Jim Hargrove

Interesting.... I'll just add the following about Mr. and Mrs. Evans. Clearly Mr. and Mrs. Evans couldn’t have comprehended the full scope of the fraud the FBI/WC was perpetrating, but they also obviously didn’t recognize the woman who regarded them as her closest friends. Julian Evans said, “You wouldn't have recognized her if they hadn't told you who she was….” If Tracy wants to pretend that’s normal and that the earth is flat, he’s free to do so.

Oh, brother, here we go again.... Myrtle Evans and her husband Julian were friends with the real Marguerite Oswald for nearly three decades. Included in Julian Evans' April 7, 1964 WC testimony was this exchange with Jenner (emphasis added): Mr. JENNER - Give me your impression of Marguerite Oswald. Mr. EVANS - Marguerite? Mr. JENNER - Yes. Mr. EVANS - I think she's a fine woman, myself, a fine woman; intelligent, very soft spoken - a beautiful woman, with black hair streaked with a little gray, but when you saw her on television since this thing happened, she really looked awful; nothing at all like she used to look. She has really aged. She looked like a charwoman, compared to what she used to look like. She used to be a fashion plate. She dressed beautifully, but when we saw her on television just recently, after all this happened, she looked awful. There's no way to describe it, the change that has come over her. You wouldn't have recognized her if they hadn't told you who she was; she looked that different. Where her hair used to be black, now it's entirely gray, and she really looks Old Mr. JENNER - Well, she's 57, I believe. Mr. EVANS - That's right; she's the same age as my wife, but she looks about 70 now. That's about all I can remember about her, and then I saw this thing on television when the President was assassinated, and when it showed her picture, we just couldn't believe it was Marguerite. His wife Myrtle Evans testified on the same day: Mrs. EVANS - A very good housekeeper, very tasty; she could take anything and make something out of it, and something beautiful. She had a lot of natural talent that way, and she was not lazy. She would work with things by the hour for her children, and she kept a very neat house, and she was always so lovely herself. That's why, when I saw her on TV, after all of this happened, she looked so old and haggard, and I said, "That couldn't be Margie," but of course it was, but if you had known Margie before all this happened, you would see what I mean. She was beautiful. She had beautiful wavy hair. Mrs. Evans added this: And then there's Oswald's brother, John Pic....Mrs. EVANS - As far as I could see, they were very happy, very closely knit, very much in love with each other, and these boys knew that their mother was putting them through school, and giving them what they needed, as best she could. She was a very good provider for her children, and a very decent woman. I mean, she wasn't a loose woman at all. She was very decent, a very fine woman. Does that sound like the "Marguerite Oswald" we all heard about. And then there's Ed Voebel.... Mr. JENNER. Did you ever meet his mother? Mr. VOEBEL. I think I met her one time, and for some reason I had a picture in my mind which was different from when I saw her in the paper after all of this happened. I didn't recognize her. She was a lot thinner, and her hair wasn't as gray, as I recall it, when I met her. Of course, this was about 8 years ago, but I can remember she had a black dress on, and she was sitting down smoking a cigarette; now, maybe she wasn't smoking, but this is a picture that comes to my mind as I recall that. Of course, none of these people could have possibly known about the elaborate charade that comprised the Oswald Project, but they clearly were surprised at phony Marguerite's appearance in 1964. Mr. and Mrs. Evans both testified that the Lee Harvey Oswald they knew was loud and boisterous, with a "foghorn voice." This is certainly not the quiet, withdrawn, passive-aggresive kid described by the Warren Commission. And then there's Oswald's brother, John Pic.... You wanna discuss that, Tracy?

Harvey Oswald (the guy killed by Ruby) apparently did go through boot camp and was stationed at some USMC bases afterward, but he was hardly a normal Marine. He spent much of his so-called enlistment time living in New Orleans doing civilian work. http://harveyandlee.net/Marines/Marines.html

Thanks, David! Don’t know why I’ve been so slow seeing the significance of this simple observation, but it looks to me that your shoulder slope argument is really credible. Assuming this sort of thing (for relaxed shoulders) remains relatively constant for a number of years it sure seems to me like a real, measurable distinction between the two Oswalds. Has anyone made a believable critique of it? Have you shown this to John? If not, I’ll send him a link to this page and try to get him to look, unless you’d rather do it.

David, Do you have more visual comparisons of the shoulders? I seem to recall you’ve posted one or two other montages before. Could you post them all again if you have some others at hand? I’d like to take a more careful look. This may be a real tell to distinguish the Terrible Twosome. I can't recall John ever talking about this, and so it may be your discovery.

DJ said above that he doesn’t believe the fellow in the Carousel audience was either Oswald, and I always take his opinion seriously because he has an awfully good eye for this visual stuff. I DO agree though, that to me at least, it sure looks like the image on the 1959 passport. And about that image…. John has said for two decades that he believes LEE Oswald’s mug shot was stapled to HARVEY Oswald’s passport application (and therefore appeared on the finished passport). I was sure John was right until a few months ago when Michael Walton produced an animated GIF showing similarities of that image with a known shot of HARVEY. I tried to get John to look at the GIF, but he said he wasn’t interested, giving a reason that I can’t repeat here without being in total violation of forum rules. A couple of other things…. Your distinction of the wide vs. narrow widow’s peaks on the two Oswalds strikes me as a good one. Thanks also for the writeup on the wife beating allegations. I was never convinced that Harvey hit her (even once), though it is possible. Once Hoover decided to vilify Harvey in every way conceivable, it becomes pretty hard to do a real investigation into stuff like that after the fact. Interesting, though, that the alleged episodes seemed to always occur when Harvey was alone with Marina, and there were therefore no other witnesses. Could Marina have been instructed to leave Harvey?

Sandy – If you remember the name of the white Russian who said Oswald didn’t drink, please post it. My recollection of the wife beater allegations was that they were mostly (or entirely) rumors and hearsay, though Marina apparently did have a facial bruise she claimed she got accidentally. What did you decide about the whole wife-beating controversy? Joe – Author Michael Eddowes believed LHO was a Soviet plant, but he also believed the published reports of the 1981 exhumation and apparently abandoned his claims. To me, though, this all makes the CIA’s claims that it had no interest in interviewing LHO upon his return from the USSR all the more laughable. One more thing about Oswald and alcohol. Fred Moore’s FBI interview that LEE Oswald bought beer the morning of the assassination is really quite believable. Although his description of the fellow sounds more like HARVEY than LEE, it is clear that HARVEY was at the TSBD when this incident occurred, and media images of HARVEY might have colored his recollections. If Moore’s customer was the same beer-drinking LEE Oswald who got court-martialled for his drunken behavior in the Marine Corps, we have to wonder if he was seeking liquid courage for instructions he was about to follow on November 22, 1963.

I agree with everything Joe says above. We've talked in this thread about how American-born LEE Oswald was apparently two inches taller and twenty pounds or more heavier than Russian-speaking HARVEY Oswald, but we haven't talked about the two men's different approaches to alcohol, which is sometimes a tell to distinguish them. Lee Oswald drank beer and other alcoholic beverages, sometimes to excess. In June 1958 he was drinking beer in a Yamato bar near his Marine base and tried to get into a fight with a Marine staff sergeant and ended up in a court martial. Part of his defense was that he was drunk at the time. Skipping a number of other incidents, on assassination day there is credible evidence that LEE Oswald drank three beers in the morning. Harvey Oswald, as you say, seems to have been a teetotaler. None of the Dallas police or anyone else made any mention of alcohol on his breath on 11/22. Marina testified several different times that her husband “doesn’t drink beer; he doesn’t drink anything, he doesn’t like beer.”

Except for the events around early October 63 (Alice Texas, etc), which even JA can’t explain and may have involved more than two Oswalds, I think the events around assassination day and the previous decade are best explained by one real Oswald and one impostor. (The Oswald killed by Ruby was actually the impostor.) Any time a second, third, or fourth impostor might be added, would that not become a second, third, or fourth loose end with the potential to unravel after the hit? And if, for example, you didn’t have an Oswald with a legit Texas drivers license, you’d have to find someone to forge it… yet another potential loose end. How would you ensure the silence of all concerned? From 1959 to 1963, virtually every existing document lists “Lee Harvey Oswald’s” height as either 5’9” or 5’11”. The single exception being an arrest record that Tommy Graves found which, if memory serves, listed his height as 5’10”. If more than two Oswalds were involved during this period, you’d think the heights (and weights as well) wouldn’t cluster around just two nexuses. Let’s say just for grins that you’re David Atlee Phillips and for a decade you’d managed two young men sharing the same identity for the Russia project. Since both these young men had proved that they could follow orders and get the job done, why would you look anywhere else for a potential patsy and set-up man in the assassination of JFK? Best yet, the USG connections of both young men would help shut down any real investigation by Hoover.

I'm not so sure about point #2. There is a bit of history about Lee and his driver's license. See, for example http://harveyandlee.net/Driving/Drive.htm It's a reasonably short page and should take just twenty minutes or so to go though.

The inset photo is from HARVEY Oswald's passport, and I agree that it looks just like the fellow at the Carousel Club. But LEE Oswald, as you say, clearly had been developing a pronounced widow's peak during the late 1950s. I can only figure that LEE Oswald began wearing a toupee, or the photos have been retouched. We probably ALWAYS have to take the photographic "evidence" in this case with a grain of salt. As James Norwood wrote on my website, "From the inception of the Warren Commission hearings, photographic evidence has been used to sow dissent and confusion for JFK researchers.... Mr. Armstrong is absolutely correct in suggesting that we need to approach all photographs with a healthy skepticism. The unreliability of the pictorial evidence should alert students of the JFK case to the danger of over-reliance on photographs—both of documents and images of people."

Probably because so much evidence has been suppressed, it’s pretty tough to prove that the fellow who set up “Harvey” as the patsy was “Lee,” but there are some decent indications. For example, on November 2 a fellow saying he was LHO went to the Downtown Lincoln Mercury dealership in Dallas and test drove a car at recklessly high speeds and said he would soon come into enough money to be able to buy a new car. I know that whenever I test drove a car from a dealer, I first had to produce a driver’s license, which, if memory serves, was usually photocopied by the sales rep. But Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald famously did not have a driver’s license. Not so famously, Lee Oswald apparently did have one. Someone bearing at least a passing resemblance to Harvey Oswald was seen at various places on 11/22/63, including the sixth floor of the TSBD shortly before the assassination and at 10th and Patton during the Tippit killing. (There’s obviously a lot of confusion from the eyewitness, but the closest observer, Domingo Benavides, thought the killer looked like LHO except for the back of his hair.) Jack Ruby appears to have been far more involved in the actual assassination of JFK than we previously though, and there is a lot of evidence that American-born Lee Oswald was associated with him. Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen wrote in the New York Journal American (June 6, 1964): “It is known that 10 persons have signed sworn depositions to the Warren Commission that they knew Oswald and Ruby to have been acquainted.”

Norman Mailer wrote a whole book about LHO, much of it about his time in Russia, and Mailer talked endlessly about real or imaginary dialog between Marina and Oswald, and not once did he hazard an opinion about what language they were speaking in.

Are you aware, Sandy, of the 1980’s entire crack cocaine epedemic / Contra / Oliver North / Gary Webb / CIA story? Do you know what happened during the 1980’s in L.A. during the CIA’s crack cocaine drug war? Do our G-men suck, or would you offer them solace? True enough. But if you were a CIA drug lord knowledgeable about Harvey and Lee, who would you pick to impersonate Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald? Some newcomer with no experience in this case, unknown to the USG… or the guy whose identity Harvey had shared for more than a decade? I’m not alone here appreciating your honesty. Thanks for being here, Sandy!

Marina said that she thought Oswald spoke Russian "with a Baltic accent" when she first met him in early 1961, but I'd take that with a grain of salt. She was probably trying to hide her command of English during her earliest years here and wouldn't want to say that she and her future husband spoke English in the USSR.

The evidence shows the exact opposite of what Mr. Parnell suggests. Little more than a year after arriving in the Soviet Union, “Lee Harvey Oswald” was, according to Marina, reading “classical novels, some Russian classic writers… in Russian.” According to Mr. Parnell’s Theory of Reading Education, beginning readers in the U.S. should start out reading James Joyce and William Faulkner, not more simple things like “Dick and Jane” or other beginning books. Even more laughable is Mr. Parnell’s attempt to dismiss the evidence that Oswald attended Stripling School, memorialized in his amusingly short and incomplete Web essay: http://wtracyparnell.blogspot.com/2017/04/robert-oswald-and-stripling.html Mr. Parnell neglects to inform his readers that fellow Stripling classmates Doug Gann, Bobby Pitts, and Fran Schubert all remembered Lee HARVEY Oswald attended Stripling. Fran Schubert even submitted to a YouTube interview with John Armstrong: Gym teacher Mark Summers, who didn’t begin teaching at Stripling until 1950, remembered that Oswald was in his gym class. Mr. Parnell apparently does not want to alert his readers to John’s YouTube interview with Stripling assistant principal Frank Kudlaty, who gave Lee HARVEY Oswald’s Stripling records to the FBI immediately after the assassination. The house at 2220 Thomas that DJ talked about above was directly across the street from Stripling, and was clearly some sort of CIA safe house, lived in by “Marguerite” at several different times from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Could this be wrong?

Bump!

Will no Warren Commission defender on this forum answer this simple post?

Yo-ho-ho, Tommy…. I’ve been away from home and ignoring the Internets for a while, but now I’m back and ready to discuss stuff.... What “gem” from Harvey and Lee would you like to attack next? Do you still want to talk about Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald’s incredible Russian-speaking abilities? Or, uh, do you need to speak to Gregory Parker first? If not, let’s talk about this: As I keep saying, I’ve been reluctant to use Marina Prusakova’s testimony in my arguments about Harvey Oswald’s Russian fluency because I think she was really put in a difficult position of having to hide her own English proficiency from the U.S.G., which forced her to be less than totally forthcoming. But here’s another part of her HSCA testimony that I do tend to believe, partly because it was confirmed by DeMohrenschildt. Mr. McDONALD. Did he read a lot when he was in the Soviet Union? Mrs. PORTER. Yes. Mr. McDONALD. What kind of books did he read there? Mrs. PORTER. Novels mostly. Mr. McDONALD. What kind of novels? Mrs. PORTER. What you call maybe as classical novels, some Russian classic writers. Mr. McDONALD. The novels or the books that he read in the Soviet Union, were they in Russian? Mrs. PORTER. They were in Russian; yes. And, of course, DeMohrenschildt added that “it amazed me that he read such difficult writers like Gorki, Dostoevski, Gogol, Tolstoi and Turgenieff -- in Russian.” We’re told that Harvey Oswald arrived in Russia on October 15, 1959 and married Marina on April 30, 1961. Are we to believe that Harvey taught himself enough Russian in a year and a half in Russia to read and discuss the “difficult writers” De M. talked about? Really?? No doubt a linguist as smart as you could do that effortlessly. No doubt Parker/Parnell will agree. Love is a wonderful thing, eh? Do you agree?

Mr. Parnell continues to tell us that the U.S. government can be trusted to investigate itself in the tragic matter of the Kennedy assassination. There are many proven examples of government malfeasance in this case. Here are several of my favorites, since they just take seconds to explain. One is FBI agent James Cadigan's sworn testimony that was altered because he inadvertently explained that that possessions of "Lee Harvey Oswald" were secretly transferred to the FBI on the very night of JFK's assassination, then secretly returned to Dallas a few days later, and then publicly sent to the FBI a few days after that. And Atty. Mark Lane, soon after the publication of the Warren Commission report and other volumes, interviewed three Dealey Plaza witnesses showing how the FBI altered their observations suggesting there were other shooters in the Plaza. Watch this three minute video: I have already shown earlier in this thread how dishonest the HSCA was in attempting to explain how "Lee Harvey Oswald" was simultaneously in Japan and Taiwan (and en route to Taiwan). There are many other examples of both the Warren Commission's and the HSCA's treachery in this case, but Mr. Parnell wants us to believe their "evidence" anyway.

It's not me. It's not even JA. This knowledge belongs to the American people and the world! Unlike every other person on this forum, and unlike everyone else on every other JFK forum, I understand most of Harvey and Lee. With just a tiny push from honest people like you, the truth ALWAYS wins, and you're seeing that simple fact unfold right in front of your eyes, despite all my critics. EDIT: I forgot to mention David Josephs. Although he doesn't post as much in the H&L threads as he used to, he understands Harvey and Lee as well as I do.

Yep! That’s what Dr. Hartogs said when the FBI was in charge of delivering his words. When Hartogs himself was in charge of what he said about Harvey Oswald, the report was a whole lot different. In his 1965 book The Two Assassins, Dr. Renatus Hartogs described the Oswald he met as a “slender, dark-haired boy with a pale, haunted face…. He had an underfed look, reminiscent of the starved children I had seen in concentration camps.” All of this information has been available in Harvey and Lee for nearly 15 years now. Btw, Sandy, your description of the character traits of Harvey vs. Lee seems right on the money. Lee, however, did not have serious truancy problems. Lee, not Harvey, shot himself in the arm in the USMC.

Yes. Lee’s schooling can be traced back to Benbrook School in Texas in 1945. But very little is known about Harvey’s schooling until he barely attends the seventh grade at PS 117 in NYC in 1952. He then attended PS 44 in the Bronx. New York City was a clever choice for Harvey Oswald’s school placement. Public schools in the city were given numbers that were often repeated in some of the five boroughs. While Harvey attended PS 44 in the Bronx, Lee was probably (according to info from Robert Oswald’s book) at PS 44 in Manhattan. Despite the cleverness of the NYC school operation, Oswald Project handlers faced a real problem due to Harvey’s truancy and legal problems in NY. They couldn’t risk sending Harvey and phony Marguerite to court to answer the charges; but sending Lee and real Marguerite risked a total meltdown from Lee, who would want to ask the judge why in hell he was being charged with truancy when he had only missed a day or two of school in a year. The answer, of course, was to flee NYC, which is exactly what happened. The Beauregard situation has been discussed at length here, and Harvey’s Stripling records disappeared while in FBI custody. That leaves just Harvey’s VERY brief stays at Warren Easton and Arlington High.