Reclaiming History (123 page)

5. We all know that human movements are harmonious with each other and are therefore essentially predictable from any chosen interrupted point. Common sense tells us, then, that if the forgers altered any frames, juxtaposition of the altered frames with the unaltered frames would necessarily result in extremely jerky movements, making the Zapruder film look almost cartoonish in the altered areas. No such Charlie Chaplin–like movements have been evident on the Zapruder film to the hundreds of experts who have studied it and the millions of people who have seen it.

6. Even hypothetically assuming that a forgery were possible, the forgers would have had to alter the original Zapruder film before any copies were made, since an altered copy could immediately be exposed as a fraud when it was compared with the original.
†
But we know from the record that Abraham Zapruder kept the original film in his possession until it was sold to
Life
magazine on Saturday, November 23, 1963, which means, of course, that no one could have altered the film before then. Yet by
that
time, multiple copies of the film were already in the hands of the Secret Service and the FBI, both of whom were, in turn, making second-and third-generation copies for their files. Or do the alterationists want us to believe that the “conspirators” altered the original film
after
these second-and third-generation copies had been made? But in that case, any one of the copies could expose the fact that the original had been altered.

The fact that each of the many copies of the Zapruder film matches all others as well as the original film proves
beyond any doubt
that no alterations were made.

7. Finally, even if by some miracle of miracles the conspirator-forgers were able to get possession of and alter the original and all copies of the Zapruder film, and had the time and technology to do what had to be done, they would, of necessity, have to also commit themselves to finding and altering all
other
films and still photographs of the motorcade on Elm Street so that they all agreed with the altered Zapruder film. Because if they didn’t, any one of those photos and films could immediately expose the Zapruder film as being a fraud and forgery, something the conspirator-forgers would never want to be known. Yet, we know that none of these other films and photographs have ever been shown to be in conflict with the Zapruder film, but instead are completely consistent with it. As Josiah Thompson says, to believe that all of these other films are consistent with the Zapruder film because they too were altered to match the altered Zapruder film is to “end up claiming that the whole photographic record of the assassination has been falsified. When we reach that point, don’t we have to turn away in disgust mumbling to ourselves, ‘This is just crazy!?’”
²⁶⁶

Even assuming, for the sake of argument and without any evidence to support it, that the conspirator-forgers seized and altered the Hughes, Bell, Nix, Muchmore, Towner, Martin, and Bronson films, how in the world would they even presume to have knowledge of the identity of every other person in Dealey Plaza who took a photo or film of the motorcade (people like Elsie Dorman, who filmed part of the motorcade from a fourth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository Building, or Patsy Paschall, who filmed part of the motorcade from an upper-story window of the old Dallas Court House on Main Street),
²⁶⁷
locate them, and seize their photos and films?
*
And even if they could somehow manage to do this impossible task, they could never be certain that a photo or particularly a film wouldn’t surface in the future (and the fact remains that such a film could still, even decades later, emerge from someone’s attic or closet) and expose the alteration as being a giant hoax.

Gary Mack, the curator at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, said that “for years our staff used to joke about someone one day showing up here with an old shoe box containing assassination or motorcade photos or film. And in early 2003, Jay Skaggs, an eighty-two-year-old Dallas citizen, who was watching the motorcade at the northeast corner of Main and Houston, showed up here with a small box containing twenty 35-millimeter color slides and photos of the motorcade, seventeen of which showed the motorcade or aftermath. Because none captured the assassination, Skaggs didn’t feel they were important enough to turn over to anyone, but his wife finally encouraged him to do so, and the guy was apologetic for having waited so long.”
²⁶⁸
All of this only illustrates the suicidal venture of any conspirators who might set out to forge the Zapruder film.

I
n conclusion, it is instructive to note that although the Warren Commission has been severely maligned in its interpretation of the Zapruder film, and although it was demonstrably off in its ambivalence as to when the first shot was fired, its conclusion way back in 1964 on the much more important issue that the bullet that entered Kennedy’s back also went on to hit Connally was reaffirmed by the in-depth Itek Corporation study in 1976
²⁶⁹
and by the HSCA in 1978. It is also completely consistent with all the other available evidence as well as simple common sense.

Before getting into the case against Lee Harvey Oswald, just who was this killer and historical figure?

Oswald is not, I put it in simple words, an easy man to explain.

—G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations
¹

Robert Oswald, the brother of the president’s killer, says that to understand how and why his “kid brother” ended up in the sniper’s nest window, “people need to look at what transpired before that, everything, from childhood on up, especially that last year of his life.”
²
That proposition cannot be quarreled with. English psychologist and writer Havelock Ellis notes that “a man’s destiny stands not in the future, but in the past. That, rightly considered, is the most vital of vital facts.”

T
he long road to the sniper’s nest for a man who would change history started just over twenty-four years earlier, when Lee Harvey Oswald was born at the Old French Hospital on Orleans Avenue in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 18, 1939, to thirty-two-year-old Marguerite Frances Claverie Oswald.
³
The delivering physician was Dr. Bruno F. Mancuso.
⁴
Two months earlier, Lee’s father, named Robert Edward Lee Oswald for the famous Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, had died of a stroke while mowing his lawn on a hot and muggy August morning. He was only forty-three years old. Marguerite, seven months’ pregnant, buried him that afternoon, an act his family considered shockingly cold, causing them to never speak to her again.
⁵
Marguerite was Robert’s second wife. He had divorced his first wife in 1933 and married Marguerite six months later.
⁶

Marguerite’s ancestors were part of the working class in the great port at the mouth of the Mississippi, many working in trades associated with shipping, although Marguerite’s father, John, was a motorman on the city’s tramlines for forty years. Her grandparents on her father’s side, the Claveries, were immigrants, Catholics from France. Her mother Dora’s parents, named Stucke, were Lutherans from Germany. Marguerite, her three sisters, and two brothers were brought up as Lutherans, even though their mother died in 1911 when all were still children. Marguerite, who was born in 1907, was four at the time and was raised by her widowed father, housekeepers, and her older siblings.
⁷
It was not easy to raise six children on a motorman’s salary of ninety dollars a month, even if the rent was only “twelve or fourteen dollars a month,” but Marguerite’s older sister Lillian remembered it as a happy time. “We were singing all the time,” she would later recall, “and I often say that we were much happier than the children are today, even though we were poor. My father was a very good man. He didn’t drink, and he was all for his family. He didn’t make much money, but we got along all right.”
⁸

Marguerite also remembered having “a very happy childhood,” and the pleasures of life centered on the home on Phillips Street in a poor, racially mixed part of New Orleans, the Claverie children playing with the Negro family next door.
⁹
Lillian recalled skating parties around Jackson Square in the French Quarter and parties at an aunt’s who had a piano and who didn’t mind when the teenagers took up the rug to dance. Eventually, Mr. Claverie bought a piano for five dollars and Marguerite learned to play a little by ear. Marguerite was “very entertaining,” according to Lillian. “She could sing very well, not, you know, to be a professional singer, but she had a very good voice.” The girls were given a dollar a day to feed the family, and they were allowed to keep whatever was left over after shopping for the beans and rice and spinach and vegetables and bananas.
¹⁰

Lillian and Marguerite’s brothers died young, Charles, a gunner on transport ships during the First World War, at age twenty-three, John at the age of eighteen, both of tuberculosis.
¹¹
*
Marguerite dropped out of McDonogh High School in New Orleans her first year, lied on a job application that she had completed high school, and went to work as a receptionist for a firm of lawyers.
¹²
On August 1, 1929, with the Great Depression about to explode on America, Marguerite, pretty, vivacious, but quick-tempered, married Edward John Pic Jr., a stevedoring company clerk in Harrison County, Mississippi. Both were twenty-two years old.
¹³
Pic, who had lost the sight of one eye as a youth when a loose lace on a basketball struck him in the eye, and Marguerite rented a house off Canal Street in New Orleans, but the marriage was in difficulty from the outset and they separated after about a year. Marguerite was three months’ pregnant. Money was one of the big issues—as it would be with Marguerite throughout her life. She told her sister Lillian that Pic had lied to her about his salary, but Lillian, who found Pic oddly silent, never heard his side of the story. Marguerite also claimed that Pic left her because he didn’t want children, although Pic claimed that he had no objection to them, that the legal separation would have happened with or without the pregnancy. “Marguerite was a nice girl,” he told the Warren Commission in 1964. “We just couldn’t get along, you know, so we finally decided to quit trying and call the whole thing off…Our dispositions would not gel.” He said that she was aware of his earning capacity when they married and that it did not worsen during the year they lived together. Marguerite did not work during that time, he claimed, but lived as a housewife.
¹⁴

Their son, John Edward Pic, was born on January 17, 1932. The father went on sending Marguerite forty dollars a month and claiming their son as a dependent until 1950, when the boy was eighteen and started filing an income tax return on his own behalf, claiming Marguerite as a dependent. Otherwise, the separation was nearly total—Pic never saw his son after the boy was a year old, or even a photo of him, until Marguerite sent him one of eighteen-year-old John Edward Pic in his Coast Guard uniform.
¹⁵

Marguerite met Robert Edward Lee Oswald shortly after her separation from Pic. A friend of Lillian’s, Robert saw Marguerite and her baby coming home from a park, picked them up in his car, and started dating her.
¹⁶
Robert Oswald collected insurance premiums door-to-door for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Lillian was already married to Charles “Dutz” Murret when the energetic and affable Robert began to collect the Murrets’ premiums. He too was separated from an earlier marriage, and eventually both he and Marguerite arranged divorces in order to marry on July 20, 1933. Oswald, a divorced Catholic, could not remarry in the church, so he had to marry Marguerite in her Lutheran church on Canal Street. He wanted to adopt young John Edward Pic, but Marguerite, aware that the boy’s support payments from his father would cease, was against it.
¹⁷

A son was born on April 7, 1934, nine months after the marriage, and named after his father, Robert E. Lee Oswald. The couple settled down to what Lillian perceived as a happy marriage, a family that flourished as the Depression raged, eventually buying a house on Alvar Street. The Oswalds even had a car.
¹⁸
That period with her husband, their son, and her son by her previous marriage, Marguerite would recall later, “was the only happy part of my life.”
¹⁹

Two months after her husband died on August 19, 1939, Marguerite gave birth to their second son, Lee Harvey Oswald. (
Harvey
was Oswald’s paternal grandmother’s family name.) Although the young couple had been hoping for a girl, the baby’s two older brothers, then five and seven, were not. “If it’s a girl,” John told Robert, “we’ll throw it out the hospital window.”
²⁰

At times the boy would pretend that the death of his father before he was born was of no consequence, as a psychiatric social worker who examined him at the age of thirteen noted. “He has no curiosity about his father,” Evelyn Strickland wrote, telling Strickland he never missed having one and never thought to ask about him.
²¹
Nevertheless, one chilling phrase from a draft of a book he was writing about his experiences in Russia has lodged itself in the consciousness of many: “Lee Harvey Oswald was born in Oct 1939 in New Orleans, La.” he wrote, “the son of a Insuraen Salesmen whose early death left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck.”
²²
*

T
he early death of Oswald’s father plunged the family into economic difficulties. The Depression was all but over by October 1939 as the country geared up for the Second World War, which had just started in Europe, but for Marguerite and her boys, life would soon become harsh. For over a year after her husband died on August 19, 1939, Marguerite remained at the Alvar Street home with her three children without working, probably living on the life insurance proceeds from her husband’s death.
²³
Her oldest two children went to the William Frantz Elementary School, which was across the street from the Alvar Street home. In January of 1940, Marguerite removed her two sons from the Frantz school and placed the boys in the Infant Jesus College, a Catholic boarding school in Algiers, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans proper.
²⁴
John Pic believed Marguerite had done this to save money,
²⁵
though it is not known how much it cost to board the two boys, and why that would have been cheaper than to keep them at home. Evidence that Marguerite was feeling a financial pinch is that at some time in late September of 1940, she applied for Aid to Dependent Children assistance.
²⁶

The boys did not like it at the Catholic school. “The nuns were terribly strict,” Robert would recall, “and we were afraid of them. We saw boys who broke the rules beaten with a broomstick. The whole place was gloomy and cold and we felt like outsiders because we were Lutheran.”
²⁷
With the advent of the new school year in September of 1940, Marguerite reenrolled her two sons at the Frantz school.
²⁸
Also, sometime in late September of 1940, Marguerite rented the house on Alvar Street to Dr. Bruno F. Mancuso, the doctor who had delivered Lee,
*
and at the end of September moved to a smaller home at 1242 Congress Street.
²⁹
She soon transferred her two sons to the nearby George Washington School.
³⁰

In early March of 1941, Marguerite purchased and moved into a small-frame house on Bartholomew Street for $1,300.
³¹
Her nine-year-old, John, recognized the move as a step down in life but recalled the house as pleasant enough. It was in an older, “upper-lower-class” neighborhood, but it had two bedrooms and a large backyard, and they had a dog called “Sunshine.”
³²

Marguerite opened a shop in the front room, “Oswald’s Notion Shop,” where she sold needles, thread, ribbon, and other sewing materials, as well as candy—which the boys occasionally swiped. She hoped to be able to make enough money to stay at home and keep her children with her, but she couldn’t.
³³
In December 1941, as war broke out, Marguerite turned to the Lutheran church, which ran the Bethlehem Children’s Home (Evangelical Lutheran Bethlehem Orphan Asylum), a place that took in orphans or children with just one parent for a fee tailored to the circumstances. Marguerite paid ten dollars a month for each of her sons, John and Robert, plus provided shoes and clothing, and hoped to place Lee there too, but the home did not take children under the age of three.
³⁴

Robert thought Lee must have already begun to realize that Marguerite considered all of her boys a tribulation to her. “I don’t know at what age mother verbalized to Lee to the effect that she felt he was a burden to her. Certainly by age three he had the sense that, you know, we were a burden.”
³⁵

The older boys got on well at Bethlehem. Robert remembered it as a cheerful place, far less rigid than the Catholic boarding school at Algiers. Marguerite, flitting like a butterfly from job to job, would fetch John and Robert on weekends and return them on Sunday morning so they could go to church with the other children.
³⁶
†
John recalled pleasant interludes at Aunt Lillian’s too—“Whenever we had a chance we were more than glad to go there.”
³⁷

In January of 1942, Marguerite sold the Bartholomew Street house back to the seller from whom she had purchased it for a profit of $800,
³⁸
and moved again, to an apartment on Pauline Street. She tried as best she could to look after Lee, with the help of babysitters,
³⁹
while she worked as a switchboard operator.
⁴⁰
But it wasn’t working and her sister Lillian, already with five children of her own, the youngest about the age of Robert, volunteered to take Lee in as well. He was “a very beautiful child,” she said. She took him to town in his sailor suit, where the friendly tyke would call out “hi” to everybody and people would say, “What an adorable child he is.” He got along well with Lillian’s children too, but he could be troublesome, particularly in the morning when Lillian had her hands full getting all five of her own kids off to grammar school. Lee, still in his nightclothes, would slip out of the house, go down the street, and sit down in someone’s kitchen. “You could have everything locked in the house,” Lillian said, “but Lee would still get out.”
⁴¹

Although Lee’s Aunt Lillian got on well enough with Lee, her relations with her quick-tempered sister Marguerite were often prickly. The women usually settled their differences, as they had ever since they were children—“Marguerite was easy enough to get along with,” Lillian would say, “as long as she gets her own way,” adding, “You see, she was always right.” Also, “She would fly off too quick,” and no matter how much anyone did for her, such as Lillian taking in Lee, “she never thought that anyone was actually helping her.”
⁴²

Lillian is unsure of the length of time she kept Lee, though she believes it was two years. Robert recalls a much shorter time and says that Marguerite, evidently feeling Lee would be better off in his own home, took him back from Lillian. Marguerite advertised in the newspaper and found a couple willing to accept free room and board and fifteen dollars a month in return for caring for Lee while she was at work. The arrangement lasted only two months. Marguerite came home one day to find the child crying, red welts on his legs. She fired the couple, who claimed that Lee was “a bad, unmanageable child,” on the spot. Marguerite did not believe that a child that young could be that bad. She moved back nearer to her sister, to a house on Sherwood Forest Drive, and made a new arrangement: Lillian would look after Lee during the day while Marguerite went out to work.
⁴³