Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  In October of 1945, the couple moved to Benbrook, a suburb of Fort Worth. Something of note happened here, which the Warren Report does not mention. On Oswald’s enrollment card at Benbrook Common School are listed two addresses: the Worth Hotel and 7408 Ewing. The family lived at neither. They were living in a rented home on Granbury Road. The family may have briefly lived at that Fort Worth hotel in the months preceding. But there was no reason for the Ewing address, because Marguerite would not live at 7408 Ewing for two more years. And Oswald’s only attendance at Benbrook was 1945–46.14 It is hard to believe that the Commission did not notice this odd discrepancy because they actually cite the records of that school in the report.15 And two pages later, they mention Ewing Street as a 1948 address.

  Marguerite suspected her new husband, correctly, of infidelity. They also began to argue about finances. They separated in 1946, reunited in 1947, and divorced in June of 1948.16 After this divorce, Marguerite reverted back to her former name of Marguerite C. Oswald.

  In October of 1948, John Pic wanted to join the Marine Corps Reserve. Yet he was only sixteen years old. Marguerite signed a false affidavit stating that John was seventeen years old and was born on January 17, 1931. (He was actually born in 1932.) John entered the reserve on October 24. He then quit high school and began working at a department store. It was at this time that Marguerite purchased the home in Fort Worth on Ewing Street.17 By 1949, all three boys now attended Fort Worth public schools, since John had decided to go back and achieve his high school diploma. John was in high school, Robert was in junior high school, and Lee attended Ridglea West Elementary School. Marquerite held a series of jobs, usually having to do with retail sales.

  New York City

  In January of 1950 John Pic turned eighteen. He graduated from Paschal High School and decided to join the Coast Guard.18 He was first stationed in New Jersey and would not return to Texas for nine months. In August of 1951, he married Margaret Fuhrman in New York City. He was soon assigned to port security at Ellis Island. He therefore moved to an apartment on East Ninety-Second Street in New York City. In July of 1952, without graduating high school, Robert Oswald joined the Marines. He soon left for San Diego.19 This left twelve-year-old Lee at home with his mother in the house on Ewing. Lee graduated from Ridglea Elementary and now should have attended the brand new William Monnig Junior High in the fall of 1952. But instead, Marguerite now sold the house on Ewing and drove to New York City with Lee. Her reason for this was that she did not think Lee should be left alone while she worked.20

  The visit began well enough. But when Marguerite disclosed that she thought Lee and herself should live with the Pics, relations soured. For Pic’s wife did not take a liking to Marguerite.21 Lee and his mother then moved to an apartment in the Bronx (where Jacobi Medical Center is located, a point that will be explained shortly). Marguerite now again began taking jobs in retail sales stores like Lerner’s Shops. And she and her son occasionally saw the Pics. Lee now began having truancy problems in the New York public schools. Other pupils teased him because of his “Western” clothes and Texas accent.22 Lee complained to Marguerite that he wanted to go back to Texas.23 Because of this problem, the Oswalds were to appear in Domestic Relations Court in March of 1953. Lee did not accompany his mother, and therefore a warrant was issued for him. He was eventually apprehended at the Bronx Zoo, where he called the attendance officer a “damned Yankee.”24

  On April 16, 1953, Lee and his mother appeared in court. Lee was judged a chronic truant. Therefore the judge remanded him to Youth House in Manhattan for observation for a period of three weeks.25 He was interviewed by social workers and psychologists who delivered various opinions about him. (One of these observers, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, actually revised his opinion of Oswald after the assassination for his book The Two Assassins.) The recommendation from Youth House was that young Oswald be placed on probation, and that his mother be required to seek help from a family consulting agency.26 From most indications, after this, Oswald’s behavior in school generally improved and the truancy problem was alleviated to the point that Marguerite did not feel any more court appearances were necessary. But one more appearance did ensue in November. And the probation officer suggested using the Big Brother organization to provide a mentor for Oswald.27 Marguerite called both the probation officer and the Big Brother group before deciding to return to New Orleans in January. She clearly did not want to return to court and risk having Lee remanded, which would have altered her plans to leave the city.

  We should note some anomalies in the New York school records that the Warren Commission did not note. The most curious being that it appears that “the original sets of New York school, court, and psychiatric records disappeared while in FBI custody.”28 Only copies are available today. Yet, when Anne Buttimer of the ARRB surveyed the documentary record on this issue, she wrote that the Warren Commission was supposed to have the originals of these records.29 Yet, it appears that what the Commission worked with was not original material. And further, the FBI did not do a complete job in their field investigation. Only one teacher of Oswald was interviewed and no schoolmates were.30 Another oddity is that in the extant New York records, nothing appears to have been transferred from Forth Worth: no grade cards, no enrollment forms, and no transcripts.31 Further, the records of his actual school attendance differ as to the number of days Oswald actually missed. In one set of records produced by the Commission, the truancy problem is quite serious. Yet in the New York School records, it does not seem very bad at all. In the former, he missed seventy-five more days of school in a ten-month period than in the latter.32 Finally, when John Malone of the FBI wrote a report based upon the original records, he said that when Oswald left Youth House in May of 1953, he entered ninth grade at P. S. 44. Yet, the previous September, Oswald entered the seventh grade. How could he have been skipped through a grade if he was a chronic truant?33

  Before leaving the subject of Oswald and his mother in New York, two other points of information should be noted—points which either the FBI or the Commission itself knew about. About a week after Kennedy’s assassination, the FBI office in New York received a phone call from a Mrs. Jack Tippit. Mrs. Tippit had just received a call from a strange woman with a foreign accent. This woman wanted to know if Mrs. Tippit was related through marriage to the slain police officer in Dallas who Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly had shot. She replied that yes, they were distantly related. The woman with the accent now warned Mrs. Tippit not to go to the press with the information she was now about to disclose. She implied she was calling from a public phone so the call could not be traced. She also said she could not reveal her name since she feared for her life if it ever got out. She said that she personally knew Oswald’s father and uncle. They had come to New York from Hungary. They were communists. They had lived at Seventy-Seventh Street and Second Avenue in a section of New York called Yorkville. They had been unemployed while she knew them. The communist party in America had supported them because they worked on communist activities. The unidentified woman gave Mrs. Tippit two names. When she did, her demeanor now became agitated and her speech more disjointed. One was Emile Kardos. She then mentioned the word “brother-in-law,” a phrase which she repeated. The other name was “Weinstock.”34 Louis Weinstock, also from Hungary, was the head of the Communist Party in New York City in the early 1950s. Weinstock was also General Manager of The Worker, located in New York. It was a publication Oswald subscribed to and wrote to in 1962. There is no evidence the author could find revealing that the FBI tried to find Emile Kardos or investigated if any Oswalds ever lived in Yorkville.

  The second point of information is perhaps even more interesting. And the Warren Commission clearly knew about it. To any student of the Oswald family, it becomes apparent that, at this time in her life, Marguerite was not at all financially well off. She was barely surviving on about 45 dollars per week as she went from job to job in retail sales work. Yet, while in New York, she hired a ho
usekeeper to clean her one bedroom apartment. Her name was Louise Robertson. And she cleaned her apartment two to three times per week. Louise worked for Marguerite for about six weeks. During which time Marguerite told the cleaning woman that the reason she had brought Lee to New York was to undergo mental tests at Jacobi Hospital.35 (As noted earlier, this hospital is in the Bronx where Marguerite moved to after leaving John Pic’s place.) When chief consul J. Lee Rankin of the Warren Commission asked Marguerite about this particular point—Jacobi Hospital—she replied in the negative and escaped into a defense of “normal” characterizations of Oswald as a boy who had puppies and a bicycle. She clearly was avoiding the broader context of the question. For mental tests did not have to deal necessarily with abnormal psychology. This utterly fascinating point was never brought up again.

  Return to New Orleans

  Following the Warren Commission biography of Oswald, the reader will now notice something rather odd. The author (attorney Wesley Liebeler) has just spent about four pages on Oswald in New York. He will now spend a bit more than half of that on Oswald’s return to New Orleans even though Oswald stayed there for about the same length of time before joining the Marines. This seems odd because some very important things happened in this time period, which the Commission clearly discounts.

  In January of 1954, upon her return to New Orleans, Marguerite Oswald first lived with her sister Lillian Murret on French Street in the Lakeview area. The Commission then says that Marguerite’s friend Myrtle Evans rented them an apartment at 1454 Saint Mary’s Place. Oswald now attended Beauregard Junior High in New Orleans. He graduated in June of 1955 before attending Warren Easton High School that fall. He then dropped out, worked in New Orleans for the next eight months, and then moved to Fort Worth in early 1956.

  But Robert Oswald said, on numerous occasions, that Lee attended Stripling Junior High in Fort Worth. He said this before the Warren Commission in 1964, in 1959 after Oswald’s defection to Russia, and in 1962, upon his return.36 Yet, according to the Commission, this did not occur. In fact, it could not have occurred since Oswald graduated from junior high school in New Orleans. This may be why the Commission deals with Oswald’s intermediate schooling in New Orleans in just one paragraph.37

  Yet, in 1993, Principal Ricardo Galindo backed up Robert Oswald. He stated that it was common knowledge that Oswald had attended Stripling.38 In fact, a teacher, three students, and an assistant principal all recalled Oswald being there.39 And here begins one of the strangest discoveries in the recent scholarship on the phenomenon of Lee Harvey Oswald.

  In 1994 John Armstrong got in contact with Stripling assistant principal Frank Kudlaty. He asked him if Galindo was correct: Did Oswald attend Stripling Junior High School? Kudlaty replied without hesitation that he had. Armstrong then asked how he was so sure. Kudlaty’s response was, “Because I gave his Stripling records to the FBI.”40 Kudlaty went on to say that on the Saturday morning after Kennedy’s murder, he was contacted by his superior, Weldon Lucas, the school principal. Since he lived close to the school, he was to meet two FBI agents there. Kudlaty was there before the FBI was. He went and retrieved Oswald’s file, which he briefly looked at. He noted that there were no trailing records—that is, records from his previous school, or a notice that Stripling had transferred records to his next school. He placed the file back into the folder. Once the agents got there, they asked for it. Kudlaty turned it over. They then left. Kudlaty locked up the school and went home.

  Kudlaty’s credentials are beyond reproach. After leaving Stripling, he became Superintendent of Schools in Waco, Texas. He stayed there until his retirement in 1987. When the State Department selected a group of school administrators to advise the Chinese government on education, he was one of those chosen to attend. He traveled to China in 1979.

  One of the most disturbing aspects of Kudlaty’s testimony is that the FBI had to have known Oswald attended Stripling ten years previous. Or else how could they have called Weldon Lucas the morning after the assassination? Yet, this information is not in the Warren Commission. Neither are the names of Frank Kudlaty or Wendell Lucas. And, as with the original school records from New York, it appears the FBI misappropriated the file Kudalaty gave them. For it is nowhere to be found today.

  The Warren Commission chose to believe Marguerite Oswald when she said her son began to read communist literature in 1954.41 This was strongly disputed by Oswald’s best friend at that time, Edward Voebel. He said that “I believe that’s a lot of baloney … I am sure he had no interest in those things at that time.”42 Later he was asked specifically about Oswald studying communism at age fourteen, “Did you see any evidence of that when you were going around and associating with Lee Oswald?” Voebel replied firmly, “No, none whatever.”

  In 1955, an event would occur that would change Oswald’s life. He would join the Civil Air Patrol and meet David Ferrie. This is how the Warren Report deals with that crucial topic: “He was briefly a member of the Civil Air Patrol.”43 And that is that. Even though in Volume VIII of the Commission volumes, two witnesses tentatively recalled Oswald being in the CAP with Ferrie as the commander.44 We have already dealt with this key topic at length in Chapter 5. But we should note another aspect of it here. As we have seen with Ed Voebel, his friend did not recall Oswald reading any communist literature or expressing Marxist sympathies in 1954. This important observation is backed up by Robert Oswald: “If Lee was deeply interested in Marxism in the summer of 1955, he said nothing about it to me. During my brief visit with him in New Orleans, I never saw any books on the subject in the apartment…. Never, in my presence, did he read anything that I recognized as Communist literature.”45 Therefore the evidence indicates that the dabbling in Marxist literature likely began with Oswald meeting Ferrie.

  Oswald dropped out of Warren Easton High School on October 7.46 He brought a forged note to school saying his family was moving to San Diego. He then tried to join the Marines by claiming he was seventeen. (He had just turned sixteen on October 18.) There is a very interesting incident that occurred previously, in the summer of 1955, that foreshadows Oswald’s eagerness to join the Marines. Marguerite recalled being visited by a man in uniform who she presumed to be a Marine Corps recruiter. This man encouraged her to let her son quit school and enter the Corps. As this was illegal at that time—Lee was fifteen—this man could not have been a legitimate Marine Corps officer. As more than one commentator has pointed out, this may have been Ferrie masquerading as a recruiting officer.47 We have seen how Ferrie was active in recruiting young men into the service, and also how he had a domineering role in their lives. This incident likely influenced his mother to later make out a false affidavit about Lee’s age to join the Marines. The subterfuge failed.48 By badly underplaying Oswald’s service in the CAP, and not even mentioning Ferrie, the Commission leaves out a key piece of the puzzle as to why Oswald was so eager to join the Marines illegally, as to have someone visit his house in order to do so.

  The Warren Report then tells us that Oswald went to work as a messenger at Gerard Tujague’s shipping company. Again, by never mentioning the Friends of Democratic Cuba, or the Bolton Ford incident, the report leaves out another key piece of key information. For Gerard Tujague was the vice-president of the Friends of Democratic Cuba.49 In other words, the name “Oswald” could have been gathered through him. According to his mother, Oswald now began studying the Marine Corps Manual and waiting to turn age seventeen to join the Marines.

  In July of 1956, Marguerite moved back to Fort Worth. She rented an apartment at 4936 Collinswood. Oswald now enrolled at Arlington Heights High School on September 6. He dropped out after only a few weeks.50 This was in preparation for his joining the Marines the next month. Two other things happened around this time that should be noted. Although Oswald had been studying the Marine Corps Manual month after month, he tried to sell classmate Richard Garrett on communist philosophy, for which Garrett reported him to the principal.51 The second inter
esting point is that on October 3, Oswald wrote a letter to the Socialist Party of America. He said he was very interested in their youth league and would like information on a branch in his region so he could join. He then closed with: “I am a Marxist, and have been studying socialist principles for well over fifteen months. I am very interested in your Y. P. S. L.” (This last refers to the youth league groups.) The Warren Report makes almost nothing of these two incidents, or their timing. Yet, any honest investigator would have certainly arched his or her eyebrows reading about them. For in just a bit more than two weeks from the date of this letter to the Socialist Party, Oswald would be interviewed, fingerprinted, and measured for his later enlistment in the Marines.52 It is astonishing that the Warren Report never mentions this jarring juxtaposition. Oswald was writing letters to the Socialist Party, and trying to sell his classmates on communism at the same time he was joining the branch of the service that was trained to fight and kill communists. Was Oswald a split personality? If so, the report does not say that. The inability to explain this dichotomy, or to even honestly acknowledge it, is one of the largest lacunae in the Warren Report.

  Oswaldskovich in the Marines

  Oswald was in the Marine Corps from October of 1956 until September of 1959. He served in three main geographical locations: the southeast United States, California, and the Far East. He served in boot camp in San Diego. In early 1957 he went to Camp Pendleton for infantry training (ITR). In March he went to the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, for Aviation Fundamental School. This was the beginning of his training to be a radar operator. He took classes in basic radar theory, map reading, and air traffic control assignments.53 This training continued at Keesler Air Force base in Biloxi, Mississippi. Keesler is home to the Air Education and Training Command and specializes in training students in such areas as radio communications and avionics as well as related electronics areas. Oswald was granted a security clearance to deal with confidential material at this time.54 This is odd considering his relatively recent letter to the Socialist Party. But in light of the fact that Ferrie used to take his CAP students on bivouac maneuvers at Keesler—which he had to have clearance for—perhaps it is not so odd. In late June of 1957, after graduating seventh in a class of thirty, Oswald was given a certificate as Aviation Electronics Operator.55