Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (20 page)

Neither could the Warren Commission seem to locate a woman filming
the assassination who came to be known to researchers as the "babushka
lady." The House Committee took testimony from this woman after she
was identified by researchers as Beverly Oliver, but never mentioned her
in its report.

Oliver, an acquaintance of Jack Ruby, has told researchers she was
introduced by Ruby to "Lee Oswald of the CIA" prior to the assassination.

Jean Hill, who was standing beside Mary Moorman on the south side of
Elm Street at the moment of the assassination, said she saw a man fire
from behind the wooden picket fence on the Grassy Knoll and saw smoke
drift from his location.

Hill's story is supported by the testimony of railroad supervisor S. M.
Holland, who told government investigators he, too, saw smoke drifting
from the Knoll. Holland's account is corroborated by other men on the
Triple Underpass, such as Richard Dodd, James Simmons, Austin Miller,
Frank Reilly, and Thomas Murphy-none of whom were asked to testify
before the Warren Commission.

Even employees of the Depository, both inside and outside that building, stated shots came-from. the direction of the Grassy Knoll.

Three employees-Bonnie Ray Williams, Harold Norman, and James
Jarman-were sitting just below the sixth-floor window later identified as
the sniper's window. Despite their later testimony that they heard shots
right above their heads, they all said they ran to the west side of the
building because they believed that shots had come from west of the
Depository.

Less than sixty seconds after shots were fired, Dallas policeman Marrion
Baker and Depository superintendent Roy Truly encountered another Depository employee-Lee Harvey Oswald-in the building's second-floor
lunchroom holding a Coke in his hand and appearing calm and unperturbed.

At least one Depository employee, Joe Molina, was intimidated by
authorities and lost his job soon after the assassination.

One man, James Tague, was the third man wounded in Dealey Plaza
when his cheek was bloodied by cement sent flying by a bullet striking the
curb just east of the Triple Underpass.

Apparently it was reports of Tague's wounding that forced the Warren
Commission to revise their account of the assassination. Where they had originally concluded that one shot hit Kennedy in the upper back, another
struck Governor Connally, and a third struck Kennedy's head, they finally
settled on the "single-bullet theory," which states that one bullet passed
through both Kennedy and Connally, another missed altogether, striking
the curb near Tague, and a third shot struck Kennedy fatally in the head.

Despite great efforts on the part of authorities to establish the Depository
as the source of all shots, public attention-both in 1963 and today-kept
returning to the infamous Grassy Knoll.

Photographer Abraham Zapruder clearly stated that the shots came from
the Knoll behind him. His testimony is corroborated by Dealey Plaza
groundskeeper Emmett Hudson, who reported that shots came from the
Knoll above and behind him.

Lee Bowers, a railroad employee who was in a railroad tower overlooking the back of the Knoll, told of seeing men with radios in strange cars
cruising the area just prior to the assassination. He also reported seeing a
flash of light and smoke from behind the fence on the Knoll at the time of
the shooting.

Gordon Arnold, a young soldier, said he was chased from behind the
wooden picket fences shortly before Kennedy arrived by a man showing
Secret Service indentification. He said he was in front of the fence on the
Knoll filming the motorcade when a shot was fired from over his left
shoulder from behind the fence. He said moments later two policemen
took his film and he fled.

A gunman behind the picket fence may have been captured in a photograph taken by Mary Moorman. A recent enlargement of the Knoll area in
her photo seems to reveal a man firing a rifle. The man is dressed in what
appears to be a police uniform. The existence of this gunman is further
confirmed by the acoustical studies commissioned by the House Select
Committee on Assassinations in 1979. The results of these tests forced the
Committee to reluctantly conclude that a second gunman fired on Kennedy
from behind the Knoll fence.

The deaf-mute Ed Hoffman tried to inform the FBI after the assassination that he had witnessed a man with a rifle behind the picket fence on the
Grassy Knoll. However, Hoffman was warned to keep quiet or "you
might get killed" by an FBI agent, and reports of his sighting were hidden
from the public for twenty-two years.

Conclusions to be drawn from the wide range of testimony by people in
Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, include:

-There was much confusion and panic among the people watching the
presidential motorcade.

-The majority of witnesses originally believed the shots came from the
area of the Grassy Knoll.

-The preponderance of evidence indicates shots came from two different
directions-the Grassy Knoll and the direction of the Depository.

-There is nothing in the available evidence that rules out the possibility
that more shots from other directions were fired.

-The activities of the federal authorities, especially the Secret Service and
FBI, before, during, and after the assassination, have raised serious
suspicions in the minds of researchers.

I knew then what I know now: Oswald was on an assignment in Russia for
American intelligence.

-Oswald's Marine roommate James Botelho

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was not an isolated
event. It occurred within a complex matrix of national and international
events and issues. Therefore, this event must be placed within a context of
the times.

As President, John F. Kennedy daily was juggling a wide variety of
responsibilities on many different fronts-foreign policy, civil rights, agriculture, finance, politics, crime-busting, and defense considerations.

Likewise, Lee Harvey Oswald-the man identified by two government
panels as Kennedy's assassin-did not live isolated from the world of his
time. During his brief twenty-four years of life, Oswald came into contact
with an incredible array of groups and individuals, all of whom had reason
to wish for the elimination of Kennedy. Beginning with an uncle connected to organized crime, young Oswald moved through a shadowy world
of soldiers, intelligence agents, Russian communists and anticommunists,
pro- and anti-Castro Cubans, FBI men and right-wing anticommunists. To
place the events of November 22, 1963 in proper perspective, it is necessary to become familiar with these groups and with their relationships to
Oswald and each other.

After all, every good detective begins his murder investigation by
determining who had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the
act. The obvious starting place is with the one man universally acknowledged as being the person most closely connected with the assassinationLee Harvey Oswald.

Prior to his enlistment in the Marines and with the exception of the
death of his father, Lee Harvey Oswald's boyhood was little different from
that of millions of other Americans.

Oswald was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 18, 1939, two
months after the death of his father, Robert E. Lee Oswald, a collector of
insurance premiums. While this unfortunate event must have had some
effect on young Oswald, it was a fate endured by thousands of other young
Americans, none of whom have felt compelled to murder national leaders.

In 1945, Oswald's mother married fora third time, but three years later
the marriage ended in divorce. From that point on, Oswald and his
brother, Robert, were brought up by their mother, Marguerite.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 concluded that
President Kennedy was "probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy." However they maintained that Lee Harvey Oswald was the actual
killer and that another gunman-whose presence was established by two
separate scientific tests based on a Dallas police recording of the gunfire in
Dealey Plaza-escaped and remains unidentified.

This finding was a milestone to the many Americans who had come to
disbelieve the lone-assassin theory of the Warren Commission.

Typically, however, this reversal of official American history was still
not enough for the mother of the accused assassin, Marguerite Oswald.
She told newsmen:

The committee members have made a first step in the right direction.
It's up to us to do the rest . . . I hope and know the future will vindicate
my son entirely. It took us 15 years to come this far. It may take another
15 years or longer. I probably won't be around, but the world will know
that Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent of the charges against him.

This was the statement of a woman who was much more than just a
supportive mother. It came from a woman who faced more public hostility than most murderers ... a woman who faced the autumn of her years
alone and in poverty. And all because of a child she bore.

Marguerite Claverie was born in New Orleans in 1907. Her family was
of French and German extraction. Her mother died a few years after her
birth, leaving young Marguerite and her five siblings in the care of her
father, a streetcar conductor. According to relatives, the Claverie family
was poor but happy.

Marguerite, at the age of seventeen, completed one year of high school.
She then dropped out to become a law-firm receptionist. In August 1929,
she married Edward John Pic, Jr., a clerk. However, the marriage was not
successful and the couple divorced in 1931, several months after the birth
of her first son, John Edward Pic.

In 1933, she married Robert Edward Lee Oswald, himself recently
divorced. She described her marriage to Oswald as the "only happy part"
of her life. Out of this union came a second son, Robert. Then her
happiness came to an end. Two months before the birth of Lee Harvey
Oswald in October 1939, her husband died of a sudden heart attack.
Making her way alone, she saw an opportunity of establishing a family
once again by remarrying in 1945. Sending the two elder sons off to
boarding school, she and her new husband, Edwin A. Ekdahl, took
six-year-old Lee and moved to Benbrook, Texas, a small town south of
Fort Worth.

However, there were soon arguments over money and charges of infidelity against Ekdahl. A divorce was granted in 1948 and she was allowed
to use her former name of Oswald. It is interesting to note that Ekdahl's
divorce attorney was Fred Korth, who in the fall of 1963 was fired as
secretary of the Navy by President Kennedy amid charges that Korth may
have been involved in a scandal over the General Dynamics TFX airplane.

John Pic and Robert Oswald rejoined their mother, but both soon left
home to join the military. Marguerite was left with only young Lee. Some
accounts say Lee was overly mothered by her, while others claim she
neglected the boy. However, the former seems to be closer to the truth in
light of the fact that she became a practical nurse charged with keeping the
children of prominent Texans such as the late Amon Carter, Jr., and
former congressman Tom Vandergriff. Despite much conjecture, there is
little evidence that Lee's childhood was any better or any worse than
others.

In 1959, after serving three years in the Marines, Lee received a sudden
discharge and came back to Fort Worth for a two-day visit with his
mother. Lee said he was off to New Orleans to work for an import-export
firm, but several weeks later, Mrs. Oswald read that her twenty-year-old
son had turned up in Russia, where he told U.S. officials he wanted to
defect.

Mrs. Oswald's statements to the press at that time were unpopular.
Instead of branding her son a traitor, she said:

I feel very strongly that as an individual, he has the right to make his
own decision. Lee has definite ideas. I believe God gives us a conscience and the ability to know right and I feel he has the right to make
his own decision.

Despite this motherly support, Lee seemed to make every effort to avoid
Marguerite after his return from the Soviet Union in 1962. At one point he
moved his family from Fort Worth to Dallas without leaving his mother a
forwarding address.

Her family was reunited only briefly during those dark days of November, 1963.

Mrs. Oswald was on her way to work on November 22, when she heard
over the car radio that Kennedy had been shot while riding in a motorcade
in downtown Dallas. She also learned that a young ex-Marine named Lee
Harvey Oswald was being held by police as the suspected assassin.

Concerned by the broadcasts and apparently with no friends to turn to,
she contacted the local newspaper, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and
asked if someone would take her to Dallas. She told the newspapermen
who drove her to the Dallas police station: "I want to hear him tell me
that he did it."

Mrs. Oswald also told them that she had been persecuted since her son's
journey to Russia and knew the meaning of suffering. She also told of
being fired by her last employer, Star-Telegram publisher Amon Carter,
Jr. She said she had been acting as a day nurse for the Carters' children
until about two weeks prior to the Kennedy assassination. After a weekend
trip to Las Vegas, the Carters suddenly let her go.

She once told this author: "You don't know what it's like to have
someone look at you and say, `You've done a good job, but we no longer
need your services.'

In Dallas Mrs. Oswald was disappointed in her desire to hear a confession from her son. She was not allowed to talk with him. And Oswald
steadfastly maintained his innocence. He shouted to newsmen gathered in
the police station hallway: "No, sir, I didn't kill anybody. I'm just a
"
patsy!