Reporting on the Kennedy Assassination

Willem L. Oltmans, Michael A. Rinella, David Stephenson

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700623785, 9780700623785
• eBook ISBN: 9780700623792
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In March 1964 the Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans (1925–2004) encountered Marguerite Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, at JFK International Airport. In April 1977, he found himself testifying before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). In the thirteen years between these two events, Oltmans conducted his own investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy—an undertaking that would bring him into contact with a host of individuals with prominent roles in the case, most notably George de Mohrenschildt (1911–1977), whose involvement with Oswald and whose own untimely death remain mysteries to this day.

Reporting on the Kennedy Assassination is Oltmans’s account of his investigation, published here for the first time in English. Combining personal memoir and factual reporting, the book chronicles the journalist’s interviews with figures such as Jim Garrison and Cyril Wecht, his long and complicated friendship with de Mohrenschildt and his wife, and his own whirlwind experience in the media spotlight. Most saliently, Reporting on the Kennedy Assassination offers an intimate look at Oltmans’s collaboration with de Mohrenschildt on the book that would later become Lee Harvey Oswald as I Knew Him, and at the circumstances surrounding de Mohrenschildt’s death and his possible implication in Oswald’s actions.

Systematically annotated and fact-checked, with an insightful introduction from editor Michael Rinella and a wealth of rare photographs and letters, this book provides a fascinating portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most controversial journalists even as it completes a critical chapter in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination.

Part One

Meeting Marguerite Oswald

After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, like most people I assumed in good faith that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine and dissident, was the sole perpetrator. Until fourteen weeks later, on March 8, 1964, when I met Oswald’s mother by sheer chance.¹

On that date, I was traveling from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport to Dallas to give a lecture to the Criterion Club in Wichita Falls, Texas. At the airport booking office, I saw Marguerite Oswald, the fifty-five-year-old former nurse and mother of the American president’s presumed assassin.² She arrived lugging many boxes, packages, and suitcases, and I courteously offered my assistance.³

“How do you know who I am?” she asked the obvious question.

“Surely the whole world knows who you are,” I exclaimed to her delight.

We sat in seats 7E and 7F of American Airlines flight 25.⁴ Oswald’s mother prattled on for the whole trip, even during dinner. And I must say that, contrary to those who believe she has little of interest to impart, some of her ideas left an impression on me. For example: How in the world was it possible that Oswald, suspected of murdering JFK, underwent twelve hours of questioning at police headquarters in Dallas over the course of two days without any record or report being prepared? “Yes,” Police Chief Jesse Curry later said laconically before the official investigation commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, “we did have some notes, but I don’t know what happened to them.”⁵ Chief Justice Warren and his commission asked whether the department had a tape recorder. “No,” Curry replied, “we don’t have one, but we had been planning to buy one for a long time.”⁶

Marguerite Oswald asked angrily, “Why didn’t Mr. Warren ask him this: ‘Didn’t you think someone accused of killing the president was important enough to go out and borrow a tape recorder?’” It is indeed absurd that Oswald, who repeatedly contended that he was not the gunman, was never able to speak his mind through that medium, since nightclub owner Jack Ruby sent the former marine to an early death, shooting him in a hallway at Dallas police headquarters.

Mrs. Oswald: “It’s possible that Lee murdered the president, but no one’s ever proved it. As a mother, I’ll fight for his rights, even if he’s dead now. His guilt should be proved through our existing judicial procedure. Until that’s been done, I’ll never be able to accept that he really did it. Do you find it so strange for a mother to believe her son? I visited Lee in jail together with Marina (Oswald’s Russian wife).⁷ I know him like a book. He was completely calm. He said ‘Mama, I didn’t kill anyone, not even Officer J. D. Tippit.⁸ Just don’t be upset. Everything will be alright.’ But what surprised me most,” Mrs. Oswald said, “was that he had black and blue marks on his face. He wouldn’t tell us that the police had mistreated him. He explained that he had gotten those wounds during the struggle while he was being arrested in the movie theater. He seemed so certain of his innocence that all he talked about with Marina was the kids.”

Mrs. Oswald had been in New York arranging the sale, to Esquire Magazine, of sixteen of her son’s letters that he had written from the Soviet Union back when he was a dissident. She had added comments to each letter.⁹

The next day, I visited her in Fort Worth.¹⁰ We took her new 1964-model Buick Skylark out to Arlington Lake, the site of the grave.¹¹ She recalled that for Lee’s burial the police had cleared out the small chapel and canceled the funeral service. “The only thing we were allowed to have was a small graveside ceremony. We couldn’t even find a minister willing to say a prayer.”

The simple headstone read only, “Lee Harvey Oswald, Oct. 18, 1939–Nov. 24, 1963.”

There was a cross, adorned with a few flowers, and a weeping willow had been planted. “The gardener told us the tree wouldn’t make it. But look, it has some new growth,” Oswald’s mother said. She also said proudly that 50,000 people had already visited the grave.

She still wondered exactly what her son had done while he was in the military. “He wanted to join the Marine Corps when he was sixteen. I put a stop to that. I thought he was too young. But then he did join when he was seventeen. The newspapers are reporting now that he started reading Communist literature at a young age. He even learned Russian. That may be true, but at the same time he knew the Marine Corps manual almost by heart. I joked about it and told Lee, ‘If you keep this up, you’ll end up a general.’”

Another recollection: “Still, sometimes I thought he acted strangely. After he went to the Soviet Union especially, I realized that he was actually a secret agent.”

I asked her, “A secret agent for whom?”

“For America, of course,” she replied. “I wasn’t completely sure about this until new letters had arrived for him at our address for a whole year, even though I knew absolutely nothing of his whereabouts. I finally went to Washington, D.C., to ask our authorities for information. Five weeks later I received a report that Lee was in the Soviet Union, living in Minsk, Byelorussia.¹² Only then was I informed that he had married a Russian woman. Now they’re trying to make a case against him in the president’s assassination by emphasizing that anyone who travels to the USSR can be considered a probable perpetrator.”

We talked about Lee’s youth. She denied having failed to raise her son properly. She recalled one time when she took Lee to a birthday party, and one boy from his class had not been invited. He was playing in the street pitifully. She left Lee with his classmate and went inside to the party to say that her son was not coming. She felt she had done everything she could to raise her son properly. However, there is plenty of evidence that even as a youth Lee had dealings with probation officers and psychological problems.

As Marguerite Oswald and I were traveling from New York to Texas on the American Airlines plane, Jack Ruby, the owner of the Carousel, a Dallas strip joint, was still being questioned about his murder of Oswald. “Ruby will come clean sooner or later,” Oswald’s mother said. “I don’t want to see him dead. Revenge is the least of my desires. In fact, it wouldn’t help me much if Ruby were to die as well. I need him alive.”

When we landed at Love Field in Dallas at dusk, Mrs. Oswald and I were filmed as we walked down the ramp. Dozens of journalists and photographers were on hand. She patiently spoke to each of them.¹³

Since then, I have stayed in contact with her. I invited her to come to New York, partly for an interview to be broadcast on Dutch NOS TV.¹⁴ On March 25, 1964, I gave her a tour of the United Nations building, to the annoyance of some journalists who wrote unkind reports about it.¹⁵ Still, it was not until 1967 that I would really become interested in the unsolved...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Afterword
• Appendix A: Executive Session, House Select Committee on Assassinations, April 1, 1977
• Appendix B: Letters and Other Documents
• About the Translator
• About the Editor
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover