I apologize for being scattered in these posts. One would prefer a systematic development of the argument. My excuse is that I’ve only been at this for fifteen months part time. Oliver Stone read 24 books to get his mind around the subject, his research assistant read 200.
I’ve blown past 24, don’t know if I will make 200.
Norman Mailer interviewed dozens of people who knew Lee. I’ve interviewed two - Ruth Paine and Ernst Titovets.
And, we have to do better than Oliver Stone and Norman Mailer.
I often think of the effort of understanding the assassination in terms of the metaphor of blindfolded people assembled at different positions around the elephant. Each has a deep understanding of the situation at their position but a poor notion overall, and a dangerous bias towards being incomplete.
To stretch the metaphor, the Warren Commission stopped short and told us it was a three legged stool with a lone tusk, even though a bunch of people were shouting, “there’s a fourth leg over here” and others said “there’s another tusk on the grassy knoll “.
They shut all that down to protect themselves and “the country “ from the fear that a vicious rogue elephant was on the rampage.
It still is.
We are still trying to describe and name the elephant, blindfolded except for peeks at the spot immediately in front of us.
And we get ridiculed by people who mock by saying, “some say it was a tail; some say it was a trunk; obviously they are all just elephant theorists.”
My spot is in front of Michael Paine, his family, and the mystery of his connection to Lee Oswald. This focus has caused consternation to some close to me, so I will step back a bit and do a bit of blindfolded stumbling around the rest of the scene.
I do in fact have a name for the beast we are trying to describe, it is labeled “betrayal of an undercover agent as part of plot to murder the president“.
My hypothesis is that Lee was undercover, a provocateur.
Here are my reasons for arguing from the narrative of Lee’s life that he was undercover .
First an outline, then brief discussions. This could be a long post….. No, it will be an outline agenda, I will return to it from time to time in these essays.
The reasons:
His mother thought he was.
Philbrick, his boyhood idol, was.
David Ferrie groomed him.
Inversion - his own world.
There was a program in NC.
He had its phone number.
New Orleans friends Voebel/Walsh.
Marines bunkmate Delgado.
Soldier of fortune Hemming.
CI/Sig paperwork.
Jaggers Chiles Stovall assignment.
Agency for Lee.
Michael Paine security risk.
The rifle picture.
Meetings with Michael Paine.
Walker Shot.
Reily Coffee Company.
Bannister/Ferrie/Shaw.
FPCC.
ACLU.
Aliases.
His resume.
Request for Abt was the last provocation.
What was he thinking?
Patsy.
A note on recent reading. I am in the middle of Norman Mailer, “Oswald’s Tale”. I have never read him before and I take my hat off to his work at his position, he has filled in many gaps for me. And he’s done the job of reading Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s saccharine account of Lee and Marina, and made it extremely useful in as much as he weaves together multiple accounts into a continuous narrative of the marriage of Lee and Marina.
Since I am working on the hypothesis that sometime around January of 1963 someone put the squeeze on Lee and part of that squeeze was a threat to his family, I am very interested in his reading of that relationship week by week, party by party, fight by fight, in the Fall of 1962.
Still, and I haven’t gotten to the end, I believe his reading of Lee is a projection. Frustrated little man syndrome. His case is very very intimate; he reads his characters well. As someone who stabbed his wife, he knows something about domestic violence.
But as for his thesis, his fact set is missing some key pieces. He says nothing about Herbert Philbrick, the undercover outer of communists who was a boyhood idol of Lee’s.
He gives David Ferrie no role in influencing Lee politically or intellectually in his teens.
And finally, on the Mexico trip, he completely misses the fact that “the voice on the tape is not that of the man in custody “.
Case not closed.
Next week: a wrap on Norman Mailer