7

“Hands off Cuba”

Early in the morning of Thursday, April 25, Lee Oswald called his aunt, Lillian Murret, from the New Orleans bus station.

“Hello, Aunt Lillian?”

“Who is this?”

“This is Lee.”

“Lee?”

“Yes.”

“When did you get out? When did you get back? What are you doing?” Murret did not even know he had returned from Russia. She had not heard from him in six years.

“I have been back since about a year and a half now.”

“Well, I am glad you got back.”

“I am married, and I got a baby. I am down here trying to find a job; would you put me up for a while?

“Well, we will be glad to, Lee.”1

He took a streetcar to the Murrets’, and when he arrived, Lillian says he was “very poorly dressed” and she felt sorry for him. He told Lillian, and his uncle, Charles “Dutz” Murret, that he wanted quickly to find a job and have his wife and daughter join him.²*

The next morning he visited the Louisiana Division of Employment Security Office, listed his availability for work, and noted his skill as “photography.”3 His aunt said he was diligent in searching for a job. He read the help-wanted section in each day’s newspaper, and left mid-morning to visit the ads he had checked as promising. “I had supper anywhere from 5:30 to 6:00,” Murret recalled, “and he was there on time every day for supper, and after he didn’t leave the house.”⁴ After watching television, Oswald went to bed early each evening.*

Three days after his arrival, Lee asked his aunt, “Do you know anything about the Oswalds?” She had only known his father, and once met an uncle. He was disappointed. “Well, you know, I don’t know any of my relatives. You are the only one I know.”⁵ He had been embarrassed in Russia when asked about his own family. Later that day he visited the cemetery where his father was buried and a groundskeeper helped him find the tombstone.⁶ Back at the Murrets’ he pored over the telephone book, calling every Oswald until he found an aunt by marriage, Hazel. When he called on her in the late afternoon, she gave him a photo of his father and said that only two aunts and some cousins where still alive in New Orleans.† Although she invited him to visit again, he did not.

Monday, he filed an appeal to Texas’s decision to deny him unemployment benefits since his wages at Jaggars were too low to qualify.⁷‡ He continued searching for work, filling out applications on which he sometimes listed false names and addresses as references, invented previous jobs, and lied about personal details.⁸

On May 3, Oswald wrote Marina saying that while he still had no work, he was receiving “15 to 20 dollars” a week from the unemployment office, and that was enough money on which to live. Without rent or food costs, he saved more than when he supported his family in Dallas on his small salary. His uncle Dutz had offered a $200 loan, but Oswald declined.9

He found a job on May 9, two weeks to the day after he arrived in New Orleans. Lillian Murret recalled, “One morning he saw this job with the Reily Coffee Co., and he went down and applied and he got the job, and he came home waving the newspaper, and he grabbed me around the neck, and he even kissed me, and he said, ‘I got it; I got it!’”¹⁰ He was hired as a maintenance man, responsible for greasing and oiling the fittings on the company’s machinery, at $1.50 an hour.* When Lillian asked how much he earned, he said, “It don’t pay much, but I will get along on it.” She suggested he return to school and “learn a trade,” since “you are really not qualified to do anything too much.” “No, I don’t have to go back to school,” he answered. “I don’t have to learn anything. I know everything.”¹¹

His application at the Reily company was filled with lies. He listed his address as 757 French Street, the Murrets’ house, and said he lived there “23 yrs. continu.” He claimed his last job was “active duty” in the Marines and that he was a high school graduate and currently a college student. For references, he listed John Murret, a cousin, without his permission, and then added fictitious names, Sgt. Robert Hidell, and Lt. J. Evans, both of whom were on active duty, complete with false addresses.¹²

With the security of a job, Oswald searched for an apartment. He returned to a building where he had once lived, and his former landlady, Myrtle Evans,† looked at him closely for a few minutes, and said, “I know you, don’t I?” “Sure, I am Lee Oswald,” he said. “I was just waiting to see when you were going to recognize me.”13 She thought he was still “in Russia.” He explained he had returned with a Russian wife and daughter, and intended to bring them to New Orleans if Evans could help him find an apartment. Although she did not have any for rent, she made some calls and soon Oswald had given a $5 deposit toward a $65-a-month ground-floor apartment in a two-story house at 4907 Magazine Street.¹⁴ He even lied to his new landlady, Mrs. Jesse Garner, saying that he worked for the Leon Israel Company. It was a real company, but not the one that hired him.

He returned to have lunch with Myrtle Evans, and they discussed Marina and his daughter as well as his reasons for settling in New Orleans. “New Orleans is my home,” he said. “I just felt like I wanted to come back.” Evans said she would like to meet his family, and he said, “Just come anytime.” She never did.

That night Oswald telephoned Marina to tell her about the Reily job and the new apartment. Marina, who worried she might not hear from Lee for some time, was excited about joining him so quickly. The next day, Friday, May 10, Ruth Paine, her two children, and Marina and June set off in Paine’s station wagon. Oswald had begun working at Reily the same day. The supervisor who showed him his work duties, Charles Le Blanc, said that from the start Oswald was “just one of these guys that just didn’t care whether he learned it or he didn’t learn it.” Oswald found his new job even more demeaning than his previous ones.

The next day, Saturday, Marina and Ruth arrived at the Murret’s, and they spent an hour talking to Oswald’s aunt and uncle. Initially, Marina thought the Murret home was the place Lee had rented, and she was very pleased. But when he took her to their new apartment on Magazine Street, she was disappointed to find it dark and dirty, with little ventilation, and cockroach-infested.¹⁵ Ruth slept in the living room with her children while the Oswalds took the only bedroom. She noticed they did not have a pleasant reunion. “He was very discourteous to her,” Ruth recalled, “and they argued most of that weekend. I was very uncomfortable in that situation, and he would tell her to shut up, tell her, ‘I said it, and that is all the discussion on the subject.’”16 Their fighting so poisoned the atmosphere that Ruth returned to Dallas on Tuesday, May 14, a day earlier than planned.

On the day Ruth left for Texas, Oswald wrote the Fair Play for Cuba headquarters in New York and notified them of his new mailing address, and he did the same for the Soviet embassy in Washington a few days later.¹⁷ He had requested that his Dallas post-office box mail be forwarded to his Magazine Street apartment, and two of his subscriptions, The Militant and a Communist daily subsidized by the USSR, Soviet Belorussia, soon arrived. He also received a letter from the Socialist Workers Party of America. It had taken five months to respond to his request for some leftist pamphlets and an English translation to the revolutionary anthem “Internationale.”¹⁸

On May 22, just over a month after he moved to New Orleans, settled with a job and apartment, Oswald began preparing for a new phase of his activist politics. He went to the New Orleans public library and borrowed Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung. Four days later he wrote Vincent (V. T.) Lee, the president of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, requesting formal membership and saying he wanted to open a Fair Play branch office in New Orleans. He noted that “a picture of Fidel, suitable for framing would be a welcome touch.”¹⁹ Although Oswald had expressed admiration for Castro even when he was in the Marines, Marina contended his attraction to Castro peaked in New Orleans. “Well, I knew for a long time that Fidel Castro was his hero,” she recalled. “He was a great admirer of him, so, he was in some kind of revolutionary mood at that period of time. He thought that maybe he would be, I mean, he would be happy to work for Fidel Castro causes or something like that.”²⁰ Since the USSR had failed his Marxist theories, the mercurial Oswald now viewed Cuba as the pure embodiment of Communist ideology.²¹ Also, Oswald’s attraction to Fair Play for Cuba as an instrument for exercising his pro-Castro sentiments fit with his view of Marxism/Leninism. Marina and Ruth and Michael Paine said Oswald was a Trotskyite Marxist.²² Trotskyites were the heart of the Socialist Workers Party, the key element in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.23

Without waiting for a formal reply from the national office, Oswald acted as though he had permission to start an independent chapter. Picking up where he left off with his Dallas demonstration on behalf of Fair Play, he decided to begin passing out leaflets in New Orleans, but on a grander scale. On Wednesday, May 29, he went to the Jones Printing Company, opposite the side entrance of the Reily company. Using the name Lee Osborne, he said he needed a thousand handbills. He handed the receptionist an 8-by-10-inch sheet of paper on which he had written:

HANDS

OFF

CUBA!

Join the Fair Play for

Cuba Committee

New Orleans Charter

Member Branch

Free Literature, Lectures

Location:

Everyone Welcome!²⁴

Again under the alias Osborne, he ordered five hundred copies of a yellow, 4-by-9-inch membership application for his Fair Play for Cuba “chapter” from the Mailers’ Service Company on Magazine Street.²⁵ Next, also with Mailers’ Service, he placed an order for three hundred 2½-by-3½-inch membership cards.²⁶* By June 4, when Oswald picked up the thousand handbills from the Jones Printing Company, he had received a response from Fair Play. In a warm May 29 letter, V. T. Lee sent Oswald an official membership card, and in a three-page typewritten letter offered him advice regarding a possible New Orleans chapter.27 V. T. Lee told Oswald, “We are certainly not at all adverse to a very small Chapter” and “in fact, we would be very, very pleased to see this take place and would like to do everything possible to assist in bringing it about.”²⁸ Also enclosed were copies of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee’s bylaws and constitution. But V. T. Lee also told Oswald that a review of the committee’s records indicated there were probably “too few members … in the New Orleans area” to make a successful chapter. The letter also warned that Fair Play work would place Oswald under “tremendous pressures” as “we do have a serious and often violent opposition.” V. T. Lee’s response was the friendliest Oswald ever received to any of his letters to leftist organizations, and it strengthened his faith in Fair Play for Cuba.

Meanwhile, Oswald’s preoccupation with Fair Play led him to neglect Marina. She could not have a normal relationship with him while his obsession was Castro. “Mostly—most of the conversations [we had] were on the subject of Cuba,” Marina said.²⁹ On May 25, Marina complained in a letter to Ruth Paine, “My mood currently is that I don’t feel much like anything! As soon as you left all ‘love’ stopped, and I am very hurt that Lee’s attitude toward me is such that I feel each minute that I bind him. He insists that I leave America, which I don’t want to do at all.… And again Lee has said to me that he doesn’t love me.… How will it all end?”³⁰ Even when he went out with her, to visit the Murrets for lunch, for instance, she later had to listen to him complain, “Well, these are just bourgeois, who are only concerned with their own individual welfare.”³¹ Marina said his mood was “gloomy,” and overall she considered the marriage a succession of “tears and caresses, arguments and reconciliations.”³²

Although he no longer beat her (she was five months’ pregnant), their arguments were fierce, and Marina was frequently heard sobbing.³³ It was not long before their New Orleans neighbors were talking about the bad relationship between the new couple.³⁴ When they had sex, Oswald would sometimes roll over when finished, turn his back to Marina, and say, “Don’t touch me, and don’t say a word. I’m in paradise now. I don’t want my good mood spoiled.”35 After receiving a letter from Ruth with details of her own marital difficulties with Michael, Marina answered, “It is very sad news … as it is the same story with Lee.… In many ways you and I are friends in misfortune.” In another letter, Marina told Ruth, “You know that Lee either yells at me or is silent, but never talks. It is oppressive.”³⁶

Although there was little communication, Marina still became aware of some of Oswald’s political activities. On Tuesday, June 4, the same day a letter arrived from the Soviet embassy suggesting she travel to Washington to discuss her request to return to the USSR, Lee involved her in his fantasy political world. When he returned that evening from work he “wrote this [A. J. Hidell] down on a piece of paper and told me to sign it on this card,” Marina recalled, “and said that he would beat me if I didn’t sign …”³⁷ She signed the “Hidell” as the chapter president for Lee’s Fair Play for Cuba membership card, as well as on a couple of blank cards. Marina asked him who Hidell was, and Oswald admitted he did not exist. She said, “‘You just have two names?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’” Unaware of his Marine colleague Heindel, Marina assumed the alias was a rhyme for Fidel. “I said, ‘You have selected this name because it sounds like ‘Fidel’ and he blushed and said, ‘Shut up, it is none of your business.’ … I taunted him about this and teased about this … and he said … ‘I would have to do it this way, people will think I have a big organization’ and so forth.”³⁸ “He always brought his pamphlets home,” she recalled. “I was kind of pleased that the papers weren’t as bad an occupation as playing with the rifle so I couldn’t see any harm in that.”³⁹

Unknown to Marina, two days after he had her sign his Fair Play membership card, he took a government printed form entitled “International Certificates of Vaccination or Revaccination against Smallpox,” wrote his name at the top, and then stamped it, with a 98-cent rubber-stamping kit he had bought from a local variety store, with the name Dr. A. J. Hideel [sic].⁴⁰ Oswald wanted to travel and planned to apply for a passport, and apparently thought the vaccination certificate might be needed for visas to some countries. On this occasion, instead of threatening to send her to Russia on her own, he insisted he would join her in the Soviet Union. “I’ll go to Cuba, then China, and you will wait for me in Russia,” he told Marina. “I love to travel and with you, I can’t” (he thought her pregnancy hindered her).41 Oswald rented a new post-office box on June 3 and signed Hidell’s name as one of those authorized to use it. Besides himself and Hidell, he listed Marina as well, giving a false home address for all three.⁴²

As Oswald began to implement his Fair Play for Cuba activities, he slacked off at his work at Reily. Charles Le Blanc, his supervisor, was increasingly dissatisfied with Oswald’s performance. Le Blanc would drop him off on a floor to grease and oil the machinery and then “about a half hour or 45 minutes or so, I would go back up and check how he is doing … and I wouldn’t find him … So I would start hunting all over the [five-story] building …”⁴³ When Le Blanc found Oswald, “I asked him, I said, ‘Well, where have you been?’ And all he would give me was that he was around. I asked him, ‘Around where?’ He says, ‘Just around,’ and he would turn around and walk off.” Le Blanc later estimated that Oswald probably spoke one hundred words to him during his two and a half months at Reily. But on one of the few occasions when Oswald spoke to Le Blanc, Lee asked him, “Do you like it here?” Le Blanc, thinking Oswald was referring to the Reily Coffee Company, told him yes, that he had been employed there for eight years. “Oh, hell, I don’t mean this place,” Oswald said. Le Blanc asked what he meant. “This damn country,” replied Oswald.⁴⁴ When Le Blanc said he “loved it,” Oswald again just turned around and walked away without saying anything else.

As he had on other jobs, he stayed to himself, ate lunch alone, and made no friends among the workers.⁴⁵ Some remembered that during their coffee breaks he often sat in a chair and stared blankly into space.⁴⁶ Oswald further alienated his co-workers, recalled Le Blanc, by walking past and aiming his forefinger at them. “He would go, ‘Pow!’ and I used to look at him, and I said, ‘Boy, what a crackpot this guy is!’”⁴⁷

On the occasions when Le Blanc could not find him, Oswald had often gone to the neighboring Crescent City Garage. It was run by Adrian Alba, a gun enthusiast, who subscribed to American Rifleman, Field and Stream, Argosy, and National Rifle Association magazines. Oswald sat in the garage reading these and often borrowed the magazines overnight. Alba remembered Oswald as inquisitive about guns and specifically about which caliber bullet was the most deadly on a human target.48 Alba had ordered a .30-06-caliber rifle and Oswald offered to buy it sight unseen. On another occasion, he saw a Japanese rifle at the garage, and again wanted it, but Alba would not sell. He also asked Alba if he “knew of a place where you could discharge firearms … without getting the car and riding for hours.”⁴⁹ Alba told him about the River Road levee, but warned he could be arrested if discovered shooting there.

Among other customers, Alba’s garage serviced cars for the Secret Service and FBI. He later told a story, repeated by many conspiracy writers, that he saw Oswald approach a car occupied by an FBI agent from Washington. According to Alba, Oswald then “bent down as if to look in the window and was handed what appeared to be a good-sized envelope … I think he put it under his shirt … and the car drove off.”⁵⁰ A few days later he saw Oswald again meet the car and briefly talk to the same FBI agent. If true, Alba’s story is the critical link to establish a covert government connection to Oswald. Although Alba was interviewed immediately after the assassination, on at least three occasions by the FBI, and later extensively testified to the Warren Commission, he never mentioned this story. He did not disclose it publicly until 1978, fifteen years after it allegedly happened, when interviewed by Anthony Summers. Alba’s excuse for not mentioning the story earlier was that he claimed he forgot it until his memory was triggered years after the incident, while watching a television commercial.⁵¹ The 1970 commercial was for a local furniture store and portrayed an elderly man walking up to a car, leaning over toward the window, and inviting the driver into the store. “That’s when I remembered Oswald doing the same thing,” he says.⁵²* After talking to Summers, Alba testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations and it thoroughly investigated his claim, discovering that no FBI agents checked a car out of his garage during all of 1963 and concluding that he was of “doubtful reliability.”53

Although the only part of the workday he found enjoyable was the time spent at Alba’s garage, Oswald needed the income and had no choice but to stay at Reily. On June 8, he was reminded of his weak finances when he could not afford to provide for Marina’s prenatal care. On that day, he took her to the New Orleans Charity Hospital, but since she had not lived long enough in Louisiana to qualify as a resident, they refused to treat her free of charge. After arguing with a doctor for nearly an hour, Lee left with Marina. He was furious about the American emphasis on money. “Everything is money is this country,” he yelled at Marina. “Even the doctors are businessmen. You can’t have a baby without money.”⁵⁴ It was the first time she saw his anger mixed with tears. The hospital rejection highlighted his distaste for capitalism. Although Marina never recalled him saying anything bad about President Kennedy, she said that shortly after the hospital incident, he complained that “his papa bought him the Presidency. Money paves the way to everything here.”⁵⁵

Oswald now focused his attention more than ever on politics. He wrote to The Worker requesting more Communist party literature, announcing his formation of a local chapter of Fair Play for Cuba, and sent honorary membership cards to “those fighters for peace” Benjamin Davis and Gus Hall, leaders of the American Communist party.⁵⁶* On Sunday, June 16, he put his activism into practice, appearing at the Dumaine Street Wharf, where the U.S.S. Wasp, an aircraft carrier, was docked. There, he distributed his Fair Play for Cuba propaganda. In the late afternoon, the officer of the deck aboard the ship complained to harbor patrolman Girod Ray, who found Oswald and asked if he had permission to distribute the leaflets.57 Oswald said he did not need it, and would distribute his pamphlets wherever he desired. Ray told him that he was on port authority property and without authorization he had to leave, but Oswald argued with him. Finally, when Ray threatened to arrest him, he left.⁵⁸ Oswald was exhilarated by his demonstration, later boasting in a letter to Fair Play president Vincent Lee, “We also manged to picket the fleet when it came in and I was surprised at the number of officers who were interested in our literature.”⁵⁹*

Oswald’s interest in Cuba now included Marina. He asked her if she liked Cuba and “Uncle Fidel” and said that his demonstrating “will help make people be on the side of Cuba. Do you want them attacking little Cuba?”⁶⁰ He pasted a photo of Castro, clipped from the Soviet magazine Ogonyok, on their living room wall.

On Monday, June 24, he visited the U.S. passport office and applied for a new passport (one that he never used before his death). His passport had expired exactly one year earlier. Oswald said he intended to travel as a tourist, starting in October, for three months to a year. Destinations included England, France, Germany, Holland, Finland, Poland, Italy, and the USSR.⁶¹ He listed the Lykes shipping line, the same he took during his 1959 defection, as his means of transportation. He also gave his date of marriage to Marina as the nonexistent April 31, 1961, and said his occupation was “photographer.” The New Orleans office issued his passport the following day.⁶²†

Oswald did not tell Marina about his passport. But he did begin talking about how dissatisfied he was with the United States. “Little by little he became gloomier, or disillusioned,” recalled Marina.63 One day she found Oswald sobbing uncontrollably in a darkened kitchen. He said he was lost, and she tried to console him by saying they could stay together in America and still make a better life. But he refused, telling her it was too difficult for him in the U.S.⁶⁴ “He was extremely upset,” Marina recalled. “He appeared to be very unhappy and he said that nothing keeps him here [in the U.S.], and that he would not lose anything if he returned to the Soviet Union, and that he wants to be with me. And that it would be better to have less and not be concerned about tomorrow.… I don’t think he was too fond of Russia, but simply he knew that he would have work assured him there, because he had—after all, he had to think about his family.”⁶⁵ “Would you like me to come to Russia, too?” he asked. A year after returning to the U.S., filled with hatred for the USSR, the mercurial Oswald had second thoughts as his life in the U.S. seemed in a quagmire over which he had lost control.

Less than a week after getting his new passport, Oswald had Marina write another letter to the Soviet embassy.⁶⁶ A letter from the embassy had arrived on June 4, asking Marina to visit in person or to send a detailed explanation of why she wanted to return to Russia. She excused the delay in answering due to “certain family problems,” expressed “homesickness” for Russia, and asked for financial help for a return to the Soviet Union. “But things are improving,” she wrote, “due to the fact that my husband expresses a sincere wish to return together with me to the USSR. I earnestly beg you to help him in this. There is not much encouraging for us here and nothing to hold us.… My husband is often unemployed. It is very difficult for us to live here. We both urgently solicit your assistance to enable us to return and work in the USSR.… Please do not deny our request. Make us happy again, help us to return that which we lost because of our foolishness. I would like to have my second child, too, to be born in the USSR.” Enclosed with the letter was an application completed by Lee for permission to enter the Soviet Union.67 He also included a short note, in English, asking that Marina’s visa be “rushed” so she could have the baby, due in four months, in Russia, and that his request should be considered “separtably.”⁶⁸

Although Oswald was still demanding and abrupt, their fighting temporarily subsided. He spent his evenings quietly reading books from the public library.* The Oswalds wrote to friends in the Soviet Union, like Ziger and Titovets, telling them they planned to return to the USSR. One answered him saying that he should be sure he wanted to return, as his next Atlantic crossing was likely to be the last the Soviets allowed him.⁶⁹

Marina again wrote the Soviet embassy on July 8, emphasizing their “impatience” with the delay over visas and asking for expedited service.⁷⁰ A few days later, Marina received a letter from Ruth Paine, who was unaware of Lee’s recent change of mind about returning to Russia. Ruth invited Marina to live with her if Lee still insisted she return to the Soviet Union. “Marina, come to my home the last part of September [just before the baby was due] without fail,” Ruth wrote. “Either for two months or two years. And don’t be worried about money.”⁷¹ Ruth soon sent another letter, reiterating that Marina should not be concerned about the money, because Michael was financially secure and would gladly help them.⁷²

Yet just as things seemed to stabilize, Oswald was fired from Reily, on July 19.⁷³ It was the third job dismissal in less than a year. To worsen his sense of failure, his sedulous efforts to find another job through the help-wanted ads met with constant rejection. In order to continue collecting unemployment benefits of $33 per week, he had to visit the Louisiana Employment Commission personally every Tuesday and report on his job-hunting progress. He let his fantasies run free and not only listed scores of employers to which he never applied, including NASA, but he also lied extensively on the applications he did submit for work.74

Several days after Oswald was fired, Marina received another letter from Ruth Paine, offering to visit New Orleans in mid- to late September, at the end of a long vacation, and then take Marina back to Dallas to have her baby.⁷⁵ Paine’s offer now looked more acceptable in case Lee could not find work, but he did not relish the idea of Marina returning to Dallas and the Russian community that so disliked him.

The succession of unsettling news continued. On July 25, Oswald was notified that his 1962 demand for a review of his undesirable Marine Corps discharge was rejected.⁷⁶ He was infuriated. The Marine Corps had initially given him an honorable discharge and then belatedly changed it to an “undesirable” discharge, based upon his defection to Russia and anti-American statements he made to the press.⁷⁷ Oswald had written letters, in January 1962, to John Connally, the former secretary of the Navy, and the Department of the Navy, saying his defection to the USSR was “much in the same way E. Hemingway resided in Paris.”⁷⁸ He was convinced his defection should have no bearing on his Marine service.

That Saturday, Marina and Lee traveled to Mobile, Alabama, with Lillian and Dutz Murret, to visit his cousin Eugene Murret, who was training to be a Jesuit priest. Eugene had invited Oswald by letter to speak to the students about “contemporary Russia and the practice of Communism.”⁷⁹ Oswald gave a half-hour talk that evening. Those present later described him as “very tense and high-strung.” He confirmed he was a Marxist, although he admitted that he was disillusioned with the USSR.⁸⁰ In fact, he said he was against most forms of organized government. “Capitalism doesn’t work, communism doesn’t work. In the middle is socialism, and that doesn’t work either.”⁸¹

Back in New Orleans, he tried to have another three thousand “Hands off Cuba” flyers printed, but for reasons that are unclear, he was turned away from the print shop. On August 1, the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a front-page story saying that federal agents had seized a ton of dynamite and other materials on a raid of an anti-Castro paramilitary group planning operations against Cuba. That same day Oswald wrote to Vincent Lee, Fair Play’s president.82 The letter is almost a complete fabrication. He claimed that he had attracted “great interest” in his local chapter, that anti-Castro agitators were attacking him and ruining his base of popular support, and that he had distributed “thousands of circulars.” There was one sentence, however, that later caused considerable debate: “I rented an office as I planned and was promptly closed three days later for some obscure reasons by the renters.” Oswald stamped addresses for his fictional chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee on the printed leaflets. Most were marked “L. H. Oswald, 4907 Magazine Street” or “A. J. Hidell, P.O. Box 30016” (the dyslexic Oswald transposed the last two digits of his post-office box, as it should have been 30061). But some were stamped “544 Camp St.”

If Oswald had an office, even briefly, at 544 Camp, it could be significant, for as Jim Marrs writes, “It was at 544 Camp Street in an old, three-story office building that the paths of Lee Harvey Oswald, the FBI, the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, and organized crime figures all crossed.”⁸³ That address was the office of Guy Banister, a highly decorated ex-FBI agent who maintained a relationship with Naval Intelligence as well as doing investigative work for G. Wray Gill, an attorney for New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello.⁸⁴ Another frequent Camp Street visitor was David Ferrie, a rabid anti-Communist who worked with Banister, for some of the most radical anti-Cuban groups, and also for the attorney for Marcello.⁸⁵

Ferrie and Banister were a strange and memorable pair of associates. Ferrie was a self-ordained ultra-orthodox Catholic bishop and an amateur hypnotist and cancer researcher.⁸⁶ This self-proclaimed fighter pilot and soldier of fortune was eccentric but brilliant. He suffered from alopecia totalis, a rare disease that left him totally hairless. He wore a badly fitted red wig and sometimes glued on tufts of synthetic fabric for eyebrows.87 Banister, former agent-in-charge of the Chicago FBI office and then deputy police chief of New Orleans, established his own detective agency in 1958. ⁸⁸ He was an obsessive crusader against Communism and belonged to several radical right-wing groups, including the John Birch Society and the paramilitary Minutemen. He even published his own virulently racist journal, The Intelligence Digest.⁸⁹

Many claim Banister was possibly the middleman linking the CIA and the mafia in a plot to kill the President. But the only Oswald-Banister connection is 544 Camp Street. Most ignore that the FBI and Secret Service conducted an extensive investigation in December 1963 to determine whether Oswald was ever at 544 Camp. None of the building’s five tenants, or the janitor who lived there, recalled ever seeing Oswald visit there, much less rent an office as a tenant.⁹⁰ None ever heard of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or saw any propaganda from the organization. Sam Newman, the building’s owner, personally rented all office space and was adamant he never met or saw Oswald, never rented space to anyone from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and indeed did not rent any of 544 Camp’s three empty offices during the summer of 1963.⁹¹ A militant anti-Castro organization, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, had rented an office at 544 Camp but had moved out more than a year before Oswald arrived in New Orleans.⁹² Such testimony seemed to settle the issue, and allowed the Warren Commission to conclude “investigation has indicated that neither the Fair Play for Cuba Committee nor Lee Harvey Oswald ever maintained an office at that address.”⁹³

The House Select Committee on Assassinations, however, re-examined the issue in the late 1970s.* Two witnesses now told the Select Committee they saw Oswald at 544 Camp Street with Banister. One was Jack Martin, a former private investigator who sometimes worked with Banister. But Martin was an admitted drunk who had previously given statements to the FBI that he had never seen Oswald at 544 Camp Street.94 Hubie Badeaux, the former chief of the New Orleans police intelligence division, knew both Banister and Martin. “Jack drank, took pills, and had a criminal record,” Badeaux told the author. “He was goofy to begin with, and lied all the time.”⁹⁵ The Select Committee concluded Martin’s testimony was so “contradictory … [that] credence should not be placed in Martin’s statements to the committee.”⁹⁶ The second witness was Guy Banister’s former secretary, Delphine Roberts. In one interview, she told the committee that Oswald had never visited 544 Camp, but in a subsequent one she said he had been in Banister’s office several times.⁹⁷ The Select Committee concluded that because of the contradictions in Roberts’s statements “and lack of independent corroboration … the reliability of her statements could not be determined.” The Select Committee questioned six other individuals who worked for Guy Banister during the summer of 1963, and none of them recalled seeing Oswald at 544 Camp.⁹⁸

Anthony Summers interviewed Roberts in 1978, and she told him a different, and wilder, story than the one she gave to the Select Committee. Roberts said that Oswald had come to 544 Camp Street and she interviewed him to become “one of Banister’s agents,” that he maintained an office on the floor above them, and that he often visited privately with Banister.⁹⁹ Summers interviewed Roberts’s daughter, also named Delphine, who claimed she used an upstairs room for photographic work. She said that Oswald kept his pro-Castro pamphlets in an office at 544 Camp and he came there often and knew Banister.¹⁰⁰ Many subsequent conspiracy writers, as well as Oliver Stone in the film JFK, have relied heavily on these statements.*

The author located both Delphine Roberts and her daughter in New Orleans. The mother is still a rabid anti-Communist and racist who rails against the U.N. Charter and “niggers.” She says, “Jesse Jackson is a satan in the skin of a human” and contends that every Japanese “should have been wiped off the face of the earth.”101 She claims to be related to the “king and queen of Wales [sic] and Mary Queen of Scots,” as well as “being one of the very few, since the beginning of the world, who has ever read the sacred scrolls that God himself wrote and gave to the ancient Hebrews for placing in the Ark of the Covenant.… I think I have been the last person to see them.”¹⁰² Roberts asserts there was “Communist involvement” in the JFK assassination, talks vaguely of a dead pigeon being brought to her by a stranger, which was then sent off to JFK as a threat, and claims she is writing a book about the assassination, “although it will also tell the story of the Creation.” She warmly remembers that she first met Guy Banister when she was demonstrating in downtown New Orleans “for states’ rights, and against the niggers,” with a Confederate flag draped behind her. She said she not only became Banister’s secretary but his mistress as well.*

As for Anthony Summers, Delphine Roberts admits, “I didn’t tell him all the truth.” She claims the only reason she told him the story she did was that Summers, then shooting a television documentary, paid her money. Roberts, who lives with her daughter, survives on welfare. “He [Summers] said our information wasn’t worth much,” she says. “He did give us $500 eventually, and they did take us to dinner. We did enjoy the dinner.” John Lanne, a former Banister friend and attorney, acknowledges that Roberts refused to speak to Summers unless she was paid.¹⁰³†

As unreliable as Delphine Roberts is regarding the Oswald-544 Camp Street issue, her daughter spins an equally untenable tale. She told the author that Oswald did not have an office at 544 Camp, but rather that “he lived there, had an apartment there, for two or three months.”104 Oswald came to 544 Camp at night and left every morning, she said, during the same period that Marina said he was never away from their house for a single evening (except his overnight stay in jail). She also says she met Oswald’s mother and that “she was lovely.” Marguerite lived in Texas during 1963. When Oswald finally abandoned his “apartment,” Delphine claimed he left behind “boxes and boxes of pamphlets, everything, just everything.”¹⁰⁵

The House Select Committee did not go far enough in branding Roberts’s testimony as unreliable. Summers caveated Delphine Roberts’s story by writing, “It is by no means certain that [she] has told the whole truth …” and attempted to buttress her testimony by citing her daughter.¹⁰⁶ There simply is no credible evidence that Oswald ever had an office at 544 Camp Street or, much less, that he knew Guy Banister.

But what of Oswald’s stamp “544 Camp Street” on some of his Fair Play for Cuba leaflets? There are several nonsinister explanations. When Oswald worked at Reily, he was only a block away from 544 Camp Street and his weekly visits to the unemployment commission took him directly past the address. He easily could have seen the FOR RENT signs at the small corner building. The offices at 544 Camp started at $30 a month, too much for Oswald on his minimal income, and his letter to Vincent Lee that he had rented an office and then was told to leave after three days is certainly a fabrication (as were many other statements he used to enhance his importance to the national headquarters). However, there is evidence he may have actually stopped by to see an office at 544 Camp. The building’s janitor, James Arthus, who lived in the basement, told the FBI after the assassination that someone had attempted to rent an office, but he had discouraged him.107 Arthus could not identify the man. But there is a possibility that it was Oswald who talked to Arthus about an office and, if so, that was the extent of his contact to the building, though he still stamped it on some of his leaflets as the “official” office address for Fair Play. Another explanation is advanced by Ross Banister, Guy’s brother, who is convinced that Banister, who monitored Communist agitators, would have been very interested in Oswald’s Fair Play activities.¹⁰⁸ Banister’s office and his anti-Communist crusade were well known in New Orleans, and a year before Oswald moved to New Orleans, 544 Camp Street was the headquarters for a radical anti-Castro group, the Cuban Revolutionary Council.¹⁰⁹ Some of its propaganda still carried the old Camp Street address even when Oswald lived in New Orleans. It is possible that Oswald, who had used phony addresses on dozens of applications and forms, had decided when settling on a false address for his imaginary Fair Play chapter that it should embarrass his nemesis, the extreme right wing and the city’s anti-Castro militants.

The issue of whether Oswald associated with the adventurer David Ferrie during the summer of 1963 is equally important, since Ferrie had extensive anti-Castro Cuban contacts and also did some work for an attorney for Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans godfather. According to the House Select Committee and its investigator Gaeton Fonzi, the two most credible pieces of information linking Oswald and Ferrie are Oswald’s 1955 Civil Air Patrol service, when Ferrie was allegedly the commanding officer, and a 1963 incident in Clinton, Louisiana, where six witnesses identified Ferrie, Oswald, and a third person, New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw.*

When Oswald was fifteen, he briefly joined the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol (CAP), at a time the House Select Committee believed Ferrie was the squadron captain. Several witnesses told the Select Committee, twenty-three years after the event, that they thought they recalled Ferrie as the group leader in 1955 when Oswald was in CAP. Summers suggests Oswald may have been the object of Ferrie’s homosexual advances or, at the very least, his political influence.110 Garrison charges that through Oswald’s attendance at several CAP meetings, Ferrie initiated him into the CIA.¹¹¹ Ferrie was interviewed by the FBI on November 27, 1963, and denied ever knowing Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol.¹¹²* CAP records show that while Ferrie was a member through 1954, he was disciplined because he gave unauthorized political lectures to the cadets.¹¹³ When he submitted his 1955 renewal, he was rejected.¹¹⁴ Ferrie was not reinstated until December 1958.¹¹⁵ Although he was not even supposed to be in the Civil Air Patrol when Oswald was a member in 1955, he may have continued to attend CAP events with a unit in Metarie (a New Orleans suburb). A photo produced in 1993 purported to show Ferrie and Oswald standing on opposite sides of a small group at a CAP cookout. Another photo, yet to be published, shows Oswald and Ferrie talking to each other.† If the photos are legitimate, they show that Ferrie ignored his official CAP suspension. Yet, even if the two met in 1955 when Oswald was fifteen years old, the question then is whether the two rekindled any association in 1963, only months before JFK’s assassination.

The evidence for a later Oswald-Ferrie relationship is the testimony of witnesses from Clinton, Louisiana. The witnesses were found by Jim Garrison’s investigators, in 1967, when they interviewed more than three hundred people in Clinton and the neighboring township of Jackson, some 20 percent of the local population. From this enormous dragnet they produced six witnesses.116 The allegation is that in early September 1963, Oswald conspicuously appeared in Clinton, a dusty, backwater town of fifteen hundred people, some ninety miles from New Orleans. At the time of the supposed appearance, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was organizing blacks to register to vote in the still-segregated South. According to the way the witnesses now tell the story, on the same day that a long line of black residents waited to sign forms at the registrar’s office, a large, expensive car pulled into Clinton and parked near that office. It attracted considerable attention in the poor rural town.¹¹⁷

One young man got out and joined the line of blacks waiting to register. That man was identified as Oswald. According to Garrison, since Oswald was the only white man in the long line, the witnesses found his face and the scene “unforgettable.”¹¹⁸ One of the other passengers in the car was identified as David Ferrie. Garrison says “There was no doubt that this was David Ferrie.”¹¹⁹* Other Clinton witnesses say that Oswald got a haircut while there and asked about obtaining a job at a local mental hospital.¹²⁰

Not only is the Clinton episode used to establish the Oswald-Ferrie link, but some give it greater significance. Summers says it might be “connected with the FBI’s infamous Counterintelligence Program, better known as COINTELPRO,” a program to infiltrate political groups like CORE.¹²¹ History professor Philip H. Melanson says that the incident “might even be part of an illegal CIA domestic spying effort on leftist organizations like CORE.”¹²²

The House Select Committee interviewed six Clinton witnesses and found their testimony, fifteen years after the event, “credible and significant.”123 The committee concluded they were “telling the truth” and “[t]herefore, [is] inclined to believe that Oswald was in Clinton, La., in late August, early September 1963, and was in the company of David Ferrie, if not Clay Shaw.”¹²⁴ While the Select Committee sealed the testimony of the Clinton witnesses under the confidentiality cloak of executive sessions, it firmly established an Oswald-Ferrie connection as part of the historical record.¹²⁵

Since Garrison’s investigators uncovered the Clinton witnesses, evidently no researcher has gained access to the witnesses’ original statements. The author, however, obtained affidavits, handwritten statements, and summary memoranda to Garrison regarding the initial stories the witnesses told the investigators.* Their original statements reveal substantial confusion, and only after extensive coaching by the Garrison staff did the witnesses tell a cohesive and consistent story. By the time they testified to the Select Committee, they had told their story so often that they had ironed out fundamental contradictions. The following discussion is based on the witnesses’ original statements.

The first problem arises over the time of the purported visit. Summers says the episode took place “in early September.”¹²⁶ It is imperative that the alleged visit not have taken place later because Oswald permanently left New Orleans and Louisiana on September 24. But Edward McGehee, the Jackson town barber who claimed to have cut Oswald’s hair and advised him about a job at the local mental hospital, said it “was kind of cool” on the day he saw Oswald. He remembered the air conditioner was not on in his shop. Reeves Morgan, the state representative for the parish, said Oswald visited him at his home to inquire about obtaining the hospital job. There was a chill in the air, and Morgan recalled lighting the fireplace.¹²⁷ Review of U.S. Weather Bureau records for the period through September 24 show daily temperatures above 90 degrees, with only a few days dipping into the eighties, with high humidity.¹²⁸ There was certainly no day that was “cool” or required a burning fireplace. The registrar of voters, Henry Palmer, felt very strongly that the visit was the “first week of October, possibly around the 6th or 7th.”129 Oswald was in Dallas then.

In their testimony at the Shaw trial, and in subsequent statements, all the witnesses described a black Cadillac entering the town. Summers says that “everyone agrees” the car was a black Cadillac.¹³⁰ In his statement to Garrison’s investigators, Corey Collins, the local CORE chairman, said it was a big, black, expensive-looking car, with four doors, and not more than two years old.¹³¹ Edward McGehee described it as an old, dark-colored, beat-up car, probably a Nash or Kaiser, but probably not a station wagon.¹³²

Since the Garrison trial, the witnesses have consistently described only three men—Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw—in the car. However, originally, they were not nearly as certain on the number of people, much less their identifications. Corey Collins said the driver of the car (whom he later identified as Clay Shaw) was about forty-five years old and wore a light hat that prevented Collins from seeing his hair.¹³³ John Manchester, the town marshal, said the driver did not have a hat and his hair was gray.¹³⁴ Henry Burnell Clark, a local resident, said the man had no hat and “looked like a movie star.”¹³⁵ McGehee, who claimed Oswald sat in his barber chair staring at a photo of Martin Luther King at a Communist training school, said a young woman may have been the driver.¹³⁶

McGehee also said that only Oswald and the young woman were in the car, with a baby bassinet in the rear seat.¹³⁷* Andrew Dunn said there were four men and that one of them was Estes Morgan, a local resident. “I knew Estes Morgan personally,” said Dunn.¹³⁸ At the Garrison trial, Dunn described only three men and omitted Morgan.¹³⁹ Town marshal John Manchester said there were only two men in the car and that about that time he also saw Estes Morgan, whom he knew well, in the voter-registration line.140 Corey Collins remembered two men in the car.¹⁴¹ At the Garrison trial Collins identified three.¹⁴² Henry Burnell Clark, on the other hand, said there was only one man in the car.¹⁴³ He said he saw Ferrie, “or his twin,” on another day, and recognized him from photos because his hair was “bushy and stood up [in] all directions on his head like he had been out on a drunk all night.”¹⁴⁴ Bobbie Dedon claimed she did not see the car but that she spotted Oswald at the nearby Louisiana State Hospital applying for a job. She also connected Oswald to Estes Morgan, but dropped that association during her trial testimony.¹⁴⁵ Another hospital employee, Maxine Kemp, testified she did not see Oswald, but saw a job application with his name on it. A thorough search of the hospital’s records shows no such application existed or had been filed.¹⁴⁶

Registrar of voters Henry Palmer, at the Garrison trial, gave the most potentially damaging testimony identifying Oswald. He said that when Oswald was attempting to register to vote, he had interviewed him. He later told Summers, “I asked him for his identification, and he pulled out a U.S. Navy ID card.… I looked at the name on it, and it was Lee H. Oswald with a New Orleans address.”¹⁴⁷ But Palmer said much more than that in his 1967 statement to Garrison’s office. Not only did he think the visit was in October, but he said there were only two white men in the voter-registration line that morning, and as a result they were very conspicuous. When he spoke to them, he learned one was Estes Morgan and the other was Lee Oswald. He said he interviewed both Morgan and Oswald separately in his office, and said Oswald produced a “cancelled Navy I.D. card” and that Oswald told him he had been living in Jackson for six months with a doctor from the hospital. Palmer could not remember the doctor’s name. In his trial testimony and subsequently, he omitted Estes Morgan and the story of Oswald living with a local doctor for six months. He saw two men in the black car outside the voter-registration site and identified one as Ferrie, solely upon his “heavy eyebrows.”¹⁴⁸ Palmer told the Garrison investigators that he only had a side angle of the driver and “could not positively identify him.” Yet at the trial, under oath, he emphatically picked out Clay Shaw as the driver.

None of the Clinton witnesses had a good explanation for why they had not contacted the authorities if they thought they had seen Oswald. One, Reeves Morgan, testified he had called the FBI after the assassination. There is no record of such a call.149 There is little doubt the Clinton witnesses are telling the truth as they now recall it. However, their original statements to Garrison’s staff reveal considerable contradictions, so much so that the very heart of their story is invalidated. Oswald clearly was not in Clinton in October or when it was cold, nor was he there with Marina, nor did he live there for six months with a doctor, or apply for a job at the local mental institution. Garrison’s staff realized that the local resident Estes Morgan had no connection to Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw and therefore required the witnesses to drop their reference to Morgan being with Oswald. The evidence shows the witnesses saw Estes Morgan, whom they personally knew, with someone whom they later mistook to be Oswald. Garrison never mentioned Morgan because he did not support his hypothesis. (The author was unable to locate Morgan.)

It was almost six years after the alleged incident in Clinton that the witnesses first testified at the Garrison trial. Garrison’s staff, when questioning the Clinton witnesses, had only presented photos of Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw, and incorrectly said that others had already identified those as the people who had visited the town. This power of suggestion, and later coaching, developed the testimony that today has been repeated so often that the House Select Committee found it convincing.

Irvin Dymond, the New Orleans attorney who led the legal team that defended Clay Shaw in 1967, told the author that the Clinton testimony is “a pack of lies. What the motive of the Clinton witnesses is I do not know. But it is clearly and demonstrably false.”¹⁵⁰

There is no credible evidence that Oswald knew Guy Banister or had any association with David Ferrie during the critical months preceding the assassination. Marina cannot visualize him working with an accomplice. “I am not a psychiatrist … but living with a person for a few years you at least have some kind of intuition about what he might do or might not. He was not a trustworthy and open person. So, personally, I seriously doubt that he will confide in someone.”151 As Oswald moved toward more radical actions at the start of August 1963, he was acting quite alone.

* Henry Hurt, in Reasonable Doubt, tries to add mystery to the start of the New Orleans period by writing, “He [Oswald] arrived in New Orleans on April 25, 1963, and—after several days that have never been accounted for—moved in temporarily with relatives …” In fact, Oswald moved in with the Murrets the same morning he arrived at the bus station.

* While Oswald was at the Murrets’ for two weeks, and then with Marina after she arrived in New Orleans, there was only a single night (August 9, when he was in jail for a pro-Castro street demonstration) out of four months that he was not home and early to bed. His quiet home life, attested to by his wife and relatives, contradicts numerous postassassination tales of Oswald’s supposed late-night cavorting with anti-Castro Cubans, homosexuals, or soldiers of fortune.

† He never showed Marina the photo of his father. After Lee’s death, it was not found among his belongings.

‡ Oswald filed his appeal on April 29, and by May 8 the unemployment commission ruled in his favor, awarding him the maximum benefit of $369, payable at $33 per week.

* Jim Garrison charges that an Oswald imposter filled in all the applications for jobs in New Orleans, including the one at Reily. He asserts that job was arranged by American intelligence because it wanted Oswald to be nearby to an ex-FBI agent, Guy Banister. But handwriting experts confirmed the writing on all the applications was Oswald’s, and witnesses later identified him as the applicant in each case. Oswald also spoke of his job hunting to both his aunt and wife.

† The fictitious reference on his job application earlier that day, Lt. J. Evans, was probably based on Myrtle’s husband, Julian Evans.

* The question of how Oswald could afford such large printing orders on his minimal income has led some to suggest he had secret sources of funding. Oswald paid cash for all the orders. The 1,000 flyers cost $9.89; the 500 membership applications were $9.34; and the 300 membership cards cost $3.50. The $22.73 printing costs came in a month in which Oswald’s total income was $157.58, and with only $44 on housing for the prorated month, he had more than enough for the printing costs (WC Report, App. XIV; Burcham Ex. 1, WC Vol. XIX, p. 192).

* During a conversation with the author, Alba claimed “it was a fact” that Robert Kennedy had personally selected Lee Harvey Oswald to kill Castro, and when Oswald instead killed his brother, Robert Kennedy went around the Justice Department wailing, “Oh God, I killed my brother, I killed my brother.” He admitted he was always worried, even in 1992, that people who telephoned were FBI or other federal agents trying to pry information from him (Interview with Adrian Alba, March 20, 1992).

* From Dallas, in December, 1962, Oswald had also sent the Hall-Davis Defense Committee some of the posters he made while at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, and offered his photographic services. The lawyer for the Defense Committee was John Abt, the legal counsel Oswald requested five months later, when he was arrested for killing the President.

*Oswald used “we” when writing to the Fair Play national headquarters since he often wanted to impress them that his local chapter had attracted more volunteers than just him. Officer Ray said Oswald was alone on the day he confronted him on the wharf.

† Since Oswald was a defector, was the overnight processing for his passport unusual? Jim Marrs says that the ease with which Oswald obtained his passport is key evidence “pointing to Oswald’s involvement with spy work” (Crossfire, pp. 189–90). But only a few months earlier, in order to speed up passport applications, the New Orleans office had instituted a state-of-the-art teletype to Washington. The local newspapers covered the innovation as a major technological advance. When Oswald applied, one-day turnarounds were typical (WC Vol. V, p. 335). All that was required was for the field office, in this case New Orleans, to telex the names of the applicants, together with their place and date of birth, to the Department of State. Then Washington checked through a lookout-card file, and if there was no card for that person, it automatically authorized the field office to issue a passport. There was no lookout card for Oswald, and legally there was no reason to deny him a passport (WC Vol. V, p. 317). Oswald had repaid his repatriation loan to the State Department, his defection to the USSR was not a bar, and there was no indication in the file that he was under criminal indictment, wanted by the police, or a member of the Communist party (WC Vol. V, pp. 317, 329–30, 376). “They [the State Department] could not have refused a passport,” said Abram Chayes, the State Department legal adviser in 1964, “based on the information in the Oswald file” (WC Vol. V, pp. 317). Near the time of Oswald’s application, another defector to a Communist country, Paul David Wilson, applied for a passport and it was also routinely issued (WC Vol. V, pp. 338-39; WC Vol. XI, pp. 204-5).

*He read a broad range of books, including science fiction, spy novels, volumes about Communism, and even two books involving John Kennedy—William Manchester’s biography, Portrait of a President, and Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.

* The investigator on the 544 Camp Street issue, as well as the question of any Oswald relationship to either Guy Banister or David Ferrie, was Gaeton Fonzi. Fonzi seems an unusual choice for an inquiry that claimed to be impartial, as he was a committed believer in a conspiracy, having written his first article critical of the Warren Commission in 1966. After the House Select Committee finished its work and concluded that Oswald shot JFK as part of a conspiracy, Fonzi wrote a scathing 80,000-word article in The Washingtonian attacking the committee for not going far enough in its conspiracy conclusions, and setting forth his own hypothesis of how renegade CIA agents masterminded JFK’s death.

*Some critics use less credible witnesses to establish an Oswald link to Camp Street. Garrison, during his investigation, found a local resident, David Lewis, who claimed he often saw Oswald in Mancuso’s Restaurant on the ground floor of Camp Street. The problem was that Lewis swore he saw Oswald there in early 1962, when Lee was still in Russia.

* Two of Banister’s closest friends, John Lanne and Hubie Badeaux, confirmed to the author that Roberts was Banister’s mistress. They both said that after Banister’s unexpected death by heart attack in 1964, his wife took possession of all of her husband’s files and barred Delphine from the office, leaving her extremely bitter.

† Anthony Summers told the author that he had met with Delphine Roberts at John Lanne’s office. There, Lanne, whom Summers “thought to be fairly mad, certainly odd,” pulled a pistol from his desk, waved it in the air, and told Summers he could not interview his client, Delphine. Summers drove Delphine home from that meeting, and during the ride, “she suddenly, more or less, broke up, put her hands to her face, and said, ‘Mr. Summers, look, why should I bottle this up?’” She then told him the story he wrote in his book. Following that discussion, Summers told Roberts that he wanted to do an interview for television. He says that “several days later, at the urging of her daughter, Delphine Jr., a big fat lady, she agreed to do the interview, not for $500, but if I rightly recall, for $250 to $300.” Summers says, “Just so you know, the general tariff I make is that I do not pay people to do interviews for the book, ever, but I do regard television interviews as a different thing” (Interview with Anthony Summers, May 31, 1993).

*Jim Garrison also found another witness, Perry Raymond Russo, who claimed to be at a party where Ferrie, Oswald, and Shaw discussed their plans to assassinate Kennedy. The problem is that Russo only remembered the story when given drugs and asked leading questions while under hypnosis. He later contradicted himself numerous times, then finally recanted. For more on Russo, see Chapter 18.

* The FBI’s interview of Ferrie was prompted by two rumors, later repeated in Garrison’s investigation. One was that Ferrie’s New Orleans library card had been found in a search of Oswald’s house in Dallas after the assassination. That was false, and Ferrie produced his library card for the FBI agents in the November 27 interview. The second rumor was that Ferrie was to use his plane as a getaway vehicle for Oswald. The FBI discovered that his single-engine four-passenger monoplane had not been airworthy since 1962.

† These photos have not yet been tested for their authenticity. During the late 1960s probe by Garrison, two other photos that purported to show Oswald and Ferrie together in CAP were unmasked as composites.

* The car’s driver was allegedly identified by all the witnesses as Clay Shaw, the tall, distinguished businessman from the International Trade Mart. Jim Garrison used the Clinton evidence in his unsuccessful 1969 trial against Shaw, trying to tie him to Oswald. However, few critics now believe that the third man was Shaw. As Anthony Summers says, the case against Shaw “was extremely weak,” so “many investigators now favor the theory that the car’s driver was in fact Guy Banister.” Except for their both having white hair, Shaw and Banister did not look alike.

* All of the papers were in the files of the late Edward Wegmann, one of Clay Shaw’s defense lawyers.

* McGehee’s testimony is so different from any of the others’ that some critics suggest Oswald visited the barber shop on a different day than when he appeared in the voter registration line. Postulating a second Oswald car trip, especially since he did not drive, compounds the critics’ problems, since Marina testified he was in New Orleans every day during August and September.