A Dialog With Robert Oswald

ROBERT OSWALD WROTE:

Robert Oswald wrote: While I am ready at any time to be convinced that the Warren Commission was wrong,….

BK Notes: Robert already has demonstrated how the WC was wrong in that Lee did not practice, when he wrote: “If Lee did not practice with that rifle in the days and weeks prior to the assassination he did not take the shots that killed the President and wounded Governor Connally.” Robert refers to the doctor and son who engaged with “Oswald” at the rifle range, which had to be a second rifle, and an associate who he handed the rifle over a fence to – a second suspect. And where did the ammo come from? Robert also wrote in his book that he was suspicious of the Paines, as I am. 

Robert: I have not yet read or heard or seen any evidence that has shaken my conviction that Lee and Lee alone fired the shots that wounded Governor Connally and killed the President of the United States. I base my own judgement largely on the physical evidence and on the words spoken to me by Lieutenant Cunningham and Henry Wade in the first twenty-four hours after the assassination. Cunningham's report of Lee's strange behavior at the Texas Theatre and reports by both Cunningham and Wade of what various eyewitnesses had said made me impatient to hear some explanation from Lee. When I saw him on Saturday, he offered no explanation.

BK: So it wasn’t that he thought Oswald had a motive to kill the President, it was Cunningham’s report on Oswald’s behavior at the Theater that convinces him of his brother’s guilt? I don’t think so. What does Cunningham say?

Robert: Despite the blunders by the Dallas Police and the errors and omissions of the Warren Commission, I am convinced:

1. Lee ordered the 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano from Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago in March, 1963. Handwriting experts told the Commission that the mail-order form and the money order were in Lee's handwriting.

BK: Yes, shortly after Volkmar Schmit told Oswald Walker should be killed as Hitler should have been – which he did at the party set up for the Oswalds to meet the Paines, Oswald ordered the rifle though the mail using the Hidel alias traceable to him, when he could have purchased a similar rifle at any department store, pawn shop or gun shop within walking distance of Dealey Plaza with cash and no paper trail. Why did he establish a paper trail that led directly to him?

2. Lee received the rifle. It was mailed to Post Office Box 2915, Dallas, and this was the last address Lee gave me for his mail. While he denied that he owned any rifle, Marina's testimony and the photographs found in the Paine garage on the afternoon of November 23 prove that he did own one.

BK: Yes, Oswald owned the rifle, and ordered the pistol COD – a month apart, but they arrived on the same day, and the day the WC says he picked them up at the PO he was working at Jaggers/Chiles/Stoval from 8am until after the PO closed, so he didn’t have the opportunity to pick it up. And no one at the PO remembers handing him the rifle over the counter – it couldn’t fit in the PO Box, and there’s no record of Oswald paying the COD cash at the PO for the pistol. WTF?

Robert: 3. The rifle was taken from the Paine garage sometime before November 22, 1963. I believe it was taken by Lee when he made his unusual visit to the Paine home on November 21, 1963.

BK: Then Lee did not practice with that rifle in the days and weeks before the assassination, and as Robert says if he didn’t do that, he “didn’t take the shots that killed the President and wounded Governor Connally.”

Robert: 4. Lee did have a package with him when he went to the Texas School Book Depository on Friday morning, November 22, 1963. If the package actually contained curtain rods - as he told Buell Wesley Frazier, the neighbor who drove him to work - then those curtain rods have never turned up after the most intensive search of the Depository building.

BK: If it was the rifle, it had to be disassembled, and there is no screw driver or tool or even a dime that Oswald could have assembled the rifle in the building. An intensive search of the building failed to find Oswald’s clipboard on the wall, or his jacket found weeks later in the Domino room window sill by the table he said he was sitting reading a paper at the time of the shooting.

Robert: 5. Lee did have the general opportunity to shoot at the President without being seen by anyone else in the depository. Charles Givens, who was working with a floor-laying crew on the sixth floor, Lee on the fifth floor around 11:50 or 11:55 A.M. on November 22, 1963. Lee was then carrying a clipboard which was found ten days after the assassination hidden on the sixth floor.

BK: Yes, and then Shelley saw Oswald at noon on the first floor standing by a telephone as if waiting for a call. He said he then went into the Domino room and read a newspaper by the window where his jacket was found, and from where he said he saw two black guys walk by, and they acknowledge having done so. If Oswald wasn’t there how did he know they were? Then Oswald was seen by a secretary at 12:15 on the first foor.

Robert: No one has ever come forward with any testimony that proves that Lee was not in that general part of the Depository building at the time of the assassination.

BK: Mr. Ochis Campbell, a senior executive, told a New York Herald Tribune reporter on the day of the assassination that when he reentered the building immediately after the shooting he saw Oswald standing by the first floor storage closit under the stairs leading to the second floor. Ninety seconds after the shooting DPD officer Marion Baker saw Oswald walk past the window of a closed door to the second floor lunchroom as he ascended the stairs with Roy Truly. For Oswald to have been the Sixth Floor sniper he would have had to ditch the rifle on the sixth floor, descend the four flights of stairs and go through the door Baker saw him through the window. But Truly, seconds ahead of Baker, didn’t see Oswald go though that door, as he would have if he did. After confronting Oswald with drawn pistol, Truly said Oswald worked there, and Oswald bought a coke and walked out of the lunchroom the same way he went in, through the secretary’s office. A secretary who just returned saw Oswald with the coke and talked to him, but he didn’t respond. He was described by Baker, Truly and the secretary as being cool, calm and collected, unlike anyone who had just blown the president’s head open, ran down four flights of steps and was confronted by a cop with a gun pointed at his belly.

Robert: 6. The 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano, serial number C2766, was found on the sixth floor of the Depository building about 1:22 P.M. on November 22, 1963. The rifle still had one live round in it. About ten minutes earlier three empty cartridge cases had been discovered near the window in the south-east corner of the sixth floor.

BK: Yes, where did the cartridge case come from? It holds five bullets, but only four are accounted for. Where did they come from? Bullets are like cigarettes, you can’t just buy one or four, you have to buy a pack. And the pack they were traced to were last sold in a bulk box lot to the US Marine Corps in 1948. Where did they come from? And were did the US Air Force side arm holster used for the sling on this rifle come from? It had to come from somewhere.

Robert: Unfortunately, an officer - Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman - said the weapon was a 7.65 Mauser bolt action rifle. He made that statement before he had taken the trouble to examine the weapon closely, and he was wrong - as he later admitted. Actually there are certain resemblances between the 7.65 Mauser bolt action rifle and the 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano, and under ordinary circumstances, the officer's casual statement would have been treated as an unfortunate but unimportant error - as though he had said a suspect was "about 5 feet 9 inches" when he was actually 5 feet 8 inches. The error Weitzman made does not alter the fact: Less than an hour after the assassination, the Dallas police had found in the Texas School Book Depository Building the rifle mailed to Lee from Chicago about seven months earlier.

BK: Yes, the same rifle shipped to Oswald’s PO Box was found in the TSBD, the only solid piece of evidence that links Oswald to the assassination, and the bases for the frame up that made Oswald the “Patsy” he claimed to be. And that rifle was incapable of taking the head shot, which was taken by a first class trained sniper – “one shot one kill” and they go for the head. It was shot from somewhere in front or behind as the target moved away or approached him, and used a diffent type of bullet that shattered on impact.

Robert: 7. Lee did leave the Depository building almost immediately after the assassination.

BK: Yes, he heard Shelly say there would be no more work that day, and a number of others left as well.Oswald then went into “Operational” mode, walking eight blocks away from the TSBD, then got on a bus going in the opposite direction. Getting off the bus stuck in traffic he called for a cab at the bus station, and offered it to an old lady. He took the cab five blocks past his rooming house and walked back, using trained counter-surveillance intelligence trade crafts. As former CIA agent Bob Bair says in his TV series “JFK Declassified – Tracking Oswald,” Oswald practiced intelligence tradecraft HE – Bair was trained in by the CIA.

Robert: 8. Lee did return to the rooming house at 1026 North Beckley about one o'clock on November 22, 1963, and left three or four minutes later.

BK: Yes, and he retrieved a jacket and a pistol, while a cop car beeped its horn out front, and he was last seen standing by a bus stop.

Robert: 9. Police Officer J.D. Tippit was shot near the intersection of Tenth and Patton, a few blocks from 
the rooming house, at approximately 1:16 P.M.

BK: Yes, and Oswald or someone who closely resembled him was seen in a 57 Plymouth near the scene of Tippit’s killing, a car owned by Tippit’s good friend Carl Mather, whose alibi was that he was working at the time at Collins Radio, in Richardson, Texas, where he worked on the radios on Air Force Executive planes, including Vice President LBJ’s plane. Three weeks earlier, on Nov. 1, the NYTs reported in a front page story that Collins Radio had leased the CIA Cuban raider ship “Rex,” that had deposited commandos with high powered rifles on a Cuban beach on a mission to kill Castro.

Robert: 10. When Lee was arrested at the Texas Theatre, about eight blocks from the spot where Tippit was shot, between 1:45 and 1:50 P.M., he had a Smith & Wesson .38 Special caliber revolver, serial number V510210. Four cartridge cases found a few minutes later in the shrubbery at the corner of Tenth and Patton by three eyewitnesses had been fired from that particular pistol, according to expert testimony.

BK: And where did those bullets come from? Mixed match makes, and bullets found in his pocket TWO hours after his arrest show black leather scuff marks as if they were in a police holster.

Robert: 11. Lee had ordered that revolver in January or February, 1963, from Seaport Traders, Inc., of Los Angeles. He had used the alias "A.J. Hidell," and had used the same address he gave me and later used in ordering the rifle - Box 2915, Dallas, Texas.

BK: Yes and he ordered it COD – Collect On Delivery, but there’s no record of this payment or a PO employee who recalls taking the money and handing him the gun, that he could have bought, as John Hinkley did, for less for cash with no paper trail at a pawn or gun shop or even a department store.

Robert; 12. Five different people picked out Lee as the man they had seen shoot J.D. Tippit or run from the scene of the shooting, emptying his revolver as he ran.

If that was Lee who was the man who resembled him sitting in Carl Mather’s 57 Plymouth a block away? Or was that the guy who resembled Oswald and killed Tippit. Oswald looked like any ordinary USMC jar head – who fits the COP personality profle.

Robert: I do not believe any of these twelve statements can be disproved, and I find only one explanation for this sequence of events: Lee shot President Kennedy, Governor Connally, and Officer J.D. Tippit. I kept my mind open for other explanations as long as I could, and I am ready at any time to be proven wrong. But those who chip away at details in the twenty-six volumes issued by the Warren Commission seem to me to accomplish nothing unless they can offer some alternate explanation for this series of actions by Lee between January, 1963, and November 22, 1963.

From Robert L. Oswald’s, "Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald by His Brother". (1967).

BK: Okay Robert, I wish you were still among us as I intend to offer a more reasonable alternate explanation for this series of actions by Lee between Jan and November 22, 1963 that will include all of the facts and evidence.

Lee: “Don’t believe the so-called evidence.”

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