Family Reunion:  Oswald’s Thanksgiving Day Charade

by James Norwood

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a smoldering enmity between President Kennedy and General Curtis LeMay,  and the stakes were as high as the future of the planet.

In October, 1962, the lives of John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev became enmeshed in the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: The Cuban Missile Crisis.  Over time, the peaceful resolution of the crisis has been studied as both a model of conflict management and as a seminal moment in diplomatic history that likely saved the planet from nuclear holocaust.  But in their own times, JFK and Khrushchev were each subjected to enormous criticism in their separate governments for their actions as the crisis was unfolding and for the way in which it was resolved. 

In response to the photographic proof of the Soviet missile installations in Cuba, on October 16, 1962, President Kennedy assembled the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm). There followed twelve days inside a pressure cooker during the meetings of ExComm. The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed on either an air strike of the missile sites or an invasion of Cuba.  But the diversity of participants in ExComm allowed for open exchange, dissent, and vigorous debate.  And with the calm leadership of JFK, a peaceful solution of a blockade coupled with backchannel communications with Khrushchev culminated in the withdrawal of the Soviets and the promise to remove the missiles. 

But the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Curtis LeMay did not view the diplomatic approach as a resolution; they saw it as a defeat and the loss of Cuba to communism.  Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, recalled the “coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles” following the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.”¹  JFK’s advisor Arthur Schlesinger observed that for the Kennedy administration during the crisis, “we were at war with the national security people.”² And Admiral George Anderson expressed bitterly after JFK’s peaceful settlement, “We have been had.”³  In slightly over a year after the Cuban affair, President Kennedy was assassinated.  And it is plausible that within a month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the selection of a scapegoat in the assassination had already been made.

Living through a Kafkaesque experience, Oswald is captured on  camera in the middle of the nightmare as he is paraded through Dallas police headquarters.

While in custody of the Dallas police on November 22, 1963, Oswald earnestly told reporters in the hall, “I’m just a patsy,” and he denied shooting anybody.  But he was unaware that in the months leading up to the assassination, there were numerous impersonations of him that were breathtaking in their scope and ambition: 

• In faraway Mexico City, a conversation took place in the Luma Hotel in which a man identified as Alex James Hidell was talking of assassinating President Kennedy.  The conversation was overhead by James Buick.  On the day of the assassination, Buick recognized the Oswald arrested in Dallas as the individual named Hidell whom he had observed in Mexico City.  After Oswald’s arrest, the police handed Oswald a crudely made selective service card with his photo and the name Alex James Hidell.  When that card was linked to the Klein’s mail order rifle and postal money order in the name of A. Hidell, Oswald was caught in the trap.

• On another occasion, a man identifying himself as Lee Harvey Oswald made a trip to Louisiana where he applied for a job at a mental institution.  He was not in need of a haircut, but he left his calling card at a local barbershop, and he made a memorable appearance at the home of a local politician.  The impression left behind was that of an unstable malcontent.

• Around Labor Day, a man introducing himself as Lee Oswald met with gunrunner Robert McKeown in an isolated location on the Texas Gulf Coast.  The visitor wanted to purchase rifles and was willing to pay an exorbitant price.  McKeown, who had previously run guns to Castro’s Cuba, was confused and refused to deal with the stranger.  If he had sold one of the guns and it was later placed in the Texas School Book Depository, it could have served the dual purpose of convicting Oswald and implicating Castro in the assassination.

• A Cuban expatriate, Sylvia Odio, was visited at her Dallas apartment by two Cubans and an American named “Leon.”  Within a day or two, Odio received a telephone call in which one of the Cubans (Leopoldo) described Leon Oswald as an expert marksman who believed the Cubans should have shot JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  On November 22, Odio recognized “Leon” as the man arrested in Dallas for the murder of President Kennedy.  But Odio’s timeline conflicted with the “official” dating of Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City.  She had to be harassed and discredited as an eyewitness.

The framing of Oswald was so meticulously planned that it was as if his life story was being scripted as a fictional character.  But the plotters faced a dilemma because the young man they were scapegoating was part of their own intelligence community, which had to be concealed from the public.  A second obstacle was that the Oswalds were not his real family.  The CIA had fooled the Soviets through a paper trail of evidence of two boys, “Lee Oswald” and “Harvey Oswald,” as they grew up in separate households through the 1950s.  In 1962, the so-called defector, Harvey Oswald, had returned from his mission to the Soviet Union, and it was determined to use him as the scapegoat in the assassination.  Instead of fooling the KGB about Oswald’s Russian language proficiency, the public would now need current evidence that would reinforce the fictional life created for the Russian-speaking immigrant as a member of the Oswald family.

In the month following the Cuban Missile Crisis, a mundane domestic experience played out in Fort Worth, Texas, in a Thanksgiving Day family get-together of the Oswalds.  This event would serve as the opening scene in the drama of framing Oswald for the assassination of President Kennedy that was already under way in November, 1962.

Lee’s older brother Robert was the key player in coordinating the Thanksgiving Day reunion.  Robert and his wife Veda hosted the family gathering in their Fort Worth home.  Oswald and Marina with their baby June would travel by bus from Dallas to Fort Worth.  John Pic and his family were the third invited group.  Pic was the older half-brother of Robert and Lee, and he had recently transferred from the Tachikawa AFB in Japan to Lackland AFB in San Antonio. 

When the Oswald boys were growing up, John Pic was the first to enlist in the armed forces, and he apparently had no awareness that his family was involved in a CIA project related to his youngest brother.  But Robert, who spent much more time with the family in the years to come, was a greater eyewitness to and participant in the workings of the Oswald Project in which his younger brother Lee was sharing his name with the Russian-speaking immigrant.  The identities of the two boys were merged while serving in the Marines, and the second Oswald, who answered to the name of “Harvey,” spent two-and-a-half years in the Soviet Union as a spy.  He returned with a wife and child in 1962.  The Thanksgiving Day celebration was much more than a family reunion.  The older half-brother John Pic would now be introduced to a man who was an imposter, a stranger he was likely meeting for the first time. 

By 1962, “Harvey” had been appropriating the name Lee Harvey Oswald name for over a decade.  But now (and likely for the first and only time), he would be inserting himself into a family gathering and playing the role of Lee in an intimate setting.

What would be the purpose of this audacious stunt?

As we shall see, the principal objective of the Thanksgiving event was a photo-op.  A home movie would memorialize the event of the three Oswald brothers with Harvey assuming the role of Lee.  If there were any questions raised in the future about his true identity, the memories of the participants and the visual record of Thanksgiving Day in 1962 would serve in dispelling them.

Neither Marguerite Oswald (left) nor “Margaret” Oswald (right) was present for the Oswald family’s Thanksgiving celebration. The question is:  Why?

The Thanksgiving event was the first time since 1953 that the entire Oswald family would be in one place, yet the mother of the three men was conspicuously absent from the celebration.  Robert’s wife Vada had recently seen Marguerite Oswald driving in town.  With the mother in the vicinity at such an opportune moment for a family reunion, there was no conceivable reason to exclude her from the Thanksgiving celebration where she would be holding court with her sons.  In human terms, the special reunion would assuredly be incomplete for three brothers if their mother were not with them.  For the true purpose of the gathering, however, the mother’s presence would not only have been inconvenient; it would have shattered the legend created for the youngest son.  For a decade, Harvey Oswald had been raised by a short, stout “practical nurse” often identified as “Margaret” Oswald.  If the much taller Marguerite Oswald, mother to John, Robert, and Lee, were photographed at the event, the cover would be blown on the identity of Harvey.

But what if the “other” mother, the shorter version of Marguerite and the caretaker of Harvey, had been invited to the Thanksgiving event?  John Pic informed the Warren Commission that during the day at Robert Oswald’s home, not a word was mentioned about the young man’s “defection” to the Soviet Union in 1959.  But if Harvey’s caretaker mother “Margaret” were present, the story of the two Oswalds would need to be disclosed to John and his wife Marjorie.  If “Margaret,” whose actual identity is still unknown, were presiding as matriarch, the entire affair would have been a grotesque mockery of “family” at Thanksgiving.

 
The primary goal of the gathering was to demonstrate that Harvey Oswald was a genuine member of the Oswald family and would be remembered on the occasion of a holiday celebration with his two siblings.  To accomplish that goal for this staged event, there was no way that a mother figure could be present. 

Life with the Oswalds:  The Home Movie A YouTube video of the home movie footage of the Thanksgiving Day celebration of the Oswalds leads with the following caption:  “Rare 8 mm home movie of Lee Harvey Oswald spending time with his family on Thanksgiving.”4  The domestic sequence caught on camera includes John Pic, Robert Oswald, and Harvey Oswald, along with the three spouses, in the family living room, talking and enjoying the children at play.  The film was shot in living color.  Following the assassination, the film footage was released for the public to have a glimpse into the Oswald family.  Clips from the film would regularly appear in television documentaries on Oswald, reinforcing the narrative set forth in the Warren Report’s “biography,” which was the centerpiece of its final document.

In the early 1960s, a home movie set-up was a prestige toy, not a commodity.  An acclaimed Dallas dressmaker brought his state-of-the-art camera to Dealey Plaza, and his name was linked forever to his short film.  But home movie equipment at this time was not a product for mass consumption.  The standard home package would include camera, projector, and reel-to-reel film that would require development in a photographic laboratory.  In a time-consuming process at home, the processed film was threaded into the projector, and a cumbersome projection screen with tripod would be set up.  The lights were then dimmed in the room for playback.  The provenance of the camera and color film used for the Oswalds’ Thanksgiving Day event has never been established.  But it is clear that the camera was in possession of Robert Oswald, who did the amateur filming on Thanksgiving Day.

 

Photoanalyst Jack White performed a study of the light and shadows in this photo of Harvey Oswald, allegedly taken by Robert Oswald outside his Fort Worth home in 1959, and just prior to the defection of his “brother.”  White concluded that the photo was inauthentic.

In his book Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald by His Brother, Robert Oswald published a number of photographs allegedly from his private collection.  One of them was an image of Harvey Oswald holding his niece outside Robert’s home in Fort Worth.  Robert asserts that the photo was taken just before Oswald’s so-called defection to the Soviet Union in fall 1959.  With this photo and the Thanksgiving Day home movie, Robert conveniently left for posterity a visual set of bookends of the period before and after the defection.  That visual record with Harvey photographed in close proximity to Robert’s home was essential in maintaining the façade of the identity of Harvey Oswald, the Russian-speaking immigrant, as the American-born Lee Oswald and a member of the Oswald family just prior to departing and then after returning from the Soviet Union.  That was precisely how Robert Oswald used the images in his book.

Between the time of the assassination of President Kennedy until his death in 2017, Robert Oswald was both a hostile and erratic witness with regard to his “brother,” and he took every occasion to malign him in order to uphold the findings of the Warren Report.  In his book, Robert invariably engages in unsubstantiated overreach in throwing Harvey Oswald under the bus of history.  The only instance of understatement in the book is when Robert writes, “I began to realize how carefully and patiently Lee had planned his defection.”⁵

 

Fort Worth, 1944:  Three boys at a simpler time when they could actually recognize one another as their brother. (L to R:  John Pic, Lee Oswald, Robert Oswald).

After Oswald’s half-brother, John Pic, died at age 68 in April 2000, his pastor disclosed that Pic “believed he was a sinner who deserved God’s condemnation.  He knew he was going to heaven only because of God’s undeserved love.”⁶  But Pic may have undervalued his own integrity. While he steadfastly refused to speak publicly about his younger half-brother, he nonetheless stood by his Warren Commission testimony as a set of truthful recollections.

Pic appeared before the Warren Commission on May 15, 1964, and he provided a detailed account of his interaction with the man he was expecting to be his half-brother Lee at the Thanksgiving Day event in 1962.  Of his conversation with the younger brother at the reunion, Pic told that Commission that “he didn’t talk about anything prior to him and Marina being married….all the conversation was after their marriage.”⁷  In other words, John Pic and his younger brother did not engage in what everyone would have done on such a special occasion after being apart for nine years, namely, to reminisce about their times growing up together. 

Warren Commission attorney Albert E. Jenner, Jr. asked Pic, “How did he look to you physically as compared with when you had seen him last?”  Pic replied, “I would have never recognized him, sir.....he was much thinner than I had remembered him.  He didn’t have as much hair….His face features were somewhat different, being his eyes were set back maybe, you know like in these army pictures, they looked different that I remembered him.  His face was rounder.  Marilyn [Murret] had described him to me when he went in the Marine Corps as having a bull neck.  This I didn’t notice at all.”⁸  When asked for a general impression of his brother, Pic replied, “Well, sir; the Lee Harvey Oswald I met in November of 1962 was not the Lee Harvey Oswald I had known 10 years previous.”⁹

In the next portion of Pic’s testimony, he was shown a batch of photographs of his brother, but was honest enough to admit that he could not identify multiple pictures as the Lee Harvey Oswald he knew.  One photo that Pic could not identify depicted a young boy at the Bronx Zoo, who purportedly resided with Pic and his wife in New York from 1952–53.  Thus, the photo was taken at the precise time in which Oswald was living with Pic.  This was the photo seen and identified as the boy who answered to the name of “Harvey” Oswald by Dr. Milton Kurian in New York and, later, the boy’s middle-school teacher in New Orleans, Myra DaRouse.  The second image was a photo of Oswald in the Marines in 1957, and the third was Oswald in New Orleans, handing out leaflets in the summer of 1963.  Pic could not recognize his brother from all three of the photos.  For other select photos, Pic offered the truthful but cryptic responses of “that looks to me approximately as Lee Oswald looked when I seen him Thanksgiving 1962” and “he appears to me as Lee Harvey Oswald in 1962 when I seen him.”¹⁰  While it may be true that people change over time, Pic failed to identify a photograph of young Oswald taken at the Bronx Zoo around 1953 when the youngster was living in Pic’s apartment; a second image in 1957; and a third photograph taken in 1963.  In both physical appearance and in attitude, the Lee Harvey Oswald that Pic met at the 1962 Thanksgiving get-together was not recognizable as his half-brother.

Three factors were pressing on Pic during his Warren Commission testimony.  First, it is clear that when he was recalling his experience of meeting his younger brother at the Thanksgiving event in 1962, it was a genuine shock to his system.  The disconnect between Pic’s memories of the Lee Oswald he had grown up with and hosted in New York in 1953 vis-à-vis the man now claiming to be his brother was apparent both in the physical and attitudinal properties of a man Pic simply could not recognize.  A second factor impacting Pic’s testimony was the knowledge that he had gleaned by the time of the 1964 Warren Commission hearing, as compared to what he knew at the 1962 Thanksgiving Day celebration.  By the time he gave his testimony, Pic was well aware of the public presence of a strange woman who for years had apparently stolen the identity of his mother.  He had now at least begun to piece together the story of the Oswald Project.  A third factor weighing on Pic was that he was under considerable pressure to be a compliant witness and to avoid revealing too much of what he knew and for the remainder of his life he had to keep buried.  Within that complex, threefold dynamic, Pic delivered circumspect, yet truthful responses to the best of his ability. 

As the work of the Warren Commission was in progress, it was clear that the staff had uncovered troubling information about the young Lee Harvey Oswald.  But the goal of the committee was not to follow the evidence impartially and see where it led; historical truth was not the objective of the Commission.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the memo written by Warren Commission attorney Albert E. Jenner, Jr., less than halfway through the inquest.  On April 10, 1964, Jenner wrote the following about the youth of Oswald, based on the chronology that was being compiled by attorney John Hart Ely: “There are details in Mr. Ely’s memoranda which will require material alteration and, in some instances, omission.”¹¹

Why would the details of the young Oswald’s life need to be suppressed and altered in the Commission’s report?  The answer lies in an understanding of the two Oswalds that exposes the truth about how Oswald was being framed for the murder of President Kennedy.

Paul R. Gregory’s book The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee is written in the form of a memoir of Gregory’s time spent with Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald in 1962.  When Gregory expands his narrative to consider the assassination of President Kennedy, he writes that during the period he knew Oswald, “I detected none of the trademarks of a future assassin.”12  But he then pivots to the role of Warren Commission apologist in order to condemn Oswald to history.  For Gregory, “The Warren Commission Report rests upon hundreds of thousands of documents, testimonies, administrative folders, and technical reports to back up its 'lone gunman' conclusion."13  But there is not a single critic, text, or resource mentioned in Gregory’s book that challenges the findings of the Warren Report.

At the close of the Thanksgiving Day celebration, Harvey, Marina, and June were picked up in Fort Worth by an acquaintance named Paul Gregory.  When Harvey introduced John Pic to Gregory as his half-brother, Pic took umbrage because he always felt that he was a genuine brother to Robert and Lee and they never thought of one another as half-brothers.  Pic told the Warren Commission the following:

It was very pronounced.  He wanted to let the man know I was only his half-brother.  And this kind of peeved me a little bit.  Because we never mentioned the fact that we were half-brothers….Now, my brother Robert, whenever he introduces me to anyone always refers to me as his brother.¹⁴ 

Adding to the confusion of not recognizing his brother, Pic’s feelings were now hurt by what he considered an inconsiderate remark.

But the younger man was not intentionally being callous, as he had no way of knowing that the “half-brother” remark would touch a nerve.  Harvey had shared no childhood experiences with Pic and had no memories of their upbringing.  He was only performing a role that had been scripted for him for the Thanksgiving Day charade.  One of the most perceptive observations of Harvey Oswald comes from Stanislav Shushkevich, who came to know Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union.  Shushkevich was a young engineer in Minsk where he was assigned the task of tutoring a strange American visitor.  For his two-and-a-half years in residence, Oswald was successful in hiding his expertise in spoken Russia.  During his overt struggle with the language, Shushkevich was brought in as a tutor.  Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Shushkevich became the first President of the independent nation of Belarus.  This head of state also took an interest in the JFK assassination, visited Dallas, and studied the Warren Report.  He concluded that:

It is my absolute conviction that they found a passive, calm, compliant boy, and used him as the guilty one.  As for the conclusions of the Warren Commission, I don't believe them one bit.  I have studied them and I don't think [the assassination] was the work of my student.¹⁵

The words “passive, calm, compliant boy” are a perfect description of the young man working at the behest of the American intelligence network in exchange for asylum.  That description is almost exactly how Harvey Oswald was recalled by his eighth grade homeroom teacher in New Orleans, Myra DaRouse. 

Harvey’s assignment at the Thanksgiving Day event in Fort Worth was simple:  say little; try to fit into the family; and smile when the camera is rolling.

 
 

In the summer of 1962, Paul Gregory had approached Marina Oswald for tutorials in Russian language, as he needed help on an assignment at the University of Oklahoma.  During a seven-week period, they would meet for approximately two nights a week from the end of June until mid-September when Paul returned to college in Oklahoma.

While most of Gregory’s time spent during his lessons was with Marina, he also became acquainted with Harvey.  As the couple communicated at home exclusively in Russian, Gregory came to recognize Oswald’s mastery of the language.  Although Marina would call out her husband for occasional sloppy grammar, Gregory nonetheless told the Warren Commission that “having spent hours with Lee speaking Russian, I can confirm that his command of the everyday language was excellent.  He could express anything he wanted to say.”¹⁶  Indeed, Oswald was so proficient that his closest friend at the time, George de Mohrenschildt, recalled that Oswald “preferred to speak Russian than English any time.  He always would switch from English to Russian.”¹⁷  Additionally, Oswald read enormously challenging (and long) works of Russian literature in the original language.  De Mohrenschildt attested to Oswald’s knowledge of such authors as Gorky, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev in the original Russian versions.

Surprisingly, Gregory never expresses curiosity about how Oswald came to acquire such stellar Russian language skills.  In his book, he casually asserts that Oswald was “self-taught.”  And yet, Oswald only completed the ninth grade prior to dropping out of high school to join the Marines.  While serving in East Asia, he had no time for formal language training.  But even before the alleged “defection” to the Soviet Union in 1959, Oswald was demonstrably fluent in Russian.  By contrast, Gregory was privileged enough to be enrolled in university courses in Russian language, and he had a distinguished linguist and native-born Russian as a father.  But learning Russian was such a daunting task that he felt compelled to search out a tutor and spend seven weeks in sessions that would help him over the hurdle of an academic assignment.

Gregory met the Oswalds through his father Peter, a Russian émigré from Siberia.  Oswald paid a visit to his office in order to obtain a letter of recommendation that verified his Russian language competency.  Peter Gregory tested him after pulling out several Russian volumes from his bookshelves and asking Oswald to translate.  Surprised by Oswald’s proficiency, Peter then wrote a brief note that vouched for Oswald, whose aptitude in Russian was so impressive that Peter believed him “capable of being an interpreter and perhaps a translator.”¹⁸

In what is arguably the most important information contained in Gregory’s book, the linguist father Peter Gregory concluded that, based on his spoken Russian, Oswald was “from a Baltic republic or even Poland with Russian as a second language.”¹⁹  He also posited that “Oswald’s Russian fluency was explained by immersion in daily life rather than attendance at some sinister Russian language school for spies.”²⁰  Oswald’s lapses in grammar and mistakes in gender usage in his speaking, as observed by Paul, may be explained by his father’s contention that Oswald originally learned Russian as a second language “possibly from a Baltic republic or even Poland.”  This description sheds light on how Oswald had already become proficient in Russian at the time he departed for the Soviet Union in 1959.  It also must give us pause as to what was the true background of this young, multilingual man.  The American Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans and was raised exclusively in the United States.  But Peter Gregory was identifying a young man who was likely born in Eastern Europe and was speaking both Russian and English as second languages.

Peter Gregory had been selected to translate the words of Marina in response to questions from the Secret Service shortly after the assassination.  While working under tremendous pressure, he demonstrated exemplary results, as his translations were subsequently checked by other experts and judged “faultless without deviation.”²¹  Previously, he had been selected to accompany President Eisenhower to Moscow to serve as translator during the summit that was eventually cancelled due to the Gary Powers U-2 spy plane incident.  In describing his father as “one of the nation’s best Russian interpreters,”²² Paul may have not have been engaging in hyperbole. 

As a world-class linguist, Peter Gregory is an authority worth listening to as an eyewitness to Oswald’s Russian language skills.  For the Warren Commission, Peter dispelled the notion that Oswald learned his Russian exclusively during his stay in the Soviet Union, when he asserted that “it would be rather unusual, rather unusual for a person who lived in the Soviet Union for 17 months that he would speak so well that a native Russian would not be sure whether he was born in that country or not.”²³  As it turns out, Peter’s characterization of Oswald having learned Russian as a second language somewhere in Eastern Europe, possibly “from a Baltic republic or even Poland,” merits careful consideration.

Armed with the knowledge of Peter Gregory’s analysis that Oswald’s spoken Russian was close to that of a native speaker because he had acquired the skills as a second language somewhere in Eastern Europe, how does this impact our understanding of Oswald?  The answer lies in the overwhelming evidence of two Oswald boys using the same name, growing up in different households, attending different schools, and training separately in the Marines.  The evidence points to two boys with the same name being raised in different families over many years, who eventually became participants in American intelligence operations.  It is likely that references to them in government records included separate identifications:  one boy was "Lee Harvey Oswald," born to Marguerite Claverie Oswald on October 18, 1939.  The other boy was "Harvey Lee Oswald," likely a Russian-speaking refugee from World War II, who was brought to this country with thousands of other refugees and raised by a caretaker mother occasionally known as “Margaret” Oswald.  Peter Gregory’s revelation about Oswald’s Russian language abilities advances our knowledge of the inner workings of the Oswald Project, wherein a Russian-speaking boy was recruited and groomed as an American spy for a mission in the Soviet Union.

The long-term project of planting a Russian-speaking asset in the Soviet Union must be examined in the context of the aftermath of World War II and the start of the Cold War.  Immediately after the war, there was the forced relocation of enormous populations as the map was being redrawn in Eastern Europe.  Thousands of “displaced persons” were interred in camps.  The so-called Displaced Persons Commission made available to the CIA the names of potential assets.  As a result, Eastern European refugees were brought to the United States under a program headed by Frank Wisner, the CIA’s director of clandestine operations.  Wisner had become the State Department’s and the CIA’s expert on Eastern European war refugees during the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Under Wisner’s program, the refugees were granted asylum in return for their cooperation in secret operations against the Soviets.

Wisner gained approval from the National Security Council for the “systematic” use of the refugees as set forth in a top-secret intelligence directive, NSCID No. 14 (March 3, 1950).  Both the FBI and the CIA were authorized to jointly exploit the knowledge, experience, and talents of over 200,000 Eastern European refugees who had resettled in the United States.²⁴  Under Wisner, the CIA was running thousands of covert projects for the purpose of what the NSCID directive called the “exploitation of aliens as sources of foreign intelligence information.”²⁵  The surviving evidence points to one of those projects that merged the identities of a Russian-speaking immigrant boy, who likely came from Eastern Europe, with an American-born boy named Lee Harvey Oswald.²⁶

Many of the Eastern European children grew up bilingual with Russian as a second language.  As observed by journalist Anne Applebaum in her book Iron Curtain:  The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, Eastern European children would as a matter of course be sent to live with another family at an early age in order to learn a second language.  One of the most prominent of those languages was Russian.  The idea behind the Oswald Project was to train the Russian-speaking boy as a spy who, when he reached adulthood, would “defect” to the Soviet Union.  Because he had assumed the name and identity of an American, the Soviets would not suspect that he was competent in Russian.  The result was that nearly a decade later, as an undercover agent who secretly understood Russian, the Eastern European immigrant posing as a disgruntled United States Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald defected and spent two-and-a-half years in the Soviet Union.  While there, he married a Soviet woman and returned to the United States with his wife and child.

Upon his return to the United States, Oswald wrote a lengthy account of his experience working at the Minsk Radio and TV Factory, where he drew upon “his fairly wide circle of friends and acquaintances to gather the figures and descriptions of the inner workings of the Soviet system.”²⁷  In wondering how Oswald “was able to put together such an insightful picture of the Soviet enterprise,”²⁸ Paul Gregory notes in his book that Oswald was “a surprisingly keen observer of Soviet reality.”²⁹  But there should be no surprise if it had been Oswald’s principal purpose as a false defector to observe and to report on the realities of Soviet life during his stay. 

Dennis Offstein was a co-worker of Oswald at the graphic arts company of Jaggars, Chiles, Stovall in Dallas shortly after Oswald’s return in 1962.  In his testimony to the Warren Commission, Offstein recalled that Oswald gave him a detailed account of Soviet military maneuvers during his residency.  Specifically, Offstein remembered Oswald’s description of:

the disbursement of the [Soviet] military units, saying that they didn't intermingle their armored divisions and infantry divisions and various units the way we do in the United States, that they would have all of their aircraft in one geographical location and their tanks in another geographical location, and their infantry in another, and he mentioned that in Minsk he never saw a vapor trail, indicating the lack of aircraft in the area.³⁰

This perceptive account of the Soviet military maneuvers that includes being on the lookout for “vapor trails” squares with other detailed observations that Oswald brought back and recorded in detail.  In the testimony of Offstein alone, there was enough cause to warrant an investigation of Oswald's ties to intelligence and the possibility that he was sent to the Soviet Union in 1959 in the capacity of what Offstein called “an agent of the United States.”³¹  But with the presence of Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission, Oswald’s records in the CIA were effectively screened from the committee.

It was Allen Dulles who insisted that the Warren Commission publish a detailed biography of Oswald.  As a result, Chapter VII (“Lee Harvey Oswald:  Background and Possible Motives”) is a fifty-page narrative replete with inaccurate biographical details and chronological errors.  That “biography” is a mélange of the lives of two young men, and it has misled researchers for nearly sixty years, the latest of which is Paul Gregory. 

The major premise that undergirds Gregory’s book is that Oswald was a genuine defector.  Referring exclusively to the Warren Report, Gregory believes that Oswald was a committed Marxist, that his distribution of pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans was genuine, that his opening of a branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans was genuine (despite him being the only member), and his visits to the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City were genuine (despite the absence of concrete evidence that Oswald himself paid those visits).  In paraphrasing the Warren Report, Gregory identifies Oswald’s principal motivation for the assassination, not out of animosity for John F. Kennedy, but in his belief, shaped by his study of Marxism, that “he was destined for a place in history.”³²

But if it can be demonstrated that Oswald was not a genuine defector and was working for the United States government, the entire edifice of the Warren Report collapses like a house of cards.  And if Oswald really had delusions of grandeur, he had the perfect opportunity to proclaim his great deed to history as he was paraded through the halls of the Dallas police headquarters and even allowed to address the press.  But instead, he protested his arrest and insisted on his innocence with the words, “I’m just a patsy!”  In this moment, he may have come to the realization that he was a mere pawn in the greater design of the Cold War.

Paul Gregory eventually earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard University.  He is the author or co-author of twelve books on economic history, the Soviet economy, and other specialized fields of economics.  He is currently a research fellow at the Hoover Institution in California.  Based on this academic pedigree, Gregory should know that scholarly research into a historical topic implies remaining current in the field by studying the most recent literature that documents new inquiries and discoveries.  But in his assessment of the JFK assassination and, above all, in his analysis of Oswald, Paul Gregory simply stops at the publication of the Warren Report in 1964, writing that “I cannot consider hundreds of theories that reject Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman.  To get embroiled in them would be like falling into a vast sinkhole of bullet trajectories, purported conversations, conjecture, and complex conspiracies.”³³ 

Over the past half-century, an enormous body of factual information has deepened our understanding of the assassination of President Kennedy.  It has also exposed the deficiencies and flaws of the Warren Commission.  In 1976, Richard Schweiker (R, PA), the co-chair of the Church Committee, appeared on the CBS program “Face the Nation” and observed that “the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was…to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.”  Unfortunately, Gregory has not kept up with over fifty years of evidentiary discoveries in the JFK assassination and the life of Oswald, especially those of John Armstrong, that pertain directly to the subject of Gregory’s book.

Keeping Up Appearances:  The photo above was taken at the Fort Worth bus station on the day of the Thanksgiving reunion.  According to Paul Gregory, Marina was not interested in attending the family get-together, and Oswald had to use all of his powers of persuasion to change her mind.  At the time, the Oswalds were separated.  But over a period of three days, there ensued “a barrage of phone calls” with entreaties not to allow him to be “humiliated if he had to go alone.”34  She finally agreed.  With Marina and Baby June at the event, the final compositional element was in place for the home movie memorializing the three family units of the Oswalds on Thanksgiving Day, 1962.

The principal planner of the Thanksgiving Day celebration was Robert Oswald.  He was in correspondence with the two “brothers” in setting up the event.  For Robert, “it seemed like a good time to bring them together again—for all of us to be together with our wives and children.”³⁵  In reinforcing the façade of the bogus reunion, Robert offers in his book a sentimental recap of the day:

It was a good day for all of us, happy and relaxed, the way a family holiday ought to be.  Vada and Margie and Marina were busy in the kitchen while John and Lee and I talked in the living room and played with the children.  We took some color movies that day.³⁶

Robert’s final point about the movies gets unwittingly at the true purpose of Thanksgiving Day charade.

After the Thanksgiving event of 1962, Robert never saw his younger “brother” again until November 23, 1962, when Harvey Oswald was in police custody.  Paul Gregory never saw the Oswalds again after the Thanksgiving event.  While they shared brief correspondence, John Pic and the younger man at the Thanksgiving celebration never met again.  Pic had last seen his brother Lee in New York in 1953.  But the only known occasion when John Pic, Robert Oswald, and Harvey Oswald ever met together was on Thanksgiving Day, 1962, making it stand out even more starkly as a salient moment in this unique family’s history.  Before they departed on Thanksgiving, Oswald took the time to write his name and address in John Pic’s address book, and this is the most significant documentary detail that defines the Thanksgiving reunion.  Following the letter “O,” he wrote his name with a single word:  Harvey.

CONCLUSION

A Parody of the American Nuclear Family:  In the grainy image of an old home movie, the three major players (L to R, John Pic, Harvey Oswald, and Robert Oswald, seated on floor) may all be aware on various levels that they are participating in a hoax.

There is tragi-comic irony in the date of the Oswalds’ Thanksgiving Day charade:  November 22, 1962, exactly one year before the assassination.  For the Oswalds, the event was the last time they would meet together.  It was also the only known time that John, Robert, and Harvey were ever assembled in a single venue.  And the glaring absence of the mother on this occasion speaks to the ultimate utility of the gathering:  a staged event that would serve as a photo-op.

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, a number of leaks to the press were facilitated by the FBI in order to convict Oswald posthumously in the eyes of the public.  The February 21, 1964 issue of LIFE magazine included on the cover an incriminating photograph of Oswald holding a rifle and brandishing a pistol; this was one of the highly suspicious “backyard photos.”  Other leaks included Oswald’s membership in the FPCC; his pro-Castro demonstrations and radio interviews in New Orleans; the prominent reporting of a trip to Mexico City that could never be corroborated with hard evidence; allegations that he had fired a rifle shot into the home of right-wing General Edwin Walker; suggestions of Oswald being a wife beater; and any details that would earmark him as a malcontent were fodder for the press. 

But while the majority of the disinformation painted Oswald as a violent misfit and supporter of Castro, there was another, overarching imperative that was necessary to preclude questions about Oswald’s personal identity and his family history.  Due to the film footage from the November 1962 Thanksgiving Day event and the participants’ memories, there would be convincing evidence to validate the identity of the man shot by Jack Ruby as the American-born Lee Oswald.

The film would be the ocular proof to demonstrate that Harvey Oswald was a bona fide member of the Oswald family.  After all, if any inkling that the man shot by Jack Ruby in Dallas was a creature of the CIA and not the Lee Oswald born in the United States, the film footage would show conclusively that the assassin was indeed the brother of John and Robert, celebrating with them in a festive mood on Thanksgiving. 

The proceeds from the Thanksgiving Day charade came in the form of the home movie that would serve in deceiving the public of the truth that the younger brother was in fact a Russian-speaking immigrant granted asylum in a quid pro quo arrangement.  In return for American citizenship, he would spend and ultimately sacrifice his short life on the high altar of the United States intelligence network.  The film images of Oswald sharing Thanksgiving with his brothers are only one instance of skillfully crafted propaganda employed to mislead the American public for sixty years about the true identity of Lee Harvey Oswald.

In the same month as the Thanksgiving Day event in Fort Worth, a cab driver in Augusta, Georgia named Lynn Davis Curry picked up a passenger at the corner of 8th Street and Broad.  The young man was approximately twenty-five years old and was wearing a black jacket.  The rider informed the driver that (a) he served in the Marine Corps, (b) he married a Russian woman, and (c) he was a supporter of Fidel Castro.  When the driver arrived at the destination of 5th and Watkins Street, the young man insisted that Curry write down his name:  Lee Oswald.  The driver was told he would be hearing that name again in the future.  The cab driver did indeed write down the name would recall it on November 22, 1963, which he reported to the FBI after the assassination. 

In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the game was afoot.  The Georgia cab driver’s experience and the Thanksgiving Day charade in Fort Worth in November 1962 were harbingers of the wave of Oswald impersonations that would continue for a year in the elaborate framing of an innocent man for the Crime of the Century.

NOTES

1 David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard:  Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York:  Harper, 2015), 443. 

2 Peter Janney, Mary's Mosaic--The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 235.

3. William Taubman, Khruschchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 555.

4 The home movie may be viewed at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gHVz5PYwzM

5 Robert Oswald, Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald By His Brother (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1967), 99.

6 Hector Saldana, “Oswald’s Brother was in S.A. in ’63,” San Antonio Express- News (November 21, 2013).

7 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume XI, 52. 

8 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume XI, 55-56. 

9 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume XI, 81.

10 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume XI, 65. 

11 A complete facsimile version of Jenner’s April 10, 1964 memo may be read in James Norwood, “Lee Harvey Oswald: The Legend and the Truth”: https://www.harveyandlee.net/J_Norwood/Legend.html

12 Paul R. Gregory, The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee (New York:  Diversion Books, 2022), 16.

13 Gregory, 36.

14 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume XI, 59.

15  Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Stanislav Shushkevich interviewed by Pavel Butorin: “I Never Saw Oswald Get Excited About Anything” (November 19, 2013): https://www.rferl.org/a/interview-transcript-oswald-shushkevich-belarus- soviet/25172632.html

16 Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. IX, 149.

17 Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. IX, 226. 

18 John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee (Quasar, Ltd., 2003), 399.

19 Gregory, 100.

20 Gregory, 100.

21 Gregory, 202.

22 Gregory, 207.

23 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume II, 347.

24 The first article of the directive reads as follows:  “Exploitation of aliens within the U.S. for internal security purposes shall be the responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Exploitation of aliens as sources of foreign intelligence information or for other foreign intelligence purposes shall be the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency.  This allocation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and to the Central Intelligence Agency of separate areas of alien exploitation responsibility does not preclude joint exploitation, which must be encouraged whenever feasible.” 
NSCID No. 14:  https://cryptome.org/nscids-50-55.pdf

25 NSCID No. 14, article 1:  https://cryptome.org/nscids-50-55.pdf

26 See my article “Lee Harvey Oswald:  The Legend and the Truth,” which begins with discussion of the HSCA testimony of Jim Wilcott:  https://harveyandlee.net/J_Norwood/Legend.html

27 Gregory, 59.

28 Gregory, 59.

29 Gregory, 49.

30 Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 10, 202.

31 Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 10, 200.

32 Gregory, 36.  

33  Gregory, 36.

34  Gregory, 147 

35  Robert Oswald, Lee:  A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald by His Brother (New York:  Coward-McCann, Inc., 1967), 130. 

36 Robert Oswald, 130.

James Norwood, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, taught in the humanities and performing arts for twenty-six years at the University of Minnesota.  He regularly offered a semester course on the JFK assassination.  At the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of President Kennedy, he presented a lecture series at the University of Minnesota entitled “The Assassination of President Kennedy:  An Event That Changed History.”  He is the author of “Former People”: John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and Lee Harvey Oswald at a Crossroads in History.