The Oswald Exhumation

[Sandy Larsen]

6 hours ago, W. Tracy Parnell said:

8 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Joe,

I sent the photo to John A. and he responded that he suspected the image was altered to show Harvey instead of Lee.

Question of the day-how does a H&L person know what evidence is faked and which is real? Easy-anything that doesn't support the theory must be faked and whatever they perceive as supporting the theory is authentic.

 

There is some truth in what you say, Tracy. I do what you described myself sometimes. But only if I feel the evidence is so strong that I consider the theory to be fact. (Though I always leave a door open to back out, just in case I later find I was fooled by something.)

Here's an example, though not a perfect analogy:

Nearly every medical professional in Parkland and autopsy witness saw a gaping hold in the back of Kennedy's head. And yet the back-of-head autopsy photo shows the scalp to be fully intact in back. Either those 40 or so witnesses are wrong, or the photo was faked. By necessity we have to choose which is true. I say the photo has been fake. You, on the other hand, apparently believe those 40 witnesses didn't see what they said they saw. Even though most of those witnesses are doctors and other medical professionals.

 

[Jim Hargrove]

32 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

But wasn't that some Eastern European accent Jim, according to Marina? Not American, as Jeremy is certainly suggesting?

Sandy,

Marina said he spoke with a Baltic accent and that she didn’t realize that he was a foreigner.  But this gets complicated because Marina was trying to hide the fact that she spoke English (Robert Webster said she spoke good English but with a heavy accent).  If Marina said “Oswald” spoke English, she would have to admit that she did too.  It’s almost funny.  Both these spies were trying to hide the fact that they could speak each other’s languages.

[John Butler]

1 hour ago, Jim Hargrove said:

John,

From H&L:

November/December-Lee Oswald in Fort Worth
(November 15 thru December 11, 1958)

On November 19, Marine Corps records show that Lee Oswald took a 30-day
leave, but there is no indication where he stayed during his leave. According to Robert
Oswald, Lee spent some of his time in Fort Worth and they hunted with .22 rifles at his
in-laws (the Mercers) farm. Robert said, "I recall this to be in the early fall of the year­
perhaps September."96  Robert Oswald's memory was a bit off. Lee Oswald's leave was from
November 19 to December 18, 1958.

Robert Oswald continued, "I recall two times that we had this type of light hunt­-
ing out there at that farm, at the same place. One time was during a leave that he had
from the Marine Corps. I don't recall any game at that particular time that we shot. I
know we did handle the rifle and fired maybe target practice, something along that
line."97 Robert took a photograph of Lee holding a rifle during one of those leaves. He
published a photograph of his husky, thick-necked brother between pages 96 and 97 in
his book, Lee. 58-27  

-- (From Harvey and Lee, pp. 208-209)

Note also that LEE opened a bank account at the West Side State Bank in Fort Worth on Dec. 8, 1958.

Jim,

This is very interesting.  Thanks for providing it.  So, there is no documentation for a Feb., 1958 leave while Lee was at Atsugi, Japan.  Or, as Robert recalled in the fall of the year perhaps September, either.  There is no documentation for that either.

The leave that Lee Oswald took when he left Atsugi, Japan is well documented as to time.  But, what did he do during that leave is an unanswered question.  One would assume he went back to see his family. 

 Robert said, "I recall this to be in the early fall of the year­ perhaps September"  contrasts startlingly with what he said in the inscription on the photo in question.  He said "Lee and I went squirrel hunting with Vada’s brother on the Mercers’ farm in February, 1958 when Lee was at home on leave from the Marines.  That’s my .22 rifle." 

The photo, as you say, comes from the book Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald published on January 1, 1967.  I would guess 9 or 10 years is enough time to develop a faulty memory.  But, the problem remains.  Neither time mentioned, Feb., 1958 or Sept., 1958,  by Robert Oswald was available for the original Lee Harvey Oswald to take leave and go to the US.

As we have agreed in the past, Robert Oswald was a member of good standing in the Oswald Project.  Is he believable?  Do we need to look closely at what he has said over time?  What he said doesn't match what you are saying.   

IMO, what Lee Oswald did on his leave when he returned to the US from Japan has nothing to do with what Robert said about Feb., 1958 or Sept., 1958.  We have to look at Robert and who was available to be Lee Harvey Oswald in those two time periods.  And, the only fellow available for this photo is Harvey from over at Pfisterer Dental Lab.  It is not a short distance between New Orleans and Ft. Worth/Dallas, but certainly one that can be traveled in a day. 

One other question bothers me about this photo.

What kind of squirrels were they hunting in this West Texas brush country?  Ground squirrels?  

 

Edited May 2, 2020 by John Butler

[Sandy Larsen]

On 5/1/2020 at 6:22 PM, Jim Hargrove said:

John,

Thank you for the montage above.  It's a heckuva post!  It should hardly surprise any of us that your visual analysis of the photographic record agrees precisely with John A's analysis of the written documentary record. According to both you and John A., LEE is LEE and HARVEY is HARVEY from two different perspectives. I always thought the surviving photographic record of "Lee Harvey Oswald" was too compromised to be of any use, but you have proved me wrong.

Do you want to add the earlobe analysis, and anything else that occurs to you, to the above?  Thanks again!  I also wonder if Sandy Larsen would like to contribute anything to this.

 

Oh, I nearly forgot to reply to this Jim. What did you mean by adding "to the above?"

 

[Jim Hargrove]

John,

You’re right that there are certainly some discrepancies in the timing of the leave.  John A. has all the Marine Corps records at Baylor University, but the online portal was recently damaged by an update and I can’t use it at all.  My inclination is always to go with John A., though.  He went deeper into all of this than anyone.

We agree that Robert was entirely in on the Oswald Project, though I think it was for entirely patriotic reasons.  There’s a Garrison document somewhere that says, from memory, “If you want to know what I really think, it’s that Robert knew this returning ‘defector’ was not really Lee, and that why he had to take such a long drive the night of the assassination.  He knew things were far more complicated than they seemed.”  (I may have butchered that a bit, but the meaning should be about right).

Sandy,

John B put some earlobe graphics at the bottom of an early version of his tooth montage and I wondered if he should put it back in.  On second thought, though, it’s probably better just to go with the teeth.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Jim Hargrove writes:

Quote

I sent the photo to John A. and he responded that he suspected the image was altered to show Harvey instead of Lee.

Tracy Parnell points out the obvious:

Quote

Question of the day-how does a H&L person know what evidence is faked and which is real? Easy-anything that doesn't support the theory must be faked and whatever they perceive as supporting the theory is authentic.

You'd think the believers would at least make an effort to demonstrate that the photo was faked. But it's hardly surprising that they don't, since they can't even agree on which photos depict which fictional character or which physical features belonged to which fictional character. Which one had the 13-inch head? Was that the same one who had the sloping shoulders, or was that the other one?

If the faithful can dismiss inconvenient evidence by claiming that it has been faked, their belief cannot in principle be disproved. 'Harvey and Lee' is just a superstitious belief.

The faithful are just like creationists. This fossil's a fake! And that one! And that other one over there! They're all fakes! The good lord put them there to test us, but our faith is strong! (Apologies to any religious fundamentalists who are reading this and who might feel insulted by being compared to a 'Harvey and Lee' believer.)
 

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Jim Hargrove writes:

Quote

Harvey Oswald made the kind of grammatical mistakes you would expect from someone who learned Russian as a child but switched to English at a young age.

I'm not aware of any evidence that Harvey Oswald spoke Russian at all, let alone that he had learned it as a child. Harvey Oswald was a native speaker of English, as was his nephew, Lee.

What's that, you aren't talking about the real-life, historical Harvey Oswald? You're talking about a character in a work of fiction that's very loosely based on Harvey Oswald's nephew? Ah, I see.

All the evidence that Jim has cited applies to the real-life, historical Lee Harvey Oswald: he had some knowledge of Russian while in the marines, and tried to minimise the appearance of this knowledge while in the Soviet Union. There's no need to invent a fictional character to explain any of this.

The evidence is overwhelming that the real-life, historical Lee Harvey Oswald was not a native (or, to be charitable to Jim, a near-native) speaker of Russian; that he made grammatical mistakes when speaking Russian even after having lived in the country for nearly three years; and that he spoke Russian with an accent.

Unfortunately, it is a central point of the 'Harvey and Lee' theory that the defector must have been a native (or near-native) speaker of Russian. That was the whole purpose of the elaborate, decade-long fictional impersonation scheme involving two Oswalds, two Marguerites, 13-inch heads, sloping shoulders, fake mastoidectomy operations in hospitals that hadn't been built yet, and all of the theory's other inventions. The Oswald who defected cannot have spoken with an accent, because doing so would have given the game away. Here again is the relevant sentence from page 10 of Armstrong's Harvey and Lee (Soon to be a major motion picture! Or not!):

Quote

And there is little point in sending an American agent, taught in the United States to speak a Slavic or Oriental language, to infiltrate these countries because they would speak with an accent.

But the one and only, real-life, historical Lee Harvey Oswald who defected to the Soviet Union did speak Russian with an accent. He did not speak Russian anywhere near as well as a native. That's because he was an American who had learned Russian in his teens and early twenties.
 

[Jim Hargrove]

2 hours ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

The evidence is overwhelming that the real-life, historical Lee Harvey Oswald was not a native (or, to be charitable to Jim, a near-native) speaker of Russian; that he made grammatical mistakes when speaking Russian even after having lived in the country for nearly three years; and that he spoke Russian with an accent.

Oh, brother.  Marina said she thought he was a native Russian because he spoke with a Baltic accent.  (Fun fact: Did you know that Russia borders the Baltic Sea?  St. Petersburg is a major Baltic port.)  But, we all know Marina was in a difficult position, so let's look at some other evidence.  This is from a post I made in 2017:

Yale University Slavic Language Department Prof. Vladimir Petrov wrote that a letter supposedly written by Harvey Oswald was actually "written by a Russian with an imperfect knowledge of English."

And, of course, we're supposed to believe that, while reading Russian magazines with a Russian-English dictionary in his spare time in the Marine Corps, and while working full time in a factory in Minsk and taking only a handful of language language tutoring session, Harvey Oswald learned to write Russian like this:

And, of course, we're supposed to assume that the H&L critics know more about Harvey Oswald's Russian abilities than his friend George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian immigrant who wrote the following in his manuscript entitled "I AM A PATSY! I AM A PATSY":

Incidentally I never saw him interested in anything else except Russian
books and magazines . He said he didn't want to forget the language -
but it amazed me that he read such difficult writers like Gorki, Dostoevski,
Gogol, Tolstoi and Turgenieff - in Russian. As everyone knows Russian is
a complex language and he was supposed to have stayed in the Soviet Union
only a little over two years. He must have had some previous training and
that point had never been brought up by the Warren Committee - and it is
still puzzling to me. In my opinion Lee was a very bright person but not
a genius. He never mastered the English language yet he learned such a dif-
icult language! I taught Russian at all level in a large University, and
I never saw such a profficiency in the best senior students who constantly
listened to  Russian tapes and spoke to Russian friends . As a matter of
fact American-born instructors never mastered Russian spoken language as
well as Lee did.

No doubt we're also supposed to believe the opinions of H&L critics over the opinions of other Russian immigrants around Dallas who met Harvey Oswald and shared their thoughts:

Natalie Ray was asked by Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler, "Did he (Oswald) speak to you in Russian?" Mrs. Ray replied, "Yes; just perfect; re­ally surprised me ... it's just too good speaking Russian for be such a short time, you know.... I said, 'How come you speak so good Russian? I been here so long and still don't speak very well English."

Mrs. Teofil (Anna) Meller was asked by Liebeler, "Do you think that his com­mand of the Russian language was better than you would expect for the period of time that he had spent in Russia?" Mrs. Meller replied, "Yes; absolutely better than I would expect."

Peter Gregory told Warren Commission Representative Gerald Ford, "I thought that Lee Oswald spoke (Russian) with a Polish accent, that is why I asked him if he was of Polish decent."

And on and on.