I am 87, a year older than Lee Oswald. My memory is not as sharp as before. But I sat fuming at the program. For example, on Oswald's background, it points out that he attended 20 different schools growing up, showing an unstable youth. However, when the young Oswald, who was born in New Orleans, returned, he attended P T G Beauregard Junion High 1952-1954. If he had problems adjusting, so did everyone else, as the School Board that year decided to integrate both junion and senior highs. I am not speaking of racial integration, that was clearly illegal in Louisiana and throughout the Solid South, but mixing boys and girls in the same schools, including high schools and the newly established junior highs. The previous system K-8, and the sexually divided high schools 9-12th grades ceased; replaced by K-6, 7-9, 10-12, all co-ed. Oswald did well enough to graduate from Beauregard in 2 years in 1954. Also important to his development, he joined the Civil Air Patrol, headed by a charismatic man, David Ferrie.
I never met Ferrie, but I had a roommate who had had problems as a youth. Although I attended Tulane U., and he was a student at Loyola U. of the South, we met in the late 1950s at an intercollegiate interracial gathering at Loyola. I barely knew him, and he never looked me in the eye when conversing, so I assumed he was not interested in what I was saying. We both attended a CORE training institute in Miami in August 1960, where one day our teacher was Jackie Robinson, another day, Martin Luther King. It was only when we roomed together back in New Orleans did I discover that he was legally blind. No wonder he did not look people in the eyes, he probably was lucky to see the who person. He told me he was on the path to becoming a juvenile delinquent, but the CAP and David Ferrie saved him, pushed him to return to school, gave him hope, etc. If Ferry could perform miracles with my roommate, perhaps he could do the same with Oswald. Ferry was gay, but my roommate was strictly straight. I suspect he may have done the same for Oswald. At any rate, Oswald did not want to continue to Warren Easton Senior High, but would continue his education elsewhere; he got his mom to sigh papers so he could enlist in the Marines at 17.
Some talk about Oswald as pro-communist as a youth. Are Communists anxious to enlist in the Marines at 17? By the way, Beauregard was the officer honored to give the command to CSA troops to fire on Fort Sumpter and start the American Civil War.
After graduation from Loyola, my former roommate went off to Laos in the early 1960s with the US AID. He returned to NO, married and had 2 children, and led in many ways to improve the opportunities for the blind and handicapped. A university building is now named for him. Meanwhile, Oswald ended in Japan working around the secret U2 flights. Ferrie was a very conservative patriot, and would clearly influence the youths in the CAP. Ferrie was a good pilot, and somehow involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was furious when Pres. Kennedy failed to come to the rescue of the invaders, and later, in a speech, I think at Springhill college on the Mississippi coast, declared that Pres. Kennedy "should be shot." He lost is job as an airline pilot on a morals charge, but Car;ps Marcello and the Mafia also called upon Ferrie. Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy's crusade against crime, led him to deport important New Orleans Mafia leader Carlos Marcello, and apparently left him in Guatemala in a jungle, wearing his expensive shoes. Some allege that Rob Kennedy hoped that Marcello would die. Marcello survived however, reached civilation, and got Ferrie to come and fly him back into the US.
When Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, was it real? Or was he still a Marine, doing secret work? After a few years, he wanted out of the USSR, and had no troubles with American authorities in returning.. True, he had a dishonorable discharge from the Marines, but if the Marines were to send other undercovers to the Soviets, perhaps that was a way to keep the pretense going.
When Oswald returns to the US, and then to NO in 1963, who does he hang out with? The super anti-communist Guy Banister. Banister's office is where the pro-Castro leaflets, handed out by Oswald on the streets of NO, are stored; the address of the building is used on the Hand Off Cuba leaflets. Some say Oswald was seen at the CIA training center north of Lake Pontchartrain, where the Cuban refugees were preparing for a new and hopefully successful Bay of Pigsinvasion to liberate Cuba. Pres. Kennedy was inching toward a rapprochement with the Communists and did not want another Bay of Pigs. But could he count on his head of CIA to close the camp? No! JFK needed someone he trusted to shutter the CIA camp; his brother Robert, Atty. Gen., was also in charge of the FBI. He got the FBI to close the CIA training camp in July 1963. Some said, this act by the President sealed his fate. It meant he was not interested in liberating Cuba, or so it seemed to many conservatives.
Why was anti-com Banister working with Oswald to print and distribute Fair Play for Cuba leaflets and that pro-Castro organization? Perhaps Oswald was being prepared to assassinate someone, maybe like Fidel! In September 1963 Oswald is in Mexico City trying to get into Cuba, making anti-Kennedy statements. But, it did not work; they did not let him in.
MORE LATER
If the now identified Marxist Lee Oswald could not get into Cuba or back into the USSR, what could he do for the cause? On 9 November 1963 anti-com Joseph Milteer was recorded on a wire by FBI undercover Willie Somersett, a childhood friend of Milteer. Milteer assured his friend that it was all set up, someone from a tall building would shoot the President, and they had a stooge who would quickly be arrested and blamed, while the real assassins could get away. Milteer added that people in Miami, New Orleans, and California were in on the action. One can hear this on YouTube. Was Oswald's new mission to be an unknown patsy?
More on the ABC program; basically they declare what others call the magic bullet to be what really happened - Oswald shoots Kennedy's upper back, the bullet exits his neck, and then goes on to wound Gov. Connally in many places, and emerges almost like new.
In the late 1960s I was teaching at a university and had time between classes, time which I used to attend sessions of the DA Garrison trial against NO businessman Clay Shaw. One day a doctor from the Bethesda Naval Hospital, one who performed th autopsy on Pres. Kennedy, was questioned under oath. Dr. Pierre Finck asserted he was beginning to probe the path of the bullet that entered the President's back, and which according to the official line must exit his throat and the go on to do damage to Connally, He began, but then Dr, Finck related he was ordered to stop. Who ordered that. I don't know as there were many Admirals and Generals. So the entire picture of the media, and the government, and the Warren Commission of one gunman shooting from behind the President WAS NOT CONFIRMED in the autopsy. Recall, the physician in Dallas thought the neck wound was an entry wound, not an exit wound. And some photos show a large part of the back of Kennedy's head being broken off, indicating a shot from the front. Some allege there were fake photos showing a smaller back head wound.
Garrison failed to convict Shaw, and had I been on the jury, I too would have voted not guilty. But he did expose how the government united to destroy his expose of the fraudulent conclusions of the Warren Report. Governors refused to let subpoenaed witnesses come to NO for trial. National magazines carried many stories belittling his case. Only in the 1990s with Oliver Stone's provocative film "JFK" did the opponents of the official conclusion get a fair hearing, and viewing. I don't recall enough of the ABC program to add to my post.
I hope the Trump Administration will finally open all the files so we can see if the government told the truth to the American people, or simply lied, and lied, and lied.
Hugh Murray
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