George de Mohrenschildt on Lee Harvey Oswald

[John Simkin]

George de Mohrenschildt, I'm a Patsy (1977)

I hope that this book will correct the generally low opinion people in this country have had on Lee. Maybe this new focus on him will have some influence on the ultimate judgement on the assassination of President Kennedy.

Lee Harvey Oswald might have been sometimes violent, like almost anyone amongst us, he might kill a person he hated, he might have been violent to a racist or a pseudo-racist, to someone who might want to hurt him and his family. But to assassinate the President he rather admired, just for the glory of it, is entirely foreign to his personality.

Lee cared for freedom in this country and he cared for the improvement of the world tension at the time. And this type of a person was benign moved from one place to another by the Dallas police, the movements were announced, the crowds were there, and thus he was shot and killed.

Some other aspects of Lee's personality must emerge from this book. It shows that Lee was not a harmful person, on the contrary a rather inspiring individual." his deep desire to improve relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. It took twelve years and a man like Kissinger to achieve partially this purpose. At last the latent animosities between these superpowers are dissipating.

But Lee hoped for more he hoped that these two powerful countries would become friends and he thrived to achieve it in a naive and maybe foolish, but sincere, way. It is clear now that the war between these two countries would end in a holocaust. And so, Lee Harvey Oswald had dreamed and hoped for a detente and for friendship, not so bad for a high-school dropout from a New Orleans slum.

It is always better for all of us to be friends than to fight, only insane people would want to fight now with the available nuclear arsenal. These insane people are forcing other to believe in the superiority of any weaponry. We can kill all the Russians hundred of times over and they can do the same to us. So where does a "superiority" lead?

It is my firm opinion that lee was never sure he was right, but he was always groping for truth, for a light.

It must come out clearly from all the material I had gathered here that Lee was above all anti-segregationist, he was anti any people who discriminate against any minorities, against any underprivileged.

Both Lee and I firmly believed that subservience to any dominant political idea is wrong, people should try to discover an ideology which fits them, even though it might be unpopular, and follow it. If not , we would become the same dummies Russians were during Stalin's time. Their servility backfired and they became victims of it. "They did not try to find out who was right and who was wring," Lee told me during one of our conversations, which often dealt with the Stalinist times in Russia. He had learned a lot in Minsk. "Free people," he had said, "should not remain mere pawns in the world game of chess played by the rulers."

Some time ago I saw a program, sponsored by some safety razor firm, which featured Lee talking in New Orleans on the radio. This was regarding his pro-Cuban activity. The program was taped and Lee's photos were inserted. Lee spoke rather intelligently but the inserted photos made his look ugly and threatening. It was a nasty way to portray a dead man. Technically the program was awful; had no much sense anyway, but its purpose was to brainwash the American people into believing more firmly that Lee was the sole and only assassin.

And we will never know the whole truth until someone will come forward, confess and will accept the guilt.

Let's recall some of my conversations with Lee regarding Fidel Castro. Lee was rather an admirer of Fidel and especially of Che Guevara, a romantic, swashbuckling personage. In his mind Fidel was a sincere man who aimed to the best for his country, to eradicate racial prejudice and to bring a social equality to his people. I do not think he knew very much about Cuba and his information came through his contacts with Cuban students and technicians he had met in Minsk.

Lee liked Fidel as a representative of a small country, an underdog, facing fearlessly a huge and powerful country like United States.

Che appealed to him as a handsome, brilliant doctor, who had traveled around Latin America, discovering basic injustices and who eventually tried to correct them . He did know that in some of the poorest parishes of Mexico the peasants considered him a new Savior. Now Che is dead, the man who killed him was assassinated recently in Paris. So it's all immaterial.

Regarding the Bay of Pigs, Lee thought it was an utter disaster. He was sure that we would not have gotten involved in the internal affairs of Cuba. He was against the Cuban refugees, but this subject was not discussed too much between us. He thought that Cuba before Castro was a whorehouse for the American tourists, headquarters of American racketeers like Lansky and Co. there were his opinions.

As far as I was concerned, I was not sure whether he was right or not, I knew Cuba very slightly myself, I was there a year or so before Castro's victory over Battista. To me it was a cheerful, corrupt country; but austerity did not seem to fit the Cuban sunny natures.

Lee thought President Kennedy should not allow any invasion of Cuba, but he was not revengeful or violent in his views on this subject. I have the impression that the matter was of not much interest to him. Lee never expressed any hatred for Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs, he just calmly assessed as a very foolish action.

Remember that many Cuban refugees and their relatives paid with their lives for this invasion, and the ones who remained alive and here consider the disaster Kennedy's fault. I cannot visualize Lee being in cahoots with these Cuban refugees in New Orleans, as some sources suggest but he might have played his own game, meeting some of them, checking just for the hell of it what their motivations were.

The amusing and attractive side of Lee's personality was that he liked to play with his own life, he was an actor in real life. A very curious individual.

On the other hand, I can very easily visualize Lee joining a pro-Castro group.

In my humble opinion, as indicated by some events and conversations in this book, the Kennedy family did not want to pursue the matter of finding the real, unquestionable, assassin, nor a conspiracy. And they could have done it with their own, immense, privat resources. If somebody would kill my son or my brother, I certainly would want to be sure who did it. But possibly the personality of Lee Harvey Oswald suited perfectly the political purposes of the Kennedy family.

Lee was a "lunatic" and a "Marxist" who killed John F. Kennedy without any reason and made a martyr of him. And so, the matter was closed for ever. Why look for more responsible people?