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EVIDENCE FOR HARVEY AND LEE (Please debate the specifics right here. Don't just claim someone else has debunked it!)


Jim Hargrove

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Don't change the subject to Stripling Jim....

We both agree there is more than ample H&L evidence that we don't need to reach....  

The evidence offered to put Oswald at BJHS simply doesn't do it.... it much more strongly supports a child entering in January 1954....

So the Grade cards that don't match this final and permanent record isn't good enough for ya?
The dates which FBI Malone attempts  to convince us of.... WRONG, doesn't work and as I wrote, no real school administrator would write 109 attended school days in less than 3 months of a semester - let alone another 15 absences and  11 half days....  doesn't add up Jim.

So yes, I agree he was at Stripling....  I believe I read that Robert Oswald wrote that his brother was in Manhattan for the Fall 1953 semester... at yet a different PS44 - there were three of them in fact....

Take care
DJ

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David,

I'm not changing the subject.  I'm pointing out that during one school year we have one Oswald attending PS44 in New York City and another attending Beauregard in New Orleans.  The very next school year, we have one LHO at Beauregard, as the WC-published records show, and another LHO at Stripling.  The Stripling records were confiscated by the FBI and have since disappeared, but it was (and according to a recent local newspaper report still is) common knowledge that Oswald attended Stripling.  Showing evidence for two Oswalds in two consecutive school years is hardly changing the subject.

I'm not sure I understand your other point, and so if the Ed Forum will forgive me, I'll re-post the full Beauregard stuff from just a little earlier here so we can, uh, be on the same page.  Here 'tis:

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59 minutes ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Hi, David,

Let’s go through the conflicting school records in more detail, starting with the PS44 records from New York City....

In 1953, Marguerite and LEE were living in a basement apartment at 1455 Sheridan while LEE was attending PS 44 in New York City. After the assassination SAC John Malone, the FBI agent in charge of the New York Office, inspected Oswald's original court file in the presence of Judge Florence Kelley. Malone took notes and sent a report to FBI Director Hoover the following day. Malone wrote, "Oswald's attendance record at PS #44 from 3/23/53 to 1/12/54 was 171 and 11 half-days present and 18 and 11 half days absent. If LEE Oswald's 182 days of attendance (171 full days, 11 1/2 days) and 18 absences are plotted on 1953 and 1954 calendars it is easy to see that LEE Oswald attended PS 44 full time during the entire 1953 school year.

NYC%20school%20record.jpg

Now let’s see how the PS 44 and Beauregard records conflict with each other.

I’m re-posting below the Beauregard cumulative record for LHO and below that two pages from an FBI report analyzing it.  Remember that the PS44 records clearly indicated that LHO attended more than 62 school days (and was absent three and a fraction days) for the semester beginning 9/14/53 at the NYC school.

Beauregard%20Record.jpg

53-54%20%233%20Beauregard.jpg53-54%20%234%20Beauregard.jpg

Page 10 of the FBI report summarizes the attendance data in the “Absent,” “Tardy,” “Left” and “Re-Ad” columns, which are explained, according to the FBI agents, starting at the bottom of page 10 and continuing to page 11 by William Head, assistant principal at Warren Easton High School, who received the Beauregard records for incoming students.

At the bottom of page 10, the FBI indicates he said that the “Re ad” column stood for “Re Admitted” and “would represent a total listing of the school days for a given school year.”  But later in the very same paragraph, now at the top of page 11, the report indicates that Head said a school year regularly consisted of 180 days and that “school days in any given year must not fall below 170” and that “therefore the numbers listed opposite this abbreviation indicated the number of school days that Oswald attended for a given school year.”

So which is it?  Does the “Re-Ad” column represent the number of school days in a school semester or year, or the number of days a student actually attended during that period?

The answer is right before us in the documents shown above.    In the actual Beauregard cumulative record for LHO (top document above), look at the very last entry on the far right under the “Re-Ad” column.  It shows a total of “168” days for the 1954-55 school year. Head indicated that Louisiana law dictated a minimum of 170 school days in a school year, and so if we’re to believe that every student report card at Beauregard for the 1954-55 school year was evidence that Louisiana law was being broken.  On the other hand, using my interpretation (that the “168” indicated the actual days LHO attended school) we can make perfect sense of these numbers.  Adding Oswald’s 168 days of attendance and his 12 absences comes out to exactly 180 days, just what Head said comprised a typical Beauregard school year!

The “Re Ad” column clearly indicates the number of days a student actually attended school.  So let’s look at the first semester of the 1953-54 school year at Beauregard.  It indicates that Oswald attended 89 days and was absent once, for a total of 90 school days.

For the 1953 fall semester at PS 44 in New York, Oswald attended 62 and a fraction days and was absent three and a fraction days for a total of 66 school days accounted for.  Add those 66 days to the 90 days from Beauregard and you get at total of 156 days, equivalent to nearly an entire school year!  As you pointed out above, it is obvious that Harvey Oswald was a part-time student for this semester at Beauregard.  I believe this was carefully planned to gradually re-introduce him to New Orleans and its public school system.  NYC obviously had been a real problem, not for Lee, but for Harvey.  His truancy from school and his entanglement in NYC courts threatened to expose the Oswald Project.

Just for clarity.

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Here's my 2 cents:

If we assume that these two school records haven't been monkeyed with, they both look pretty believable for the most part... given that we accept that there were two Oswald's. (Had there been only one Oswald, we'd have to accept that he attended both schools simultaneously. A fact the apparently doesn't bother the anti-H&L club.)

I believe that Jim is right about the meaning of the Re Ad column on the Beauregard record. And I can't believe that the Fall 1953 Beauregard record could be reflecting an Oswald who began attending late in the semester, as David suggests. (Though, remember, I'm assuming for the moment that the records are legit. If the FBI altered the records, there's no way of knowing what really happened. So let's stick with my assumption of unaltered records for now.)

Now, David on the other hand has a very good point regarding the 109 days Ozzie was present, as recorded for the spring of 1953 on the PS 44 record. If you ask me, that's the only sticking point with the records, but it's an important one. I can think of only two ways to explain that. Either Oswald attended summer school, or that 109 is a clerical error. (Yes, clerical errors DO sometimes occur. Just not near as often as the anti-H&L club and WC apologists would have us believe.)

David pointed out that Oswald didn't attend summer school. If that information came from the FBI -- and where else would it have come from? -- couldn't it have been altered for some reason? This and the clerical error idea seem like the simplest, and therefore most likely, explanations for the 109-days-present sticking point.

 

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Sandy’s clear analyses are always appreciated.  It does seem that summer school attendance is the only explanation for the numbers David quoted, but I have to agree with DJ that these documents have probably been “monkeyed with,” to quote Sandy’s phrase, just as the rifle documents were fabricated, “Oswald’s” possessions list was vastly altered, and the Dealey Plaza witnesses statements were fabricated out of thin air.  That’s just how the FBI rolled.

If these are composite documents created by the FBI, the numbers had to come from somewhere, and I’ll bet they were just transferred from the legitimate documents.  Fake or not, there is no innocent explanation for this material.  

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4 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Sandy’s clear analyses are always appreciated.  It does seem that summer school attendance is the only explanation for the numbers David quoted, but I have to agree with DJ that these documents have probably been “monkeyed with,” to quote Sandy’s phrase, just as the rifle documents were fabricated, “Oswald’s” possessions list was vastly altered, and the Dealey Plaza witnesses statements were fabricated out of thin air.  That’s just how the FBI rolled.

If these are composite documents created by the FBI, the numbers had to come from somewhere, and I’ll bet they were just transferred from the legitimate documents.  Fake or not, there is no innocent explanation for this material.  

Jim,

The fall 1953/54 record from BJHS is not an FBI record, is it? It is, in fact, the record from the New Orleans School District itself, isn't it? I am referring to the document with the grades of "70" for both General Science and Physical Education. It appears to me that it was filled out by NOSD officials. 

Beauregard%20Record.jpg

I ask because at the top, it says that Oswald received a "p" during 53 - 54 Summer School Session in at least one class. Beneath that line, but still in the Summer School Session section, it lists the 54-55 session, but neither "p" or "f" is recorded. 

"P" is passing.

"F" is failing.

It also appears to me that the year "53-54" has been altered slightly. It appears to have originally read "52 - 54". More interestingly, in the column marked "Grade" (meaning school year), the extant "9" is distinctly different from the "9" beneath it. 

The lower "9" in the 54-55 row, appears authentic.

The upper "9" does not.

I think it originally was a "7" and was later altered to read "9".

If I am right, might that indicate that Oswald took at least one summer school class at Beauregard, probably at the conclusion of his 7th grade year during the summer of 1952?

Does anyone else see an altered "9" at the top?

Can anyone tell me why "Oswald" apparently received a "p" for at least one class in summer school, maybe during the summer of 1952 (or maybe 1953?)

 

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Paul,

The Beauregard school records are supposed to be genuine school documents, but some of us have our doubts.  Remember how all this stuff was gathered.  Within hours of the assassination, FBI agents were busy in New York City, New Orleans, and the Dallas area confiscating all the original school and teen-aged employment records of “Lee Harvey Oswald.” And the originals all disappeared. The Warren Commission was shown black and white photos of the documents.  Some NYC officials went so far as to question the feds asking what happened to their records.  

Why were these original documents deep-sixed?  One reason would be so they could be altered, a process much easier on b&w copies than on originals.    That said, I’m sure if there were alterations they were as few and as minor as was possible.  Gross changes might be noticed.

I’m not sure I’d put much importance on those faint marks in the summer school section.  No year, no school, no subject and no courses are listed, and the faint marks don’t even appear to me to be in the 53-54 row or the 54-55 row.  It may just be an impression or bleed through from another form, but that’s conjecture on my part.

My guess is that the FBI wouldn’t just try to change numbers by writing over existing numbers.  I think they were more thorough than that.  

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Karl,

Harvey and Lee is important and complicated.  The people over at the Deep Politics Forum were discussing setting up an entire subject board devoted just to Harvey and Lee, but John and I thought it would be better not to do that.  We asked them not to set it up, knowing full well it wasn't our call, but they were kind enough to agree.  No one is forcing you to read this stuff.

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You and KK are a riot....

You both run down to the TV station and tell them to stop broadcasting programming you don't like... or have already written an editorial about

or - like the rest of us - do you just turn the channel to something you enjoy ??

Like you're FORCED to click on the H&L thread
 

I think y'all just like trying to understand all 65,000 reasons why H&L are.... then again

You ain't gonna learn what you don't wanna know.....  :up

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I’m fully versed on the Friends of Democratic Cuba (FDC) and the cast of characters associated with it and the Bolton Ford incident, so you needn’t belabor my “hopeless ignorance.” 

To form a corporation in Louisiana in 1961, the incorporators were merely required to be three natural persons of at least age 21.  I can tell you from extensive experience that no one where the articles of incorporation were filed cared who the incorporators, directors or officers actually were.  If there had been something sinister about the FDC from the get-go, names such as Dalzell, Bannister and Tugague, which conspiracy buffs now drool over, would never have appeared in the articles at all.  There is every reason to believe that the FDC was organized pretty much in the way and for the purposes that the founder William Dalzell testified during the Garrison investigation.

Regarding the Bolton Ford incident:

1.  Someone would have to explain to me how it would have made any sense whatsoever for the Bolton Ford Oswald to be openly associated with an extreme anti-Castro organization at the very time that the Minsk Oswald was sitting in the USSR as a pro-Marxist defector.  Wouldn’t things like flaunting the Oswald name in connection with the FDC have run a rather large risk of the entire H&L scam being exposed?

2.  And what would have been the purpose of flaunting the Oswald name in the Bolton Ford incident anyway?  What conceivable purpose would this have served at the time or would the H&L organizers have supposed it might later serve?  If it did come to light, as it did, wouldn’t the association between the Bolton Ford Oswald and the FDC have been rather inconvenient for the Minsk Oswald’s later role as a pro-Castro assassination patsy?  Are we once again witnessing the “Geniuses at steps 1-3-5, idiots at steps 2-4-6” syndrome endemic to the Conspiracy Game?

3.  At the time of the Bolton Ford incident, the Minsk Oswald had just been rejected by Ella German and had not yet even met Marina.  He had just renewed his Soviet residency and had made no efforts to return to the U.S.  How did the H&L organizers know on January 20, 1961 that he would ever be returning to the U.S.?  Was the H&L scam so perfect that even the Soviets were guaranteed to play along?

4.  At the time of the Bolton Ford incident, JFK had been President for exactly one day, the Bay of Pigs fiasco was three months away and the assassination was 33 months away.  Again, what was the purpose of flaunting the Bolton Ford Oswald’s name in connection with anti-Castro organizations and activities at this early date?

5.  William Dalzell, the FDC founder who seems to have been pretty candid with Garrison’s team and especially with the HSCA investigators, testified that the FDC had no funds but actually was interested in buying six panel trucks and had looked into pricing, so something like the Bolton Ford incident may have taken place.  However:

a.  How likely is it that a Ford dealership would retain the carbon copy of a price quotation on a sale that never took place for almost three years?

b.  How likely is it that the day after the assassination the unsuccessful salesman (Deslatte) would recall the anti-Castro Friends of Democratic Cuba, somehow associate it with the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the news reports about Oswald, and quickly locate the three-year-old price quotation?  (Deslatte specifically said that the name Oswald is not what triggered his recollection.)

c.  Three days after the assassination, Deslatte did not recognize a photo of the Minsk Oswald and did not associate the photo with the Bolton Ford Oswald.  If the H&L scam were in operation, wouldn’t one have expected Deslatte at least to say “Well, yes, it does kind of look like him”?

d.  Despite what he told the FBI as described in item c above, Deslatte ostensibly told his friend Charles Pearson at Graham Paper Company that he had been contacted by the Oswald of assassination fame.  Pearson told his office manager Mary Cusco, who in turn apparently told Carlos Bringuier, who obviously knew who Oswald was and that he was pro-Castro.  Less than three weeks after the assassination, Bringuier reported all this to the Secret Service!  How likely does this strike you?  Bringuier now wants the late Oswald to be associated with anti-Castro activities such as he himself is engaged in?  Does this not smell just a bit fishy to you?

e.  If the Bolton Ford incident was such a potential bombshell, why did the FBI allow the interview with Deslatte to see the light of day?  Why would they not have flushed it and intimidated him and his manager Fred Sewell into keeping quiet as they supposedly did with other witnesses?  The genius/idiot syndrome again?

f.  Deslatte lived until 1998 and was only 74 then.  Why did no intrepid assassination buff attempt to flesh out his story?  Nah, we like Fred Sewell's version better.

6.  The H&L version of the Bolton Ford incident is based almost entirely on the recollections of Sewell in 1967.

a.  Insofar as we can tell, Deslatte never so much as mentioned Sewell in his account to the FBI three days after the assassination.  How likely is this if Sewell was as much a part of the incident as his 1967 recollections suggest?  If Delsatte had mentioned Sewell, how likely is it that the FBI would not have interviewed Sewell?

b.  Sewell’s “recollections” in 1967 in connection with the Garrison investigation were fantastically better than anything Deslatte had recalled almost four years earlier (a not uncommon phenomenon with witnesses associated with Garrison).  Now Sewell vividly recalled both men and the fact that Oswald had identified himself as Lee.  How likely is this?

c.  Sewell likewise lived until the mid-1990s.  Why did no intrepid assassination buff attempt to flesh out his story?  (Actually, A. J. Weberman did interview him in 1993 and found him hopelessly confused by then.  I believe he would have been around 80 at this time.  His wife died in 2016, when she was 101.)

To me, the Bolton Ford incident is one more example of what characterizes the H&L mythology and much of conspiracy thinking:

a.  The least reliable and least plausible witnesses become the Tellers of Gospel Truth.  In this case, virtually the entire “Oswald imposter” story hinges on Sewell’s 1967 tale to Garrison.  Not only are Sewell’s detailed "recollections" inherently unlikely, but the fact that he only told his tale in connection with Garrison’s investigation takes it down several notches further.

b.  Any and all inconvenient evidence is dismissed as faked or altered or the product of witness intimidation.  Delsatte’s FBI interview?  Forget about it - it doesn’t even vaguely resemble what he actually said.

c.  Logic and common sense are simply not allowed to raise their ugly heads.  Instead, every conceivable dot is connected with sinister speculation.  Tugague briefly employed the 16-year-old Oswald as a messenger boy in 1955 … and then this same Tugague turns up as an officer of the anti-Castro FDC in 1961 … and then the name “Oswald” appears on the carbon copy of a price quotation prepared for the FDC when the Oswald actually employed by Tugague was spouting Marxist treacle in the USSR.  Wow, virtual proof of a conspiracy, at least in H&L Land!!!

I have at least some doubt that any “Oswald” was part of the Bolton Ford incident.  I have a mild suspicion that “Oswald” was added to the carbon copy of the price quotation after the assassination for reasons that remain obscure.  The only other explanation that makes sense to me is that this was simply some other guy named Oswald, although the FDC had no funds at the time and his supposed statement about “handling the money” really makes no sense.  It has also been suggested that LHO’s defection may have received enough press coverage at the time that someone recalled it and just tossed it into the Bolton incident, but this scarcely makes sense if they were going to have the price quotation issued to the anti-Castro FDC.

I don’t doubt that in January of 1961 and thereafter New Orleans was a hotbed of anti-Castro activity in which all of the usual conspiracy suspects from the CIA on down were involved.  I just don’t think that any of it had anything to do, even in an “imposter” sense, with the Lee Harvey Oswald who assassinated JFK.  Perhaps I’m just a conspiracy dummy, but it seems to me that the H&L organizers would not have wanted Harvey and Lee to be in wildly different places and engaged in diametrically opposed activities at the very same time.  If they were, it seems to me that one of them would have been required to keep a much lower profile than the Bolton Ford incident (as per Sewell) suggests.

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2 hours ago, Lance Payette said:

6.  The H&L version of the Bolton Ford incident is based almost entirely on the recollections of Sewell in 1967.

That simply isn't true.

By Dec. 19, 1963, the SAC in New Orleans was already confirming directly to J. Edgar Hoover himself that a man named Charles Pearson, who was office manager at Graham Paper Company, had stated that his friend Oscar W. Deslatte, assistant manager of truck sales at Bolton Ford, had been contacted by Oswald about buying trucks.  Worse yet, the whole process of investigating the incident was prompted by a phone call from none other than Carlos Bringieur, the man who pretended to fight and then debate on the radio with “Lee Harvey Oswald” in August 1963 in New Orleans.

Bolton_Confirm.jpg

It's quite obvious that the Oswald Project at the time of the Bolton Ford incident had nothing to do with the Kennedy Assassination.  The Oswald Project didn't get used by the assassination planners until around the summer of 1963.

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Now that we know that Mr. Payette based his lengthy psychoanalysis of conspiracy believers in general and people who understand and believe in Harvey and Lee in particular on the faulty assumption that “the H&L version of the Bolton Ford incident is based almost entirely on the recollections of Sewell in 1967,” let’s see if we can really figure out what really happened. 

Here’s the basic story, as John A. described it:

On January 20, 1961, while Harvey Oswald was in Minsk, two men visited the Bolton Ford dealership in New Orleans. They spoke with Assistant Manager Oscar Deslatte and said they were interested in purchasing 10 Ford Econoline Trucks. As one of the men discussed the purchase with Deslatte the other man, who identified himself as Joseph Moore, made a list of the equipment they desired on the trucks.

Deslatte went to his boss, truck manager Fred Sewell, and told him about the two men who wanted to purchase trucks and said they represented the "Free Democrats of Cuba or some such organization." Sewell told Deslatte to give the men a bid of $75 over their cost for the trucks. Deslatte and Sewell returned to Deslatte's desk and wrote out a bid form to Joseph Moore. As Deslatte was filling out the bid form, Joseph Moore and the other man began talking to both Deslatte and Sewell.42

When Moore saw that Deslatte had written his name on the bid form he asked that the name be changed to "Friends of Democratic Cuba." Moore's friend looked· at the form and said, "By the way, you'd better put my name down there because I'm the man handling the money." When Deslatte asked, "What's your name?" the man replied, "Lee Oswald.”

Deslatte gave the original bid form to "Lee Oswald" and kept a copy for his files, which he gave to the FBI following the assassination.

Bolton.gif

Note that on the bid form “Friends of Democratic Cuba” is written in near the top left, and the date, Jan. 20, 1961, is written near the top right and, under that, “Oswald.”  Mr. Payette wants us to believe that there is nothing significant to the fact that the officers and directors of the Friends of Democratic Cuba, Inc. included W. Guy Banister, who worked with “Oswald” in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, and former “Oswald” employer Gerard Tugague.

Friends.gif

On Dec. 19, 1963, the SAC in New Orleans sent an Airtel directly to J. Edgar Hoover himself informing him that Bolton Ford’s assistance manager Oscar Deslatte was telling others that he “had been contacted by Oswald and Oswald said he was trying to get trucks for Cuba.”   

Bolton_Confirm.jpg

Hoover went on to order the fabrication of a pre-dated a document designed to discredit at least parts of the story, including a false claim that Deslatte was unable to identify a picture of Oswald.
Deslatte1.png

 

We are supposed to believe this report was issued on 11/25/63, just three days after the assassination, when, in fact, Hoover wasn’t even informed of the Bolton Ford charges until 12/19/63 Airtel three weeks later.  (If you don’t believe the FBI would fabricate information, just take a look at this three minute video on YouTube in which Mark Lane and Gil Jesus show how the FBI dramatically altered the statements of three crucial Dealey Plaza witnesses.)

PROOF THE FBI LIED

Is there more evidence that the FBI report lied  specifically about Deslatte being shown a picture of Oswald?  Sure there is.  On May 2, 1967, James Alcock and Jim Garrison interviewed Fred Sewell, Oscar Deslatte’s boss at Bolton Ford.  (Mr. Payette wants us to believe Mr. Sewell invented the whole Bolton Ford incident during this interview, as if none of the above had happened.)

During that interview, Mr. Sewell described how he and Mr. Deslatte decided to call the FBI, what the FBI did, and added that the FBI agents “didn’t show us no pictures.  They didn’t do anything but take that paper and they offered us a receipt.”

Deslatte_to_Sewell.jpg

Bolton_FBI_Denies.jpg

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