, even though he had a Russian wife and baby in tow. How Lee Oswald convinced both the Russians and the Americans to allow this unusual event to occur, with the Iron Curtain a stark reality, remains a mystery that neither government has adequately explained. Lee had spent most of his time in the USSR in Belarus (White Russia), at Minsk, where he had lived in relative comfort with his own private apartment-with-a-view, a good job, and a generous salary. He was known to be under constant surveillance by the Russians.
Photos taken in the Soviet Union prove Lee Oswald was a sociable and gregarious individual during this time period, actively pursuing lively romantic interests, attending Party dances, and needing only six weeks to court (mostly from a hospital bed, when he fell ill with adenoiditis and otitis) a young, pretty Russian girl, 20-year-old Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, who had been living in Minsk as an orphan with her aunt and uncle, an official in the Communist Party: the pair met March 17, 1961 and were wed in a State ceremony on April 30, 1961. It would not be a happy marriage.

RETURN TO THE US
A year later, the couple arrived in Fort Worth, Texas after a saga that included quick travel from behind the Iron Curtain through Poland and thence to The Netherlands, where they continued their journey by steamship from Rotterdam to New York, after which they flew to Texas. Remarkably, debriefing was reported as cursory: there was little overt interest in Lee Oswald’s return from the USSR. There is evidence that Lee Oswald left baggage behind at one stop before reaching Texas. At this time, McCarthyism and anti-communism was rampant. Persons merely suspected of communist sympathies were fired, and Xenophobia reigned. Lee Oswald’s photo had been in the papers when he ‘defected’ — yet he returned without fanfare and immediately slipped into a ‘normal’ life, first in Fort Worth, then in Dallas, finding work through immediate friendly connections.
Lee and Marina first lived briefly with Lee’s married brother, Robert, and then with Marguerite, Lee’s mother; soon, this arrangement proved impossible due to Marguerite’s controlling ways, but the culture-shocked Marina was befriended by members of the White Russian Community in Dallas, who bewailed the way Lee was treating her. The main complaint was that Lee insisted on sequestering Marina and their baby (June Lee) and resented any material aid, though they struggled financially; Marina bitterly complained of being mistreated, though the suave Baron George deMohrenschildt, a CIA asset, friend of Jackie Kennedy’s family, petroleum geologist and Russian instructor (born in Minsk), stated in his memoirs “I Am a Patsy” (HSCA document, unpublished manuscript) that Marina constantly insulted and demeaned her husband both in private and public. After Lee beat his wife on at least two occasions, they separated, but despite her new friends’ reproaches, Marina returned to Lee, and soon became pregnant again.
Lee Oswald’s job history is only briefly mentioned here: his whereabouts were sometimes unknown for days at a time when he was not employed. The official versions concur that he was a poor and sullen worker, and was let go by one employer (Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall) known to be printing maps and classified materials about Cuba –to which Lee Oswald had no certifiable access. But there is the puzzling matter of Lee’s meticulous work record there, showing careful and consistent labor, and a strong work ethic. He put in many overtime hours, including Saturdays, which would not have been allowed if he were really a poor worker. Therefore the official version does not conform to work records, for he was invariably on time, did not miss a day of work, and apparently worked hard. Some biographers contend Lee was let go from this job to make him appear just as later described (as part of his ‘cover’) — a disaffected worker who could then be able to re-enter the Soviet Union again, or, alternately, enter Cuba, where Fidel Castro had set up a communist regime that was threatening to spread throughout Mexico, South America, and Central America.
The CIA was actively countering this threat with now well-known covert and overt operations.
As a ‘fake’ defector, an argument exists explaining other puzzling developments in Lee Oswald’s life that were about to take place. The official explanations concerning Lee Oswald’s true life story are becoming progressively obsolete as new evidence, much of it released by government entities since the movie ‘JFK’ created the outcry that spurred the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), fleshes out previous conspiracy theories with hard facts. New witnesses have also emerged to support the new evidence, whose statements need to be considered: the old encyclopedia entries rarely include new evidence, and witnesses who have emerged after 1991.

THE WALKER INCIDENT

The Warren Commission concluded that on April 10, 1963, ten days after being fired, Oswald attempted to assassinate retired Major General Edwin Walker, probably using the rifle shown in his backyard pose photos of March 31 (The HSCA stated that the “evidence strongly suggested” that Oswald did the shooting.). General Walker, a John Birch Society member and segregationist, was commanding officer of the Army’s 24th Infantry Division before he was relieved of his command in 1961 by President Kennedy for distributing radical right-wing literature to his troops. Walker resigned, but upon his return to Texas, he was arrested (but not indicted) for insurrection, seditious conspiracy, and other charges related to anti-integration and civil rights. Oswald, who was known to support civil rights, regarded Walker as a fascist.

But in 1963, Marina was questioned – and re-questioned—until she finally conceded point after point. For example, at first, she said her husband had no rifle. Later, she said she saw it from time to time. Finally, she was testifying that she saw Oswald dry-firing the rifle night after night in New Orleans, though she described that he cleaned the rifle using pipe cleaners — clearly improbable – and despite the fact that neighbors reported seeing Oswald only reading on the porch, night after night.
Marina later said she was sequestered by the Secret Service, and felt intimidated.

General Walker’s brush with death was reported nationwide. The Dallas police had no suspects in the shooting. Oswald’s involvement in the attempt on Walker’s life was suspected within hours of his arrest on November 22, 1963, following the Kennedy assassination. The official version is that the bullet was too badly damaged to run conclusive ballistics studies on it, but neutron activation studies indicated it was “extremely likely” that the Walker bullet was related by manufacture and composition to the two bullets which struck Kennedy. But in May, 2007, new evidence emerged: Science Daily and The Washington Post reported that a Texas A & M University research team concluded that the neutron activation study was obsolete, and that new tests confirmed that the so-called “matching” fragments could have come from three or more separate bullets and, therefore, from more than one shooter.

THE PROBLEM OF MOTIVE
Controversy rages over what really happened next in Lee Oswald’s brief but intriguing life. The ‘official version’ paints the portrait of a mentally disturbed young man, a wife beater and ne’er-do-well who could find no happiness in America or in the USSR. Official versions stress that Lee Oswald is surrounded by masses of evidence overwhelming any other consideration except that he had to be a cold, calculating murderer of two people on the same dark day –November 22, 1963. They suggest that Lee Oswald, convinced that he was nothing but a “loser” (at age 24), descended into a winter of discontent so deep and persistent that only by murdering President Kennedy could he feel important, for no actual motive for Kennedy’s murder has actually evolved to explain Oswald’s supposed actions, except that he may have felt rejected by his wife, had a dead-end job, and did not feel important. Against this vague set of excuses for murder by a young father of two babies he was known to adore, of a man he was said to have “admired,” one must remember that Oswald insisted he had shot “nobody.” Clearly, Lee Oswald was not seeking fame or attention for the heinous act. In New Orleans, Oswald was interviewed on August 10, 1963 by a New Orleans police investigative officer after Oswald was arrested in what Martello described as a “staged event” between Oswald and three anti-Castro DRE members (described below). Martello stated to the Warren Commission that ”
when the incident occurred he remained absolutely peaceful and gentle…as far as being capable of an act [of violence]….as far as ever dreaming or thinking that Oswald would do what it is alleged that he has done, I would bet my head on a chopping block that he wouldn’t do it.”

NEW ORLEANS
To properly understand Lee Oswald, and what might have prompted his actions, we must return to New Orleans, as did he in April of 1963, when he separated from his wife temporarily, leaving her, pregnant, and with a toddler, in the hands of Ruth Paine, a woman of Quaker beliefs with small children of her own who was going through a divorce. Paine, who lived in Irving, Texas, near Dallas, was connected by several close family members to the CIA. We must carefully inspect what occurred in New Orleans before Lee Oswald’s precipitous return to Dallas after his purported trip, by summer’s end in 1963, to Mexico City, because so much new evidence has emerged there between 1991 and the present.

Oswald told Baker he did this to protect his wife and child from violent anti-Castroites.
On August 5 and 6, according to anti-Castro asset Carlos Bringuier, Lee Oswald visited him at a clothing store he owned in New Orleans, known as an anti-Castro protest center. Bringuier was the New Orleans delegate for the anti-Castro Cuban Student Directorate (the CIA’s Joannides, who had hidden information from the HSCA, oversaw the activities of this organization). Bringuier told the Warren Commission that he believed Oswald’s visits were an attempt by Oswald to infiltrate his anti-Castro group, but Baker said Oswald was planning the “fight” incident with Bringuier’s foreknowledge, and staged the visit to create an excuse for Bringuier’s display of anger on August 9th, when he saw Oswald distributing pro-Castro literature on Canal St. in New Orleans. If this is true, we can understand how Bringuier obtained, and got to keep, Lee Oswald’s Marine manual, which Baker and Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, both said Oswald ‘treasured.” On August 9, Bringuier confronted Oswald, claiming he was tipped off about Oswald’s leafleting by a friend. After Bringuier knocked Oswald’s materials from his hands and threatened him (Oswald crossed his hands across his chest and dared Bringuier to hit him). Bringuier and two of his friends, along with Oswald, were arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. The arresting officer later stated he believed the event was staged.
While under arrest, Lee asked to be interviewed by the FBI, and though it was Saturday, and the FBI office was understaffed, Lee received a lengthy interview before he was released on bail provided by a Mafia lawyer friendly with Lee’s uncle Charles “Dutz” Murret, who worked for Carlos Marcello. The arrest got news media attention and Oswald was interviewed afterwards. He was next filmed passing out flyers in front of the International Trade Mart with two ‘volunteers’ he had hired, but Oswald’s FPCC activities in New Orleans came to an abrupt end after a WDSU radio “debate” between Bringuier and Oswald, arranged by journalist and INCA director Bill Stuckey, outed information that Lee was a returned defector. Up to this time, such information had not been known. Baker has pointed out that Congressman Edwin Willis’ office was across the street from Reily Coffee, and Willis, the Director of HUAC — an arm of Congress that went actively after communists and tracked all defectors– was aware of Oswald’s true identity. Therefore, Oswald was protected at Reily’s until it was time for him to leave that job and begin posing as a pro-Castro supporter, which Baker says was to make him look pro-Cuban so he could be used to courier the bioweapon to Mexico City without suspicion. No meetings were ever held by Oswald’s FPCC.
The Reily family, who owned Wm. B. Reily Coffee, were charter members of Dr. Alton Ochsner’s INCA organization — The Information Council of the Americas (an anti-communist propaganda arm encouraged by the CIA). Many researchers believe Reily’s would never have hired a returned defector, a former Marine with an ‘undesirable’ discharge and a Russian wife, had Oswald not actually been known to them to be a double agent, as they screened all employees carefully. But after Oswald left Reily, his cover could be ‘blown’ to give him the ‘sheep-dipping’ he needed to be acceptable as pro-Castro. The fact that Oswald handed out flyers promoting his new branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, yet never held a meeting, collected dues, or provided his true address at any time, suggests this activity was indeed a ploy to add “pro-Castro” credentials to Oswald’s “pro-communist” image. It is interesting that in July, 1963, Oswald was asked to speak to college graduates who were seminarians, along with priests and professors at Spring Hill College, in Mobile, Alabama, where he delivered speech for an hour and ten minutes about life in the USSR. The speech was critical of the Soviet Union.
A different Oswald presented to the WDSU debate, however: Oswald defended Castro’s Cuba, stressing that the FPCC was not on the FBI’s list of subversive organizations. But then he was confronted with accusations about his past in the Soviet Union. Clearly unprepared, Oswald let it slip that while he was in the Soviet Union, he was “under the protection” of the U. S. government — then quickly corrected his statement to say that he was “not” under U. S. government protection. Transcripts of the program as released on the Internet by “Official Version” writers leave out the original slip of the tongue: one wonders why the phrase was removed. but in this article, the uncensored statement is presented (see notes).

Ron Lewis claimed that he briefly met David Ferrie and Guy Banister, and Lewis could have substantiated many claims proposed by Jim Garrison, but decided not to risk personal danger by coming forward with his testimony during the trial of Clay Shaw.
Witnesses in Clinton, Louisiana testified at Garrison’s trial of Clay Shaw that they saw Oswald, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie waiting, for an unknown reason, near the town’s City Hall, where the three men remained together for nearly half a day, having arrived in a black Cadillac. The Cadillac was reported as having been registered to the International Trade Mart. For some reason, Oswald stood in line to register to vote, though not a resident of Feliciana Parish. Only Baker has come forward with a logical explanation for the event, and the subsequent sighting of Oswald (with a young woman) in nearby Jackson, Louisiana, later: she says that this event occurred the day after Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, and that Oswald, tired of waiting for the telephone call at the phone booth which caused the delay, was standing in line to win a bet that he could be registered without ID’s, while many blacks were being turned away. He ultimately failed, but apparently did succeed in getting his name written down before it was erased. The wait for the call was necessary, Baker says, because the Cadillac was to join a convoy coming from Angola Prison with one or more prisoners. The convoy, she says, was delayed, forcing the three to wait. Oswald was present to observe the testing procedure on the prisoner(s) so he could later relay information to a contact in Mexico City, to whom the bioweapon was to be handed over, as only oral instructions were allowed, and Ferrie, known to have medical knowledge, was present to give medical instructions, having been trained to do so. Shaw provided the official-looking vehicle and money. (see notes)

And finally, a conflict between witnesses seeing Oswald with Shaw and Ferrie in a Cadillac, and then shortly after, with a woman in an old car, was unexplained until Baker revealed that with her specialized training, it was necessary for Oswald to drive her shortly afterwards back to Jackson to conduct blood tests on the treated prisoner(s). Critics note that Oswald had no driver’s license and was unable to drive, but Warren Commission interviews mention Oswald borrowing a cousin’s vehicle; a report of finding Oswald’s Texas driver’s license was made, but the license disappeared. Marina Oswald said Oswald took driving lessons from Ruth Paine and “did well” a month later. Baker stated that Oswald learned to drive in the Marines, but pretended to be unable to drive to keep his wife at home.

OSWALD IN MEXICO CITY

According to the Warren Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald traveled to Mexico City in the fall of 1963, in search of a visa for travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Failing in that effort, he returned to Dallas, where on Novemer 22, he killed President Kennedy.

Cuban or Soviet conspiracy theories proliferated due to the events and stories related to this visit after the assassination. The Mary Ferrell Foundation states: “They were apparently instrumental in the creation of the Warren Commission, and over the years more and more has trickled out regarding a trip which ultimately remains enigmatic. The record on Mexico City is wildly muddled and mysterious. Was Oswald impersonated there? Who is the “mystery man” caught by photo surveillance? Why are CIA records on the trip at sharp variance with participant’s memories? Were the witnesses who reported events indicating a Communist conspiracy telling the truth, spinning false tales, or perhaps reporting on staged incidents? Did Oswald, or someone pretending to be him, threaten the life of JFK in the Cuban Embassy?

Despite the mysteries, one thing is certain. The events in Mexico City had a profound effect on the federal government’s response to the assassination. President Johnson invoked fears of nuclear war in putting together the Warren Commission, finally enlisting a recalcitrant Earl Warren by telling him “what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City.”
Considerations regarding the trip to Mexico City:

The Fourteen Minute Gap – A short documentary about an erased Presidential phone call in which Johnson and Hoover a Mexico City impersonator.

Oswald’s Visits to the Cuban and Soviet Embassies – Discusses the Oswald embassy visits and the resulting CIA cable traffic.

The Mexico City Tapes – Focuses on recorded telephone conversations of a man using Oswald’s name, who was apparently not Oswald.

Valeriy Kostikov and Comrade Kostin – Examines the KGB Department 13 “wet affairs” connection and the curious letter written to a “Comrade Kostin.”

Photo Surveillance and the Mystery Man – Looks at the man caught on surveillance cameras, apparently originally thought to be Oswald.

Stories of Communist Conspiracy in Mexico City – Discusses the arrest of Cuban Consulate worker Sylvia Duran, the allegations of Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte, Pedro Gutierrez Valencia, and Elena Garro de Paz, and another event involving suspected Cuban intelligence agent Luisa Calderon.

Baker says Oswald was unable to hand off the biological weapon to a contact in Mexico City because the approaching hurricane Flora was about to devastate Cuba, meaning the medical personnel would be too busy to cooperate in the effort to kill castro, being sent to many parts of the threatened island nation. She says he then desperately attempted to find other ways to get the materials into Cuba, without success. The limited shelf life of the weapon meant that after a few days, it would be too late: oswald then was ordered to return to Dallas. Interestingly, oswald received his tansit visa on his birthday, but ignored it. he never brought up wanting to go to Cuba again, which baker says was simply because the mission there had failed and could not be repeated successfully by the ame agent. By now, Baker said, Oswald was expendable as a former ‘defector’ and as a man who ‘knew too much,’ having penetrated an assassination ring that began in New Orleans

OSWALD RETURNS TO DALLAS

Spartacus.com gives us this interpretation (modified here) of the events occuring when Lee Oswald returned to Dallas:

“In September, 1963, Marina Oswald moved to Dallas to have her second child. Oswald…arrived in Dallas in October, 1963. Marina and June were living with Ruth Paine. Oswald rented a room in Dallas, and with the help of Paine, found a job at the Texas School Book Depository.

On 22nd November, 1963, President Kennedy arrived in Dallas. It was decided that Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie would ride in the presidential limousine. Kennedy’s doctor usually rode in the limousine, but this time, was sent to a different car. Roy Kellerman, head of the Secret Service at the White House and the driver, William Greer, also Secret Service, were in the front seat. Ralph Yarborough and Vice President Lyndon Johnson rode in a light-colored car further back, part of a procession of cars that wended through the business district of Dallas. A pilot car and several motorcycles rode well ahead of the presidential limousine. The next car carried eight Secret Service Agents. This was followed by the car containing Lyndon Johnson and Ralph Yarborough. Behind that car was another car filled with secret service agents.

At about 12.30 p.m. the presidential limousine entered Elm Street, making a sharp turn that slowed down the cavalcade to below speeds that were intended to help keep the President safe, a consideration because this area was not thick with crowds and a safer speed should have been maintained. Soon after, shots rang out.

The “magic bullet” theory, propounded by now-senator Arlen Specter, was created to account for the fact that Oswald could not have fired off more than three bullets in the time frame indicated. Another bullet hit John Connally in the back, to which he testified, as a fourth bullet, but the “magic bullet” now accounts for his wounds, as well, though the bullet said to have done so much damage was fund on a stretcher in near-pristine condition. Ten seconds after the first shots had been fired the president’s car accelerated off at high speed towards Parkland Memorial Hospital. Both men were carried into separate emergency rooms. Connally had wounds to his back, chest, wrist and thigh. Kennedy’s injuries were far more serious. He had a massive wound to the head and at 1 p.m. he was declared dead.

Witnesses at the scene of the assassination claimed they had seen shots being fired from behind a wooden fence on the Grassy Knoll and from the Texas School Book Depository. The police investigated these claims and during a search of the Texas School Book Depository they discovered on the floor by one of the sixth floor windows, three empty cartridge cases, lined up in a row. They also found a Mauser and identified it (decorated Dallas police office Roger Craig testifies on YouTube about seeing a “Mauser” but within 24 hours, the rifle was described as a Mannlicher-Carcano Mannlicher-Carcano. the rifle shown being removed from the buklding, however, does not match the rifle now on display in the National Archives as the killer rifle. The rifle was fund hidden beneath some boxes.

Oswald was seen in the Texas School Book Depository before (11.55 a.m.) and just after (12.31 p.m.). The shooting of Kennedy occurred at12.33. Oswald was seen 90 seconds later on the ground floor. Despite reconstructions purporting to show oswald culd have fled down the stairs in time to have been seen only 90 seconds later, witnesses going down the stairs at the same time never saw Oswald descending. Oswald was seen leaving the building, however, and by 1.00 p.m arrived at his lodgings. His landlady, Earlene Roberts, later reported that soon afterwards a police car drew up outside the house and sounded the horn twice and moved on. Roberts claimed that Oswald now left the building.

At 1.16 p.m. J. D. Tippet, a Dallas policeman, approached a man, identified as Oswald by sme witnesses, but not as Oswald by others, walking along East 10th Street. A witness later testified that after a short conversation the gunman in question pulled out a hand gun and fired a number of shots at Tippet. Bullet casings found came form a semi-automatic, but this did not match the non-automatic revolver later associated with Oswald when he was arrested. Oswald reportedly ran off, leaving the dying Tippet on the ground.

Twenty minutes later, Johnny Brewer, a manager of a shoe shop, saw a man (Oswald) who appeared to be hiding from passing police cars. He called the police after he saw the man enter a cinema. When the police arrived, Brewer accompanied the officers into the cinema where he pointed out the man he had seen acting in a suspicious manner. After a brief struggle Oswald was arrested. The crowd outside were yelling “Kill the President, will you?” Nobody knows how this information came to be known to the crowd.

The police soon found out that Oswald worked at the Texas Book Depository. They also discovered his palm print on the rifle that was found earlier that day, but only after Oswald was dead and his palm print had been taken from his dead body at the funeral parlor. The FBI had not found any palm print on the rifle at all, and they had closely inspected the rifle in every possible way before returning it to the dallas Police. Other evidence emerged that suggested that Oswald had been involved in the killing of Kennedy. Oswald’s hand prints were found on the book cartons — but he worked there and handled the boxes. An unidentified fingerprint was found to belong to Malcolm Wallace, a convicted murderer. Nobody has been able t explain why the FBI took a year and a half to decide that the fingerprint, identified by a seasoned forensic expert, was then declared not to match Wallace’s (seer the banned History Channel documentary on YouTube–The men Who Killed Kennedy, Episode 9 of the three banned documentaries, for full information). Charles Givens, a fellow worker, testified that he saw Oswald on the sixth floor at 11.55 a.m. Another witness, Howard Brennan, claimed he saw Oswald holding a rifle at the sixth floor window.

The police also discovered that the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was purchased under the name A. Hidell. When he was arrested, the police found that Oswald was carrying a forged identity card bearing the name Alek Hiddell. The rifle had been sent by the Klein mail order company from Chicago to P.O. Box 2915, Dallas, Texas. The Post Office box belonged to Oswald. However, witness Judyth Baker has stated that the order form was sloppy, mixing cursive with printed handwriting, noting that Oswald almost always printed everything on order forms very neatly, because he had dyslexia and was afraid of making an error: hence, she believes the order form was faked. In addition, researcher Martha Moyer has noted that the order form was received and the order filled only one day after Oswald supposedly airmailed it from Dallas, Texas — improbable, at best.

While being interrogated by the Dallas Police, Oswald denied he had been involved in the killing of Kennedy. He claimed that he was a “patsy” (a term used by the Mafia to describe someone set up to take the punishment for a crime they did not commit). A voice stress analysis test of Oswald’s voice indicates that he told the truth.

On 24th November, 1963, the Dallas Police made it known when they would transfer Oswald to the county jail. As Oswald was led through the basement of police headquarters, surrounded by a large crowd of reporters and armed police, a man well known to the Dallas police rushed forward and shot him in the upper abdomen. The gunman was quickly arrested by police officers. Oswald was dragged into a small anteroom, out of sight, where police asked if he had any last words to say, to which he shook his head. He was still alive when placed in an ambulance that arrived a few minutes later, but he died soon afterwards at Parkland Hospital, the same hospital where Kennedy also died. The man who killed him was later identified as Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, FBI informant, and known mafia bagman for the New Orleans Mafia godfaher Carlos Marcello, who on November 22, the day Kennedy was shot, was acquitted after being prosecuted in New Orleans by Bobby Kennedy. Marcello held a celebration party that same afternoon.

After the assassination of Kennedy, Marina Oswald, her toddler June, and her six-week-old baby daughter, Rachel, were taken by the FBI and Secret Service to the Inn of the Six Flags Hotel. Threatened with deportation, she agreed to give the authorities all the information she had. Some of this information was later used by the Warren Commission to bolster the assumption that her husband was the lone assassin.

Conclusion:
As more evidence is released, despite media support for the official version, the responsible student or citizen needs to be aware that there are good reasons why “conspiracy theorists” are concerned about the truth concerning the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Calls to have the case reopened have fallen on deaf ears: apparently, we must wait until all the witnesses are dead before the last files on Oswald will be released. Even then, nobody knows if what we see then will be the truth, or falsified. There is no doubt whatsoever that Oswald’s case was mishandled: the tragedy is that President John F. Kennedy’s death, for whatever reasons, was not properly investigated. This biography offers an alternative to the usual “Official Version.”

NOTES:

Kennedy’s Bullet Wounds: One bullet penetrated Kennedy in the back. It was described as not exiting the body. The site of this wound was later moved upward a few inches by Warren Commission assistant Gerald Ford (he would later become the first appointed president in US history after Richard Nixon resigned from office). The wound was not probed at the autopsy, which allowed speculation that it may have exited the president, which could only have occurred if it traveled upward to exit at the neck. Such an exit would have created a large exit wound, a wound that “appeared” only after the autopsy, however. The neck wound, had to have been made by a small caliber bullet or by a fleche/dart, due to its small size. It apparently struck Kennedy in the neck from the front, causing Kennedy to grab at his throat. Such a shot could have come from the Grassy Knoll, but because Kennedy’s car was obscured behind a sign when the shot occurred, there is no photographic record to help determine the angle or direction. This entry wound was described by Dr. Charles Crenshaw and others at Parkland Hospital, but later was obliterated by a tracheotomy cut into Kennedy’s throat to assist in efforts to get him to breathe. However, the tracheotomy was a small incision. For unknown reasons, a massive probe occurred at Kennedy’s throat during his autopsy, resulting in a large disfigurement where the small tracheotomy had existed. Kennedy may have been hit by a bullet from the rear as well; in addition, Kennedy was hit by at least one bullet that struck in the right front side of the head, exiting to the rear and leaving a wide gaping wound described by over a dozen witnesses — doctors and nurses — at Parkland Hospital. A number of these doctors, years later shown x-rays they were told were of Kennedy’s skull, stated they must have all been mistaken, but researchers contend that the x-rays shown had been falsified, and indeed, there are unexplained difficulties and anomalies with the x-rays. For example, a large section of the skull shows a white area, but the brain had already been removed. In addition, Kennedy’s brain, which would have shown where the bullet(s) entered, was stolen.

The gaping wound in the back of Kennedy’s head also vanished when official autopsy photos showed only a small entry wound in the rear of the head. Problems with the autopsy photos, the fact that two different coffins carrying the President’s body have both been described by reliable witnesses, and that one account says Kennedy was in a body bag, while another says Kennedy was not, adds great confusion to the matter. These incongruities have been dismissed or ignored by official version writers, but the consensus among honest investigators is that the autopsy photos were falsified. The autopsy itself was less thorough and detailed than the autopsy later conducted on Lee Harvey Oswald. Why the President’s autopsy was so limited has been a matter of speculation: some believe that because the president had Addison’s Disease, that his use of drugs to control the disease, and drug use to handle his back pain, were matters the Kennedy family did not wish to reveal to the public.

The Garrison Investigation: Oswald’s activities in New Orleans in mid-1963 finally could not be ignored, and began to be investigated in 1967 by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who decided to arrest Clay Shaw on March 1st, 1967. Garrison was originally interested in investigating David Ferrie’s connections to Oswald, which Ferrie himself denied. Ferrie, protesting that now his life was in danger, died hours after he was released from protective custody and before he could be brought to trial, supposedly from a ruptured berry aneurysm, though two unsigned ‘suicide letters” were found, there was a bruise inside Ferrie’s mouth, and a bottle with a day-old prescription of 100 Proloid tablets was found almost empty. James Files, a known mafia associate, has stated that he killed Ferrie using an ice pick thrust up through the roof of Ferrie’s mouth, making the bleeding that resulted seem to come from natural causes. It would be a wound difficult to notice in an autopsy.
In 1993, the PBS television program Frontline obtained a group photograph, taken eight years before the assassination, showing Oswald and Ferrie at a weekend training session enjoying a cookout with a few other Civil Air Patrol cadets and a second leader. There were barriers set up to thwart Garrison’s investigation: we now know that Garrison’s efforts were impeded by the CIA and FBI. A good rule-of-thumb to determine if a writer has honestly assessed information in the case, or might have an ulterior motive, is how that person writes about Garrison. Garrison seems to be the litmus test to determine the degree of prejudice. Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, is the story of Garrison’s attempt to find Kennedy’s killers. It is telling that before its release, the film’s script was smuggled out and the film itself was being dismissed as absurd and worthless. Nevertheless, it became a blockbuster, resulting in a public outcry that created the ARRB –The Assassination Records Review Board—that has forced the release of millions of documents (though many Oswald records still remain censored — redacted). When an editor attempted to add the existence of the ARRB to Wikipedia’s biography of Oswald, to alert readers that much new evidence now exists that cast doubt on Oswald as Kennedy’s assassin, it was removed within 24 hours (June, 2009). Clay Shaw was indicted by Garrison, but it was obvious he would never be convicted without key witnesses and cooperation from government agencies. Due to Garrison’s efforts, however, we were given access to the Zapruder film that shows Kennedy getting shot. The film has been doctored, however, as a number of frames are obviously missing: anyone who has used the same kind of camera knows that it runs on a wind-up mechanism that cannot start and stop ‘just before’ and ‘just after’ Kennedy emerges from behind the sign. Some frames are missing. Further, the explosion that seems to show a shower of blood bursting forward (indicating a shot from behind) nevertheless left no blood on Jacqueline Kennedy’s hat and face, despite her bending so close to her husband that she would have been covered with this spray of blood. Instead, we see the violent “back and to the left” motion that all hunters and soldiers who have shot people will tell you is a result of Newton’s laws of physics, and a motorcycle policeman being hit so hard by fragments of bone from Kennedy’s head that he thought he, too, had been shot . Further information is available on the Internet.

Two Important “Official Version” Books: Vincent Bugliosi and Gerald Posner have both written very similar books that forcefully present the official version of Oswald’s life and activities in such a manner as to convince most persons who read these books that Oswald must have been guilty of shooting President John F. Kennedy. There seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence assembled against Oswald, leading to the obvious conclusion that he was the sole assassin. But while the statements and records, as assembled by both Bugliosi and Posner, are convincing to anyone who has not closely investigated the case, difficulties arise when the quality of the evidence is considered, versus quantity: the massive amount of evidence offered by the Dallas Police, for example, is not impressive as it first seems when more closely examined: chain-of-possession of bullets, the planting of evidence, the morphing of a Mauser rifle into a Mannlicher-carcano, then to “an Italian carbine,” — and the description of the rifle Oswald supposedly used to kill Kennedy as an ‘accurate” weapon, when it had been described broadly as “the humane rifle” for its poor performance — such considerations are dismissed, those who worry about “conspiracy” are called fools, and troubling matters such as showing one of the famed backyard photos to Oswald before the official record says the photos were actually ‘found’ or telling the public that a paraffin test ‘proved’ “Oswald shot a gun” when the test was, in fact, negative for same — such problems are ignored, denied, or trivialized.

Clinton and Jackson Incidents: Baker’s explanation has provided a logical sequence of reasons for the long delay, the persons involved, the voter registration attempt, and the trip to the mental hospital, but researcher Joan Mellen has stated she believed Oswald was asked to register to vote to help him obtain a job in the Jackson mental hospital, though with his wife and child living over a hundred miles away in New Orleans, and with the attempt to register being foiled, since not even faked documents were offered, it seems unlikely that Oswald would cooperate with such a scheme and leave his pregnant wife totally alone in New Orleans, nor did it seem necessary to have a busy and important businessman such as Clay Shaw accompanying Oswald and the notorious Ferrie. Mellen proposed that placing Oswald at the mental hospital as a worker could later implicate him in the assassination as a mental case. She cites a doctor who worked there at the time, but Baker has indicated that this same doctor was involved in medical experiments on prisoners, since witnesses (including William Livesay) are on court records that they were sent from Angola Prison in 1963 to the mental hospital for medical experimentation –such matters the doctor Mellen interviewed would not admit had ever occurred.

Information about Judyth Vary Baker: Besides naming well-known “players” in New Orleans as involved with Oswald, such as Guy Banister (former FBI), and godfather Carlos Marcello, Baker also brought several new names to the fore, including Alton Ochsner, Anna Lewis (wife of Banister employee David Lewis), William Livesay, who stated he was a prisoner from Angola Prison experimented on in 1963 at the Southeast Louisiana Mental Hospital at Jackson (supporting Baker’s statement that prisoners from Angola were used at the hospital for experimentation in 1963), William “Mac” McCullough, a musician and bodyguard-bouncer for Marcello, and from the family of Charles Thomas, who as a former Customs agent in New York had known Lee as a youth: he came from Miami to New Orleans on June 24th, 1963, to help expedite Oswald’s new passport in only 24 hours.
Baker also adds many logical explanations for actions of Oswald that have hitherto been puzzling and shrouded in mystery. Her life story and testimony is recorded in Episode 8 in the banned History Channel documentary “The Love Affair” that aired in 2003, the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, along with “The Smoking Guns” and “The Guilty Men.” Baker said she has been harmed, harassed and threatened since. Her book, Me & Lee (2009) relates the entire story. Baker’s critics contend that she should have warned Kennedy if she really knew all she claimed to know, but Baker says that not only would she have not been believed, since persons such as Ochsner and Marcello had great power and influence, but Oswald, along with an “abort team” that was trying to save Kennedy, would have been exposed (as Oswald was the inside informant) and was himself sending warnings to the FBI about the impending assassination plot.

Books that Tell the Other Side of the Story:

Crossfire , by Jim Marrs. http://www.jimmarrs.com

Dead Men Talking: Consequences of Government Lies, by Dean Hartwell

http://www.deanhartwell.com

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK by Peter Dale Scott

Dr. Mary’s Monkey , by Edward T. Haslam
http://www.doctormarysmonkey.com

High Treason , by Harrison Livingstone and Robert Groden

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters,
by James W. Douglass

Live by the Sword , by Gus Russo

Me & Lee , by Judyth Vary Baker (pub. by Trine Day 2009)

http://www.judythvarybaker.com

published by Trine Day

published by Trine Day

On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, by Dick Russell

The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald , by Robert Groden

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The Night I Lost a Second Brother

View of the Adriatic Sea

View of the Adriatic Sea

THE NIGHT I LOST A SECOND BROTHER — WRITTEN APRIL 4, 1968

I finally made friends with a black man at school. He talks funny not because he’s black, but because of a once-broken jaw. I don’t know how his jaw got to be broken. Sometimes he comes into the office where I work , and when he does, he turns the big standing lamp so that its bulb shines directly into my face. He wants the lamp to light up the whole room, which he considers smoky and gloomy. Then he takes off his jacket and hangs it loosely across a chair and sits down and talks politics.
I never used to be very interested in politics. When I was about twenty, Kennedy was shot and somebody in the office said –I’m glad, the bastard.—That shocked me, because to me Kennedy was almost a brother — Kennedy was fine and handsome and we laughed at jokes made on records about him, we laughed at the cartoons. When he died, a long-drawn-out sighing sound seemed to cover the whole nation like a sheet, and suddenly there was a cloud hanging just over my right eyebrow, just hanging there, that wouldn’t go away, and I called it politics and tried to remain disinterested, but it was harder after that.
Charlie yammers constantly about the marijuana problem. The old jerks who run the country now more or less grew up with the idea that marijuana is bad, that it leads to perversions and the use of really frightening drugs like heroin. What’s funny is that practically everyone I know who has used marijuana is smarter, kinder, more open-minded and interesting than anyone who guzzles beer on Saturday nights. The marijuana user doesn’t get a hangover, either. Yet the old folks are so afraid of it, and frankly, they seem out to punish us who did not endure the Great Depression, the World Wars, and other assorted evils – o we who have nice, bright clothes, college classes, and maybe even a second-hand car, and good food anytime we want – this gives them unhappy regretful feelings. We must be punished for our wild and comparatively carefree lives – and so here come the men with the truncheons, literally.
They rounded up twenty-seven just the other night, got them up out of bed and hustled them to jail – girls and boys sleepy in the gray fore-dawn, young men and women who had been quietly lying together in the same bed, perhaps, privately and bothering nobody – they booked them on morals charges, but what the geezers were really after was the grass — the marijuana. They found a little, but most of the kids had to be charged with vagrancy. After all, you have to charge a kid with something if you haul him off to jail and beat him up a little. The fact that the kids were vagrant in their own rooms, in their own paid-for beds, the fact that many had jobs and were students, did not make any big impression. The unfortunates who did not throw their stuff down the toilet fast enough –if they had any of it – must go to trial and try to avoid five years in jail and ten thousand in fines. If you steal a car, if you beat your child to a bloody pulp, maybe you deserve that kind of treatment. But for a quiet hour of smoking on your front porch?

It doesn’t matter. Someday we will come to power. And from my experiences, I can understand a little, therefore, of how black black Charlie must feel. I wonder how he can come in and yammer to me. I always wonder if he’ll come again and yammer again in his almost unintelligible crisscrossed syllables, the stabbing of his black powdery hand up and down on the desk, telling tales of the FDA and IRS and all those other monolithic triumvirate initialed Powers who rule unseen but with the computer’s dreadful nose diving into all our business any old time.
He talks and I watch fascinated, thinking half the time he talks he’s to me a Negro, to others a black man, or a nigger, and I’m actually talking and listening to a black man, and now I can say I know a black man. But I don’t know him. We meet here to almost spy on each other. We feel friendly and half-ashamed that color enters our thoughts, and I know they enter his thoughts as well as mine because once he was staring at my hands, and he said they were beautiful hands, regretfully, as though he were ashamed of his own, so that he added –they should have been black hands : then I could say they’re really beautiful.–
He only talked like that once. But sometimes I have heard him say ‘Black is Beautiful’ about my fountain pen, or my dress, laughing about it and giggling like an imbecile, really, in his conmingled fierceness and embarrassment. So he sits across from me and wags his head back and forth while I listen and respond and listen, and we’ve got into some roaring arguments that have put both of us at a silent and specially restful ease with each other. That we can argue gives us hope that we might become friends someday. Of course, Charlie is my friend. But because, primarily, he has received the special consideration of his blackness, which made me listen to what he had to say out of curiosity and a paternal, sympathetic I’m-really-better-than-you-are interior secret – So ! Tell me all about yourself!
You build up a whole elegant ideal, too: you want to convince him you are the best white person in the world, and at the same time, that ALL white people are like you, so please don’t hate us for trampling on you most of your days. And am I kidding about that? –What the cops are doing to you kids now—he says – they do to us just for kicks.–
–That’s what they do – I answer – to us, too – just for the kicks.—
–But—Charlie adds –you’re upset about this. It’s new stuff to you. It’s old stuff to me because I’m not upset by it. You’re upset because it aint supposed to be done that way, you feel it’s unfair. Get to the point—he says – and you see that the Fuzz and what they do to black men, they think it’s okay and even lots of blacks, they thought it was okay. Only, not no more. They can’t touch us again. You take it awhile, honey. You find out what it’s like. You liberal people do the fighting for us, and when you’re wore out, we’ll jump in again.—
–Remember me—I said to him once, half-joking. –if I remember you, and you remember me, one or the other of us can help the other sometime. Like if one of us gets thrown in jail.—
— Pooh – Charlie said, –I’ll remember you, but you go to jail awhile, there’s not one thing I could do about it. And you stay there long enough, you’ll come out different, and there’s nothing I could do about that, neither.—
–You mean – I said –if you get put in jail—
–Anybody – he said –punish them enough, and you’ll turn a puppy into a weasel. First thing I’d do is let everybody out of jail and start fixing the mental hospitals so they can take the killers and treat them and all.—
I was thinking, I know a colored man – a darky. He knows a whitey or white or whatever. A few years ago we really could have been friends. We could have marched shoulder-to-shoulder for civil rights, singing songs no tear gas or billyclubs could have stopped. But now the new mood is here, and it began with Kennedy’s killing and continues with a mad and senseless debacle called a Necessary War to Help the People in South Vietnam Decide to Become Democratic Like Us, or Hell, We’ll Kill Every Last One of Them. It is no joke, however. By my twenty-third year, gloom and joyless anxiety settled not as a burial sheet, but as heavy black earth over a coffin lid.
Our new President lied on several occasions – surely other presidents have lied – but not with so many fine communications and so many educated people. The old words don’t fit together right. They call it a credibility gap, but the president and his top men, in short, lied to us, and in doing so, made it very hard for us to trust them. Which forces the old folks to fall back on blind faith – that our President didn’t mean to lie – that lies were necessary because we can’t be told the whole truth, because we have no right to know absolutely everything. And so on.
Yet all the time, it’s 1984, Orwell’s misery-chant and that regimented life closing in on us, like some disease affecting the heart, which then spreads to the bones and muscles, until it reaches the very will to live. The manipulation of our lives by the Grand Puppeteers: so it spreads. It is a leprous horror, with grotesque forces in play against each other: the war that destroys better jobs, better education, better homes, in favor of slaying our bright youth in muddy rice-paddies for stinking ideals out of date and guaranteeing the squaring off of black and white against each other at home. They crash together, and begin to burn our cities. That is not quite how our situation is described in the news stories. The news stories speak of riots, looting, and fires, and predict more for the coming summer. But all this long winter of our discontent, the burning brand smoldered.
I distrust our lives held in the good hands of big business, of state-run schools where kids are marched from grade to grade as illiterate as at first. A man lives in a five-room walk-up flat, works hard at menial labor all his life, sends his six kids all to school and watches them grow up, despised by themselves and by the affluent whites, or the affluent blacks even, he watches them grow up and begin the same dreary life he had striven through in order to give them a better one. The cycle, repeated over and over: only the hideous flat remains unchanged, until it’s knocked down one day by bulldozers and machinery, and $200 “middle class” apartments are raised in its stead, and the old man moves into a three-room flat in an unrazed, uncondemned, but even more despicable tenement than he had before. His children are grown: they produce children, and hate and despair grow up with them.
Charlie grins. Behind his grin maybe he would after all not mind killing me. I would almost not blame him. When the big-earlobed President said — we are going to have peace talks, and I am not going to run for President — I thought — at last, I can relax a while! I can stop writing letters and carrying a picket sign for peace, and I can stop ruining days and nights arguing about the war, about its immorality. The negroes next, but first, just let me relax. It was the slimmest, shiniest glimmer of hope, and the whole world seemed to relax as if a tourniquet had finally been placed over a mortal wound. –Now just for awhile I’ll go to parties and stuff—I thought. –I’m young, and want to have some fun, too.—
Vague in my mind was the threat of black rioting to come again this summer: but just for now, for a few hours, I walked down the street with my husband – he had been the first man I loved, and he could have been the only man I loved , but for a twist of fate. Tonight we hoped to be entertained, but the first movie was worthless. The second was better: I began to forget about all the troubles out there, felt it all slipping away. We laughed. We forgot for awhile…
I was working as a volunteer on an underground newspaper, because of all the fear I had, and some of the things I’d seen the police doing. The police, my friends: a very kind policeman had pushed my little car to get it started. He dented his own car’s fender to give me that push. He was a very fine man and a very fine policeman. But later the same policeman saw me marching for peace with some hippies, and thought it was okay to pull my hair as I walked past him. What could I do? If I stopped and protested, I could have been arrested. You keep on walking and wonder if being white has any advantages after all. I was not a White Racist, and therefore, I had no white rights.
Martin Luther King, who is for non-violence, and the last black man the militants want around when they are chanting burn, baby, burn, is still listened to. He has been leading marches for years, and has been in jail for it. Martin Luther King has a very round face, he’s very Negroid, yet whitish enough that he can command respectability on all fronts, including among all the old darkies. He is planning a march, and there will be demonstrations, because an advanced version of President Kennedy’s Civil Rights bill is once more before Congress, there on that high green hill where beauty abounds. Jack Kennedy, your body is not far away: you overlook many graves, as Lincoln’s statue and Washington’s memorial must look upon you. And you would have thrilled at Martin Luther king’s words: the bill must pass, that people might see that non-violent means in the form of peaceful petition can also be heard, can be better heard, than the rampages that caused the destruction of Watts, of Chicago, of Detroit, of Birmingham and Selma and L.A. and Houston and Jacksonville.
The whole black race is watching now. Are they tensed with hope? Congress bickers over the bill. The Southern groups, as usual, are against it. Nobody should be forced to house a Negro. Nobody should be forced to hire a Negro. Nobody should be forced to educate a Negro. If a man wants to get up, he should help himself, like we white folks, we rich plantation heirs and self-made thieves and robbers, we fine educated and self-employed and employable white white, ambitious from the first bottle of white white milk, eager to work from the first taste of good steak and I-want-more and will get it…only you forget, some of these poor whites down in Kentucky or New Orleans, or the blacks stuffed into the big city ghettos like olives in a pipe, you forget they’ve never tasted a good steak, so the stuff of their dreams is plenty of sowbelly and collards and cornbread to go around. The dream of bringing down bloated bellies flatter, with ten kids’ eyes staring at the ten pounds of flour you bring home after a week’s work of loading concrete blocks, or maybe you’ve gone and picked up the pittance the government gives you because you don’t have a job and wouldn’t get one, because, hell, you’ll sweat and slave and die young like your pappy, or you’ll sit in the sun and half-starve and do nothing like your friends, or else you can take off, run to a city, then run to another city, maybe steal, or live off the sweat of a woman. But there is no way through the use of books, or of school, or by connections.
As we walk from the movie theater, the ease and laughter fade as I glance around me at the world closing in again. To my comment about the Civil Rights Bill, my husband mentions that the haggling of the Senators and Congressmen will be endless. There will be a filibuster to stop all progress. He kisses me there under the faint yellow glow of a streetlamp and says, –Let’s forget about politics for awhile.—
I reply, —King is assembling a massive march and they will camp out there in tents and under tin roofs until that bill is passed. And their quiet chanting will bring peaceful reforms. –I sound just like a politician– I tell myself, as we continue walking. –I know all the right words now.– At the thought, I start to smile —– when here comes Charlie along.
My husband had never met Charlie, so I was going to introduce them, but when Charlie saw me, he spat. He spat between my feet, accurately putting with that slab of foaming liquid a message of hate and disgust, and I looked up startled at him, but he was stalking past us and I was ashamed to say, –That’s Charlie, honey, and I wanted you to meet him.—
I couldn’t understand, even when I heard the sirens wailing, and it was only later when we got home, that I heard a sniper had killed gentle Martin L. King.
————————————————————————————————-Judyth Vary Baker
Martin Luther King died April 4th, 1968, due to an assassin’s bullet that was not fired by James Earl Ray. The true assassin was never captured: a court trial, decades later, proved both facts to the King family and to the jury that exonerated Ray. Most people don’t know that. And most people don’t know that just one week after King’s murder, on April 11, 1968, President Johnson signed the expanded Civil Rights Act King died for, after a week of rioting throughout America.

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