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LEE HARVEY OSWALD'S LAST LOVER?
The Warren Commission Missed Another Significant Connection
“It is reasonable to be suspicious of
claims that challenge our understand
ing of history. But it is unreasonable to
ignore evidence because it might change
one's mind or challenge the positions
that one has taken in public. History
shows us that new information is rarely
welcome.“
—Edward T. Haslam
“Lee Harvey Oswald was an innocent
man who was a government intelligence
agent. He faithfully carried out assign
ments such as entering the USSR and
pretending to be pro-Castro... Lee Harvey
Oswald was a brave, good man, a patriot
and a true American hero...“
—Judyth Vary Baker
“If Judyth Vary Baker is telling the
truth, it will change the way we think
about the Kennedy assassination. *
—John McAdams
Sew Views of Oswald's Visit to Sew Orleans
Lyndon B. Johnson famously remarked that
Lee Harvey Oswald "was quite a mysterious
fellow." One of the most enigmatic episodes in
Oswald's adventure-filled 24-year life was his
1963 sojourn in his birthplace, New Orleans,
where he arrived by bus on Apr. 25 and from
which he departed by bus on Sept. 25, less
than two months before the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy.
The Warren Commission, which investi
gated the assassination and concluded that
Oswald, acting alone, was the assassin, found
nothing of significance in Oswald's 1963
stay in New Orleans. The picture painted by
the 1964 Warren Report is of a lowly, lonely
and disgruntled leftist and pro-Castroite who
occasionally pretended to be an anti-Castro
rightist. But the Commission's investigation of
Oswald's five months in New Orleans in 1963
was, typically, inadequate. Six pages of the
1964 Warren Report focus on Oswald's time
in New Orleans in 1963, and in retrospect we
can see that those pages amount to a bland,
superficial account of Oswald's activities down
there.
We now know that the Warren Commission's
depiction of Oswald's activities in his home
town in 1963 is one-dimensional and essen
tially misleading. Since 1964, evidence has
steadily mounted that the Warren Commission
overlooked and the Warren Report omitted
a vast amount of relevant, sometimes eye
popping information concerning Oswald's New
Orleans stay.
The first; book to expose major flaws in the
Warren Commission's investigation of Oswald's
stay in New Orleans was Oswald in New
Orleans: Case of Conspiracy with the CIA, by
Harold Weisberg, published in 1967. Weisberg,
who wrote nine influential books on the JFK
assassination, was one of the assassination's
premier scholars.
The first scholarly article by an aca
demic to persuasively challenge the Warren
Commission's version of Oswald's sojourn
in New Orleans was Michael L. Kurtz's Lee
Harvey Oswald in New Orleans: A Reappraisal,
published in a Louisiana historical journal
in 1980. Kurtz was a distinguished history
professor at a Louisiana university and later
authored several respected books on the
Kennedy assassination.
Based on their own research, both
Weisberg and Kurtz exposed the shallowness
of the Warren Commission's investigation
of Oswald's 1963 visit to New Orleans. They
noted, for example, that the Warren Report
failed to mention the odd feet that while in
New Orleans, Oswald, an ex-defector to the
Soviet Union and supposedly a committed
Marxist, was an associate, and was seen in the
company, of David Feme, Guy Banister and
other militants on the political right who had
backgrounds in or connections to law enforce
ment agencies and intelligence organizations,
or who were affiliated with anti-Castroite,
anti-Communist, racist or extremist groups, or
with organized crime.
Both Weisberg and Kurtz concluded that
while in New Orleans Oswald behaved as if he
were an undercover intelligence agent. Kurtz
wrote: "What the Warren Commission failed
to disclose is that Oswald led a double life
in New Orleans, outwardly posing as a pro-
Castro Marxist, but secretly associated with
such rabidly anti-Communist individuals as
Guy Banister and David Feme." And Weisberg
wrote: "Everything Oswald did in New Orleans
in 1963 is consistent only with the estab
lishment of what in the spy trade is called a
'cover'"
The U.S. House of Representatives Select
Committee on Assassinations, which reinves
tigated the JFK murder in 1977-78, published
a staff report confirming the existence of evi
dence that Oswald consorted with Feme and
. Banister while in New Orleans.
The information that has become available
since 1964 has produced a consensus among
students of the JFK assassination: there was a
lot more to Oswald's stay in New Orleans than
the Warren Report reveals.
This consensus is one more in a string
of vindications of former New Orleans dis
trict attorney Jim Garrison, who (like Harold
Weisberg and Michael Kurtz) maintained that
while in New Orleans Oswald, working with
Feme, Banister and others, had engaged in
intelligence activities. Garrison also contended
that there had been a New Orleans-based
conspiracy to kill JFK, that Feme and Banister
were among the conspirators, and that the
conspirators duped Oswald, setting him up to
be the fell guy in the event the assassination
occurred.
10 RAGPOLE.COM DECEMBER 8,2010