Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  *The April 8, 1963, edition of the Militant to which Oswald subscribed carried a story datelined Denver, March 27, and headlined “United Picket Line in Denver Greets ‘Night Riding’ Walker” and mentioned that Walker had challenged President Kennedy to drop the Eighty-second Airborne Division on Cuba and get rid of Fidel Castro (Newman, Assassination of John F. Kennedy, p. 342). It cannot be known whether Oswald got his copy of the edition on April 9, or before he left to shoot Walker on April 10, or sometime thereafter.

  *Coleman lived in the house on the other side of the church parking lot and apparently was the only witness to have heard the sound of the rifle shot, though he originally thought it was a car backfire. Coleman told the FBI that he ran out to his backyard, stepped up on a bicycle, and looked into the floodlit church parking lot, where he saw about eight cars parked and a man hurrying to one of them, a white or beige 1950 Ford, with its headlights on and its motor running. The man was a white male, nineteen to twenty years old, about five feet ten inches tall and weighing around 130 pounds, “real skinny,” and had dark bushy hair, a thin face, and a large nose. A second man was walking to a 1958 black-over-white Chevrolet sedan. This man, also a white male, was around six feet one inch tall and weighed about 200 pounds. The first man got into the Ford and drove out of the lot, he said, at a “normal rate of speed” to Turtle Creek Boulevard—this is probably the car Walker saw as he came down the stairs with his pistol. The second man went to the Chevy, pushed the driver’s seat forward, and leaned into the backseat. At that point Coleman went back into the house and saw no more. (CE 2958, 26 H 437–438, FBI interview of Walter Coleman on June 3, 1964; position of cars in lot: CE 953-B, C, D, 23 H 773–775)

  *Marina told her biographer, Priscilla McMillan, that the incident took place on Thursday morning, April 11, the day after the attempt on Walker’s life (McMillan, Marina and Lee, pp. 356–358). However, earlier, on July 24, 1964, just eight months after the event, Marina clearly told the Warren Commission that this incident took place “three days after this [attempt on Walker] happened.” Question: “Three days after he shot at General Walker you saw him destroy the [notebook], is that correct?” “Yes.” (11 H 292)

  *When Dr. Vincent Guinn made his neutron activation analysis of the bullet for the HSCA, he determined that it was “extremely likely” that the Walker bullet was a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company, the same as the ammunition used in the Kennedy assassination (1 HSCA 502, HSCA testimony of Dr. Guinn on September 8, 1978). The Dallas Police Department’s “General Offense Report” on April 10, 1963, its first report on the Walker shooting, described the bullet as a “steel-jacketed bullet” (CE 2001, 24 H 39), whereas the 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano bullets were copper-jacketed. Frazier told the Warren Commission that “some individuals commonly refer to rifle bullets as steel-jacketed bullets, when they actually in fact just have a copper alloy jacket” (3 H 439).

  *Not only could the bathroom door be locked only from the inside, but also critics point out that most bathroom doors open inward. If this one did (as of September 22, 2004, when I visited the apartment, the door did, but it is unknown whether this was the same door that was on the hinges forty-one years earlier), and Marina was pushing forward, as she said she was, unless Oswald got so caught up in the moment that he forgot to turn the knob (in which case there wouldn’t have even been a struggle), she would only be pushing the door open, not keeping it closed. Hence, the critics question Marina’s story about the entire incident (e.g., Summers, Not in Your Lifetime, p. 124).

  *In addition to the Murrets, who were Lee’s relatives on his mother’s side, Lee had many other aunts and cousins in the New Orleans area, all on his father’s side. But other than Aunt Hazel, all of them told the FBI they had never met him and could furnish no information concerning him. (CD 107, pp.14–16, January 13, 1964)

  *The letter was not reproduced in the Warren Commission volumes.

  † On a lighter note, Marina wrote that she and Lee had recently been to the French Quarter in the evening. “It’s a shame you didn’t manage to get there in the evening. For me it was especially interesting as it was the first time in my life I had seen such. There were many nightclubs there. Through the open doors were visible barely covered dancing girls (so as not to say entirely unclothed). Most of them had really very pretty, rare figures and if one doesn’t think about too many things, then one can like them very much” (CE 408, 17 H 89).

  *The publications he would continue to receive which he had been subscribing to included the Worker, the Militant, and Soviet Belorussia, an organ of the Soviet government. It’s noteworthy that in an April 19, 1963, speech by President Kennedy reported in the Militant, he said that “in five years time” it was likely that Castro would be deposed, and the April 29, 1963, edition of the Militant quoted a statement by Robert F. Kennedy on April 22, that “we can’t just snap our fingers and make Castro go away. But we can fight for this. We can dedicate all our energy and best possible brains to that effort.” (McMillan, Marina and Lee, pp.399–400, 611–612 note 2)

  It was clear to Oswald that the Kennedy administration wanted to overthrow his hero, Fidel Castro.

  *On his own membership card, Lee signed his name, then instructed Marina to sign the name “A. J. Hidell” above the typed words “Chapter President.” When Marina, perplexed, said, “You have selected this name because it sounds like Fidel,” Lee blushed, then said, “Shut-up, it is none of your business.” Marina was convinced Hidell was nothing but an “altered Fidel,” and she laughed in his face at such foolishness. If it wasn’t Fidel, she pressed him, then who was Hidell? He was stuck and muttered the contradiction that Hidell “was his own name and that there is no Hidell in existence.” Oh, Marina said, taunting him, so you have “two names?” “Yes,” he said, with nowhere else to go. He finally recovered his mental equilibrium and said it was necessary to use this fictitious name so “people will think I have a big organization.” Marina played her husband’s silly game and wrote the name A. J. Hidell on the card, as Lee insisted she do. (5 H 401, 1 H 64, WCT Marina N. Oswald)

  *On the Certificate of Vaccination document, Oswald used his rubber-stamp kit to imprint the name of “Dr. A. J. Hideel,” whose office he listed as P.O. Box 30016, New Orleans. He failed to notice his misspelling of his favorite alias, “Hidell.” More seriously, he misprinted Dr. Hideel’s post office box address, reversing the last two numbers, an error he repeated, more consequentially, when he stamped some of his handbills—if any potential recruit did try to get in touch with the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Oswald might never have known about it. The rubber-stamped location on his handbills exists in two versions, one giving A. J. Hidell’s name and the incorrect post office box number “30016, New Orleans, LA” under “Location” and the other stamped “L. H. Oswald” and giving his correct 4907 Magazine Street address. (Cadigan Exhibit No. 23, 19 H 296–297; CE 2966-A and B, 26 H 448)

  *Hosty had been doing the usual things to pick up Oswald’s trace, and learned in May that Lee and Marina had apparently left the Dallas area (4 H 443, WCT James P. Hosty Jr.).

  *The shortness of this period of personal neglect is evidenced by the fact that Adrian Alba, the operator of the garage next door to the coffee company where Lee spent so many of his work breaks, apparently doesn’t recall it at all. His only recollection of Oswald in this regard is that he couldn’t figure out how someone whose job was an oiler “was always extremely neat and clean. At anytime during the day his pants had a neat crease in them and his shirt was always clean—no oil on them at all” (HSCA Record 180-10072-10047, HSCA staff interview of Adrian Alba on January 24, 1978, p.2).

  *No wonder. A hundred dollars was about all Lee and Marina had to their names. They never had a bank account or safe-deposit box during their marriage and Marina said that in New Orleans Lee put the family savings in a wallet he kept at their home. She estimated that there “might be $100” or two hun
dred dollars at the most in the wallet. Since he had no source of income other than the modest compensation he received while working, Oswald could never adequately provide for his family, and he felt shamed by this. Marina said that she was aware of the shame he felt and therefore very seldom spoke to him about finances or money or finding a job. Speaking of the New Orleans period, Lillian Murret, Oswald’s aunt, said, “Lee was very poor. They were practically starving.” (CE 1781, 23 H 387, FBI interview of Marina Oswald on November 28, 1963; HSCA Record 180-10075-10352, HSCA deposition of Lillian Murret on November 6, 1978, p.15) The situation did not improve much in Dallas. When I asked Ruth Paine at the London trial, “How would you characterize the financial condition of the Oswalds?” she responded, “They were very poor” (Transcript of On Trial, July 24, 1986, p.627).

  *Vincent T. Lee later told the Warren Commission that he decided to quit corresponding with Oswald. “He had gone ahead and acted on his own without any authorization [to set up a New Orleans chapter]…and then, when somebody goes off like this, violating all the rules that you send him, it comes as quite a disappointment because you have had hopes. Obviously, this man was not operating in an official capacity for the organization” (10 H 90).

  The hapless Lee was the only member of the “New Orleans branch” of the FPCC, a branch that had never been chartered by the national committee.

  *After the FBI confirmed Oswald’s residence at 4907 Magazine Street, Mrs. Lena Garner, Oswald’s landlady, recalled that the agent, Milton Kaack (one of two New Orleans FBI agents—the other, Warren de Brueys—assigned to monitor Oswald’s activities), asked her “different little things about if I had seen him go out and did he have company and all this and that.” Concerned, she asked Kaack, “I hope I don’t have the wrong type of person in my house,” and he told her, “Oh, no.” He gave her his phone number and told her to call him if any unusual activities pertaining to Oswald took place. (CE 826, 17 H 755, xxii, FBI report of SA Milton Kaack on October 31, 1963; HSCA Record 180-10104-10364, Testimony of Lena Garner before HSCA on May 5, 1978, pp.8–10; HSCA staff interview of Mrs. Jesse Garner on February 20, 1978) Though Agent Hosty had lost Oswald’s trail in Dallas, the New York City FBI office learned from an informant that on June 26, Oswald, with a post office box numbered 30061 in New Orleans, had corresponded with the Worker in New York, and this information was passed on to the New Orleans office of the FBI. Another informant (almost undoubtedly a New Orleans post office employee) advised the New Orleans FBI office on July 23 that Oswald’s post office box had been rented on June 3, and Oswald had given his address as 657 French Street (as indicated, the Murrets lived at 757 French Street) in New Orleans. It is not clear from the record how the FBI got Oswald’s address on Magazine Street since the Murrets never indicated the FBI came to their door until after Labor Day. (CE 833, 17 H 794; CE 826, 17 H 754–755; 8 H 146–147, WCT Lillian Murret)

  *Film, which few Americans have ever seen, was shot of this incident. Sixteen-year-old Jim Doyle, walking with his parents on Canal Street, tried out his birthday present, an 8-millimeter camera. The film is somewhat murky, but the participants are clearly identifiable. The footage of Oswald passing out literature that is usually shown to illustrate this incident in television documentaries was actually shot a week later in a different location and without the involvement of any anti-Castro Cubans.

  *Why Lee would want to talk to the FBI, whom he had tried to elude in Fort Worth and Dallas, and for whom he had a dislike, is not known. The FBI agent who interviewed him, when asked that question, could only say that “frequently, persons who are in custody of local authorities…like to talk to the FBI” (4 H 435, WCT John Lester Quigley).

  † We have seen that, per Marina, Oswald’s alias Hidell was derived from Castro’s first name, Fidel. The “A.” on the membership card was the initial for Alek, which appeared on the forged Selective Service card Oswald had in his wallet at the time of his arrest (“Alex James Hidell”), and probably came from his Russian nickname Alik.

  *Oswald’s choice of the Trade Mart, located on Camp Street in a busy part of downtown New Orleans, was a logical one, since his whole plea involved Cuba, and the Trade Mart housed many import and export companies that did business with Latin America. Before the trade embargo on Cuba by the American government, many of such companies did business with Cuba. (Letter from Johann Rush to author dated January 5, 2000)

  *The frames of Oswald in front of the Trade Mart also show him shaven and clean-cut with a white shirt and tie and dark trousers (see photo section), clearly the old Oswald once again after the brief spell at the greasing job at the coffee company.

  *Although it doesn’t make too much sense, I am forced by the evidence to conclude that Oswald probably wrote this letter before he even went on Stuckey’s show. Stuckey is positive that the taped interview with Oswald took place around 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 17, 1963, a few hours before his regular Saturday night show at 7:30 p.m. (11 H 160, 162, 165, WCT William Kirk Stuckey). Yet Oswald’s August 17 letter to Lee is postmarked, “New Orleans, L.A. 6:06 p.m. 17 AUG 1963” (Lee [Vincent T.] Exhibit No. 7, 20 H 531). There is no way Oswald could have had the long, thirty-seven-minute interview with Stuckey at 5:00 p.m., a discussion with him thereafter, gotten home (presumably by bus), written the letter, and had it postmarked 6:06 p.m. Either he wrote the letter before the interview (his saying the interview lasted only fifteen minutes when it lasted thirty-seven minutes is further evidence it was written before the interview), or Oswald was right about the interview being at 4:00 p.m., not 5:00 p.m. as Stuckey said, and Oswald, who would still, even with this additional hour, be very pressed for time, managed to get home on time to write the letter and get it off at a substation of the post office in his area for the postmarked time of 6:06 p.m. But this is still unlikely since it appears that the various post office substations in New Orleans closed at 5:45 p.m. (CE 2132, 24 H 716), the postmark being made at the post office after the mail was picked up. Oswald most likely put his letter in a mailbox or delivered it to a substation at some earlier time in the day.

  *In 1985 and 1986, researchers for London Weekend Television interviewed Stuckey several times by phone at his hotel in Seattle. Stuckey had long since given up on his Latin America specialty and had become something of a gypsy, wandering from university to university in the land picking up stories to write in science journals. They asked him to be a witness in the trial, but he wanted to be paid a substantial fee, and the production company wasn’t paying witnesses. Indeed, he wanted $5,000 just to loan out his copy of the tape of the WDSU radio debate. Stuckey said if he were to testify he should be placed into the category of a “character witness for Oswald.” He was impressed by Oswald, believing him to be intelligent, sincere, and articulate, and called Oswald’s performance on the show “the best run-down of a national liberation philosophy I’ve heard in a long time.” Speaking of how conservative and anti-Communist New Orleans was at the time, and the fact that it was populated by many anti-Castro Cubans, he couldn’t get over how Oswald could “go handing out left-wing pamphlets downtown. He was begging for a bullet.” Stuckey himself felt isolated from the typical New Orleans scene. He and his French wife had wanted to see Oswald socially after the debate, and were going to invite him to the beach with them, but decided not to, as it would be inviting trouble. (Telephone interviews of Bill Stuckey by London Weekend Television researchers on September 4, 1985, and June 9 and 25, 1986)

  *Priscilla McMillan, in talking over many years with Marina and others who knew Oswald, wrote, “Stingy as he was, and forever saving up in little ways, Lee did not want a lot of money for himself. That was not where his ambition lay. As with virtually everyone who knew him, Marina, too, believes that her husband could not have been ‘bought’” (McMillan, Marina and Lee, p.457).

  *But of course someone had to unpack the package when Ruth arrived in Texas a few days later, and it was her husband Michael, whom she had called to help her. He was perplexed b
y the weight and feel of the contents of the package, thoughts like “camping equipment” and “an iron pipe” entering his mind. These guesses didn’t seem quite accurate to him, but being the “polite” Quaker he was, and aware of Oswald’s “rights to privacy,” he never snooped. He would later say he was satisfied it was Oswald’s rifle. (2 H 414–415, 417, 419, 9 H 436–441, WCT Michael R. Paine)

  *When the FBI first ran Osborne down in February of 1964 near Russellville, Alabama, where he was staying at the residence of one Wylie Uptain, he was going under the name John Howard Bowen, with a bogus Social Security card as well as credit cards under that name, and said he was planning to leave for Laredo by way of New Orleans. He told them he had been born in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1885 and raised in an orphanage in Philadelphia. That all of his relatives were deceased. That he completed the equivalent of two years of college by correspondence courses and completed a course in theology in 1914. He said he was ordained by the Plymouth Brethren in Trenton, New Jersey, and also by the Northern Baptist Convention in Binghamton, New York. And, he added, he was recognized as an ordained minister by the Missionary Baptist Convention. He said he worked for a time with juvenile delinquents in Knoxville, Tennessee, and had traveled extensively, but had never been to Canada or England. He considered his home to be the Saint Anthony Hotel in Laredo, Texas, where he had resided “intermittently” for twenty years. He told the FBI that Albert Osborne was another Baptist preacher he met in 1958 when they were staying at the same hotel in Oaxaco, Mexico. He said Osborne was about his same size and age.