The Adventures of Lee Harvey Oswald

[Larry Hancock]

I don't know Ron, there is just something about Homer's version - especially with the imaging - that makes me play it a couple of time every month.  True Homer is a little less polished...well maybe a lot less polished....but its almost like he was singing it for real:

 

 

[Jean Ceulemans]

16 hours ago, Larry Hancock said:

Well I'm not sure everyone will "love it" as it represents a strong effort to be balanced, is without doubt contrarian in many respects, and goes to great lengths to let "Oswald be Oswald" rather than fitting him into a particular mold, the original sin of the Warren Commission and something which unintentionally came to entrap too many of us over the  years.

Oswald was actually quite unique for his time, as attested to by a good number of people who knew him, but whose commentary had to be shunted into the WC volumes rather than put up front in the report itself - because they raise way too many questions in regard to the 'look' the Commission needed to present. The WC really did not want to showcase sources such as a Marine officer who was willing to state that Oswald was as well or better versed in contemporary geopolitics than he was himself, but who had to kick him off a Corps football team because Oswald kept wanting to call plays.

Bottom line, David Boylan and I started from scratch, let Oswald be Oswald as our foundation, and simply took that where it led us. That includes some extended speculation on what might have been going on with him that let him to become both independently mysterious, and a patsy on November 22. A patsy initially useful, but ultimately ineffective for the certain of the conspiracies goals. 

Enough of that, just wanted to be clear that we think the book does justice to Oswald, that was our first concern.

-- Larry

 

 

 

 

 

 

From what you write here it IS the book I was waiting for. Lately I am getting a little fed up with the classic ways he was/is being described in most books, essays and topics. Making me feel I have to choose LN or CT first... Damn, I will not!  One has been trying this for decades. And now, what have they got to take away?

The shooting could have been yesterday, as we still have no real idea of the man´s motivations during his life..., what kept him going, what was important to him? Well, other than his kids, probably the only thing we know for sure.

 

 

 

[Larry Hancock]

To some extent I think we have always known more about Oswald than has been acknowledged - because first the WC and then the rest of  us wanted to fit him into boxes. And we made the boxes so small it left room for mysteries to grow around them. 

In fact many things about Oswald always have been quite consistent, and at the core his actions demonstrate a great deal of continuity in his beliefs (if you credit him with sufficient intelligence to follow his own course and pursue his own agendas even if that required creating conflicting stories as sometimes required).

He was not all good, he was not all bad but it was almost always true to himself and his beliefs - which were always 'populist' regardless of how he described them, and made clear in his writings of 1963.

[Jean Ceulemans]

10 minutes ago, Larry Hancock said:

He was not all good, he was not all bad but it was almost always true to himself and his beliefs - which were always 'populist' regardless of how he described them, and made clear in his writings of 1963.

Do you think he was an idealist too? Compared to his rather populist beliefs, as you say. On some matters, not in general.

He would not hesitate to discuss his beliefs, yet it seems he wasn´t very profound (from what we are told..).

To me, it seems he did have some strong feelings on certain items, for example the b/w segregation.  The south clearly wasn´t there yet in those years, but what is not clear to me is, did O. already have these more modern ideas before the New-York period?  

 

[Larry Hancock]

He was self-admittedly something of an idealist, stating that he knew he was unlikely to find what he was looking for but totally unwilling to give up because it was unrealistic. 

I'll leave it to his writing to allow a judgement of his 'profoundness', certainly I knew loads of sixties campus activists who were idealistic but not all that 'deep'. 

Based on his writings I view him as more realistic than most of them, more able to see both the good and bad sides of ideologies...including their implementations, as seen with his very objective descriptions of the problems with both the American and Soviet systems.

 

 

[Jean Ceulemans]

3 hours ago, Larry Hancock said:

I'll leave it to his writing to allow a judgement of his 'profoundness', certainly I knew loads of sixties campus activists who were idealistic but not all that 'deep'.

Oh yes, not to mention that a bunch of those activists became the Mercedes-driving bankmanagers in the seventies... or even worse, lawyers 😀

Just kidding, a number of them are still loyal to certain values.

Thank you for your insights.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited Sunday at 09:29 PM by Jean Ceulemans

[Robert Morrow]

7 hours ago, Jean Ceulemans said:

From what you write here it IS the book I was waiting for. Lately I am getting a little fed up with the classic ways he was/is being described in most books, essays and topics. Making me feel I have to choose LN or CT first... Damn, I will not!  One has been trying this for decades. And now, what have they got to take away?

The shooting could have been yesterday, as we still have no real idea of the man´s motivations during his life..., what kept him going, what was important to him? Well, other than his kids, probably the only thing we know for sure.

 

 

 

Lee Harvey Oswald, unlike Lyndon Johnson, was a big fan of JFK and his family as was Marina. We have lots of information on that. Why would he shot a public figure who he admired so much?

FUN FACT: Lee Harvey Oswald considered JFK to be "the best president of his lifetime." Source: Michael Paine: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8118362-181/michael-paine-debated-politics-with

 

“Michael Paine, debated politics with JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, dies at 89” by Chris Smith of the Press Democrat on March 15, 2018

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8118362-181/michael-paine-debated-politics-with

Michael Paine of Sebastopol was a civil libertarian and retired aeronautical engineer who, while living outside of Dallas in 1963, engaged in occasional political discussions with a self-identified Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald.

When Paine heard of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he thought immediately of Oswald “but dismissed him because I didn’t think he was that irrational,” Paine later told an interviewer.

In testimony before the Warren Commission, created to investigate the assassination of JFK, Paine said he did not regard Oswald as someone likely to kill a president.

“I saw he was a bitter person … very little charity in his view toward anybody, but I thought he was harmless,” he told the commission.

Through much of the 55 years since JFK’s murder, some conspiracy narratives have alleged that both Paine and his former wife, Santa Rosa resident Ruth Paine, were CIA operatives and framed Oswald.

Both rejected the scenario as ridiculous, declaring that their observations and knowledge of Oswald persuaded them that the killing of Kennedy was the work of him alone.

Michael Paine told an interviewer not long after the shooting, “I think it’s a lone wolf thing. The opportunity presented itself to him and he probably wanted to make a mark on society.”

Paine died March 1 in Sebastopol, where he had lived with or near his son the past 14 years. He was 89.

He was born in New York City on June 25, 1928, to architect and left-wing activist G. Lyman Paine and Ruth Forbes Young, founder of the International Peace Academy.

Michael Paine studied at Harvard and Swarthmore and was living in Pennsylvania when, in 1957, he married Ruth Avery Hyde. Two years later, Michael Paine took a job with Bell Helicopter that required a relocation to Texas.

The couple settled in Irving, a suburb of Dallas. They had two children, Tamarin and Chris, when they separated amicably in the fall of 1962, then continued to spend time together as a family.

The children lived with Ruth Paine, a Quaker who has said she studied the Russian language in order to counter Cold War tensions by seeking out dialogue with Russian people.

In February 1963, she heard of a Russian woman who spoke no English, having recently moved to the U.S. with her young daughter and her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruth, now a retired teacher and school counselor living in Rincon Valley, has said she liked the idea of having someone with whom to practice her Russian.

So she reached out to the Oswalds. She invited her ex-husband, too, when she had 21-year-old Marina and Lee Oswald, 23, and baby June over for dinner. Ruth and Marina became friends.

That friendship on occasion brought Michael Paine and Lee Oswald together, and three or four times they engaged in political discussions. Paine, a liberal and longtime member of the American Civil Liberties Union, would later describe Oswald as a “pipsqueak,” but one whose politics he tried to understand.

“He told me he became a Marxist in this country by reading books and without having ever having met a communist,” Paine said in an interview following the assassination.

“With me he spoke very freely and he complained that with other people he couldn’t … they wouldn’t talk about political subjects. He would talk about nothing else.” 

In interviews and in testimony before the Warren Commission, Paine described Oswald as a lonely man who seemed to like very few people. But in their conversations Oswald never revealed hostility toward Kennedy.

“I expressed my appreciation of President Kennedy and he didn’t ever argue with me on that point,” Paine said in an interview.

In a 2013 essay he titled, “My Experience with Lee Harvey Oswald,” Paine recalled that Oswald once declared emphatically that “change only comes through violence.”

“I’d also heard him say that President Kennedy was the best president he had in his lifetime. Looking back on what happened, these two statements seem impossibly contradictory … how could a man want to kill a president whom he thought was the best president he’d had in his lifetime?”

Though Michael Paine remained no more than an acquaintance to the Oswalds, Ruth took Marina Oswald under her wing and tried to be helpful to her struggling family.

Ruth, who became a key witness to the Warren Commission, has said she was hoping to bring a degree of stability to the Oswalds when, in the fall of 1963, she told Lee Oswald about a job opening she’d heard of — at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

Oswald was hired. He rented a room near the job. In late September, Marina accepted an invitation by Ruth to live with her and her children in Irving, about a 20-minute drive from Dallas.

Ruth Paine allowed the Oswalds to store most of their belongings in her garage. For weeks while working at the book depository, Lee Oswald, who had no car or drivers license, hitched a ride to Ruth’s house after work on Fridays, then spent the weekend there with his family.

It surprised Ruth Paine when Oswald appeared at her home unannounced on a Thursday — Nov. 21, 1963. Later that night, she walked into the garage and found the light was on, causing her to wonder who’d been in there.

When she arose the next morning, Lee Oswald was already up and gone. He’d left a coffee cup in the kitchen sink.

At 12:30 that afternoon, gunshots killed JFK as he sat beside his wife, Jacqueline, in the back of a Lincoln Continental convertible just after the presidential motorcade passed by the book depository.

It would soon dawn on the Paines that Lee Harvey Oswald had hidden his scoped, bolt-action rifle in Ruth’s garage.

In the 9,400-word “My Experience with Lee Harvey Oswald,” Michael Paine wrote that he believed the assassin acted alone and decided only shortly before Nov. 22, 1963, to do something that would make himself infamous.

“The nation would remember him as the one who had shot the president of the strongest capitalist nation of the world,” Paine wrote. “He wanted to be important — not inconsequential. He would be in the history books now, and that is what he wanted.”

Both of the Paines testified before the Warren Commission in 1964, Ruth more extensively because of her nearly yearlong friendship with Marina Oswald and her many encounters with Marina’s controlling husband.

In time, the Paines both left Texas. Michael Paine lived and worked in Concord, Massachusetts, and was active in coastal conservation and supported Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. He moved to Sonoma County in 2004.

He and his son, Chris Panym, founded near Sebastopol a “multi-household, multi-age, multi-enterprise community” they called Green Valley Village. They were unable to bring it to fruition.

Chris Panym said that as his father approached aged 90 he lost his memory but all his life was committed to championing the environment and civil liberty.

In addition to his son in Sebastopol and his former wife in Santa Rosa, Paine is survived by his daughter, Tamarin Laurel-Paine of Middlefield, Massachusetts.

There will be a memorial service at 1 p.m. on April 14 in the library at Friends House in Rincon Valley. Panym asks people interested in attending to RSVP to him at 707-861-1169.

Editor’s note: This version of the story corrects an error on the make of the car in which the Kennedy’s rode in Dallas.

Email from David Lifton to Robert Morrow on March 16, 2018 regarding his interview of Michael Paine circa the year 1994

From: David Lifton 
Sent: Mar 16, 2018 10:30 PM 

Subject: Fw: CIA patsy Lee Harvey Oswald told Michael Paine that JFK was the best president he had seen in his lifetime! 

Friday evening, 3/16/2018 - 10:24 PM PDT

 As I'm sure know (or will soon find out) Michael Paine died.

 Please do note: that back around 1994 (plus or minus), I had a full-dress on-the-record tape recorded interview, with Michael Paine, at his home in Boxboro, Mass.  

 I have notes and transcripts, etc., and cannot today recall everything he said; but I did want to note that my questioning was good, and at one point, he got rather emotional, started trembling, and broke down and started to cry. 

 As I recall, I formed the opinion that he knew (or realized) that LHO had been framed. This is contrary to the behavior of Ruth, who carried her belief that LHO was the assassin all the way into her later years, and that is something that is quite likely her belief (still) today.

 You can share any part of this email with anyone.

 Best, DSL

[Denny Zartman]

It seems to me the fingerprints of intelligence were on Oswald. How can anyone possibly believe that the public record of his life faithfully represents the real man?

[Jean Ceulemans]

On 8/4/2024 at 12:03 AM, Paul Brancato said:

‘What if LHO was spying on GDM’? A question no one to my knowledge has ever asked, an interesting one. GDM had a lot to say about LHO, but how much of it should we believe? And what would LHO have said about George had he lived? 
It’s good to know that Hancock and Boylan are looking anew at Oswald. 
We’ve examined his time in the Soviet Uinion and how he got there, yet still don’t have all questions answered. We know far less about what he was up to in Japan (as an 18 yr old), or when and how he learned Russian. 
What occurs to me rather overwhelmingly is that when viewed in its entirety it’s an impressive resume, and for such a young man. Larry says, and I agree, to paraphrase, that the WC flooded us with words about him, yet slanted their overall picture of him to fit the facts as they needed them to be. In some way it’s a miracle LHO got to Dealey Plaza in one piece. Blind luck? I’d say street smarts, intuition, training under pressure. Whether we call him an agent or asset, he was a highly skilled one able to penetrate behind enemy lines and navigate to safer shores. It’s hard to put oneself in his young shoes at the age of 17 when he writes to the Socialist Party three weeks before joining the Marines. He was a chameleon. Descriptions of him, behaviors and beliefs, vary greatly. I recall listening to his radio ‘confrontations’ in New Orleans, and having the distinct impression he was playing a part, that in some way he and Ed Butler were on the same team. 
Bottom line - no dummy, hyper intelligent and clever. Even now no can say for sure what he believed. 
 

It´s hard for me not to see the Partisan Int´l closed fist in this picture, I could be wrong.  I know it has been discussed a lot, still...

His actions regarding the SWP/CP/FPCC/... were often contradictory, and in the end he even damaged them, did he not understand, or? Did he have some kind of dream of the socialists and communists getting closer? Hard to grasp... yet... I´m still trying to picture his views on those parties. His writings explain some of it, but certainly not everything, I don´t think we´ll ever know.

I might change my mind about this, but I just don´t see him working for a US agency, at least not "just that" or fully witting, there has to be more to it.   

[Ron Bulman]

11 hours ago, Larry Hancock said:

I don't know Ron, there is just something about Homer's version - especially with the imaging - that makes me play it a couple of time every month.  True Homer is a little less polished...well maybe a lot less polished....but its almost like he was singing it for real:

 

 

I love both versions for different reasons.  If I remember right Homer wrote it and he is from Dallas, actually did live on Beckley?  I think being done in black and white is cool.  Heck, even that old microphone is cool.  The kid (Homer) in the Cowbboy's # 33 jersey, which is kind of unreal.  Not many kids or adults wore such apparel in 1963, they really stunk those first four years.  Him fishing and throwing the football with Lee.  The steel guitar.

Have you ever heard Homers other (non) hit?  They used to play it on KNON, the Dallas public radio station, supported by fund drives.

 

[Ron Bulman]

Back on topic, when will this book be released?  I'm already wondering if it will address some things Oswald supposedly did.  Like the new car 80 mph test drive on Stemmons freeway or the shooting range shooting of the guy next to Him's target.

[Kirk Gallaway]

On 8/4/2024 at 6:49 AM, Jean Ceulemans said:

Lately I am getting a little fed up with the classic ways he was/is being described in most books, essays and topics. Making me feel I have to choose LN or CT first... Damn, I will not!  One has been trying this for decades. And now, what have they got to take away?

I agree Jean, the forces of good here would portray LHO as a brilliant mind, who taught himself Russian if he didn't go to Monterey. Was not overwhelmed with being unable to support himself  and his family, wasn't put in a position to depend on the kindness of others, and still didn't seem that appreciative, and didn't really offer a lot to others and wasn't a pain in the ass to everyone around him.

22 hours ago, Jean Ceulemans said:

He would not hesitate to discuss his beliefs, yet it seems he wasn´t very profound (from what we are told..).

Yes, most of that comes from Michael Paine. I don't find LHO the least profound, but Larry makes a good point that a lot of 60's activists were very idealistic but not very deep or very penetrative in their political philosophies.

 

22 hours ago, Larry Hancock said:

Based on his writings I view him as more realistic than most of them, more able to see both the good and bad sides of ideologies...including their implementations, as seen with his very objective descriptions of the problems with both the American and Soviet systems.

Yes, I agree. Apart from the suspicions of the funding of his trip,  In some ways, to a lesser extent, LHO is like the groups of Americans who immigrated to Stalin's USSR in the 30's because they wanted to be on the cutting edge of the new political utopia and eventually found they made the worst choices of their lives, except  LHO could leave, but when that choice was thrust on him, he threatened to take his life which shows a definite sense of purpose behind the trip.

IMO, Both assertions could be correct.  He had a good healthy youthful curiosity to see  the working reality of the Soviet political system. But he was an avid fan of "I lead 3 lives", these are not necessarily at cross purposes, and at one point along the line, others took notice.

 

 

 

[Larry Hancock]

Ron, the actual availability date will be determined by the publisher (its not self published this time around) and while I would hope for pre-order this year its hard to see it being actually in print until 2025 - especially given that we just finished the manuscript the last week in July.  The editing process has been extensive, significantly expanding both the scope and detail of the book (due to the efforts of an editor who knows the subject inside out) and in the process the book essentially doubled in size (since the editor would not let me 'duck" some of the most controversial issues about Oswald).

Having said that, this book is about Oswald, his beliefs, agendas, personality - both the positive and negative aspects of each (from an external view, not his own of course since such things are relative and often situational).  And about how those things  drove him at various points in his short life, including how he entangled himself in things he thought he understood (but definitely did not).

Its less sensation in one sense (sorry no high speed drives or shooting range games) and more in another - especially when you get to the last 48 hours of his life.

[James Keane]

Sounds excellent Larry, I look forward to getting my hands on a copy once published.  

[Jean Ceulemans]

1 hour ago, Larry Hancock said:

Its less sensation in one sense (sorry no high speed drives or shooting range games) and more in another - especially when you get to the last 48 hours of his life.

Most of the time reality is a little boring and grey (even with Marina in da house!), nothing wrong with that in a book. If your book is what I hope it is, it´s needed.  Most books skip those parts, (commercially not deemed interesting...), but if one really tries understanding a character, it just has to be included (and IMO even as much as possible). 

 

 

Edited Monday at 07:44 PM by Jean Ceulemans