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George DeMohrenschildt Interview trancript

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https://mattkprovideo.com/2022/01/20/george-demohrenschildt-interview-trancript

George DeMohrenschildt was a well educated successful Russian emigree living in Dallas, Texas. He met Marina Oswald and her abusive husband Lee Harvey Oswald via the Russian community in Dallas. He befriended the 2, and tried to help Lee get a job and get him to stop abusing his young wife.

After Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for shooting a Dallas Policeman and was the main suspect in the shooting of President John F. Kennedy, a lot of suspicion put on DeMohrenschildt. Why would someone in the top rung of society want to be friends with someone on the bottom rung?

Conspiracy Theorists think he might have been LHO’s CIA contact or handler. He drew Oswald into a plot to kill JFK. It was proven that he was a CIA contact agent. But I cannot stress this enough, he was a conTACT agent, NOT a contRact agent! The CIA was contacting international business people who might have picked up information on foreign governments, and George DeMohrenschildt was one such person.

(By the way, New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw was also a conTACT agent for the CIA, but also NOT a CIA employer).

In this interview, George DeMohrenschildt says he felt like a father figure to Lee Harvey Oswald, and his wife treated Marina Oswald almost like a daughter figure.

George DeMohrenschildt was planning a book about his relationship with the Oswalds. Unconfirmed rumors have it that George DeMohrenschildt supposedly told someone he was writing a book because ” everyone else has made a lot of money off of Oswald, why shouldn’t I?”

This is a very rough transcript of an audio interview with Mr and Mrs DeMohrenschildt with Willem Ottmans.

Ottman would later claim the George DeMohrenschildt admitted he was Oswalds CIA handler. Nothing like that is in this audio recording, and there is no proof that George DeMohrenschildt every said that.

I didn’t write this out by hand, I ran it through a transcribing app. And like most voice recognition apps, it has made a LOT of errors. I don’t own the copyright of any of this. I am posting this for educational purposes. Here it is:

field interview in Dallas we stress once more that everything said is the property in all forms of Mr and Mrs DeMohrenschildt and cannot be used without their advanced consent so we were discussing the world report the meeting of mr and mr morshit in washington wisdom one commission yes george

mr albert jenner the council for the warren committee is a very clever lawyer he’s a he’s a trial lawyer in chicago and i have to admit that either he was much more more intelligent than i was or i was just impressed too much by the of the whole situation and and the people at the warren committee
and i really said some unkind things about lee harvey oswald which i regret i had said and this is the more or less the sequence of mr jenner’s attitude towards me when i sat there and answered these questions for two and a half days
first it was intimidation he said to me i know more about you than you do yourself so you answer the questions and don’t say a single lie he was very very cool to me at first and i answered the questions then he started flattering me how great i was what the cosmopolitan person i was how many people i knew in this world and probably the the flattery worked on me and convinced me that he is a good friend of mine so finally at the end of the testimony at the end of this long testimony i think he got he was convinced that i was not in any way involved in in assassination and gave me a lot of compliments and we parted the best of friends

at the at the end of this testimony i told the council of the harm this affair had done to me in Haiti and he hurried to insert a statement that was that i was naturally above all suspicion i said also i feel that having helped the Oswalds is considered by you as immoral not at all concluded mr uh jenna you did all right keep living the life you led it cannot hurt to help other people

then there was a half a more day long day of testimony for my wife at which both she and our dogs were present the manchester uh little two manchesters were there at the warren committee report not as material witnesses who had known and liked harvey oswald but because jean refused to leave them alone in the hotel uh george this is the moment you want jean to yes one more question i would like to ask you somewhere around along the line lee harvey oswald asked you a pointed question like okay george what is your political philosophy and you gave a reply i think which mr jenner of the world commission amended with the remark of his what was exactly that is well i told him that i let my political philosophies live and let live let people do they want they want you they don’t harm the others and i think that’s generally speaking mr general agreed with my point of view no uh you told me something else um lee harvey oswald asked you what is your political philosophy and you gave an answer and let and live and let live and then mr general said

made a comment well i forgot what what was it well you made notes of it yeah well we go over that later then at the end of the video just this disregard this passage i will keep reminding you of thank you this is interesting you are discussing janna now and please and okay john now what would be interesting is to get no i’ll give you this one uh what would be interesting is to um get your view of going to washington and visit with the one commission on the oswald

number one i want to go back a little to port-au-prince when we received the letter and asking us not requesting asking us to appear
if we can contribute anything to this horrible tragedy we said we would like to say anything we can say of our knowledge of oswald and his family unfortunately we didn’t see or didn’t didn’t have any communications with them for eight straight months prior to assassination and we actually would be very poor help in solving that tragedy we had no idea whether he became sane and wonderful man whether he became bad and became a criminal the only way that we could contribute anything is to our communications with him prior of all of these things going back practically a year and a half so when the news get around which we never concealed that we had a request to go and testify and we did agree all american colony was an apron for the france whenever we went to tennis and after tennis was a dad had the drinks they always said how horrible aren’t you afraid i said afraid afraid of what said aren’t you afraid to go and testify he he is supposed to be an assassin i said so what what do we have to do let’s hit assassin or not we just happen to know a man for for the time quite quite far away back from what happened and the only thing we can contribute is some to his personality and describe his character they were up they just couldn’t believe it and frankly i i had a feeling that many of them were afraid to such extent that they thought probably will be put in jail and never come back to port-au-prince but we forgot all about that and we’re arriving to washington and um we were for not uh we were asked to testify separately my husband testified two and a half days and after that that i had to testify for one and a half day and my reaction was a little bit different than his because when i came i didn’t consider it interrogation or anything i consider is as my favor to come and give my contribution to solving this horrible tragedy if in any way i can help which i doubt it very much so i had completely relaxed attitude and anything any little detail unfortunately have pretty good memory i was going to tell them if in any way that can contribute to the cause to my surprise they asked me they were rather pleasant with me and a little bit reserved all of a sudden instead of asking me when did and where about you meet him how many times you saw him what were your discussions and what do you know and what did you learn about him and his wife instead of that they all of a sudden asking me where were you born who were your parents i really objected immensely towards that but they said they have to know the background of the witness in order to evaluate its statements so i agree with that never suspecting that my personal life will appear in one report i consented to testify and give them all the information pertaining oswald but i never did any consent to them to print my personal life which i have nothing to be ashamed of but this is my personal property i can never forgive one report for releasing that to public and all over the world they had no business to print where i was from what did i do how many jobs i had how many husbands i had how many children i had it’s my personal property and if i want it published i will have it published myself or have authorization to somebody else all my impression was that i have to say and which i should all of my communications or any of my knowledge of his actions of his personality only oswald lee oswald and nothing else so i’m still carrying a very big grudge and believe me whenever i have a chance i’m going to have them pay for what they’ve done because to me it’s tremendous insult to a personal freedom which we’re supposed to have in this country that’s why we are here and not in soviet union and i respect personal freedom and personal property not to be touched by anyone unless consent of a person is given now

yes so we start talking and i tell them of course i have nothing to be ashamed of my head in fact i’m quite proud nothing sensational of my background my father was a great man my mother was a very nice woman i had excellent childhood in china i came to united states because i chose united states i could have gone to europe but i the freedom in united states and a constitution that we had appealed to me and i wanted a new world i was brought up sort of in a european matter in european a manner and i was sort of tired of it i want something new new new and that’s why i chose united states and came with the best belief that i’m going to have complete freedom of judgments fate or no faith it will be my personal business and nobody is going to try to impose it upon me well i found such a lenient with to my um regret i found that it not always worked like that sometimes it did but anyway after i gave them all of my background we went to subject of my meeting lee harvey and of course we never even discussed a testimony with my husband he never read mine i never read his but it’s completely coincide 100 because whenever you say the truth you don’t have to remember there was no problem with that then they finally and about second day they wanted me to identify the gun so they brought the gun out and my little dog was there he sniffled and a gun i said maybe he can know more about it because by smell he can say it’s the same gown or not but i cannot possibly say that was the same gun it looked just about the same the rifle i mean looked just about the same but i never touched it and never handled it so i have no way i said why don’t you ask his wife what is the same gun or not because she probably dusted it she probably handled it so she can tell you much more in order to identify and defy that was the same gun did you feel in your testimony for the moral report that you uh defendedly did you also have to feel like george had that when they questioned you about oswald they did so as if they had already made up their minds that he was guilty did you feel you had to were you free to express your opinions as far as to bring also sympathetic angles of his character out or knowing him yes they were they were not as strong as they were with my husband but definitely there was an air that there were no way out how do you mean that’s he supposed to be the assassin and no matter what that was the feeling we had and they practically they were not very happy but whatever good was ever said about him how did you notice that it’s just a feeling that was disliked in their faces when something nice was said about him and frankly we were very fortunate because we were interrogated much later than the other people after they were interrogated immediately and they were bewildered they were frightened when we faced warren committee we were completely cool and we were not excited because an excitement people did say and we know lots of our good friends said things that they didn’t mean because they were too frightened or too excited or something we spoke completely indifferent just trying to bring facts of whatever we could recall of our relationship to osfold but definitely i had a feeling that but whenever anything current was said about oswald they were sort of displeased it was not completely certain so many words but the feeling were not uh how i said they didn’t didn’t uh they sort of didn’t agree but they didn’t say so because all they wanted to know and to hear what we have to say about the subject frankly the whole thing calling us to what a report spending all the money and bringing us in and taking us back and dragging a little much the little dog is there and i’m sure they did quite a lot of research of the icia and whatever else they have all of that money were completely wasted i told them so why don’t they go to new orleans why don’t they find out who were his acquaintances and what was he up to in the last few months prior to this tragedy

instead of covering all it up and spending all the money of digging in in the backgrounds for instance like ours or the backgrounds of anybody that came in contact with him in dallas this is so far remote was complete waste of time i had sort of a feeling that they just wanted to fill in the pages with some kind of nonsense instead of actually digging in and find out we even had a fight i had a personal fight with jacqueline’s mother in her house later okay yeah it’s okay because i did believe and i wanted one thing in the world i wanted to know what rat did it and i’m insulting the rat when i say that who could possibly who could possibly commit such crime this was the president for the first time in long term was a young president completely not interested in any material possessions because he had them all with the bright brilliant ideas and going forward he was the hope not only our country but the hope of the world

i think we have covered uh a great deal of your impressions of the horror report it’s a good moment to let george get back to his script now i remember a few details about the interrogation and of course it covers so many pages that it’s so hard to remember what it actually said but it’s there for anybody to see for instance uh council jenner asked me why lee liked you so much and he liked only you why why didn’t he like the other people well i said i didn’t have the slightest idea so so generous suggested that maybe because i was a strong person that was very hard for me to say whether i was a strong person or not i answered this maybe he identified me as some sort of an internationalist an american internationalist and gender said maybe you are um you and your wife said jenner were the only ones who remained uh lee and marina’s friends well i said okay we are not defending ourselves for having seen and helped them to us lee was always hospitable and he was very responsive to our kindness then at the end of the testimony mr jenner brought out the letter which i wrote to mrs hugh orkinclaws the mother of jacqueline kennedy and i quote what i wrote to her since we lived in dallas permanently last year and before we had the misfortune to have met oswald and especially his wife marina

and i continued the possible reason

no and i do hope i continue um that marina and her children i understand she has two now will not suffer too badly throughout their lives and that the stigma of assassination will not affect the innocent children some innocent children but george you did right let’s face it you did right the possible reason he killed kennedy was insanely why don’t you read that yeah well because it’s different what is different okay i learned it because this way the innocent children they will not affect the innocent children somehow just me i i’m sorry to have to come to business here yeah why don’t you do it chronologically you made the notes of what you said why don’t you come up with it why do you skip it now all right well it’s it’s boring you it’s boring and it’s and it’s very long and this is so the pages are long this is an example of of of a thing that they really dislike about my testimony so that’s why i want to come to all right well and i think that i was really bamboozled into saying it because of the general atmosphere and i did say that the possible reason lee killed kennedy that he was insanely jealous of an extraordinary successful man who was young attractive had a beautiful wife had all the money in the world and he was a world figure and poorly roosevelt was just the opposite disappeared in the warm committee report

he had nothing he had a [ __ ] wife he had no money was a failure in everything he did

and and and you look upon this now as a little unfair maybe i said i look at it now as an unfair statement towards lee harvey harry and i continued my testimonies in the report it made him a hero in his own mind possibly he did not realize that he was doing it at the expense of the whole nation

it might have been a mental blackout that’s what’s my was my conclusion and you regret that now i said no

george is this all you want to say about what you said in the violent report oh there are so there’s the warren report is there for people to read and

yeah for instance there are other interesting questions that they ask me yeah general asked me as a humanitarian person you cannot imagine anybody murdering anybody else i said i cannot imagine i certainly cannot imagine i still expressed doubts regarding uh regarding oswald’s guilt i kept on doing it

again i want to come back to the letters i wrote to jacqueline kennedy’s mother and they were i didn’t want to have them publicized but they were presented by mrs hawking close to the warren committee and they were they are now part integral part of the warren committee report oh she gave she gave the letters to the warren community and i also she also gave a copy of the letter she wrote to me and this is another interesting letter which expresses many things it seems extraordinary she writes to me that you knew oswald and that you knew jackie as a child it is certainly a very strange world your leather made me think a good deal i hope too that mrs oswalt will not will not suffer this was the letter from january 29 64. from mrs archer generally

and we keep it because you have to yeah don’t throw it out keep it here no i want to continue judge please be relaxed and take your time i don’t care how much time you take but don’t hurry and don’t think any statement of yours is too long or too boring we need the complete information in order to make your book worthwhile so take your time and and we will be here and as stephen said in the united nations still hell freeze is over until it is done job okay very very tired by our testimonies we were invited the evening after uh the position to georgetown and spend the evening with mr and mrs few or king claus jacqueline’s mother and stepfather where we also discovered that everybody’s mind was made up that lee was the assassin we tried to object but of no avail both my wife and janet ochen claus finally cried together one over the death of her son-in-law another over the loss of a president whom she loved and admired uh jean you want to come in here about your conversation one moment george let’s recall it in her own world but the one thing struck me she was actually a mother mrs ocking claus was a mother-in-law of jack kennedy and i was complete outsider and complete stranger she didn’t want any investigation she didn’t want to know who killed jack why and what for all she kept on telling me that jack is dead and nothing will return him back i had entirely different opinion just because he was such a great man and just because he was my beloved president i would turn every stone on earth to find out who did it and i want to make sure that that person it’s even too much to call it person should be punished because things like that have no right to go on this earth be unpunished thank you and actually you got into a fight with me searching close about it it was not exactly fight it was disc we were we had a disagreement or argument and i couldn’t possibly understand how the person a woman being so close to the man that was so killed so horribly having no interest with soya to continue investigation and finding a person who did it and he is complete outsider but just happens to be to know how great that man was wanted the justice to be brought and showed to everybody who actually did it thank you judge may i once more say take your time don’t throw any material out because we have the time at the end of our conversation at mr mrs hugh oaking close house to my surprise mrs ockinglaos told me my daughter jacqueline does not want to see you ever again because you had befriended her husband’s assassin so you see how their mind was made up that’s her privilege i replied and we left the magnificent house with its millions of dollars of our treasures and thought of harvey lee oswald’s poor and tragic life fortunately the haitian government was reassured by the warren committee and we did not have much trouble anymore but we did have a lot of trouble later because of the wrong interpretation by the press of my friendship with lee harvey oswald we cannot even give here a resume of incongruous theories that have evolved in figurish brains of some writers as a result of this warren committee report one of them being that i had operated harvey oswald by long distance by long distance wave transmission having previously inserted an infinitesimal receiver in his skull in his car

as a matter of fact you realize that even last week the second week of february 1969 a book was published in new york by a pirate’s plan called the kennedy conspiracy in which you you and john are being discussed over pages having had at cia

branches which uh put lee harvey oswald on the assassination even this week yeah so

and also in this uh book that uh circulates all over europe now le meric brill a book published in luxembourg in french so that james happened yeah so that is impossible to sue for slander i am i am called to be a cia cia agent who had been assigned to test harvey oswald and may i quote what they said there um judge yeah aren’t we going away from the purpose okay very much so keep these pages i only inserted this about this you have to keep for later use when we round up the you’re knowing oswald with we we we must now stick to the fact that you came to washington don’t throw the material out we need it later that you went to washington to meet the royal commission you testified and we have now both yours and chad’s impressions including the next day me meeting the auction class family now what is your next chapter about the material on this this is a little bit more about the current committee yes but this was very discouraging of course the the result of that however more encouraging was a comment which i read later on in the warren committee report by the by a friend of mine talk a little bit by a friend of mine to whom i introduce mr balan to whom i introduced lee harvey oswald oswald when he was looking for a job he as we mentioned before likely liked what he saw of him and found him intelligent and alert a judge sorry you don’t need to look into any defense of what you said by quoting any of your friends this is mr sam yeah about we brought in already considerable time ago and i don’t want you to start defending yourself without being attacked if you need to be defensive i will ask questions which you then will quote whatever needs to be said in defense but don’t bring up defense yourself because it’s not necessary you are not being interrogated on the basis of an attack keep that material for later later let’s just close this one saying because you are getting off the track right really we must be business-like in in following the chapters no no not there this this this is the material where it was here and and this was he threw up but this we need um george really i’m i’m not very pleased this afternoon with how it goes we we must stick to and and talk with slightly more pleasure in what you are doing because it give yourself a little more your mumble away and we have to really get this now let’s first get into chapter six or seven it’s like chapter e uh which we skipped because you had misplaced it and which should go back it’s if it is e between d and f then it is chapter five and chapter five comes after which chapter george after chapter d which is which is called the further meetings further meetings with leia oswald that will be roughly on tape number three and now before chapter f which is increasing animosity between now as well yes between those two chapters we are now handling this coming chapter called what is the title contrast between the oswald exactly one evening lee brought me the typescript of his experiences

develop them into a book i read the poorly typed pages very carefully they related his experiences and nothing much was added as far as i can remember to what he had told me already lee sat on our sofa and looked hopefully at me tell me frankly what do you think of this type script he asked i’ll tell you the truth i said but remember i’m not a writer however i had a lot of technical articles published i said your story

is simple and honest but it is poorly written deprived of any sensationalism and it really has no point personally i like it for its honesty and because i remember minsk but how many people had similar experience experiences how many people would know where minsk is tell me i asked lee not many he agreed frankly i did not want to tell you that his grammar and syntax were rather poor his sentences were awkward he used pompous difficult words frequently without knowing their meaning this was the result of his scanned formal education the only thing in his favor was his obvious goodwill

if you add some sensational

uh detective story angles beautiful female spies sex and would depict russians as depraved monsters even your typescript will be published and you will maybe able to make a lot of money i suggested no thanks sadly emphatically i want to have it appear in the american press as it is even though it might be poorly written but i want the public to know the truth it should improve russian-american relations people here should know how decent in general in general russian people are how they treated me well a simple american ex-marine they treated me with kindness there is nothing really monstrous in soviet russia he said

um i agree i said but you talk in this typescript all the time about some individuals you made in minsk it’s factual but who is interested in camera at this and camera at that

and handled lee bag his pages as i mentioned before marital relations between marina and lee were not good and they progressively worsened george excuse me one minute you apparently end here the section on the manuscript yeah what did he try to point out in this manuscript on russia what would you say

just factual experiences of his life as a plain radio worker in soviet russia nothing sensational true correct relatively kind towards soviet russia but it was not exciting would he talk for instance did he have any personal friends he talked about a lot of personal friends whom naturally we did not know and the later on this type script was shown to me at the warren committee and uh it’s it was about the same as i had seen it has it been published in one report yes it is problem it was published the text of what he wrote certainly

now we’re talking again about the marital relation between lee and marina lee was now working at the photo technician in the firm of tagart in dallas mostly catering to publicity he worked long hours developing and enlarging photographs and he seemed to enjoy his work sometimes he worked overtime stayed in the shop till 10 or 11 pm marina complained he comes home tired hardly ever talks to me only to the baby and begins to read as always russian classics instead of being tender to me paying attention to me uh did you never see lee read an american book never or a french or a german no no french no no no but any of the french classics in english or latin or nor american none of no steinbeck no nothing maybe he did but i never saw him read anything except russian books maybe he wanted to keep in practice yes yes i see he read them in the original language excuse me what did you say oh you come to it yeah i’m coming to it okay it puzzled us how it was possible that lee not only spoke fluent russian but he also read difficult russian books his favorite writers were of course pushkin gogol turgani of dostoyevsky tolstoy it is a very difficult language lee was bright but not a genius and he stayed in russia only two years has he had any previous training in russian language he must have had was our conclusion

being now in a close intimacy with with the couple we became aware of the tragic development in their relationship lee seemed to be fond of marina but he really cherished mostly the baby maybe he did not show marina his affection sufficiently to me he never spoke against her nor did he criticize nor did he criticize her but he did not either expressed any deep feeling for her even in his memoirs he spoke very little of his wives of his wife marina on the other hand criticized and annoyed me openly he’s so puny he would say he’s so small he does not drink he only works his only interest is in the baby where her word

and he said that behind his back

never did we hear from her that she really loved lee but there was however an element of deep attachment which we did not see at the time lee was all laptop in his work his books his dreams his ideas of justice and equality for all

and especially in his ideas of equality for colored people and also in baby june whom he had loved tenderly Marina on the other hand

spoke freely to my wife and to myself about her extramarital experiences of her admiration for big strong men for gay amusing men the cubans in russia for instance were so gay and attractive she recalled many of them lived in minsk i think they were mostly students they had their guitars played their caribbean tunes danced well laughed all the time they were such fun they had their guitars played their caribbean tunes danced well laughed all the time they were such fun it was an indirect criticism of lee who did not play any musical instrument who did not dance he was not particularly gay especially with her here again i want to dispel the impression i may have given that didn’t that lee did not have a sense of humor to me he did and to a great extent he subscribed for instance to crocodile a russian satirical publication somewhat similar to new yorker or british punch crocodile is spelled k-r-o-k-o-d-i-l

in it not published in in moscow in it the animals frequently it means crocodile in it the animals frequently represented people especially politicians and bureaucrats and put in relief the foibles and inconsistencies of life in soviet union also this magazine took swipes at the bourgeois world sometimes quite cleverly

lee read russian classics and then understood them he discussed them for hours with me the old pre-revolutionary life of russia which i did not remember but knew only from my parents also interestedly by the way what we call classics also belonged they all belong to pre-revolutionary days soviet russians are fascinated by those bygone days they are somewhat nostalgic reading about them and so was lee

marina did not seem to care about them she was a materialist in the real sense of the world word dreamt of claws skyscrapers entertainment handsome men parties and automobiles lee when shall we get a car was repeated constantly everybody here here has one even the poorest people marina loved to drink wine lee objected to any alcohol she liked to smoke lee forbid her to smoke so whenever she was without him she would become a chainsmoker inhaling deep and enjoying this otherwise forbidden pleasure she unwillingly may be provoked slender ascetically talking about strong men she admired so much and she called him a bookworm education which he admired in others mattered little to his wife she confided one day that her degree as a pharmacist mattered little to her but she must have studied hard to get it i asked knowing how tough this competition is in soviet schools as little as i could to get by she answered brazilian on the exams i used ponies and passed another reaction of marinas comes to me she spoke of the gay amusing young people she used to know of the orgies in the apartment of some kids when their parents were away in the soviet union they drank and slept indiscriminately with each other and there was a fellow i knew she reminded who was such a full a handsome

boy but he did not like the parties but studied a lot on holidays he took a book to read and walk to the forest for the whole day some people are crazy she concluded smilingly i think judge this is a good moment to end this tape because we have to get into a new day and then we will pick up right from here this is still chapter e or five which has to be inserted earlier in the manuscript

this is step number eight in the interview with mr mrs lemanshield again the exclusive property of the demaran shields for use in any way mr martinshield is dealing with chapter 5 or e which was has to be inserted earlier which was misplaced and which is reading now he’s reading the last part of it all the relations in general between oswald and his wife marine yes george graham

in my conversation with lee i found out that lee was a straightforward

and outspoken agnostic probably since early childhood

he was an agnostic of the type of jefferson on franklin and for us it was fine it created a pleasant understanding between us

did you call him at one point with me he was humble yeah he blossomed when interest was shown in him oh definitely this was the point about him that whenever for instance discussing of organized religion and we agreed on on that point and it was created a pleasant relationship understanding between us

uh mourinho on the other hand was brought up in soviet russia jan would like to say something about oswald

i just want to mention about lee that the reason that he probably liked george was because george was the only one and i of course with him didn’t score him and accepted him as a human being on an equal basis in spite that so many people that did help them actually they were not doing it for him they were doing it for his wife and the child and they sort of left him out of the whole thing that was his resentment towards other people and sometimes he was actually rude with them because finally when they realize that they cannot have only marina and a baby and they actually have to invite him also for dinner for something he was straightforward and just refused to accept the invitations and that infuriated maria marina of course because look those people so nice they give us so many things and that idiot not even polite to them and refuse the invitation and want don’t want to be courteous with them do you feel those people were unkind to him because they knew he had gone to deserted the united states as they saw it and go to the soviet union then come back and sort of traitor absolutely they just couldn’t possibly understand that there’s a young man and usually most of the young people and it’s admirable if they search for something and he was searching for something whatever we had he thought maybe there’s something else that’s still better that was his reason as he explained to us once why he went there and when we asked him and i’m repeating it again why not did he come back he said i didn’t find the idea i was looking for maybe that doesn’t exist but unfortunately the narrow-minded people couldn’t possibly understand any of his philosophy or any of his thinking that’s why they condemn him without even giving him a chance to express himself and trying to understand what actually he failed what was his motives to go there and what were his motives to come back we were the only people that took trouble to ask and find out what were his reasons and what was his reason to return and his reasons were perfectly satisfactory to us or any other person that think

you gave us that judge yeah now i do continue regard yes absolutely and i would like to continue regarding his agnosticism yeah and which led to a conflict with marina as i said before marina was also an agnostic naturally she was brought up in soviet union she didn’t have any religious affiliation any religious feeling but she probably thought that being religious in the united states might help her hence she had her child june christened later in the greek orthodox church in dallas while lee was away from somewhere and that also contributed to a conflict between them blue face did you notice that was in disagreement oh definitely contributed to a conflict between them well he objected to that and he said he should have asked me to do to do so i don’t know if it led to any violent fact uh fights but it was the subject of disagreements i honestly i thought that true faith is good and cannot be discussed or criticized but hypocrisy is different and again i want to underline uh that main motivation of harvey lee oswald during our conversations with him was that he was an advocate of integration of colored people in the united states he said to me that it was hurting him that the colored people did not have the same rights as the white ones and that happened to be my opinion also i am violent on the subject also because it hurts me that i live in texas and do not have colored friends now i do have by the way but before i didn’t have i could not afford to have colored friends in texas

another thing lee found objectional in his wife and we tended to agree with him was lack of good care of his child this led to frequent scenes and recriminations gradually the fight became frequent never in public however but marina would arrive complaining he beat me up again she especially complained she would ride by bus she showed my wife the bruises on her body and she displayed a black eye to me one day we visited them in their apartment on elsbase street in oak cliff it was on the ground floor in an old red brick dreary building the living room was small there was a little bedroom and a kitchen lee showed me the books he has been reading some letters from russia to both of them the walls of this gloomy room were decorated by the enlargements of the pictures he took in russia he took a great pride in these pictures there were trees and streams pleasant peasant huts views of moscow and leningrad and especially of the river neva in leningrad these pictures he took himself and now he enlarged them and taggart where he was working he did that himself yes as he had access to photographic equipment and on on his new job look how beautiful they are look at this monument look at the neva river he would say lee would say he was quite happy about that and it was touching to us and the uh and the pictures were done quite artistically with a with a professional touch

while

while we were chatting with lee sitting on the mouth-eaten sofa on of his living room jean went to the kitchen to talk to marina there marina cried and showed her a burn on her shoulder lee caught me smoking and put put out the cigarette on on my bare flesh he cried out she cried she cried out

my wife told her this is terrible and she commended if you live for two years in europe you don’t have to acquire ugly characteristics of european men your life here does not give you any right to beat up your wife and to burn cigarettes on her on your shoulder she criticized lee anyway this situation was becoming desperate and we discussed discussed it frankly with both of them our advice was to separate for a while at least a cool-off period were necessary to both of them we thought i advisedly to take an easy to take it easy and lay off or brutalizing his wife but he said but she enjoys brutality he said calmly and look i am all scratched up his face did bear did bear long red marks marina provoked me he said

it doesn’t matter who is responsible i countered your temperaments obviously clash so why don’t you separate before you really hurt each other you are stronger after all lee she is a pretty good fighter too he counted in the meantime marina was crying on the shoulder of jean complaining of lee’s brutality criticizing his coolness and hostility she would say he rose to bed with me so rarely now she cried out maybe once in a couple of weeks he makes me so frustrated he makes you makes me so frustrated she bitterly complained my wife was amused by this complaint but naturally could not offer any better solution than advising marina to put some perfume in the evening or wearing a sexy negligee during these discussions the baby june was laying there in a crib rather fat and not able to say a word i looked at jones carefully one evening and noticed that she reminded me of someone look i shot that she looks exactly like nikita khrushchev i did not mean it as an insult i rather like that old man and so did the oswalds we all gathered around the crib and examined the baby same color of the skin said my wife same spares fluffy hair said marina and same round face agreedly upon leaving our couple and having advised them to take a knee to take it easy and to stop fighting we draw drove home laughing about my on my comparison of june to khrushchev it wasn’t to offend the oswalds but the baby wasn’t pretty then fat and awkward with small slanting blue eyes like nikita’s and the same belligerent expression yes the poor child was not pretty then and we do hope she’s growing up into a lovely child in her new home with a new stepfather it makes us sad when we think of lee and his genuine and tender love for his first child excellent

now we have concluded um the chapter that should be inserted between d and f uh or four and six chapters four and six and now we come to a chapter l effects on our lives of the of the oswald affair and that’s right

the publication of the short resume of the warren committee report had a lot of unpleasant effects on our lives in haiti only the real friends understood the reasons of our involvement with the assassin in quotation mark in this way the phony friends were weeded out of our lives but too many people who had been contacted at several locations by the fbi agents have become either annoyed or really suspicious of us after all where there is a smoke there is fire

idiotic and insulting article appeared in the newspapers

all over the world about my wife and i about the mysterious friends of lee harvey oswald i probably should have sued them but i did not bother our private intimate lives have been thoroughly invaded and therefore polluted

money was offered us for interviews which we refused telephone service especially overseas in haiti was inadequate i was one of the few by the way with the telephone in my office but not at home this telephone was buzzing for weeks with calls for me when did you meet harvey oswald why did you like him so much do you think he killed president kennedy why are you hiding in haiti etc

and this was absolutely ridiculous because we we have left for haiti nine months prior to assassination so all those questions were very annoying after the after those few questions i usually would hang up

then came the offer of a televised interview for nbc forthcoming the warren report

who was the reporter what the warren report macmillan that’s right yeah george let me ask you the warning report yes wait a minute yeah who was you said nbc did anyone come to see you from nbc that’s exactly what i wanted to tell you this is all used yeah but i don’t know if i would use it the warren report at first we steadfastly refused then one day george macmillan one of the writers assigned to this program called and asked for a permission to come and visit us in haiti he sounded like an intelligent man and he was well recommended by a mutual friend i told him that i would refuse an interview televised interview but he if he wanted to come and talk to us he would be welcome a rather gruesome incident coincided with his arrival in puerto prance after one of the many invasions of haiti this one came from cuba the militia had executed one of the invaders to show the popular support of france that it does not pay to invade haiti by any method his body the body of the man with guns ammunition and various supplies was displayed on the plaza near the airport as macmillan an experienced newspaperman arrived he saw the commotion and the crowds surrounding the body we do not want him to see the gruesome sight later in the evening however

especially the reason was we didn’t want him to know what was there because we thought he came over just to learn something about hate it was completely never occurred to us that he came and business of oswald we thought he came over maybe he wanted for have an interview and hate you maybe to to see some more people and to learn about hate him so can you imagine what the impact would be in the report arriving in port-au-prince and leaving the airport and immediately there’s a cadaver displayed and a plaza so we did our best to pass it as fast as we could skirted it and bring him home and said nothing at all then excuse me in other words to make a good impression of haiti on a forum that was your loyalty towards haiti yeah then another question but didn’t he call from overseas that he wanted to talk to you about the oswald assassination oh he was recommended for a general reportage on haiti exactly okay we had no idea why was he coming but you know being in haiti away from home we will welcome any american and we always took them if we didn’t know them if they’re nice and pleasant people we always offer them hospitality and we would like to talk about our home if the fairly pleasant people will put them in a hotel but we always try to help with anything we can to any american that arrived in haiti thank you john very good i didn’t make it clear yeah nbc offered us the interview but then macmillan said that he would just come and see us later in the evening as we sat on our terrace overlooking the beautiful bay of inner cities surrounded by tropical vegetation macmillan mused a lot why didn’t you want me to see the cadaver i knew all along what it was and then macmillan went straight to the business of our appearing for the nbc broadcast of the warren committee report he started trying to convince us to accept the filmed interview and even offered to bring the tv crew to haiti but we had had enough publicity and refused fortunately george macmillan turned out to be a nice fellow then a good tennis player so he did not

to be a nice fellow attend a good tennis player so he did not waste his time entirely he left haiti asking us to reconsider our decision i wrote to several friends to ask their advice and they all said that we should all go to new york and accept the offer you are the only ones who had kind words for lee tell them once more for the whole united states to hear them another friend wrote this tv show may dispel the aura of mystery about you and your relation to lee harvey oswald a couple of weekends later we reconsidered our decision and flew to new york nbc had arranged for an apartment at the plaza hotel where we spent the whole afternoon in front of the cameras what was annoying to me that the producer tried to prod me to say something derogatory about lee it was insidious effort to drag out of me some damaging comments to his memory the whole thing did not make much sense and it was best based on wrong premises that my wife and i might have some inside knowledge only something that would confirm the general opinion existing in the united states at the time that lee was definitely the assassin since the warren committee could not find any reason for the assassination nor any plot therefore there must be a hidden reason somewhere and i as his admittedly best friend should give an explanation of his insane action this was the producer’s reasoning to john and i although we did not have any more information on the events in dallas the day of the tragedy lee remained a nice interesting good friend and we never considered him an assassin of course everything is possible if the man becomes insane and we don’t deny this slight possibility but the previous chapters describing our acquaintanceship indicate that he did not act insane with us nor was he ever to us nor will he ever be a born loser an insanely envious person a poor high school dropout a dedicated thirsty revolutionary etc later we saw the complica the com completed 40 minutes film of ourselves at the nbc studio and realized how poorly we presented the side of lee harvey oswald whom we had liked so much we wish we wish we had done a better and more intelligent job

you move now into another chapter yes the next chapter is m return to united states from haiti yeah that was about what time that was in october of 1966 so you stayed after the assassination three more years

it was hard for us to leave haiti but my work was completed and some other business was in view we came back by a small german steamer carrying our car and numerous cases of instruments maps books and various other possessions from miami we drove having jammed a huge trailer full of our things in dallas which we had left three and a half years before we hoped to find some good old friends instead we met suspicion and outright hostility pretty soon we found out the reason and the reason was the warrant committee report frankly after our testimony which we signed without even bothering to read truth is truth so why bother reading again what we had said we put the matter on inquiry of other tests

of matter of inquiry and other just in our testimonies and interrogation out of our own minds

they want to say some very good friends of ours and i don’t want to mention the name it’s not not necessary at all they ask us did you read what a report i said no aren’t you going to read it you have it okay thank you so in other words we were tired of the whole thing of the report of the testimonies and of interrogation and we wanted to put them out of our minds the whole aura of suspicion of insinuation became obvious to us but the events forced us to pay attention to what we had said and especially what had been said about us soon after our arrival we sat with some friends in fort worth good friends who had visited us in the meantime in haiti and they insisted that we should get the 16 volumes of the report and find out what had been said about us that they said will explain to you the attitude of some people you had known and whom you might consider your friends and indeed

soon after reading several depositions i realized that adult albert jenner the council of the world committee was so right when he had said you will be the only people in the world to know exactly what other people think about you because you will see it in print and they will have said that under oath then you will know who are your friends and who are your enemies

by the way our friends uh who suggested our reading of the warren report and they were they testified there also were quite indignant or as many other people were who volunteered information to fbi uh that what they had said had been printed it was most unfair that private matters which had been given in confidence were exposed to public these friends of ours swore they would never trust

these fbi’s again and would never put themselves in the position of informers

it was sad to read an opinion of an old business associate that i had never been truthful to him from the testimony of my secretary i read he made mysterious trips to houston

about my wife from an old russian immigrant woman whom we had always considered inoffensive if not bright she said that this chinese woman did not even believe in god a testimony from an old man in west texas whom i knew just very slightly he had always wanted to be the commissioner of texas from the testimony of my own ex-son-in-law if anyone had finagled the assassination or influenced lee harvey oswalt that person was george the morontian of course in the meantime he had divorced my wife my daughter alex people who had detested marina and lee made money out of them especially out of resulting unbelievable promotion of marina as a poor defenseless god-fearing russian wife of the monstrous and human brutal marxist harvey lee oswald marina finally

made it in the united states just as her friend in russia had said said in her letter in 1962 she became a fantastic success and her dead husband curiously enough paid for for it with his life so the purpose of her arrival in usa had been superbly successful lee harvey oswald had finally become a real money maker poor fellow even his tomb was stolen for publicity articles and books appearing

appearing all over the united states added to general insanity of profiteering on a man’s death again foreign and american newspapermen began calling us asking for interviews our friends with whom we had stayed at the beginning were sick and tired of constant telephone calls they suggested some kind of police protection for us of course we did not want it as some of you remember especially those who were really concerned with the assassination and were anxious to know the truth the great majority of articles and books at first accepted the warren committee thesis that oswald was the lone assassin the publicity kept the articles kept elaborating and harping on it only some a little more logical who did not find any reason in lee’s action devised the theory that lee was shooting at governor’s connelly at governor connelly but being a usual flop he hit the president by mistake in either case to all of them lee was suspicious dangerous insanely envious of successful people megalomaniac loner never do well some of the blame fell on us because we had befriended him only rare authors dared to disregard the conclusions of the august august committee and cast doubt on lee’s guilt notwithstanding this publicity broadcast radio shows etc the general opinion in other countries never accepted the thesis of lee’s guilt little by little annoyed by excessive harping a large portion of the american people also cease to believe in this guilt but guilty or not guilty lee had been my friend and some shadow of a doubt was on my wife and me our lives became more secluded and although some of our real friends we retained some of our real friends we missed some of our good acquaintances who shied away from us we gave one interview to a dear friend a staff writer of dallas times herald where i pointed out how harmful for the united states was the warrant committee thesis that the lone lunatic kills the president and is killed by another lunatic what are we the country of insane homicidal maniacs

we are coming to chapter n which is called message from lee

in february of 1967 we finally found a suitable place to settle before that we stayed with friends and visited our children and traveled across the united states on business it was a duplex in a turtle creek area of dallas and it belonged to an eccentric lady who had lived in haiti also and loved the country this we had in common with her all our belongings had been stored so far in the southwest warehouse in dallas the day of moving the day of moving we went out to the warehouse with a friend and before our furniture was loaded we looked through the accumulation of our possessions

with an idea to with an idea to keep some unnecessary things in the warehouse discard useless object and take with us only what was really needed i was talking to my driver while my wife jean was finishing the selection i did not have the slightest idea of what was to happen suddenly my wife rushed out of the warehouse shooting excitedly look look shouting excitedly look look what i found i ran back to the pile of spread out belongings and saw a slightly familiar box what what is it i asked my wife don’t you remember these are the records i gave to marina oswald in 1963. four years ago she cried out yes how come they are here i asked that were the records yeah dejan used herself 20 years before in learning uh english from russian right that she never touched marina yeah too lazy

ah yeah okay that’s not jump to conclude you are not sure that she did it she made that

probably knew that some of our things were at our mutual friends before being stored in the here in the in the in the warehouse we guessed in other words we don’t know how those records got to our in our warehouse either marine only put them there

or maybe lee knew where we had stored most of our things i se this at this warehouse i said my wife began taking the records out and suddenly out of one envelope containing records stared a picture of lee harvey oswald the same picture which got such a wide publicity and was printed on the cover of life magazine some writers by the way suggested that it was a fake now we have a proof it wasn’t it’s genuine we stood frozen still and kept looking at lee standing there on the picture yeah it was a message from beyond the grave what did he mean by leaving us a picture of himself standing erect fully armed and we asked ourselves then my wife shouted look there is an inscription here to my dear friend george from lee i looked at the inscription marked april 1963 i looked at the inscription deeply moved and without thinking turn the picture around and here written in pencil weakly but clearly legible was another inscription seemingly in marina’s handwriting in russian translated this means

this is the hunter of fascists

we cannot describe the impression we received from this picture and to its inscriptions we were shocked it was a message from the grave from the graves that we did not dare to visit

that’s okay george take your time did you want to say anything at this point you you motioned earlier it’s still okay

and marina message on this picture was a chilling scorn for this man

if he were a hunter of fascists and not somehow squared with his inclinations and ideology why was his wife making fun of him why we ask ourselves this question remains with us to this day we showed this picture to a few close friends and to some it meant that lee was a maniac killer a proof of his aggression of his guilt to the others on the other hand just the opposite that he was a man of anti-fascist inclinations

that the men of such anti-fascist inclinations could not have been the assassin of the president who was as far removed from being a fascist any liberal leader in the united states

we did not show this picture to any authorities to them oswald’s case was closed anyway and we did not want any further involvement uh north to garrison or anybody no no anyway you have had no contact actually well we discuss it that’s right but i wrote a letter to life magazine saying that i had a strange message from lee harvey oswald and would they be interested in it i also asked to keep this matter confidential and i wanted to i wrote a little article about the picture how it came into our possession soon i had a call from new york and the following day a reporter assigned to the assassination case assassination in quotation mark assassination case arrived in our house an alert man familiar with the involvement of this unbelievably complex case haven’t worked on it now from november 2022-63 he was amazed by this message but like myself he could not figure out what was the meaning of it we shall use the picture in your article if and when we know something definite about oswald’s involvement or about his innocence i ask him again to keep the mother confidential and we and he promised to do so but obviously the security was not complete or maybe our telephone was tapped which i found out was true several at several locations since we did not have anything to conceal except the existence of this picture and this only for our own sentimental reasons we laughed and made fun of the people or officials listening in we used insulting language or made outrageous statements some peculiar reports must have been written by the people who had bugged our telephone

now i want to say a few words explaining why we didn’t contact marina in regard to this picture as clearly seen from this story we and my wife especially tried very hard to help her with her health with the baby and to get her out of a tragic conflict with her husband we did not get a word of thanks from her but frankly we did not expect any nor did we care we helped her when she was poor and desperate that was enough for us after lee’s death she proved herself to be quite an operator she even made believe she was religious to get simple good fair good god-fearing american people to send their contributions and as on everybody knows the total of those contributions or donations was quite substantial and tax-free by the way we heard from the reporters that that if some donations arrived with the bible she threw the bible furiously on the floor and grabbed the money we certainly did not treat her too nicely in outer testimonies but we were utterly truthful and she should have recognized it if she took the trouble of reading out the positions but probably she felt offended at our truthful evaluation of herself anyway she’s settled now had another baby by lee and the new one by her present husband and she does not need our help another reason why we did not contact marina is the following her attitude towards mrs ruth payne is certainly indicative of the type of person she is ruth is a perfectly charming charitable quaker who like ourselves got involved in oswald’s affairs actually much more than we did marina lived with her took advantage of her innumerable charitable and friendly actions hospitality food help to children and to herself transportation to new orleans and back as well as many as well as many other good gestures yet mrs payne had her own family and her husband to take care of and her teaching profession as the only reward mrs payne probably received were conversations in russian and she did not ask for more lee on the other hand seldom accepted hospitality and certainly did not ask for anything

this great friendship between marina and ruth payne

ended abruptly the day of the assassination as mrs payne told us later for some reason marina never wanted to see her again and mrs payne was too proud a person to insist george may i ask you the question here could it be that since marina was wished away by the fbi ncaa or whoever it was after the assassination that she was told by the authorities never to contact any of the former friends that she has been under pressure not to see anything very possible couldn’t that be could be but yet times time uh time time will tell and many years passed now and still she does not see mrs spain all right

yes

i think therefore that the short sketches of our acquaintanceship with marina proved that peculiar aspect of her personality yet we never disliked her there was nothing to dislike no substance we found it amusing sometimes openly cynical naive like the russian peasants are with a great deal of shrewdness underneath my wife used to call her that rascal marina this this fitted her perfectly

coming back now to the picture of lee harvey oswald that we received one moment this is a good moment to end tape number eight uh the exclusive rights of this tape of course like all the others are to mr mrs the [ __ ] shields thank you mr walls we’ll wait for the next step

this is step number three of the interview with mr and mrs the [ __ ] shield of dallas and again i repeat all the material and these tapes are the sole property of mr mrs simone shield and cannot be used in any way without their consent all right george you left off in the united states was your last word from the second thing this was we were talking about why marina married lee oh yes the scene is in minsk

these reasons were it was fortunate for her that the united states government was lenient enough to have accepted back a man with a russian wife after his ugly behavior at the embassy in moscow maybe because of this lee wanted to pay back the loan which was about 500 advanced to him by the u.s embassy in moscow for his return from russia to the united states are you sure this is only 500 500 maybe even less oh yeah actually he strained his meager budget repaying religiously every month a part of this loan you you you you know for sure that he tried hard to keep that back yes he did because we discussed it marina was quite trialled by this excessive punctuality and zeal

on the part of her husband and complained frequently to us frankly we were also amazed knowing that nobody is ever in a hurry to repay government loans and it would be very hard for the government of the united states to collect from a poor man likely he felt that obligation he felt that obligation and it was really very sincere yeah another thing which puzzled both my wife and myself why did the soviet government permit a russian wife to go abroad so easily lee told me that it was difficult for him to get an exit permit from the from ussr and that he had to make a special trip to moscow but somehow he never explained how he got the permit to take marina alone now i want to to say a few things about that i recall again about uh about marina yeah why marina had an uncle a colonel of the special forces they called department of interior by the name of medvedev m-e-d-v-d-e-v medvedev

and she had lived with this man before she married lee that was the brother of her mother

and lee told me that this man medvedev did not like me at all sadly however later on he accepted the idea of my marrying his niece

we were not particularly interested at that time in the wise and wherefores and did not ask any more questions about this kernel now it is too late to find out maybe this colonel for his own personal reasons helped his knees to get out of russia possibly it was good riddance possibly something else here i would like to add that a lot local immigrants liked marina because she came supposedly from a family of pre-revolutionary officers

in other words she came from a family of ex-terrorist officials this was complete of course completely indifferent to us and we did not inquire about this matter

judge talk a little bit you start being tired and you talk clearly please

so it was rather puzzling to us that marina was obtained the permission to leave soviet union so easily so easily uncle might have found my uncle helped but on the other hand we have heard of other cases of americans marrying russian girls and getting them out of soviet union and we thought also that the situation has improved in soviet union and that now you can take a woman out of there

one day my wife asked lee a straightforward question tell me lee why did you decide to go to russia and risk never to return to your country in other words to the united states and lee said because i was looking for an ideal

and why did you decide to return my wife insisted because i did not find my ideal utopias do not exist

he answered immediately

this is a very good answer and i think we appreciated it

i remember that when this question was asked my wife went and prepared a was in the process of preparing a good russian meal for them

i kept on talking with lee sometimes late into evenings what i liked about his conversation was that he never was hostile or emotional about his experiences in russia he spoke fondly of the russian co-workers they were hospitable friendly sincere they invited me to their homes we discussed all the subjects frankly nobody tried to intimidate me or to brainwash me

nobody tried to make a communist out of me and i never became a member of the communist party of that he was very insistent and i had no reason to disbelieve him and how were the working conditions there i would ask him not bad at all eight hours a day not too strenuous clean nice factory good companionship and the pay i insisted sufficient the apartment cost me about five percent of my pay and you know i don’t eat much i had money to spare when we married marina had a salary also we could manage quite well and the clothes i ask well my tastes are simple i could afford to buy necessary clothes of course i didn’t have a motorcycle or even a bicycle but i like to walk then transportation by bus was very inexpensive and good in minsk

what was really annoying to you if anything in soviet russia ask zhan

those endless endless meetings we had to attend after work sadly emphatically and listening to those deadly speeches you were lucky if you were in the back room and could take a nap from time to time all the workers except the dedicated party members loathed these meetings

what else did he say about them can you tell us more yeah he said as i remember that we listened to monotonous speeches half dazed like children on at the end of the long boring lesson then we voted rather indifferently as if still in the days then later like children we would file from that room like children we filed from the school and we ran home happily

and addedly for those meetings for the last hours we spent there we were never paid any extra pay we never had any extra pay

listening to that i thought to myself this fellow is all right he spoke of other foreigners who lived or worked in minsk i do not recall their names quite a few were from south america one family was from argentina the old man was a television engineer and lee was very fond of him and his daughters lee spoke quite frequently of them emphasizing the fact that they had such pretty daughters all in all lee spoke frequently of his interest in women he even bragged a little about his conquest and i’m sure he caught quite a path among the female population of minsk and why not he was a dashing foreigner an american he looked and dressed differently and above all he was friendly and his interest in russian people was genuine and this is also i recall marina told us that why did she like did you like lee would ask him well he looked differently he was an american and it was something out of the ordinary he was not not like the other guys

quite frequently marina would say that lee was a perfectly normal individual

except that he was more interested in politics and book than in sex

well this i think is yeah could we stop now because we cannot i got lost

yeah george go ahead so we said that marina mentioned that lee was more interested in politics not in sex it’s rather confidential but i think my wife remembers that marina would tell her that lee slept with her just once a month and i never get any satisfaction out of it you can say it we can cross it out later at the advice of the publisher now we are talking well again some reminiscences about about marina and and lee’s life in soviet russia we had the impression that marina wanted a richer life and that she convinced lee to leave ussr and that she made him go to the embassy and ask for his passport

and as i recall she told us that lee took illegally a train from minsk to moscow as being a foreigner he was not supposed to leave town without notifying the police

and that’s how he obtained finally the permit to return to the united states and also the permit for molina marina to leave i also recall something marina telling us that she was discharged from komsomol komsomol is the organization of youth communist youth where practically everybody has to belong and she was fired discharged from this organization because she married lee and she did not she wasn’t too worried about it

yeah right this is my revolution

very often people ask me why i supposedly a man with education and and an extremely wide experience and acquaintanceship all over the world

got acquainted with lee and got interested in him well i i said always that it is because of his straightforward personality of his experience in soviet russia and the fact that he lived in minsk and it never occurred that in my mind that harvey oswald was an agent of any other country

he was too outspoken in his ideas and his attitudes if he were an agent i think he would have kept quiet

of course he wasn’t an uneducated fellow but he tried to improve his education by reading by studying his opinions were sincere even though a little bit crude he picked up quite a few difficult words from the books he had read and what’s these words he’ll he like to display a great deal sometimes we laughed with him about the use of those long difficult words

let me say something that both my wife and i had an element of pity and uh for this forlorn individual who was groping for something trying to find the truth

and speaking about the fact that whether lee might have been an agent of any country i would say that i never believed that any government would be stupid enough to trust lee with anything of importance even the government of an african country would not give him any job of any type of confidence because he was too outspoken

he had a certain element of instability as i said because before he switched the countries but he did it i think for the enjoyment of adventure

one thing he disliked about the united states is the difficulty of finding a job and he switched from one job to another

uh because he did he did not find something that he really liked until he fina he finally found the job at this printing company

why do you skip the answer no this has nothing to do i ask him for instance which uh why didn’t you stay in the marine corps well he said i didn’t particularly care for the marine corps he i did not care about staying there although naturally it would be a permanent position i told laughingly you don’t need too much intelligence to become an officer in in the marine corps well that was an element in instability with rhythm

now why people ask me very frequently talking about lee harvey how come you get along very well with him and i said that in my life i had to be quite often a promoter a salesman of new ideas of new project and i usually do not offend people’s feeling i’m get interested in them and that is what lee appreciated in me

other people considered lee harvey oswald just as some poor miserable guy and completely disregarded him

and surprisingly some individual like in the immigrate group of dallas were even scared of me of lee because he was so outspoken instance one of them said that i am scared of this man he is a lunatic but i said don’t be scared he is just as small as you are

another element about lee’s personality is that lee resented the interest that the immigrant group and some americans had in marina they gave her gifts they gave her clothes and they surrounded her with a lot of attention because supposedly she came from an ex-terrorist family and that was the reason why lee did not want her to learn english so she could she would stay more or less in the background

possibly lee was jealous of this emigrate group who have made such excellent living and lived quite luxuriously but he didn’t show me too much

maybe it was a slap in the face of lee harvey oswald that the russians living in the united states had luxurious houses two automobiles money in the bank etc maybe it was so

also both my wife and i are very fond of children i personally lost a child and i’m very fond of babies and we wanted june to be happy and to have some kind of a future

therefore we told lee you have to let your wife learn english it is a very egotistical attitude on your part by not letting her study english you are you are showing yourself quite selfish

okay

the reason that lee didn’t like and resented all of these people that helped marina so much it was because they were really very very kind and practically she had around 100 dresses or so given to her you mean hundred a hundred dresses because we carried them ourselves when we moved her and baby to somebody’s house baby had all the things crips carriage play pen toys everything and it hurtedly very much because marina was throwing it in his face look all of these people giving me all this and that do you think you could ever make enough money to give that all to me so naturally he resented immensely the more people were giving to marina the more he resented and that created ill feelings between the people that helped them and lee mourinho naturally was very kind and sweet with them and he practically was very often rude to them he declined invitations to their homes frankly sometimes he didn’t even want to talk to them you have to look very deep into his problem they actually was spoiling marina and making things as hard as they were so much more harder for him thank you very clearly

yeah george so after we found out the situation in minsk how was life in soviet russia how they got how they got married our interest in lee and marina oswalt remained that we only wanted to help them my philosophy is life in life not to bend in front of the strong people and be nice to the poor as nice as i can if they annoyed me i did not pay a short because it’s like insulting a beggar so if sometimes lee annoyed annoyed me i didn’t show it to him

well this week from then on i think we should start now on if we have time on that on the element on them on the chapter f the increasing which i called increasing animosity

the increasing animosity which existed between lee and marina oswald and i think we showed it in the previous chapter how it slowly developed

uh looking back and remembering lee’s relation to other people i must admit that he was rather standoffish spoke civilly only to people who happened to be in of interest to him and whom he liked and these were not many he mentioned very rarely his mother never criticized her but neither had he any kind words for her neither did marina we have never met lee’s mother but we admire her efforts as awkward as they may be in trying to clear up the name of her son we wish her the best of luck in these endeavors

we agree with mrs oswalt that her son was probably innocent in this tragic crime and we said so to the warren committee investigators was the following lee was not only favorably disposed towards president kennedy but he admired him in his own quiet and reserved way one evening we discussed kennedy’s efforts on bringing peace to the world and he said that he thought it was great kennedy’s effort to bring end to segregation brought expressions of admiration from lee lee by the way was had a bug on the subject of integration he told me that he was willing to fight for it and to die for it lee obviously identified himself he in his frustrated miserable childhood with the fate of underdog of colored children and he expressed his feelings to everybody who wanted to hear it

he despised reactionary people the so-called hate groups the white supremacists from the deep south and there i was ready to agree with him mourinho of course was only interested in getting along in this world acquires some possessions for the rest she did not give her there so there there was a deep gap between ideology and prophetic materialism and this leads to their increasing animosity

well lee was indifferent also for his brother robert robert and spoke of him only at one or two occasions but neither marina expressed any fondness for his brother-in-law as i understand lee and marina had stayed with robert oswald and his wife upon their arrival from russia and probably they had usual domestic clashes during this forced cohabitation to my wife it was clear why it was difficult to tolerate marina in one’s house for any length of time she liked to stay in bed till noon or later

preferably abhorred domestic chores and furthermore there must have been a complete language barrier you know that because you know the long sleeping because she also stayed in your house yeah she stayed in her house and were recalled this incident sorry same thing was the same opinion my own daughter had of marina and her lack of cooperation and domestic choice and the fact that she slept very very late

lee was not the average eager go-getting type of a person like his brother excuse me george at that point can i ask jane a question yes

when she slept late didn’t you say something about that she then let the children also wait until she woke up that she disregarded that she wasn’t looking after the children but she had a child one child at that time and whenever she slept late the child just slept with her it was amazing but for a little baby usually they cry at six o’clock and mother gets up gives them a bottle but that child amazingly just slept right there with her whenever she gets up then she fits the child but child also very often was kept up very late so maybe that was the reason that the child could sleep longer in the morning

lee was not the average eager go-getting type of a person like his brother robert and he did not admire such people i often thought it was a pity lee did not have a better education he might have done well in the scholastic world and would have made a useful citizen but fate was not to be kind to him his relations with marina worsened every day now and marina began to ask my wife for a permission to spend a night with us or some time with her without lee with us without lee she confined it in her unhappiness of having been abused physically

she by the way when she stayed with us wore my wife’s silk nightgowns and sometimes spent the night on the sofa in our living room she also took the baby to my daughter’s apartment and farm mound

in the meantime while all this was going on lee kept on working overtime reading his russian books maybe sulking but always proud always meticulously honest paying his bills and living like a hermit do you get to what kind of books he was reading and all that yeah i think i should i should mention that whenever i saw the reading he read russian classics which are difficult for a fellow who was not born in russia to read he he read turgeniev pushkin dostoevsky gogol uh lermontov liked russian poetry and and took out of the library exclusively good classical books did you say he also listened for instance to tchaikovsky’s queen of spades that he i think so i think he had his favorite that was his favorite so he did listen to classical music yes yes he liked classical music and he liked russian folk music too they had a lot of russian records one moment

now to remember back the point of their disagreements and more and more quarrels and fights started that marina was corresponding with her ex-boyfriend in russia and lee intercepted that letter and from then on the fights became quite bitter oh she did have she had yes before and she started to correspond with that young man i assume it was young man and and then she she almost was going to go she almost was planning to go back to russia and that’s at any rate that’s what lee thought that she maybe wants to go back to russia to this boyfriend yeah it wasn’t fair and yes and from there now they start more and more quarrels and then his objections to her smoking that she is she was a real chain smoker constant cigarette after cigarette and a drink change objection objecting to her drinking wine i never saw her drinking anything else but wine but he was such a nascar himself he objected that and of course the more he objected the more she did both things so from then on their life became worse and worse and more quarrelsome more quarrelsome yes and also about the baby he was so adored the child to such extent that if a child make one little sound and if marina is not right there in this instant he was already furious with marina and marina took care of her insufficiently well but to him nothing was good enough that child was something like uh absolute perfectionism that child it was his idol absolute idol and just expression on his face when he looked at that baby it was unbelievable for such a young man and having so many other interests in life was unbelievable he was excellent father in fact he was too good because he sponsor sponsors to spoil the child too

and it was hard in marina too because she was with the baby all day long and he saw the baby just for a short little time so it was two different things but that also added a lot to their corals he’s complained that she was close to often placed in your presence and josh’s prayer and they quarreled in front of us they never fought in front of us but they quarreled quite quite bitterly and then of course probably continue quarreling home and the next day with some marina with black eye or with some bruises on her that should be happening it actually happened he really did it and we called him we talked to him we tried to explain to him for god’s sakes you’re living in civilized country you’re not back in the wilderness of russia or something and maybe they beat their wives but it’s not done in this country and i said if you realize the prime minister of japan recently was exposed to beating up his wife so okay okay and then we return to the stage thank you very much because this is an excellent interjection but all this yeah i know that my wife liked marina and found her entertaining and tried to help her in any way

and yet we had to listen to her constant complaints about that idiot lee who brutalizes me and does not give me enough sex

again which advised marina to study english to go back to school to revalidate her degree to become independent of lee it was unfair to both of them to continue that way said maijan said john my wife gave her the english records she had used herself to to study english here in what year did you use them jen 20 years back she has had a set of records to learn english from russia

she had had herself a hard time when she came to this country she learned she worked became successful and independent we gave marina our own phonograph but instead she played melancholy russian records and did not study anything it was highly amusing for us considering the sad situation that one evening lee and marina showed us a letter from one of marina’s friends in ussr and lee read it to us with his wife’s permission it said this letter said marina i knew you would do it i knew well from the first time i met you that you were destined for something great and now in america you are such a success ironical isn’t it that marina finally did become a notorious and successful woman after lee’s death but at the time it was rather pathetic to hear such nonsense lee understood it but we do not know if his wife did in her strange way maybe marina considered her marriage to lee and her arrival in the u.s united states a great success maybe her life in ussr was even more dismal than her life here that we shall never know one day she related to my wife the following what a fool was that lee he’s destroying his passport in the face of the u.s ambassador he said i will never go back to the united states she obviously considered the mirage of the united states as a reality maybe she still hoped that lee would at last provide her with clothes first cars luxurious home all that she had dreamed about from her early childhood and lee kept on working as far as i know he did not make friends with his co-workers came to us to talk about russia and seldom if ever complained about his marriage marital troubles but that situation became gradually almost desperate one day marina came over with a baby she was badly bruised and we um convinced her that it was time to separate since we did not have room in our apartment we discussed their situation with some members of the russian colony and we asked an elderly couple millers m-e-l-l

millis he a former professor from poland and his wife a charming russian woman whom he had made during the war in germany both became displaced person and persons and eventually came to the united states the miller’s new marina

well and lee only slightly they liked marina didn’t have any children and they accepted to be hosts to her and the baby

i had discussed the separation which was to be temporary with lee and he seemed to agree we remember that we invited lee to our home sat him down on the sofa the dog snuggled near him and my wife told him directly

when the things come to beatings desperate quarrels etc it’s time to separate and see if you really love each other in a month or so you will see if you really care to be with marina constantly that you cannot leave alone i interrupted that and i will let you know where marina will be and will let you visit the baby anytime you want to so don’t worry he seemed to be reasonable and faced the situation rather squarely so we said tomorrow we shall drive over and move marina and the baby from the apartment wait a moment george would like to talk to him

go ahead no he didn’t face any situation any squarely remember he threatened that he is going to break all the children’s toys yeah he’s going to tear all of her dresses he’s going to break everything in there and then we continue he was violent he was actually almost violent he turned white he was furious and he didn’t even look at us then we start to talk to him more and more and more and actually i said what where do you think that will get you you’ll never see your wife you never see your baby because things like that are not permissible in our country if you really love your wife you have to come you have to calm down and let her go you can visit with the child you can talk to your wife on the phone you’ll see a few months or two months go by and then you really make up your mind whether you really love her or not nobody ever takes the baby away from you you will always know where the baby is and you can always have a contact with the baby that was his fear that somebody will take the baby away from him more than taking his wife but then he calmed down after all that he became square yes then he became yes and quiet so this is only an amendment to a judge it was sort of like explosion of his uh fear also also fear for losing a child yeah he had impression that if marina and child will be moved somewhere else there was always supposition that maybe the child will be taken away from him and that’s why he became so forceful he thought that he’s going sort of rightness in not doing it by his action if you’ll be ferocious about it but when he saw that we were not afraid of anything he said and just exactly opposite calm him down so he agreed okay judge before we go into it any further let’s end this as tape number three this is the third tape in the interview is mr mrs the warren shield on their relations with the oswald family which is and i repeated again the exclusive right of the authors mr warrant shield to be used in any possible way before their prior agreement and tomorrow we will continue this taping at an early hour thank you boss very much

no no okay josh this is the tape number four in the interview is mr and mrs the moonshield and we repeat all the material is the exclusive possession of the demurran shields now we left off off in tape three as you remember george in the scene where you were talking to oswald in your house about separating from his wife marina and mrs the manchester interjected her passage on oswald first being rather angry threatening to destroy the toys and where did we finish this completely or do you have a okay so there is something to add i think so this is uh lee arrived late to our house jean my wife prepared some food for her for him as usually he had refused food and had some soft drinks he probably he was naturally quite perturbed we spoke to him as he as if he were our son my wife said you both are good people but it’s not necessary for you to fight constantly this is one of the worst features you obtained in soviet russia the ugliest characteristic you are

you shouldn’t be a man who beats his wife but they do it in soviet russia

if you come to the point that you cannot tolerate each other without scratching and beating and constant fighting and you still think you are in love with each other the only thing to do is to separate and give each other a test if you really love each other and if you cannot if you cannot live without each other naturally it will mean that you are in love otherwise it’s better to be separated jean suggested again we have a nice temporary home for marina and the child we will place her very safely

she and the child will have all the care she needs if you promise not to carry any of that fights and disturb her the people who who will give marina in june hospitality we will give you their address and the phone because nobody in the world has the right to separate a child from its parents josh uh please remember you are talking into a microphone if you mumble too much they will not be able to how is this out mr wallace it’s okay okay go ahead yes i confirmed to lee also that i will give him the telephone and the address i would also like to digress on that point that we had consulted the other members of the emigre colony regarding the separation of lee and marina and they were all for it they were helping marina and at the time there were still relatively good relations between them and some of the members of the immigrant family family group in dallas told jean and i that we should not give lee the address and the telephone on marina and should leave her completely separated from their husband of course that we could not accept as my wife mentioned before the first reaction of lee was quite violent i’ll never consent to that i’ll tear all the dresses of my wife to shreds i’ll break all the toys of my child where on earth will it get you if you love your child and your wife countered the only way to solve this misfortunate and unpleasant situation the only proof you can give that you care for your wife and child is to let them go do the best you can while you are alone and give yourself and marina a chance to find out whether you have feelings for each other you may hit us for it or

you may someday be exceedingly grateful to us for enforcing this separation i said this is logical order under the circumstances then lee gradually came down and did agree for us to come and get his wife and his child as well as their belongings he trusted and that we would have we would give him the phone and the address he left the house very blue and very thoughtful

next day i remember this was a sunday we drove to lee harvey oswald’s apartment on elsbass street to take marina and the baby away from him lee was gloomy and mad at first how did he receive you when you get there he received us uh looking gloomy at us obviously he has been thinking over all night and could not make up his mind whether he should accept the inevitable as he did the night before or he should go on fighting it’s understandable that it was a big problem for him we were coming to separate them uh sean do you have any special remembrance of catholics i remember very vividly when we were king he hardly said hello and usually we were greeted very warmly by him then he sat on the sofa unfolded his hands and just make believe he doesn’t see what goes on he didn’t offer any effort to help to carry the crib or the toys or especially marina’s dresses we had to do it all by ourselves and believe me there was about 100 dresses in there and all the children’s things including playpen and crib and a carriage and it was quite a chore we filled our car we still have that we don’t want to part with it just as a memory what took place with this car and it was open and filled so high that i had to sit and just hold on the things that they won’t fall out that’s how many belongings marina and a baby had at that time thank you

well in this from this point of view our memories separate differ a little bit i i seem to remember that lee was shouting at the suddenly that i will not permit it i will not permit it stop don’t carry things away but we kept on helping marina and carrying our things then he repeated again i’ll burn your clothes first he shouted furiously and grabbed a bundle of clothes i was personally about to call the police and said so to lee but jean-interme interceded again and explained patiently to lee that violence would not help that we were doing this for the good of both of them that you cannot achieve anything in this country by brutal by brutalizing one’s wife my friend i totally realizing that he was receptive you know we are your friends we promise you that we shall contact you as soon as marina wants to be with you after all we are wasting our valuable time trying to help you young kids to be so be cooperative help us also and lee agreed finally and helped us to carry some of his family belongings we had a large open car and gradually it became filled up mostly with marina clothes my wife began to get worried we would be overloaded there must have been almost 100 dresses that marina had acquired from various benefactors gifts from russian and american people who pitted this poor russian woman

lee handled these bundles with a supercilious smile when he was helping us the play he began to help he finally began to help us the playpen the crib came to the top of the mountain of marinas and june’s belongings the car was overflowing we had to hold the rags and we must have been a ridiculous spectacle fortunately it was sunday the traffic was spares avoiding main arteries i drove slowly to the opposite part of town to east dallas and left marina in june with a charming elderly couple the millers little did they suspect that this kind action would cause them after november 2363 endless troubles and investigations and their quiet gentle lives would be disturbed by insane publicity and suspicion

i think this is all about you you want to shout to to skip all that what’s here nothing better are you sure

john you have anything to add on on the departure that the oswald became friendly and did help in the end would you like

i don’t think he did help us at all i think he just kept sat there and just we did he didn’t say goodbye to us

that’s how i remember he was very very cold and gloomy from what i recall and did not change throughout the incident no he remained very very gloomy

the next chapter is chapter g which we call separation and further development uh george you want to finish this chapter before i go into my questions to you maybe within this chapter after that okay obviously the semi-forced separation which we’ve described in the previous chapter was not the right solution for lee and marina marina became immediately a burden on our friends the millers the polish russian couple and lee was definitely unhappy alone now he was every night in our house asking about marina fretting discussing his past saying a little more about his disagreements with his wife there was nothing new in them for us just another proof that this separation was necessary i was asked over and over again in the last five years why did you waste your time with this crazy marxist his baby and his loverly wife

and i would like to add to this a lot of explanations just memories of what i found interesting yeah attractive let’s let’s keep this on the track now yeah i know you have many recollections on lehavia oswald but why don’t we go through i have collected during this first half of our interview a number of questions that i would like to ask you and clarifications on certain points why don’t we do it up you want it at this point it’s okay that’s right okay and let me let me go over a number of things that i have found we should elaborate on a little bit and my first question to you would be

you have indicated that again that oswald had a definite liking for president john f kennedy yes how did that how did that come become clear to you well first of all i remember talking to him and looking at the cover of life magazine which has the picture of president kennedy and he commented commended how handsome he was how young how attractive

again i think this appealed to him and he every time he spoke about president kennedy he spoke kindly of his effort to improve the racial relations in the united states you feel his racial racial that was one of his basic uh preoccupations

one of his basic motivations and from that point of view he definitely had love and respect for president kennedy he i have to say did not respect particularly his background for instance the fact that his father joseph kennedy made money in the whiskey business and he knew about it and he mentioned that to me but i don’t i don’t think that this distracted from his general very positive feeling towards

president kennedy and his wife as far as politics in the united states is concerned um did did lee have any ideas about democrats republicans and did he tie it in with international affairs like us and ussr that i think is an interesting question and for instance he mentioned to me one day that all the politicians are the same and the people all over the world are decent those are the leaders who create confusion in the world and he made a very amusing comparison in the republican democratic party in the united states on one side and said that they disagree on certain subjects but still they do not fight each other and then he made a comparison between the western civilization the western democratic countries and the soviet union and he said well that’s the same thing between the western countries and the soviet union there are different points of view but we should not fight each other what did lee say about his marine corps days what what did he fear how did he feel about his the marine corps in the united states the marine corps in the united states he had a rather unpleasant memory he did not like the discipline he considered that the marine corps was a highly rightist organization and actually he thought even that it would be a danger to the democratic institutions in the united states someday as a powerful military group which might take over sometimes in other words

exactly that by the military that’s exactly that and he mentioned at the same time that president truman wanted to abolish the marine corps he knew about it and he seemed to agree with it because that was his own opinion yeah did he speak to you ever about his dishonorable discharge from the he never spoke about his dishonorable discharge and i guess i confounded i found out later that it was not dishonorable but undesirable discharge first he had an honorable discharge then he obviously made a false statement that he was going to leave the marine corps to help his mother and instead of that he did not do it and went to russia to investigate the world prospects for himself and that’s when he obtained a uh this type of a discharge the undesirable discharge but not dishonorable jean do you have anything to add i don’t think it was obtained he was given yeah yeah he was yeah

yeah it was judge how did uh harvey oswald if he ever did speak about the religious institutions in the united states did he indicate any sympathy or antipathy against religion uh lee harvey oswald was not a violent atheist like some people think he was he was an agnostic and he did not like organized religion many many times he mentioned to me that the money spent on churches in this country could have been spent much more usefully by helping poor people make them by building hospitals asylums for for poor and by improving the situation in the negro slums so he was against organized religion but not particularly violently he just disliked it george how did he feel about the communist party regime when he was in the soviet union he neither did he like the communist party he didn’t he did not he said that they were all opportunists who joined the communist party for the purpose to obtaining to obtain the benefits of uh of better jobs of better salaries that they shouted and screamed at meetings and presented themselves at the best as patriots and actually the part of the people in russia without party affiliations were the best

neither did he have a great respect for any polit political parties all over the world he liked the people but not the political leaders did you think he has been i think somewhere i have heard you say you use you considered him rather useful because he he spoke nicely about the united states when in the soviet union exactly i i remember him telling us that when he was in minsk he used to teach his co-workers english he used to tell him about the united states he used to present the united states in a favorable light and maybe that’s why he didn’t he wasn’t so popular because he was not really a traitor to the united states but he has a ordinary nature what we call here you see in soviet russia he was defending his own country in the united states he was defending soviet russia and therefore i think he was a useful person and created good feelings for in both countries you you would say though from your knowing him in these years you did not consider him capable of violent acts i never considered him capable of violent act he did threaten the to destroy the toys but that was in your view more of it definitely it’s in a fit of of anybody can get mad and don’t forget that marina constantly annoyed him made fun of him yeah i will get to them yes and so he did strike her but she scratched back if you called very terrible violent acts then he was capable but to me he was not capable of really violent like i never considered him capable of killing a man and

the the example for it is that he accepted our intervention in his personal life a very strong intervention intervention taking his child and baby away from him personally i’m not a very violent man but i wouldn’t stand for it yeah okay judge one moment i’ll come back to you in a minute what did you want to inject chad at that point well just to clarify his personality that he believed and he said and what he believed he never played double game and when he expressed his belief about religion and his view about religion he’s stuck by it at the same time marina according to her had the same feelings she completely ignored religion she thought was ridiculous it was just completely look just like a farce and at the same time while she was separated from lee she baptized her baby just in case oh she did she did were you pregnant of course not i wouldn’t let her if i knew she would be doing it but how did you find out she is that in the next chapter the baptized everybody knew she was but she was baptized and no she was baptized in the greek orthodox church did all not know about it i’m sure he found out about it he had to know and in fact the priest of the church is not particularly a friend but very good acquaintance of ours yeah we can’t be two very good friends because we don’t attend the church yeah but otherwise he’s a very nice person it was a real ceremony of baptism she just real christening actually and that i just like marina for being double-faced right there yes which was never was do you think your russian friends have influenced her to have that done oh i am sure yeah i am sure because they also do it just in case most of them there are a few religious but most of them are just in case and that’s despicable really either you believe or you don’t believe right thank you john george i want to come back a minute to to marina feel that you have an impression that in their relationship for instance oswald would help her in the house around the house and and was a good husband and dad yes extremely good husband he was constantly helping her with housework he objected to her being a relatively sloppy houseworker but he did not mind helping her cleaning the room cleaning the dishes and washing the clothes even so i thought he was very very helpful and um did you notice any uh talk between them or with you about when the marriage was going to the rocks of all sorts saying well then why don’t you go back to the soviet union well i don’t remember him saying that but possibly my wife does however he did mention to me quite a few times that it was he was not too happy in the united states there were many reasons for it and uh i had the impression that they might leave both of them together someday if they could not find happiness here

yes but i did not hear anything about the separate the idea of a separate moving away from the united states to russia separately jean you have to inject something yeah yes i was going to just um add a little bit to it that when marina came to united states her dreams were that everybody has a car everybody has a washing machine everybody has a terrific well-equipped kitchen and nice apartment nice gardens and when she came over and they were so poor and they lived almost in destitute she didn’t find anything and the way in spite how hardly worked and how hard he tried to work she definitely knew that he’ll never be able to provide all those things for her so she began to be a little bitter and more disappointed at the same time she didn’t make a move to get those things herself which she can very easily she learned the english having profession already and if she disagree with lee she could obtain all of those things by herself so that was beginning of their quarrels the she was dissatisfied with the things that she found instead of the things that she was dreaming about and she began to pick only why can’t you make more money and you’re not smart enough and you’re this and that and that was the beginning of their quarrels until future when he intercepted one of her letters from her ex-boyfriend from russia then the real battle start george i would like to ask you did you have the feeling that marina really killed

lee huffy oswald yes i i have to say that she did it quite often and really unnecessarily of course he was not a conventional type of a person but to call him uh a fool an idiot you’re always busy with this politics you’re always busy with the books instead of doing something useful you think you are such a big shot and i think you are nothing at all was definitely

russian did she correct him yes that was another thing she tried to correctly and lee resented it of course he spoke russian with excellently but with uh with certain grammatical mistakes and had a slight foreign accent it was remarkable for a man of his uh educational background to speak russian so well but marina tried to uh to underline his mistakes to blow them up yeah that’s exactly it but because you did say to me somewhere along the line that this phrase theology was correct he for being two and a half years in russia it impressed you surely it was perfect not but not perfect from a point of view of a russian you know really one knows only one language in one’s life it’s very difficult to know two language to perfection and uh lee’s language of course was english and marina’s language was russian and marina knew russian very very well oh you have to feed well from that point of view she was very well-educated and spoke russian uh well-educated russian not a vulgar type of russian that one hears from a ditch digger george uh i might inject here that you are actually at the moment teaching russian at the texas university in years arlington yes indeed i’m a lecturer yeah one moment jan you wanted to interject something all right i thought maybe you um mentioned somewhere along the line that he did read the classics and did he talk intelligently about russian classic writers yes he did not talk at a great length about it but he definitely appreciated the atmosphere created by the russian classics the atmosphere of the russian countryside of the life of the russian people and of the complicated russian uh mental processes did you ask for instance talk about language did you ask marina how she got long buying stuff in shops without making any effort to learn english well that was quite amusing she went to the store and knew only two english words yes and no and so she said she would point out to a merchandise that he wanted to get to get and said yes and she didn’t want it she would say no and that’s how she got along in the stores judge howe and getting back a minute to this political philosophy of lee harvey oswald did he ever ask you what your political philosophy was well my political philosophy is to live and let live that’s what you told oswald yeah and i’m not interested in any political organizations and you did vote republican all my life because of my own personal reasons but i would uh consider that each country deserves the government the government they have and let the communists live they well their way they won’t let the socialists live they were the way they want let the dictatorships live they were the way they what we want we have enough problems in this country to solve rather than to try to interfe intervene in other countries affairs and that was more or less lee’s ideas too um

country deserves the government the government they have and let the communists live they well their way they won’t let the socialists live they were the way they want let the dictatorships live they were the way they what we want we have enough problems in this country to solve rather than to try to interfe intervene in other countries affairs and that was more or less lee’s ideas too judge

what was coming to you since we are talking a minute about you

what was how did the fbi influence your life after this oswald affair i mean what were your contacts with the fbi you did ask them first of all whether oswald was okay you’re one of the few pro people in dallas who inquired at the local fbi how did this influence you well i will tell more about it in the following chapters okay then we then then we don’t definitely had a strong effect around our lives yeah but you uh you did say somewhere along your in a number of points why you were furious at that well naturally what happened that immediately after the assassination the fbi or whatever other organizations were started investigating uh my wife and i they went immediately to all our friends and acquaintances business acquaintances and business uh relations and started in inquiring whether i was a communist whether i was an anarchist where there was a killer whether it was the assassin they see i hear whether it was all those insulting things and when your friend or an acquaintance hears it all the time and spoken by a government agent naturally they start worrying about it not only worrying but they started they start suspecting you of being that and that exactly what happened to my wife and i we lost a lot of friends we lost a lot of business because of this absolutely useless way of investigation because you cannot find anything by asking questions you have to investigate secretly like scotland young does and not going and asking people questions and assemble a bunch of papers this is my criticism by the way of the warren report too we will get to that in later chapters yeah because i want to keep that definitely altogether that package of your fbi experiences so i would almost say we have gone now through a number of clarifications on the past chapters on your relationships with and i have made notes for further questions at the later stage so why don’t we continue or do you have anything special a few things i would like to mention what the lee did not like about the united states he did not like about the united states the existence of ultra rightist hate groups which he called fascist organizations number two he disliked in the united states that it was hard to get education at least to him you have to pay for it you have to work for get an education you have to get a job to get an education well in that i don’t didn’t agree with him but that was his point of view and the third that it’s hard in the united states to find a job and to make a living and in this i have to agree with him because i had similar experiences and i also have to say that fbi certainly didn’t help lee to hold the jobs yeah let’s let’s get he had a lot of problems here in this area is getting a job and you think that’s in part of the fbi going to all his bosses definitely each time he had a job they would go to his bosses and tell him that he is the guy who went to soviet russia and you know what the result was he started he lost the job and that’s uh a friend of mine also was who is a banker in dallas who was aware of that yeah mr barn was aware of the fact that lee would have a very hard time ever finding a decent job in this geographical area frankly he should have moved out of dallas completely dallas was better than fort worth it was less provincial but still it wasn’t good enough for him yeah but if he goes somewhere else the fbi maybe so maybe so but at least he might have find some more liberal bosses who would have accepted uh him as he as he was george you you mentioned the rich gentleman mrs sam this friend of mine mr sambalan how do you know that b-a-l-l-e-n he testified too he justified also the warren committee and he also told me uh of his reactions when he heard about that lee harvey also might have been involved in the assassination how did he know lee at all i introduced him for a job for a job and ask mr balon to find him a job at the bank uh no no he was an investment banker and he had various companies that he controlled and was chairman of the border one of them was a reproduction company in dallas and in various other towns and he gave an interview to to lee and had a lot of liking for him from his interview he said he was an independent man a clear thinking man a man who had a desire to improve himself but he did not give him a job he was not mentally unstable in mr boy not at all not at all he said that he did not give him a job because he is too much of a hard head and too much of an individualist and would not fit into his organization

did he did your friend the banker later comment at one point that if you hadn’t gone to haiti and you had been able to to look after lee as you were doing when you were in dallas

if lee was involved in the assassination it would have never happened definitely did he say that no he said that on its own record in the warren committee report oh he did and i’m really very grateful to him for this remark because it shows that the man understood lies lee’s personality and he also understood what my wife and i have been trying to do to them to open new horizons for them to get it to get them out of their uh frustration out of their dark hole to get them into the fresh air and improve their position socially and economically and i am sure that if we were in dallas at the time we would have known what lee was planning to do and he would have told me that but unfortunately we were not in dallas but we were in haiti

okay now that you you were dealing with some of the questions that he did not like about the united states yeah well i already mentioned what he did not like about the united states do you have any further notes on your remember yeah for instance i remember that marina was saying that lee was quite a different man in savvy russia he was a friendly man and relatively happy man but in the united states said marina lee became a different person he became or more or less a very clueless he disliked the russian immigration that he met maybe it was a jealousy that they were rich or successful but i think probably he was sincere in considering them as foolish people and also traitors to their country for having left russia but that was his own opinion not mine of course being yourself yeah vein myself a refuge at least the son of a refugee yeah so this is what uh his reaction to russian colony and to life in the united states jean wants to inject here

actually his dislike and unfriendliness to a russian colony or whoever did help marina was because they were really much too lavish and they gave her so many things they practically spoiled her and the child and marina was throwing it in his face look at this i just received this look this give it to me did they tell that before no so this actually made him quite angry and you mentioned quite a few times that you’ll never be able to give me all these things so it worked backfired actually all their help and all the generosity backfired as far as least concerned because it made life for him much more difficult and marina much more demanding

it’s okay and well it’s okay we will edit it another interesting thing i would like to add from my memories of lee harvey oswald is the fact that he disliked bureaucracy in any country and he’s he had sort of a satiric uh satirical attitude towards the bureaucracy in the united states and in savith russia i asked him i asked him for instance how did you get out of soviet russia how did you get the permit to get out of savatrasha hey he said that’s easy you stick it with the bureaucracy and you get it in other words he was he outsmarted the russian bureaucracy which to them was just just a amorphous bunch of people

regarding for instance the comparison between soviet russia in the united states um lee harvey oswald had maybe an exaggerated opinion but he did have that opinion that both sides had a lot of mis had made a lot of mistakes and no both sides were sometimes right sometimes wrong and that he himself would make a decision which side was right and which side was wrong yeah yeah okay the end of the number four the end of it yeah i feel like i cannot get organized and go into a chapter because now we’re going

yeah that’s good i’m glad we got sammy

oh yeah okay okay we wait for you sign for the next

so we continue now tape five in the modern shield interview on further events in the separation between lee and marina oswald as i said before many friends of mine and my wives asked many times why did you get up and get mixed up with this crazy marxist and his wife the reason for it are explained in my various conversations with him the others asked you belong to a different spheres of society from oswald why did you ever get mixed up with these low-class people in the quotation mark law class some reasons were already made clear in the previous chapters and in my conversations with lee but i should add more in 1960 i lost my only son of the congenital disease cystic fibrosis this affected me so strongly that i asked my wife john the son was by the way by a former marriage to join me in an expedition on foot on the indian trails from mexico and central america we met oswald soon after the return from this trip which helped me in my ordeal this was this trip was somewhat in an old russian tradition to retire back to nature and to walk in the wilderness to be in spirit with my lost child we walked for almost a year all the way to panama canal this trip affected our way of thinking and we had discovered the dismal poverty and the exploitation of by ruling classes in all those countries we had passed through british countries exactly did you go out i’ll give you the detail later on we became much more liberal than before naturally lee was extremely interested in our trip and we discussed our observations with him constantly marina on the other hand could not care less in a way therefore i identifiedly with my lost son and because of the difference of age he could have been my son possibly he felt it and appreciated it maybe that’s why he had

accepted our interference in his private life also he trusted me implicitly and felt that what both my wife and i were trying to do would be beneficial to him

another comparison excellent why we i became close with lee harvey oswald i had been an officer in the polish army long ago and i treated lee sometimes like an officer would treat a young soldier not super seriously but fairly and firmly jean my wife also had the same attitude with marina as her own daughter was about marina’s age

actually marina was exactly between the ages of my daughter alex and chris my wife’s daughters ages

therefore this was the reason widely accepted interference and

forced uh uh action in separating him from his wife now we’re coming back uh to the results of this separation a few days after the separation lee came over to our house and brought me the cards he had made for me what cards at staggered well he obviously liked my name which was which is long and very difficult to most people but he printed me the cards calling cards very absolutely correctly on in fancy leather heads on shining white paper and those cards had for some reason black borders like uh as if it had some morning to them i still have those cards and i looked sometimes and think how nice was lee to have done it and i found it quite touching especially as it was done after our decision to intervene and intervene in his life

and as i said before soon after the separation he came back to our house and sat down despondently despondent many many evenings he did say yes he was silent for a long time well i was working on some of my projects remember your promise he drawed i have to have marina’s telephone number i want to talk to her and see june

my wife jean trusted lee implicitly and asked me give him the number of the house and the telephone number although marina asked her not to do

she was obviously quite afraid of lee and did not want him to approach her

but what we had to do we wanted to help those two bewildered people and we could not break our promise to lee to give the telephone number and the address of his wife from that day lee began calling marina at all hours of day and night until the elderly couple the millers got tired of being disturbed and asked marina to move somewhere else this time we did not have anything to do with the move and it seemed that first marina moved to mrs ford f-o-r-d mrs katja ford stayed there for a little bit and when her husband came back from a trip he was a geologist also marina moved to another place to another russian girl married to an american by the name of ray who whose husband was an advertising executive stayed there for a little bit and then she returned to lee the lee again obtained the television the various telephone numbers got to see his wife and after a tearful scenes scene so we had heard we didn’t see it at which lee cried and promised that he would love her that he would take care of her etc uh he swore that he would never hit her anymore he would work even harder and make some real money and this made effect on marina and she returned to him later on we found out um that’s before all this she had moved all by herself away from lee in fort worth and then went back to him again but this is just something that we remember talking to them about and we don’t know too much too many details but regarding this separation i want to say that we thought that this was too short a time for a useful separation only about two weeks or ten days and told eventually both marina and lee that they should have been more patient at the same time we were angry with ourselves to have intervened in their lives and to have wasted so much effort and time really for nothing

all at the same time my work in connection with the haitian project of the geological survey became more pressing in addition to that i was appointed chairman of the cystic fibrosis campaign in dallas this meant seeing people go to the meetings write letters help the public relations people and the most important of all try to raise money in this way jan was extremely helpful to me she canvassed our neighborhood explained what cystic fibrosis was cajoled begged and almost extorted money out of rather unwilling citizens of the university park and out of the executives of the closing industry

uh this is just to explain why we couldn’t give more time to lia and marina it may be interesting to say here that my previous wife who was an md and i had started the cystic fibrosis research foundation in dallas some years before and it became gradually a national organization another strange coincidence jacqueline kennedy became unknown to me in 1963 and honorary chairman of this foundation all the parents of children stricken with this dreadful disease are profoundly grateful to her for having lent her name to this cause so important to us to me especially as i still have a daughter stricken with cystic fibrosis and i had lost my only son in 1960 from this illness

this is the end of the chapter and we’re going to chapter 8 which deals with the end of 1962.

an important geological consulting job in haiti was shaping up at the end of 62 and i wanted to combine it with other projects like operation of a sisal plantation which is which the government was to give me as a guarantee of my contract ahead of time i tried to form a development company to help the sagging economy of this impoverished but lovely caribbean country my time was getting short and now visits with oswald’s cursor between christmas and new year’s of 1962 a big party was to be given by declan ford an international geologist declan let me spell that name d-e-c-l-a-n ford f-o-r-d

an international geologist in dallas and his russian wife katya both of them knew oswald slightly and tried to stay away the recently from this unusual couple although marina had visited with them but after this unsuccessful separation they kept stayed away from from oswald’s like the rest of the russian colony so after we got the invitation we thought that it would cheer

cheer up our proteges if they would go also to the party they liked the idea and my wife called katya ford to have her agreement katya was not enthusiastic at first and definitely did not want the baby maybe the baby was an excuse and the forts just did not want to have such controversial people and to jeopardize their position in the dallas establishment but my wife was determined and pressed the issue they are lonesome they need company they have to get out of their shells uh we are not going to give a christmas party this year you are russian katya and have russian friends marina won’t be won’t be lost and may find some with whom she will become friends and will speak russian

of course we could invite her to some of mark mccorkle friend’s party but then she will not be able to speak english and would be lost at your party she will find some russian-speaking people and my wife promised that i’ll find a babysitter for her all right

bring bring them along said mrs fort if you insist jean’s friend an american italian widow was asked to sit for for us babysit for june in our house and she gladly accepted as we remember it was a clear cold night when we drove to ford’s fashionable house in the rather exclusive section of north dallas the international crowd milled around excuse me did you uh did lee and marina come to your house and you drove the far of you yes yes and they left june and you loved the junior house the international crowd milled around one of the loveliest girls present was a japanese musician who stayed in dallas with her with her friends her name was yaiko y a i k o as far as i remember she was delicate elegant and

sophisticated she was somewhat deep dp in other words lost in our society of rich aggressive self-assertive dallas women marina did not look well that evening we remember and did not create much of a sensation she spoke quietly with a few russian presence there but lee was the hit of the evening possibly the crowd was more liberal and more international than at the showing of our movie later on but unquestionably lee was at his best he was a good conversationalist that night both in english and in russian but his manners were excellent he was attentive to all present he was very sensitive to the audience and appreciated when he was taken seriously and when he was asked serious questions someone played russian traditional songs on the piano we all sang and we joined in

somehow

marina was a little bit lost that evening we even don’t remember what exactly she was up to however i think she also sang some songs or tried to sing and she was just stayed close to the piano and listened what the others had to do several women fondly most attractive i heard favorable comments all around but his great success that evening was the lovely japanese girl yaiko lee noticed her immediately and in the middle of the evening he angled towards her or vice versa i don’t recall of course lee had served in japan as he told me before he got his grounding in his so-called marxism so maybe they had something in common possibly the japanese girl had met gi’s like lee in japan we do not know but it was attraction at first sight they stood away from the crowd and talked she spoke england perfect english by the way and marina stayed in the crowd of russian women fretted and threatened frankly i was delighted knowing

how difficult it was for lee to get along with his wife and how often she had called him a fool a boar a poor lover and a brute now she appeared in a new part of a jealous woman who forgot the surroundings she forgot even men that evening and she also forgot about cigarettes and wine and she watched lee with narrowed eyes what’s the matter asker don’t be jealous your loving husband will come back to you we should go home i’m worried about june she used the excuse of a jealous woman but this time lee was not to be budged

the first time we saw lee really flourish in a crowd he did not have his usual worried expression he was really enjoying the evening and he insisted staying almost to the end of the party

now i remember some other things about this party some other russians who were there and um who told me at the party that how well lee spock spoke russian actually then he spoke perfect russian they also asked him in my presence how do you like russia and he said oh it’s all right not completely he spoke very fast russian to this russian lady who was there

and she mentioned i have been here in the united states so long and still don’t speak very good english and lee mentioned that he was there in russia less than three years and yet he spoke excellent russian so this is a sign of his intelligence

so finally the party became as usual in the early hours of the morning quite crowded and boisterous the japanese girl and lee lost sight of each other she approached me shortly afterwards and said bashfully what an interesting friend you have i didn’t have a chance to ask his name lee harvey oswald i said what a lovely name she said in a low voice yes he’s an unusual fellow but lots of people do not understand them i do she said he had such true things to say about japan tim midlesh looked around would you tell me please where he is working where does he work actually i told her and she wrote it down a real romance is cooking i thought obviously she and lee communicated later but we we do not know what came out of it you are sure they did communicate yes i will explain why we are really very nosy people but in this case our personal affairs took precedence and if it hadn’t been for marina we would have forgotten this involvement marina appeared some days later i found the telephone number of the japanese girl or maybe she said [ __ ] in lee’s pocket she cried bitterly and we had a fight again look at me she had the black eye and lee later showed me some scratches she loves to promote me lee concluded bitterly she fights like a mad cat look at those scratches the situation was back to normal again they were fighting

now next chapter excuse me one more one church yes um jan do you have anything to add on that party or is this your view too you don’t recall anything especially of that party no i don’t think so i think it’s just about about right the whole space yes okay now we’re going to chapter i rare meetings in 1960. you know i called rare meetings in 1963.

the incident with lee’s romance in quotation mark was another proof to us that only themselves could solve their problems no intervention on our part would be of any use maybe the emigres the russian immigrants were right in eliminating this unhappy couple anyway our meetings became quite rare and uneventful if we saw them a few times we did not talk much about their personal problems or about anything of importance hence we cannot remember the details of these encounters

maybe my mind should add a few words about this

i don’t have it because we both were working quite quite heavy schedules we a couple of times maybe we went to see them in the evenings and spent very very little time with them in one of those occasions marina promised lee not to smoke anymore finally and then during our visit all of a sudden she was very very upset she went to the kitchen so i went after her ask what happened i said look what that fool did he took i had a cigarette and he took the cigarette and squashed it on my shoulder that was quite an unpleasant incident and i could never forget it of course we told lena that was completely ridiculous and stupid but the thing already happened was too late

also in addition to this uh fact that we were a little bit tired of of their constant fighting and quarreling the situation became changed for us the travelogue i was working on was almost completed and the practical issues of life took over

uh my geological work became more pressing and i couldn’t be an angel savior anymore jean was also extremely busy involved in in her designing work she designed for one of the you know fashion houses in dallas right yes so our meetings with oswald became scarcer in the beginning of 1963. now i want to tell about the evening with a when we showed our movie one evening uh geologist everett glover g-l-o-v-e-r that wasn’t 63-66 you have a fake idea what months and 63 probably in january january maybe beginning of february so still about nine months before the ssd yes one evening um a geologist for working on the research department of a large oil company his name was everett glover he worked here in dallas asked us to show he and his friends the eight millimeter movie of our long expeditions from mexico and central america

at our request he invited all his friends and colleagues yes

we asked the oswalds to come along with us as lee was anxious to see our film

all i just want to clarify what was our trip and what was our expedition we actually crossed from border of united texas border all the way to panama canal and took us precisely 10 and a half months it was 1960 october 6 1960 and we went to haiti after finishing its august and then we returned from haiti back in october 61. within this time we travel on foot crossing mexico entirely of mexico guatemala honduras nicaragua san salvador costa rica and panama and we stopped at the panama canal we couldn’t we planned to spend one more year on that trip but we were extreme floods and we couldn’t forge the rivers and we were compelled to wait at least six months for the rivers to subside and we decided to return to united states one question this then you made a movie during this trip and you were showing that movie that night okay yes this was an amateur type movie but it showed the sequence of our expedition

and quite a few people in dallas and even in other cities were uh were shown this film quite a few younger people although generally conservatively inclined were interested in meeting harvey lee oswald before the showing they asked him quite a few questions of the same type that i asked him myself so many times and i have the impression that lee answered them maybe a little aggressively without hiding his sympathies with a revolutionary movement all over the world i remember that he especially expressed that night his respect

for che guevara and for fidel castro that hardly made him popular that evening

and while he was talking and discussing these things an extremely tall slender woman doug had in her late 20s whose name i didn’t catch immediately asked me if marina spoke any english i said none would you introduce me to her i find her very nice my name is ruth payne i did and to my great surprise mrs payne began to speak in halting but understandable russian she turned out to be an easterner who had majored in russian in some eastern college and was anxious to practice it from that day sprang a friendship between her and marina and friendship which

lasted to the day of the assassination ruth payne has done more for marina than one could conceive yet for some reason marina rejected her after lee’s death the showing of the picture was a success with uh we filmed mainly scenery volcanoes flowing lava mountains and jungles and since most of the people were geologists there they are usually interested in such things as they are adventurous at heart and explorers marina naturally could not care less how did she she she’s sure to be bored or something yes i have the impression that she was bored by the whole thing well she was not an outdoor woman she was not interested in that sort of thing she did not express her dislike or like just anything at all and lee did he say anything about it to you uh lee commented later on how much he liked the film and that he envied us for having lived for almost a year so close to nature to have worked almost four thousand miles to have gotten away from all conventional comforts and to have been completely free in other words he really understood the meaning of our trip i advised him quite a few times later on to follow in our tracks someday if he ever had a chance and he if he would be free from unnecessary obligations that sadly is unlikely to happen to me he was rather sad

some people attributed to me and still do the part of svengali or some sort of a mentor to lee harvey oswalt nothing could be further away from that lee was a fellow who had made up his mind early in life that our way of life that our ways of life in our country and our political system were wrong and nothing to the country would persuade him it so happened that our opinions in regard to latin america coincided possibly i was even more critical of it than lee

all the basis of unions of our tribe yeah but you have had other contacts yes i lived in latin america for many years i worked a lot of companies and therefore i knew latin america but i looked at it from an from a point of view of a petroleum geologist and i did not know the life of the people there now this trip that we took showed us an entirely different angle yeah life in latin america you got closer to the we got closer to the people we understood the problems of the poor people actually you discovered the same thing that apparently oswald always was talking about exactly

exactly roswell uh found it in japan and an interesting coincidence is that che guevara had discovered the same thing in his assignment as a doctor to central america and that’s what made him revolutionary he discovered the dismal poverty the exploitation of the poor by the rich he was on some kind of a medical assignment in in the same countries we were in but years before that and that’s what made him the the revolutionary he was

very interested and um so we walked and

lived for a year close to nature

yeah actually lived with all people and as my wife mentioned in mexico in guatemala and el salvador in nicaragua honduras costa rica and panama and only in costa rica did we find some traces of democracy

in what way did you find well it’s it’s it’s a small democratic country which has uh hardly a any really problem of dictatorship they have a police force but no army they have spend all their money on education you can talk freely there and it’s really it’s a little jewel of democratic institutions in latin america i think this idea is clear to most americans now but it was not in 1963

who knew in 1963 that in san salvador

there was such utter poverty in desperation of agricultural masses as the land and the wealth of the god yes that’s right the banana and coffee republic that the wealth of the country belonged and still does to 23 feudal families from the time of the spanish rule this is no secret it is no secret that samosa family still dominates and owns most of nicaragua the underprivileged do not

have the slightest chance in those countries

the support of our own country the united states to oligarch corrupted generals and crooked politicians all over the world is now openly discussed by the national figures like senator mccarthy or john galbraith but six years ago especially in the south such conversations were considered dangerous and revolutionaries in this respect both lee harvey oswald and i were revolutionaries in spirit pity for the poor and underprivileged had not been my characteristic in my younger years but the loss of my son my long experience in latin america as a geologist including pre-castro days in cuba and finally our trip made me vividly aware of the horrors of poverty and inequality

i had been in the social register played around with a lot of wealthy people did business with them

dangled jacqueline bouvier on my knee when she was a teenager now these attitudes became meaningless to me jean my wife on the other hand as well as lee had always been on the side of the poor and underprivileged lee especially

and because of that i liked and respected him

may i interject i would like you to if you can to say a few words about uh as george mentioned here your sympathy for the masses for the poor people could that be traced back to your use in china where you have seen would you be willing to say something about your i know you are very fond of china because you spend your use there and maybe a clarification from your own ideas on how you developed already in early age this closeness to to to masses and for people it would help it would probably be very interesting

well i think the attitude towards life mainly depends on you are bringing and on your parents and not of your background you can be very poor and you can be snobbish you can be very rich and you can be very humble and love poor people i was fortunate i was born to very not a millionaire but very wealthy family and i had everything under the sun that anybody could have in china including all the most expensive toys from germany including all the russian children’s library which was carpet in my own house but at the same time it was drummed in our heads mind my brother’s head that you have to be kind and you have to the only way to enjoy life and to be happy is to give and not to receive and the more you have and the more you give then the only way you can balance what you have if you give so it’s actually very simple plus of course i’m fond of china because i was born there and i was educated there and i saw the real chinese people not the way they’re pictured across the border in general chinese people are exceedingly kind and honorable the in china such a world is contract will be insult to ask for the contract their word is everything as far as their kindness is concerned the only thing they’re not kind to the animals but to each other they’ll never fight you would never see two chinese fighting the only thing they do they swearing at each other in fact they’re very funny because they just stand in front of each other they wave their hands they’re swearing and they stamp their feet and they spit on the ground that’s the amount of their fights you would ever hardly see a fight a bloody fight between chinese people except of course well naturally of course they have been they have been in a rough spot since the japanese invasion and so many so much poverty for instance if chinese family of course they had no birth control and not nothing of this kind and if the family has a girl very often that baby was just thrown away in the street because there was no room to bring up a girl she’s not a worker the boy they would keep you are talking of the years of the twenties yeah but uh 25 by 30s was still very very bad then the poor people were hit by japanese that invaded manchuria in fact and they are forcing to interrelate into marriage between japanese and chinese and the call that manchuria they start to call manchego and they were persecuting everybody that had anything to do or any knowledge of the military installations i mean japanese military installations in china i would like to get back to this early for the poor people that that george was mentioning that appealed to you again on your trip in that america that goes back to probably your early years when you could be an eyewitness to the poverty in china oh yes oh yes i’ve been eyewitness the poverty in china not only in the cities but also in the countries

because my father built it far eastern railroad and he was in charge of it until 1925 when was sold to russia and then he immediately resigned from it because he never had to come refused to take communist past but became chinese citizen so but i did travel with him or just on that railroad every summer we made long trips so i really so chinese country and people living in the country so that came all back to you during the trip that’s right

now we’re going to talk again about the relations between lee and marina why did he ever fall in love with marina being such a different person no reason other probably than that the opposites attract a friend told me once there is no greater mystery than what goes on behind the closed doors of a couple’s bedroom notwithstanding all their quarrels there must have been a very strong emotional bond between them and it lasted to the last days of lee’s life we know that before the fateful day in november 1963 lee had asked marina again and again to come and live with him and marina refused because he supposedly could not afford to buy her a washing machine hence came a theory which some publication attributed to me in quotation marks washing machine motivation for the assassination of president kennedy in congress of course

whatever may be said of this congress of course in congress no later on in the publications in the united states they they attributed to me this motivation of possibly he became an assassin because uh marina rejected him and this was caused because lee did not buy a washing machine for foolish that’s they could attribute it for some reason to me whatever may be said of lee’s motivations i have never heard him express any dangerously violent tendencies he never admitted to have been a member of any party either socialist or communist and i believe that he was only mildly influenced by his early marxist readings that was of course his business and privilege he did not try to influence me neither did i try to influence him in any way

that’s why it’s so easy to be with you sadly once you let me be myself everybody else try everybody else tries to advise me to improve me you leave me strictly alone

the subject of our film reoccurred once or twice in our conversations later on

tried to influence both lee and marina to be sportier to exercise

to get their troubles out of their systems through physical exhaustion it had worked so well in our case but neither of them were to follow her advice

did you advise them for instance to play tennis yeah we advise them to play it because knowing you are very hardiest tennis players

and study english

well this is the uh

number six in the des moines shield interview and again i stress

the following interview is the sole property of mr and mrs the merchant

this is chapter i which deals with rare meetings between us and oswald’s in next you continue chapter 1963 so i went to haiti in march of 1963 by myself and signed the contract when i came back we still had a few weeks left before our departure from the united states may i interject

did you have any contact with the oswalds

i was busy packing okay thank you yeah and i remember this incident it was a beautiful spring day probably saturday on sunday and lee was not at work and he brought marina and the baby to our house early in the afternoon it so happened that the dear friend of ours a retired admiral admiral bruton b-r-u-t-o-n a great hero of the submarine war in the pacific who had five navy crosses and his charming wife and had invited us for a swim in their house in north dallas joanne jean called and asked asked if we could bring along a young couple with us yeah chad called the admirals they admiral wife and asked if we could bring along a couple with a baby and she mentioned that he was a marine of course was the answer so we sat by the swimming pool marina holding the baby she either did not swim or did not like herself in a bathing suit and lee was sitting quietly immersed in some of his thoughts admiral’s wife a cheerful and friendly lady who had spent a lot of time in china discussed something about the orient rajan and i swam back and forth no alcohol was served to marina’s disgust by the way this lack of interest in any physical exercise was extremely distasteful to us in both oswalds but at least lee had an excuse to have worked hard all week and marina had no such excuse john plunged in the pool came out in a splendid physical condition and muttered to me look at this lazy female she won’t move off her sin behind

even mr wallace thinks this is amused then the admiral came in we called him audi and he loved to speak french play the organ drink moderately and and speak disgustedly of his new job in as a vice president of some defense plant and what wonderful humble person he was although a heroic soldier and the most educated man in the u.s navy he was a lawyer also and an electronic engineer we greeted him with warmth but lee hardly moved here i noticed for the first time well he never saw the man in his life he wasn’t your friend that’s right of course we told him he was an admiral yeah here i noticed for the first time his deep and genuine dislike for the brass military brass i presented him to the admiral and mentioned that he had been a marine the most miserable time of my life that damn marine corps mutteredly bitterly in front of the airplane

i seldom saw admiral brewton mad but he hardly restrained himself from ordering lee to standard attention first and then to get out of his house lee practically ignored them and behaved like a pouting child or a muffle marina was on the other hand a personification of a perfect lady on the end of a good mother held the baby smiled politely and nodded whenever the admiral spoke although she did not understand the word of what he said nothing particularly drastic happened that evening because the admiral was a good oh you stayed for dinner no no we just spent the evening had sandwiches but no dinner no but you came in the afternoon yeah yeah all afternoon because the admiral was a perfect host and restraint and restrained himself from being rude to lee lee made a few more derogatory but rather funny remarks about the military authorities can you remember no just uh said that they did not like the discipline didn’t like big shots something like that and we left quite early four years later we visited the admiral in washington and he had forgotten the incident or did not connect the name of oswald’s with the ex-marine who came to his house he was terribly excited when we told him that he had entertained amicably in his house the presumed assassin of the president being a good fellow with an adventurous healthy streak in him he was rather amused than appalled by the fact that he had known oswald so was his wife

he was never called to the vern community he was never called to the warren community although although i mentioned to the warren committee and gave his name but obviously they decided that it was not uh worthwhile to call an admiral and that was their attitude we being foreign born we were suspicious but an american admiral it was above suspicion yeah yeah it’s understandable now we’re coming to the next chapter easter of 1963 the chapter j we were about to leave town for new york first and then for haiti

was that jen that was april april 63 yes we don’t remember the date of easter but this was in april 63 or april 13th probably all our furniture was packed only small details remain to be settled

i want to say that during that period we found out that uh found out that lee and marina were practically stayed practically recluse because none of the russian speaking people and the american people saw them anymore or very few at least and john my wife said that they are alone let’s do something for lee and marina this is easter which in russia is the big is what christmas is to us right yes and john was right the russian emigre colony was tired now not only of lee but also of marina she went back to her marxist husband instead of getting a divorce and marrying someone more respectable

i think there were some amateurs for marinas hand and heart among some elderly bachelors

with a terrorist background but marina preferred her lee notwithstanding all the fights and beatings so there was a bond between them

john got the large fluffy rabbit and we drove late in the evenings to lee’s new apartment a toy a toy the new apartment was on neely street it was just a few blocks away from the old place on elsbath but it was an unquestionably better apartment judging from the outside looks as we drove up to it this was the first visit to that new apartment house the house was wide frame with a few big pecan trees around and the small garden in the back

full of of uh climbing roses they were all blooming at the time we rang the bell and had to wait for 10 or 15 minutes as the oswald seemed already asleep yet it was only 9 30 or 10 in the evening the light came on a window opened on the second floor and lee asked

who is there

george and jan i shouted and wake up we have something for the baby lee came down opened the door and led us up a dark wooden staircase now marina was up also and the apartment was brightly lit

isn’t this a nice place so much better than the old dark hole in the wall confined at marina in russian she was quite cheerful and lee also smiled which hadn’t happened

too often before the immigrant protectors of leon marina stopped seeing marina having lost hope obviously in changing her destiny and separating the couple permanently

lee was satisfied with his job and was justifiably proud of being able to provide better place for his family that came out from our conversation with him this was the first time that we did not see any conflict between them marina served as soft drinks and began discussing some domestic affairs with jean lee and i walked to the balcony sat on the railings and began to talk they had some sort of a porch there on the second floor he asked me about my project in haiti and envied me for having an interesting profession and for a chance to be helpful in an undeveloped country in an undeveloped colored republic

how many people in our country know anything about haiti the oldest negro republic in the world i ask myself lee knew exactly where haiti was located what part

of the espanola island it occupied he had an idea of the population there he knew that they were 98 colored he knew of the president and knew of the occupation of haiti by the u.s marine corps from 1917 until 1937. personally i had known haiti since 1945 loved the country and the people and was extremely anxious to start working there you really are lucky sadly

this opinion was very highly valued by me as the majority of my friends at the time in dallas and also the acquaintances hardly knew anything about haiti and had predicted the worst of disasters for us if we lived there so we talked to lee about his new job which he still liked about his relations with marina which had improved lately

about june who was getting along nicely and was growing we also spoke as i remember of the unfortunate rise of the ultra-conservative in our opinion racist movement in the south especially and agreed that it was a dangerous phenomenon for all freedom-loving people

yes when he finishes paragraph i want to start when we explain everything no no i just want to tell what we did with mourinho and how i found the rifle and then my remark and evening exactly george do you want jean to talk now or do you want her to wait until you finish yes i think john comes in at the right time now okay i thought so go ahead so you are in the osmo department on easter that evening late yes he went george went to the balcony and talked with him about the on railing and what did you do and marina was very proud of her new apartment and he was showing me around her bedroom the living room and finally we came in to a large closet we opened the door and we told it it was walking closet sort of and lots of clothes was hanging there and and the right of it on the floor was standing a rifle leaning on a wall in a closet it was not hidden it was it was not hidden at all was standing right in front of everything and to me it looked kind of funny because there was something dangling in the middle of it later on i found out it was telescopic side i never did see telescopic side before so i didn’t know what it was did you ask marina at the time well when i saw the rifle my first question was what’s this thing doing here what did she say said well they bought it imagine that how poor we are and how much we need the money for june all of a sudden he buys this rifle so naturally my question was what on earth does he need the rifle oh he just likes to shoot to shoot where on earth can he shoot it oh he just likes kissing skid shooting where can he go skid shooting he has no time he works all the time so then he she said well he shoots at the lips in the park when we take junior on sundays which didn’t make too much sense but the same time i could understand that because i should at least myself because i like like target shooting and i never or cannot kill anything but i find immense pleasure in target shooting so to me it was perfectly excusable and plausible so then by this time george and lee moved to the living room sitting in a soft and sipping under drinks and we’re walking in with marine on the first thing i talked to george do you know what they have in that closet he said what he said a rifle he said what a rifle said yes a rifle imagine that did you take by any chance a bad shot that walker and start laughing yes george did you take a pot shot the general worker ha ha ha ha ha lapping his head off now here the reactions were was hard to judge for us because we thought it was very funny and of course it was a stupid joke but just three or four days before that there were a count on general walker’s life in dallas in the very very neighborhood close to where we were living in turtle creek so of course we would we thought was tremendous joke and we sort of all laughed a little bit and then had another drink and then we departed for home and marina caught me tremendous bouquet of roses and everything was fine this was excuse me do you recall the facial expression of lee harvey oswald when you said that or did it get lost in the joke well it got lost in the joke overall but i believe that george noticed some change in his faces which should he called later yes so attenuate as far as i was concerned it was just perfectly funny and stupid joke and this was the last time we saw households from then on we just had only one card from them from new orleans which we misplaced because we were just about to move out okay but let me get to that later so about that evening do you have anything else to say about that

20 seconds

yes okay thank you yes again the question is what effect did you remark have on lee harvey oswald and i cannot answer this question with precision as much as i strained my memory i think but i cannot vouch for it possibly i was influenced by the later events that lee mumbled something unintelligibly and was embarrassed marina also seemed shocked

but naturally neither my wife nor i were shocked my wife laughed and said what a foolish idea and i just laughed the proudest like a damn fool at the poor joke which at the time seemed funny only to me only later did i realize how stunning this remark must have been to lee and shocking to marina she testified later that she knew lee shot a general walker and my remark indicated to her that i knew that he did i do not blame general walker whom i had never met for being suspicious of me later and calling me a dangerous leftist the remark was unkind and uncalled for and as a joke it was in a bad taste as general’s life was at stake supposedly the bullet had missed him narrowly um

there are other yes there are other things which indicated to me later that possibly lee might have shot a general walker aside from marina’s opinion a friend of mine who had known nazi germany had medley some months before this easter of 1963 had a talk with him and told him you can identify the friend no i don’t remember his name the most dangerous man in the united states is general walker lee may be he may be the head of an american fascism someday so that might have influencedly another indication is the inscription on lee’s picture which we received was posthumously but i shall write about it later what i have to say

that this remark of mine really influenced our lives to a tremendous extent because later on we heard from mr albert jenner council of the warren committee that marina’s testimonies were so contradictory and she had to be called back and repeat on the oath her deposition dealing with the mo with these most important matters she actually has said that i as the door was opened to the apartment before even seeing their rifle she had said lee why did you miss him so naturally that might have indicated to her that i knew and i was in some kind of a cahoot with lee

did you say that no of course i didn’t say that so she must have been when he made the deposition on the enormous pressure frightened for herself and her children bewildered and flabbergasted what caused her to contradict herself we do not know but only guess that whatever it was is it created a sinister aura around me uh one moment

from what we understand later that marina actually did believe that we knew somehow about about this incident and she actually lived in fear for days and days just waiting that we’re going to sort of betray them and tell police about it that maybe was the reason so when we came to the house the house was dark and before the door was open they asked who it was maybe that was the explanation of their early retirement to bed and shutting the lights in the house

you think they were afraid that he had been dis discovered as having shot at general walker she actually did believe that we somehow knew it and she was afraid that we’ll go to police and tell them and later on we found out about that five years later when we we read it and report her the position we’re in water report when i had no idea about that and later on of course we saw in the warren report and the council of the warren committee told us that she said she said that that we knew that lee had shot at general walker but later in the same warren report she contradicted herself and said that george probably just guessed that lee had shot the general walker because he was an intuitive person that i was an intuitive person i knew lee very well and therefore i made a guess which hit the target anyway whatever it was we’ll talk about it later but that particular evening of eastern 1963 we finished that evening in the most amiable manner we walked in a little garden behind the house there were roses in bloom lee and marina caught a gorgeous bouquet of roses for cern in appreciation for the pink rabbit brought for their child and probably they were very relieved that yes they weren’t betrayed yet yes naturally looking backwards or that we don’t know their reactions but for us it was just a friendly visit we kissed the baby june which looked now less than khrushchev joked about it again and drove back home this was our usual joke for us baby june looked a little bit like mr khrushchev i had his head yeah it was a round head bald with a little bit of fuzz around had little squinty bluish eyes and the rather bulbous nose it was a very unattractive baby and i’m sure that in the meantime the baby had improved but it looked very funny and it didn’t look like ruschief and we we laughed about it and so did lee lee also thought it was very funny another example of a stupid sense of humor so our affairs absorbed us so much from then on that we did not have time to see oswalds but we received only one postcards from them uh from new orleans why from new orleans because they moved in the meantime to new york to new orleans this was just before our departure to haiti and we lost the card it was as we remember just a short card greetings from new orleans and and they gave us the address i think lee wrote the card and the address was the magazine street in new orleans

it was written in english

just to remind us of their existence and to give us the new address we failed to put the address in our address book and the only address of lee harvey oswald now in my wife’s book is 214 neely street and his business telephone number riverside 15501 the business telephone of his photographic company we were planning to send them a christmas card in 1963 the tragic events prevented us from doing it but the address is still in jan’s book and whenever she looks through it she says this poor lee how we wish him to be alive and tell the truth

he had enough integrity to tell the truth even if even if he had done something wrong

maybe what we say here will indeed help to show what a person lee harvey oswald was the reader will have to form his own opinion as to his guilt both my wife and i miss him and are deeply sorry that he had met an untimely death on the hands of a man extremely unpalatable to any decent society

now we’re going to the next chapter dealing with the warren committee chapter k life in haiti became tough for us and from excuse me george maybe you do it but i just want to recall here going back to the scene where you signed the register in the american embassy in haiti and went to your friend’s house there black black black

i i recall you’re telling me the next meeting was with a guy in the gray flannel suit at the uh in front of the american ambassador in haiti yeah is that where you want to pick up that’s why we’re on the pickup now okay that’s just i want just to be sure information trickled somehow to the newspapers that we not only had known the oswalds yes in haiti but that i had been his best friend of course we told the political officer at our embassy that indeed we had known the oswalds and especially lee harvey oswald and we wrote to our friends about it i also wrote a letter of condolences to an old friend mrs hugh orkinclose jacqueline kennedy’s mother expressing my grief over the loss of a wonderful man and a great president

being influenced by the news attributing to lee harvey oswald the guilt i had added to my letter i am sorry to have ever met lee harvey oswald and to have befriended him

the general opinion of the world was at the time that my old friend lee harvey oswald was indeed the assassin

the grey flannel suit boys the fbi agent mr w james wood arrived in haiti trying to make me deny the statement i had supposedly made to my friends that i had contacted government men in dallas and asked him about lee and that the answer was he is a harmless lunatic in other words george to recapitulate when you got to know oswald in the very beginning in 1962 yes you have inquired with the local fbi who oswald was not fbi some government agent i don’t know whether the fbi or cie and i mentioned to the warrant committee the name of the people yeah it’s a vague recollection but it actually happens yeah whatever it may be it never occurred to me or to my wife that lee might have been in any way connected with cia on any other similar agency i do not like concealment and spine and this would and if i thought that lee would be in some connect some way connected with an agency he wouldn’t have been a friend i he wouldn’t have been a friend of mine so i didn’t have the slightest indication that he played some kind of a double game in russia or in the united states and i still do not believe it although in review certain facts as indicated in previous chapters leave a lot some unanswered questions especially both to jean and to me his incredible knowledge of the russian language how did you learn it so fast now i want to speak of a strange kind of coincidence uh that meeting of the great reynolds man in haiti can you say something more about it it took place at the u.s embassy it took place at the u.s embassy it’s the american ambassador president no with a political officer or a political officer present and as in their usual manner he tried to to push me hard to say what that i never spoke to anybody about lee harvey oswald and nobody called him a harmless lunatic uh then in a way in he sort of threatened me that life would be difficult for me and so the father i do not remember the detail but that’s how the fbi agents act

what i know all about yeah well what i wanted to add now here

so you are still in haiti part of france and it tripled out that you were his friend and the fbi came to talk to you in haiti and what else happened there here is what uh i have some uh bit and better memories about this mr woods visit yeah so we had doubts about lee’s guilt although the general opinion was he was an assassin and doubts were working on our minds but we did not make any public statements that fbi uh in any way was connected with the with the killing of president kennedy the fbi or cie never i thought they were just negligent however our statement were of utmost importance to fbi and mr wood tried to force me to deny them which i refuse to do anybody is entitled to his ideas especially if the facts do not jive i told him it was a stormy session a friend of mine in dallas an investment banker who had known me well testified later to the warren committee george is an extremely discerning person and right now his emotions are kind of tensed up he saw me in haiti possibly he knew me better than myself and our emotions were done 10 stop

as i said before at the beginning of my acquaintanceship with lee i became somewhat alarmed by his extremist views and by the fact of his having the his citizenship and that’s why at the time i asked a fellow connected either with fbi or cia i do not remember with which organization for sure what did you think of harvey oswald that i had recently met a harmless lunatic he said therefore lee appeared to us all right

and uh during this after the assassination he appeared to us as a patsy because he was a harmless lunatic

so this statement we possibly have made to our close friends and relatives and caused a lot of our future troubles maybe we were emotionally upset and tense

another reason uh that’s an unanswered question that remained in my mind regarding lee how did he ever get to russia it’s expensive to get there finally how did he get the permit to return so easily and how did he get the money from the u.s embassy it’s applied to him these are the questions which were in our minds and still remained unanswered in a way that you might think mostly working for any government agency even in the united when in the when he was in the soviet union do you ever know he wouldn’t have been a friend of mine if i had thought so yeah yeah

now i want to speak about the interesting coincidence in our lives that i did indeed know jacqueline bouvier in 1939 when she was a teenager i knew her mother then misses jack bouvier her father in quotation marks the blackjack a handsome dashing man and a whole charming and warm swarm of bouvier family where was it in long i spent the summer in long island near them and although my later life kept me away from them i all i will always have a very warm feeling for them but jacqueline’s mother who became later mrs hugh hawking claus i visited occasionally in washington as late as in 1961. newspapers made insidious remarks about me being the only man who knew lee harvey oswald and jacqueline kennedy but this was just a coincidence and my life is full of strange coincidences

be as it may even the president of haiti became concerned about the rumors of my friendship with the assassin of president kennedy naturally the visit from fbi uh men was quite well known to everybody because everybody knows what goes on at the american embassy the haitians know more what goes on in the american embassy than the americans so the president of haiti asked herve b-o-y-e-r who was secretary of state for finance to call me to his office mr boyle said you have to clear your name somehow or you may be expelled from haiti it so happened that very soon afterwards our embassy received the letter for me and my wife

from mr j lee rankin council of the warren committee the letter asked us to come to washington if we wished and we were naturally anxious to help and solve this horrible crime also the committee would pay all our expenses including

uh the expenses of travel about two manchester dogs we immediately gladly accepted in spite of extreme inconvenience to the work i was doing at the time in haiti the veterans administration building occupied now by the warrant committee was buzzing with activity wait a minute this way coming to washington so we arrived in washington this is a nice moment to end this tape this is step number six we will continue this afternoon with the interview okay then we start with your reward committee testimony thank you mr wallace

go ahead george

so so we are effective blazing with activity the one is the veterans administration building uh the late allen w dallas former head of cia and a scholarly looking man was there he was by the way a friend of mrs hugh ocking claus and he came over to talk to us amicably his appearance did not suggest at all that he and his brother had occupied positions of extreme importance there was a handsome and amiable congressman gerald r ford a republic minority leader a bold-headed and small but oozing importance and wall street heir john mccloy banker and former governor of west berlin j lee rankin a pleasant looking man more like a country lawyer and finally albert e jenner assigned

to my own case

actually mr albert jenner was assigned to the first investigation of the personality of harvey lee oswalt and of personality of people involved around our villi oswald and there started my interrogation it lasted for two and a half days

and uh the i was interrogated by mr jenner a successful lawyer from chicago who said at the very beginning of the interrogation in an important voice we know mr demorential more about you than yourself

frankly i do not know why they had to dig out all the incidents of my life and also of my parents and my relatives life but the governments of the united states must have spent an awful lot of money as i had studied and lived in several countries before coming to the united states and later my geological work took me and my wife all over the world this must have seemed suspicious to the committee and to generate and to mr jenner who was very cold to me at the beginning but gradually he became more friendly as i had explained to him the reason for my various travels

what amazed me in looking backward on my testimony was that whatever good i said about lee harvey oswald seemed to be taken with a grain of salt as if the decision regarding his guilt had already been formed

i cannot go into the all the details of my testimony they cover some over 200 pages and are the largest testimony before even marina oswald

you

Making Muppets Haunted Mansion

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https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/12/07/journey-through-disneys-the-haunted-mansion-with-the-muppets?sdid=6WTV6ZM4&mv=social&mv2=ownsoc-org&scid=c5e0a362-bacb-4afc-a496-a3d1d1a43bd6&mv=social&mv2=owned_social&fbclid=IwAR1c4WC4iuyePXVIPBCEvCt9tVbXRIk_ZJq0Hqp2a1y5Sc7GLbsQVaOVEdM_aem_AY2Q2P3ubTATz-Hm-fjIoNFCNl4RtnRuBr5a3zSC9hx760VBZas6KIVru0rEJp5Sc1YlgKafaRBkj0SZJriBf4W9UX9XNTvVyqtgZ2NR2VXhwHMc4jfrv6UVrfx5qeeQRGg#gs.mjnq67

Mark Lane worked with Paul McCartney?

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mattkprovideo.com/2021/12/31/mark-lane-worked-with-paul-mccartney/

162 | CITIZEN LANE
time almost penniless, unable to pay any rent, and I rarely enjoyed
a full meal. I lived in a room on the King’s Road, near World’s End,
London, in a large !at owned by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. I was, of course, ecstatic about the news and almost as pleased
about the wonderful lunch.
I told James that I wanted to rewrite portions of the manuscript
and that I would need to check all further entries against the Warren
Report and the twenty-six volumes of its evidence. A young American,
Michael Lester, had worked with me both typing the manuscript and
checking out certain references to government documents. James was
not surprised, since the manuscript that I submitted began with this
note: “This is an un-corrected, un-conformed and un-edited original
mimeographed copy of the manuscript. It is intended as a publisher’s
document and is NOT intended for publication or release in its present form.” That page also bore my signature.
I began to write the “nal version of the book. Comparing the
printed work with the earlier manuscript reveals that very few changes
were made. I spent a great deal of time writing to Mike, who was in
New York, and waiting for his reply about a citation I sought. When
I received a small portion of an advance from the publisher I invited
Mike to join me in London and to bring all the relevant documents
and volumes. I asked Lord Russell if Mike could stay at one of the
rooms on King’s Road, and he was more than gracious and welcoming. The team was reunited, and Mike began to type.
Since there were no personal computers, Mike employed a portable typewriter. If he made a single mistake, even at the end of the
page, even placing a period where a comma belonged, he ripped
the page out rather than place a comma over a period, and started
anew. When I submitted the “nal manuscript, the executives at the
Bodley Head were astonished. They agreed that it was likely the
most perfect submission they had ever read. They were referring
to the typing.

While living in London during that time I attended a small party
of about a dozen people. One of them was Paul McCartney.

RUSH TO JUDGMENT: THE JOURNEY BEGINS | 163
He walked up to me, offered his hand, and told me his name. The introduction was hardly necessary as he was one of the most famous people
in the world. He seemed very young and remarkably modest. That
was because he was twenty-two years old, and he was not impressed
with his accomplishments. He said, “I understand you have written
a book about Kennedy’s assassination. I would like to read it.” I told
him that it was still in manuscript form and that there were only two
mimeographed copies, one at the publisher’s of”ce and one at the
!at where I was staying. Paul said, “If I could just borrow your copy
I would keep it safe and get it back to you in a few days.” I agreed.
The next day a man in a chauffeur’s out”t arrived and asked if I had
a package for Mr. McCartney. He took it.

Several days later he returned with the manuscript, neatly
wrapped. I took it to my desk, opened it quickly, and began to search
for the note that would be my “rst review. There was no note; I
was very disappointed and thought that evidently he had not been
impressed or perhaps, I hoped, he had just been too busy to read it.
Early that evening while I was in the throes of editing, the telephone rang. The caller said, “Well he could’na done it, could he?”

I was irritated by the interruption, the obscure message, and the
failure of the caller to identify himself. I said, probably in a less-thangenerous tone, “Who is this? And who could not have done what?”

He replied, “Sorry. Paul, Paul McCartney, we met the other
night. And I meant that Oswald could not have killed President Kennedy.” I may have been one of the very few people on the planet who
would have failed to recognize that most famous voice. Paul seemed
not at all put out. He said, “Could we have dinner together to talk
about it? Maybe tomorrow?”

A few days later he invited me to his home, suggesting that I
drop in at about noon. He opened the door and showed me to a
parlor, asking if I minded waiting a few minutes as he walked into
another room where John Lennon was seated at a piano. Paul called
out, “Mark, this is John. John, this is Mark.” We each said hello, and
the two of them continued working on a song. They hummed, they

164 | CITIZEN LANE
sang, and they played the piano and Paul played the guitar. When
they were satis”ed, they agreed to call their associate who was going
to write it down. Neither Paul nor John could write music. Then
we had lunch prepared by a woman who worked there. It was sliced
white bread toasted and covered with baked beans, apparently a Liverpool favorite. Paul’s very large English sheepdog stayed outside,
guarding the house.
Paul, of course, had a very busy schedule and said he would call
when he could. He did a few days later and suggested a late dinner
at a place I might recommend. I told him about a Polish restaurant
where the food was excellent, and since all the diners and staff were
ancient and spoke primarily Polish, he might not be recognized. The
owner seated us near a window and then returned in a few minutes
and nodded toward a table where an obviously wealthy woman in her
nineties was seated.

“Madame Slovenskia wondered, Mr. McCartney, if you could sign
her menu, which she would like to present to her granddaughter.”
Paul smiled and wrote, “Happy dinner, Paul McCartney, friend
of Mark Lane.” The owner was bemused, and his customer was
bewildered. Paul smiled and said, “I guess they heard of the Beatles
in Poland.”

As our dinner continued past the closing hour it was fortunate
the door was locked. Paul had been spotted. Before long, the crowd
grew to more than two hundred. The owner showed us a seldom used back door, and we ran to Paul’s car. He drove me to my apartment in a rather deserted section near World’s End. No one was on the street. Paul brought out a guitar, and we walked just a few steps before a young couple appeared. She screamed, ran up to Paul, and
ripped a handkerchief from his pocket as we ran to the building. We settled into the den and caught our breath.
During a meeting at my London publishers, James Michie mentioned
that there was an American named Ben Sonnenberg who was eager to

RUSH TO JUDGMENT: THE JOURNEY BEGINS | 175

I met with Paul McCartney at my flat. He asked about the film,
and I described it. He asked if there was going to be music, and I said
that the director and I had not even thought about that yet. “Well,”
he said, “I would like to write a musical score for the film, as a present for you.” I was astonished by that generous offer and speechless
for a moment. I thanked him, but then I cautioned him that the subject matter was very controversial in the United States and that he
might be jeopardizing his future. He added, “One day my children
are going to ask me what I did with my life, and I can’t just answer
that I was a Beatle.” It became clear to me that he had not grasped
the enormous contribution he had made to music and to the lives
of young people everywhere. During that meeting, Paul said he had
just finished composing a song and he wanted me to hear it. “You’ll
be the first,” he added. I told him that I really enjoyed his music but
that I was practically tone deaf and not the person who should give
him the first review, that he should play it for someone else first. He
laughed and took the guitar out of its case.
He played the melody and sang bits of the lyrics he had composed. I didn’t really get it; it had a haunting and sad sound. I said, “I
think this is a little complex for me the first time hearing it.”
“You don’t like it?” he asked.
I said I did, but I would have to give it more thought.
He added as a joke, “I gave you your first review, and it was much
more favorable.”
The next morning Mike Lester, who was staying at the !at, asked
what Paul was playing. I didn’t remember the name, but I recalled
that it had a refrain about all the lonely people and that some father
was darning his socks at night. I had apparently been the first person to hear “Eleanor Rigby.” When it became a huge hit, my friends
made sarcastic remarks about my musical ear, suggesting that I might
consider giving up the law for a new career as a music critic.
Paul called and said, “What do I have to do to write the musical
score for the film?” I arranged a meeting at the King’s Road !at for
Paul and D and myself to discuss the subject.

176 | CITIZEN LANE
D asked Paul, “What have you written for us?” Paul politely said
that he wanted to see the film and then compose. D ruled that reasonable suggestion out. Paul then asked D how the film would begin,
and D described a scene where the plane landed and the president
and his wife walked to the tarmac. That had not been discussed as
the opening scene and was not used in the film.

D said, “So play your music for that scene.”
Paul said, “You want me to audition now?”

D said, “Yes, right now.”

There was a long and awkward silence broken when Paul picked
up his guitar and created a bit of music. D, even less musically talented than I was, immediately said, “No good. It’s boring.”

Paul laughed and agreed by saying, “I tried to match the scene
you had described.”

I argued with D about the musical score to no avail. He insisted
that a score by Paul McCartney would not increase the “lm’s popularity or reach and would prevent it from being “stark and didactic,” a phrase that I still did not comprehend and one D could never
adequately explain.
The film without a musical score was stark enough and was moderately successful. Its debut was on BBC in 1967. I was there for the
showing of the flm with two Warren Commission lawyers, Arlen
Specter and David Belin. It was then the longest studio-originated
broadcast in the history of BBC.

7
In the United States the documentary debuted at the Carnegie Hall Cinema and was reviewed by Bosley Crowther, the film critic for the New York Times, who wrote that
if the “purpose of this film is to rouse its viewers into having doubts about Oswald’s total guilt . . . then it eminently succeeds.”

Being the Ricardos

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I just watched “Being The Ricardo’s” and it’s good but not great. I remember the TV movie from the 90s as telling the same story but better. This is a dark melodrama without one laugh in it. Nicole Kidman is pretty amazing, when she’s doing “Lucy” she sounds exactly like the original. Then again Frances Fisher in the TV movie was really good too.

Lawyer Videos

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http://tonylawfirm.com/

I shot and edited/animated the backgrounds using Adobe Premiere, Photoshop and After Effects.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonynguyenattorney/

I shot these TV spots for Austin/Waco Texas lawyer Vic Feazell.

I used a Canon G20 camera and edited them in Adobe After Effects. I made the graphics in Adobe Photoshop.

http://www.withviclegal.com/

CALL (512) 372-8100

WEST SIDE STORY 2021

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mattkprovideo.com/2021/12/20/west-side-story-2021/

I just saw the new WEST SIDE STORY. It will never surpass the original, but its quite good. I don’t get why its a bomb!

The good: This is “Stage 3 Spielberg” not the “dolly up to the actors face” Spielberg from the 80s. Beautiful photography, big wonderful sets ( did they build a fake New York City somewhere?) “Cool Boy” seemed to be on a greenscreen stage. Real Puerto Rican Actors playing Puerto Ricans?!?!? Imagine that! Great dancers, great actors, great singing.

tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18pNvg3ckdU

The Bad? If this an update of Shakespeares “Romeo and Juliet,” does anyone remember that THOSE two lead characters are supposed to be around 12 years old? That explains the overdone emotional outbursts (Talking about getting married after the second day they know each other?) The 2 leads are around 18, but putting (most of) them back in High School would make the gangs, the school dance and the overall juvenile delinquency seem more logical.

Rita Morena sings the signature “A Place for Us” and its no longer a love song, but a lament about being Puerto Rican immigrants in a strange land.

I cant put my finger on exactly WHY…. but the memorable energy that the original gave off just isn’t here.

Not good or bad, just different:

Both teen gangs are battling for control of a neighborhood, that ( in this new version) is about to be demolished soon anyway. (Was that historically accurate for the early 1950s?)

The Hispanic actors mostly talk to each other in Spanish with NO subtitles. BUT the actors deliver their lines so well that I could most get the gist of what they were saying

What is “Me & Julio” about

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What is the Simon and Garfunkel song “Me and Julio down by the schoolyard” about? What do the lyrics mean?

https://mattkprovideo.com/2021/12/19/what-is-me-julio-about/

The lyrics are:

The mama pajama rolled out of bed, And she ran to the police station
When the papa found out he began to shout, And he started the investigation
It’s against the law
It was against the law
What the mama saw
It was against the law
The mama looked down and spit on the ground Every time my name gets mentioned
The papa said, “Oy, if I get that boy I’m gonna stick him in the house of detention

Whoa, in a couple of days they come and take me away
But the press let the story leak
And when the radical priest
Come to get me released
We was all on the cover of Newsweek

It sure sounds like someone was caught doing something naughty with an underage girl?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_Julio_Down_by_the_Schoolyard

Actually it wasnt really a Simon and Garfunkel song, it was a Paul Simon solo song!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Simon_(album)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Simon