Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

This concerns the claims of Judyth Vary Baker.

I know that some of the people I am associated with are enthusiastic supporters of hers. I am not. I am skeptical of some of Judyth's claims. For instance, I know that she has claimed that Lee (who was Harvey, according to John Armstrong) was assigned to be an assassin, to be up on the 6th floor shooting at Kennedy, but he told her he intended instead to fire a warning shot for Kennedy or deliberately miss him. 

Obviously, we know that didn’t happen because we can see Oswald (Harvey) standing in the doorway during the shooting. (Note that by the summer of '63 when JVB knew him, Oswald was indeed going by "Lee" but previously he, the Russian-speaking Oswald who was married to Marina, went by "Harvey.")

But, the claim itself bothers me a lot because it maligns Oswald.  If Oswald (Harvey) knew that the murder of JFK was about to happen, and the only thing he did for Kennedy, to help him, was to not shoot at him, it wasn't much. And it wasn't enough. Any decent person would have done more. Any decent person would have taken it to the limit. He would have gone to the authorities- whichever authorities he thought he could trust. And if that didn't work, he'd have taken it to the street. He'd have stood out in the middle of Elm Street and made a scene, waving his arms and yelling, "Stop!” He'd have pointed to wherever he knew shooters were perched and yelled, "Killers!"  In this case, either you do everything you can to stop the slaughter OR you've got blood on your hands. 

I don’t believe "Harvey" Oswald (the Oswald we know) had blood on his hands, but "Lee" Oswald had been working undercover for two years setting Harvey up as the patsy. 

Moreover, the whole idea that anybody, least of all the CIA, would choose Harvey to be a shooter is preposterous. He wasn’t an assassin; he wasn’t even a marksman. He was just a guy who did the minimal amount of shooting required by the Marines. He was never in combat. He practically flunked his last shooting test. And that was 5 years before, and he had done very little shooting since. The kind of shooting that was involved from the 6th floor he had never done in his life- not even once- or anything close to it. 

Do you understand that these people could afford to get the best? To get real pros? Professional killers? They weren’t going to put a gun in Harvey Oswald’s hands and have him start shooting in the direction of Jackie and Nellie and other people they didn’t want dead.  

So, that claim of Judyth’s bothers me a lot. But recently, Judyth Baker wrote a piece denouncing the claims of John Armstrong, whom I support. And one of the things she attacked was the whole idea that the Oswald she knew could speak Russian. She made it sound like he really couldn't speak it, and at the time she knew him, he was using flash cards to learn it.

What? That is insane! Harvey lived in Russia for three years. John Armstrong provides ample evidence that he grew up speaking Russian in a Russian-speaking household. Harvey was married to a Russian woman who, at the time, could speak very little English, practically none, and with whom he communicated exclusively in Russian. And when she, Marina, first met him at a dance in Minsk, he spoke Russian so well that she thought he was a native Russian speaker, perhaps from Lithuania, she thought. It never occurred to her that he was an American- he was that fluent in Russian. Harvey was known to speak, read, and write in Russian. As early as 1958 and 1959, he was speaking and reading Russian so well that his Marine buddies in California gave him the nickname "Oswaldavitch".  The idea that he was still at the flash card level in his Russian by the summer of 1963 is preposterous. It is totally absurd.    

Did Judyth Baker have a romance with Harvey (whom she knew as Lee)? I don't claim to know, but in order for me to believe it, I would have to have some independent verification, such as a photograph of the two of them together in a romantic way. Supposedly, there is a woman, Anna Lewis, who reported going on a "double date" with Oswald and Baker in New Orleans. Maybe if I saw her interview I would be impressed; then again, maybe I wouldn’t.    

And it raises another question which I think is important although highly personal: What was the true status of the Oswald marriage at the time of his death? Obviously, Harvey and Marina weren't living together. But, was it mostly because of his job situation or because of marital strife?  My understanding is that the night before the assassination, the Thursday, when Harvey spent the night at the Paine house in Irving that he slept with Marina. Talk all you want about marital strife, but if a couple is still sleeping together, they’re together.  There's no mention of him sleeping on the couch, is there? 

Then there is Marina's first public interview after the assassination, which you can see here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRiOZlTTswQ

In it, she said two things which struck me. First, she said repeatedly that she loved Lee. (Note: that was the only name that Marina ever knew her husband as) And second, she said she was visiting his grave twice a week. Twice a week? I wouldn't expect the people who love me to visit my grave twice a year- if at all- never mind twice a week. My impression, from that and other things, is that the Oswalds were still a married couple and still loved each other.   

Was Harvey really going to abandon his wife and kids to run off with Judyth Vary Baker? Reportedly, after being arrested and charged with murder, he told Lee's brother Robert that his daughter June needed new shoes. I find it hard to believe he would even consider such a thing. 

According to Judyth,  Harvey's famous trip to Mexico City was for the purpose of delivering a poison “cocktail” to an agent in the plot to murder Castro.

But, neither Oswald ever went to Mexico, and Harvey said so himself. You can read it here:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/LHO.html

He said he never went to Mexico, except to go to Tijuana when he was stationed near there in the Marines.  

(If you lack the time, patience and funds to read Armstrong's classic 1,000-page epic, Harvey and Lee, I strongly recommend you read senior member Pat Shannan's synopsis of the same work titled The JFK Assassination and the Uncensored Story of the Two Oswalds. You will never look at the news media propaganda stories in the same way again.)

www.patshannan.us

Mark Lane, with whom I have had correspondence, is a senior member of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, and he states, emphatically, that Oswald did NOT go to Mexico. He also says that he was told- face to face- by David Atlee Phillips that Oswald did not go to Mexico and that the CIA knows full-well that he did not go to Mexico. So, I don’t believe that claim of Judyth’s either.

There’s more I could say, but I will only add that I wish Judyth well. I know she’s had a hard life.  But, she is not a member of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, and she is not going to be- as long as I have any say. 

At the OIC conference in Santa Barbara, Jim Fetzer may be doing a short interview of Judyth by Skype. But if it happens, it will be in the afternoon, not the evening, and only for half an hour. It’s a compromise we worked out. 

Realize that, except for lone-nutters who are devotees of the Warren Report, students of the JFK assassination can agree about some things and disagree about others.  In the Oswald Innocence Campaign, the one thing that we all agree on is that Lee Harvey Oswald was standing in the doorway during the shooting and can be seen in the Altgens photo and the Wiegman film. But, we have 26 senior members now, and I can’t tell you that we all agree on everything else.