Paul Gregory On Marguerite

Defending “the Boy”
It is not possible to understand Lee Harvey Oswald without delving into his mother. Those privy to Marguerite Oswald’s testimony on February 10 and 12 of 1964 could have concluded they were seeing a reincarnated older version of Lee
Harvey Oswald. A high-school dropout scraping by with assorted odd jobs, in her mind, Marguerite Oswald had spent her life taking on the powers that be that had held her and her talented son down.

The parallels between the biographies of Lee and Marguerite Oswald are striking. They both were convinced they had been dealt a bad hand in the cards of life. Both exhibited a tenuous relationship with reality. Both were underdogs, through no fault of their own. Both craved the limelight, which Marguerite refused to share with others. Both had a loose relationship with the truth. When caught in a lie, Marguerite dug in her heels and insisted she had told the truth. Her life had been a series of slights and mistreatments by those positioned above her.
. . .
Marguerite Oswald left the Six Flags Inn on Monday, November 25 with a chip on her shoulder. She was the grieving mother of Lee Harvey Oswald. Marina, the grieving widow, really knew nothing of the “boy.” Yet all eyes were on Marina, who, under James Martin’s tutelage, was being transformed from a frumpy scarecrow into a chic model. As deals were monetized, Marguerite felt she, herself a destitute widow, was lagging behind Marina in the spoils. (She estimated Marina’s earnings at $38,000.) Marguerite relished speaking engagements and was always game for interviews. Once the word was out that
she was unhinged, invitations became rare. She could, however, look forward to her testimony before the Warren Commission on February 10 and 12, 1964, with the Supreme Court chief justice, Earl Warren, himself presiding to hear Marguerite’s account of “the boy’s” life.

Warren’s staff would have alerted him to the bizarre testimony to expect from the dowdy, bespectacled fifty-seven-year-old nurse. Marguerite had begun to formulate her story of “the boy” within hours of the assassination. In her first encounter with the FBI at the Dallas police headquarters just hours after the shooting, she told them: “For the security of my country, I want this kept perfectly quiet until you investigate. I happen to know that the State Department furnished the money for my son to return back to the United States, and I don’t know if that would be made public what that would involve, and so,
please, will you investigate this and keep this quiet?”

Within twenty-four hours, Marguerite had further refined her narrative. Her “boy” had transformed into “a hero,” a secret agent for the United States. He loved his country, as did his mother. He deserved to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Marguerite claimed to anyone who would listen that she possessed “all the records” to prove “the boy’s” innocence. A government conspiracy had prevented her from telling her story. Already at Six Flags, Secret Service agents Howard and Kunkel refused to “put her on tape,” other than for five to ten minutes. As she testified later before the Warren Commission: “I will state now emphatically that I have never been questioned by the FBI or the Secret Service. Never, gentlemen. If they have more, they should produce my voice.”

Chief Justice Warren had been alerted that Marguerite had procedural demands to be clarified before she “told her story.” Her first demand was addressed
directly to Chief Justice Warren, presiding: “I implore you, in the name of justice, to let my son Lee Harvey Oswald, who is accused of assassinating the
president, and I, the mother of this man, who is the accused’s mother, be represented by counsel. We have information pertinent to this case. . . . And I
think that my son should be considered in this. He is dead. But we can show cause that my son is not the assassin of President Kennedy. And so I would like
my son [to be represented]-he is the main object of the Presidential Commission, is he not, sir?”

Marguerite already had a lawyer, and she had picked out Lee’s advocate in advance-Mark Lane, a New York lawyer, among the first to dispute the Warren
Commission’s lone gunman finding. Lane believed that JFK was killed by a CIA plot.

Chief Justice Warren emphatically shot down Marguerite’s first request: “The commission is not here to prosecute your dead son. It is not here and it was not
established to prosecute anyone. It is the purpose and the provenance of the commission to obtain all the facts that it can obtain, and then make an impartial report-not as a prosecutor, but as an impartial commission-on the manner in which the president came to his death.”

Marguerite was not buying what Justice Warren was selling: “We do not know the questions that you are asking of myself or Marina or the other witnesses.
And I contend that you cannot ask them the pertinent questions because you don’t know what I know, and what Mr. Lane knows.”

In effect, Marguerite was demanding that Mark Lane be present to challenge all testimony relating to Lee Harvey Oswald and his presumed role in the
assassination. As Warren continued to refuse Lee’s counsel, Marguerite grudgingly conceded that “I will have to accept your verdict, but I don’t do it graciously. I want that for record.”

Marguerite and Justice Warren then turned to her heralded “documents” that she claimed would answer all questions of the assassination. In her back-and-forth with the chief justice, Marguerite plays the innocent and destitute victim, even claiming that the Secret Service had stolen some of her precious documents. She states to Warren: “And so the documents stay with me. I make the statement perfectly plain. And so the documents stay with me.” Any documents photocopied must be done in her presence, Marguerite demanded. Marguerite clearly had money on her mind with respect to her papers: “I need to protect myself financially, because I am a widow, and do not have the money.”

Marguerite’s most bizarre request came next; namely, she be granted subpoena power: “When I tell my story, I will be including people in my story that
possibly you don’t know of. I request that I have the privilege, through you, of course, to subpoena these people that are in connection with the story that I tell.”

Marguerite, it seems, had her sights on Marina, whose testimony implicated “the boy.” Per Marguerite: “I also request that after my testimony, that Marina
Oswald will be subpoenaed-not subpoenaed but will then testify again, if you see fit. And I believe that I have contrary testimony to her testimony that would make it necessary for her to be recalled.”

The chief justice quashed Marguerite’s demand for subpoena power with dispatch: “Well, Mrs. Oswald, of course you have no power of subpoena, and we
have no power to give you the power of subpoena. But you may be sure that if your evidence produces anything that is critical to this investigation, that we will pursue it to the end.”

Marguerite was still not ready to give in on subpoena power for herself. Marguerite to Justice Warren: “You will give me the assurance that these people
I name, regardless of title-I am liable to name some very important people-”
Warren (interrupting): “No, we cannot give you any assurance, because we don’t know-”
Marguerite interrupting defiantly: “I see no reason, then, for my testimony.”
Justice Warren explained the trap that Marguerite was setting as he declared to the assembly: “But the only thing-I would not want Mrs. Oswald to leave here and say, ‘I gave the commission a list of witnesses and they did not call all of them.’”
. . .

As the commission turned to its afternoon session, Marguerite was far from exhausting her litany of complaints. Now her villains were the two Secret
Service agents, Howard and Kunkel, tasked by LBJ to protect the Oswald family. Their original sin, according to Marguerite, was their deference to Marina and
Robert at the Six Flags Inn. The agents, in Marguerite’s mind, were wasting their time on Marina and Robert, who knew nothing. She, on the other hand, had all the records-documents that somehow would exonerate “the boy.”

By the time Marguerite testified before the Warren Commission more than ten weeks after Six Flags, she had come to the conclusion that Howard and Kunkel
were out to murder her. Why? In her mind, the Secret Service had to suppress the fact that Lee was an American secret agent and innocent of killing the
president. When Mike Howard knocked on her door in Fort Worth to announce her protective detail, she called the local newspaper to be on the alert if she
disappeared. Similarly, Marguerite enlisted another newsman to ride to the airport  with her and Howard as protection against an assassination.
Although the chief justice and general counsel remained polite, I imagine they wondered why they were wasting time on this woman who appeared to live in
her own fantasy world.

Marguerite continued her testimony on February 12, running through an exhausting account of her marriages, sons, divorces, and her battles with
adversity as a single mother, whose combative nature made it difficult to hold jobs. Her account of Lee growing up trailing behind a vagabond mother follows
her script-a heroic mother fighting for her rights and those of her son against the obstacles that society places in her way. In her testimony, she brushes off
Lee’s chronic truancies and incidents of violence. In the Bronx, living with the family of Lee’s half-brother, John Pic, Lee threatened his sister-in-law with a
knife. By Marguerite’s account, no big deal. Lee only pulled out a small pocketknife. They did not deserve to be thrown out of the house by Pic’s
“hysterical” wife. Lee was portrayed as a loving son, who bought his mother a $35 coat with his first Marine paycheck. She notes that he also paid his room and board-to her.

Still to be addressed by the commission was Marguerite’s complaint that no one had bothered to interrogate her-most specifically Howard and Kunkel at Six
Flags-although she claimed that she alone had the key information on Lee’s innocence.

Marguerite’s claim was patently false. Pete Gregory and Robert Oswald had witnessed Agent Howard “putting Marguerite on tape.” The tape recording and
its transcript, labeled “November 25, 1963, an interview by J. M. Howard,” was introduced as a thirty-eight-page transcribed exhibit while the general counsel
played the actual tape-which Marguerite claimed did not exist-for an attentive audience. As the tape played, it became apparent that these were Marguerite’s and Howard’s voices. In the background, crying infants (June and Rachel) could be heard:
Justice Warren: And that is your voice?
Marguerite: That is my voice.
Justice Warren: Yes.
Marguerite: But I am not going to vary from my story.
Indeed, Marguerite stubbornly continued to challenge the existence of the taped interview with Howard: “I have stated previously, if I was taped it was during a conversation going on that they taped me. I have never sat down and been taped, sir. I don’t think I am out of my mind.”
The chief justice was incredulous: “It would hardly seem possible, Mrs. Oswald, that unless this is a complete fabrication that anyone could have given these
answers but you . . . so many of these questions and answers are exactly what you have told us.”

When challenged to explain her obvious lie, Marguerite maintained that someone had doctored the tapes and substituted recorded voices and sounds of
infants. She then went back to her litany of complaints about Mike Howard. He was the one on the tape; so he could have manipulated it. Exasperated, General Counsel Rankin put an end to the clown show: “She does identify the voices as being hers and all we have is her word, and this tape, and the transcription at the present time. So, for the moment, I suppose we will just have to leave it where it is. I don’t see any other answer to it.”
. . .
The Warren Commission did not devote a specific section of Marguerite’s testimony to her “proof” that Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed a secret agent
somehow caught in a dark plot against the president. Her “proof” trickled out in the form of episodes and anecdotes in her rambling statement: That the State Department “paid” for Lee’s return proved he was a secret agent (Marguerite failed to mention that this was a loan Lee repaid). Lee always walked ahead of his wife-according to Marguerite a typical practice of secret agents to protect their wives. The flood of contributions to Officer Tippit’s widow, Marguerite contended, proved that this money had been prepared in advance. Marguerite claimed to have a picture of Lee at the book depository purportedly after the shots were fired. When marked as an exhibit, no one could find Oswald in the picture.

Marguerite’s claim that she was shown a photo of Jack Ruby before he shot Lee attracted the most attention. Her story runs like this: As she and Marina were confined in the Executive Inn on Saturday (one day after the shooting), an FBI agent, Bardwell Odum, knocked on the door with a photo he wanted Marina to see. Marguerite did not admit him, but she was briefly shown the photo of a man she did not recognize. Later, at the Six Flags Inn, she saw a newspaper picture of Ruby. She claimed that this was the same person she had seen in the Executive Inn photo.

In a sworn affidavit, Agent Odum testified that the photograph (attached to the affidavit) was of an unidentified man-not Jack Ruby. (Recent releases by the
CIA explain the photo was an unidentified man, clearly not Jack Ruby, entering the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.)
. . .
Marguerite Oswald’s testimony before the Warren Commission discredited her claim to have proof that her son was innocent. Her testimony instead established that she was on the borderline of mental incapacity. We do not know if this was the “normal” Marguerite or whether her behavior was brought on by the trauma of the assassination. Her own description of herself as she ran through her life story-aggressive, combative, self-pitying, and with delusional images of grandeur-appear to be lifelong characteristics.

Despite her gentle handling by the chief justice and general counsel, Marguerite added the Warren Commission to her list of enemies. Consider her closing
remarks:
Mrs. OSWALD: I think you are making a very big mistake not pursuing this further because I have told important people about this particular incident and I
say it is correct and I hope you will continue while I am gone not just to ignore what I have said.
The CHAIRMAN: Mrs. Oswald, you misjudge the Commission when you say we will not pursue it further.
Mrs. OSWALD: Fine, I don’t know, I am asking.
The CHAIRMAN: You may be sure we will pursue it further.
Mrs. OSWALD: Thank you, and I have more people that I could call. I have told Mr. Doyle [her lawyer], the people- Would you like me to name the people on
the record for you? Mr. Lane, I called Mr. Lane-
The CHAIRMAN: To what purpose are you naming these people?
The chief justice’s question seemed to hit the mark, as Marguerite hemmed and hawed about the “important people” who would back her up.

I can find no evidence of Paul Gregory ever having completed a psychology degree. He has a degree however in economics.

He would wait 60 years to tell this story. I'll let others be the judge.

Mick_Purdy wrote:I can find no evidence of Paul Gregory ever having completed a psychology degree. He has a degree however in economics.

He would wait 60 years to tell this story. I'll let others be the judge.

 Agreed Mick. He just seems to be wanting to cash on his decades old connection to Oswald. With this being the 60th anniversary I assume more and more people will be coming out of the woodwork trying to cash in or get their 15 minutes of fame.