Call him Lee, Lee Oswald.
Lee Oswald wanted to do right by his country. As a boy he hero-worshipped his older brothers in the military as well as Herbert Philbrick, an advertising executive who went undercover and penetrated the Communist Party of America for the FBI. Lee joined the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans as a teenager and saved scarce pennies for his CAP uniform . He joined the US Marines as soon as he could by faking his age.
He volunteered for risky undercover roles in military intelligence and agreed to a mission to the Soviet Union as a fake defector trolling U-2 spy plane secrets on a counterintelligence mission.
Returned to the US he resumed his undercover role as an outer of leftists by trolling a fake Marxist persona. One of his targets was the scion of an old Boston family, Michael Paine.
His big chance came when he took on a role to penetrate Castro’s Cuba as part of a false flag provocation. Little did he know that the false flag was fake and he had been set up, betrayed by agents of the agencies he was working for.
He died reviled as an assassin, but he managed to save his wife and young children.
“Lee was no saint”, in the words of his Russian wife Marina. He was a familiar of the street life of New Orleans. He hung out with people who serviced all genders, with the mob, and with Cuban counterrevolutionaries. But he knew his way around all that. What he could not get around were the machinations of his controller in military intelligence, Commander Bash, who maneuvered Lee into an unwanted leading role in the assassination of the president.
Note: The above is a little synopsis of the counter legend of Lee Oswald, on which the White Gloves Legend is based. This synthesis came out of a conversation with producer Mark Kiefer of https://markkiefercreative.com/ and a writing exercise for Scott Myers’ online course in screenwriting, Write a Worthy Nemesis. Thanks to both for helping me to clarify.
Clearly it is a synthesis of work that has been done by so many over the last sixty plus years. It does not aim to be original; it aims to be true. All thoughts on what is the truer truth are welcome.
The only sheer fabrication here is the persona of Commander Bash, who definitely has a real life analogue in Colonel Pash, nemesis of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Commander Bash is a dark personification of the forces we fear and do not understand behind the assassination of our President.
As a trained historian of medieval European history, I feel I have something to contribute to the task of bringing justice for JFK by wading through histories and chronicles that depend on an obscured, suppressed and falsified record. Speaking of medieval history, here is a photograph from my recent visit to Runnymede, site of the signing of the Magna Carta. A cornerstone of the evolution of liberal democracy and of progress towards a society that honors freedom and truth.
We are not there yet.
Photograph by Robert Manz