On Mar 1, 7:19 am, "justme1...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
" <justme1...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
> On Mar 1, 10:02 am, Raymond <Bluerhy...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > Oswald: A brother's burden
> > Through 34 years of stress, Robert Oswald has stood steadfastly by his
> > family name in the shadow of that infamous day in Dallas.
>
> > MICHAEL LEAHY
> > ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
>
> > WICHITA FALLS, Texas -- At night, when it falls dark and quiet in the
> > house and a tired Robert Oswald finds himself alone, the dream still
> > sometimes finds him.
>
> > He sees himself alongside his younger brother, Lee, in a grim room
> > with only a desk and a note pad. He hears himself ordering the smaller
> > man to sit down and write an explanation for why he killed John F.
> > Kennedy. Amazingly, Lee obeys. He sits at the desk, writing, writing,
> > writing furiously, while big brother paces.
>
> > Finally, the enigma finishes. He stands and, as Robert tells it,
> > "He's about to hand me this paper when he says, 'Just a minute.' He
> > looks at his writing on the paper, then tears it all up and throws it
> > away. And he looks at me and says, 'I don't know why.' And I think it
> > will always be that he doesn't know why. I think that's the truth of
> > it."
>
> > A third of a century after the 35th U.S. president's assassination
> > in Dallas, some things do not change. When a puzzled grandchild asks
> > Robert Oswald whether he has any brothers or sisters, the house falls
> > funereally hushed, holding its breath with the occupants. When the
> > leaves begin falling, he and his wife, Vada, monitor ever more closely
> > their visiting grandchildren's television viewing, just as they did
> > their own children's. They keep ears open for any program with a
> > reference to Oswald, or Lee, or Lee Harvey.
> > Autumn is the season for new TV do***entaries and books about
> > Robert's dead brother, the time for revamped conspiracy theories and
> > for strangers' bizarre phone calls. He braces himself for the
> > exploiters and crackpots who will want a piece of him. November is
> > hard.
>
> > As with his own children during that first November in 1963, 63-
> > year-old Robert Oswald does not talk to his grandchildren about either
> > the assassination or their great-uncle Lee. To do so, he reasons,
> > would only cause them confusion and worry. He believes his brother
> > killed President Kennedy, alone and irrationally. Just the same, it
> > hurts terribly to say so.
>
> > "You can either light a situation or defuse it, and we chose a
> > long time ago to [defuse] it," he says. "Why put all of that on
> > kids?"
>
> > If a man is not the reputed presidential assassin, but the
> > surviving brother who must live with the name, how do he and his
> > family do it when the name is Oswald?
>
> > In the aftermath of Nov. 22, 1963, Robert Oswald could have
> > avoided the question, along with many worries, merely by changing his
> > name at age 29. It was something that a variety of people, including a
> > Secret Service agent, urged him to do -- because the name Oswald
> > swiftly had become like that of John Wilkes Booth a century earlier in
> > the rage it triggered.
>
> > But while Oswalds unrelated to the family were re****tedly becoming
> > Smiths and Joneses all over Texas and elsewhere in America, Robert
> > Oswald never considered the possibility of a name change.
>
> > His name was his father's and grandfather's, after all. The Oswald
> > family tree dated back to colonial times. He'd learned as a child that
> > he was a fifth or sixth cousin of Gen. Robert E. Lee, which explained
> > why he had been named Robert Edward Lee Oswald Jr., and his little
> > brother Lee Harvey Oswald. To change his name would have amounted to a
> > betrayal of his heritage, he believed.
>
> > He snaps his fingers loudly. "I mean I didn't think about changing
> > it for that long, OK?" he says, the "OK" for emphasis.
>
> > This is the former Marine's way when he's intense, his deep blue
> > eyes fla****ng behind gl*****, and then, like a furnace burner going
> > from ON to OFF, the eyes dim and cool. His fingers rake his sparse
> > gray hair, his tensed shoulders settle back into his chair. He grins
> > companionably. By nature, he is affable, soft-spoken, gentle, a
> > chronic laugher, utterly without pretense.
>
> > When a stranger calls the house, skeptically asking whether the
> > casual-sounding man on the other end of the phone with the twang part-
> > Texan and part-Cajun could possibly be Robert Oswald, the Robert
> > Oswald, the brother of Lee Oswald, the object of the chase chuckles by
> > reflex. He says in the cheery, peppy voice of the brick salesman he
> > was, "Hi. You got him. That's me."
>
> > STEELED FOR HARD TIMES
> > Two weeks after the assassination, he made himself return to his
> > job as a sales coordinator for a brick company in Denton, 30 miles
> > outside of Dallas. He would neither run nor deny he was an Oswald.
> > Neither he nor his family was guilty of anything, he kept telling
> > those closest to him. A childhood spent in and out of orphanages had
> > prepared him for hard times and steeled his belief in, among other
> > things, his ability to get along with people and survive the worst of
> > cir***stances.
>
> > Away from the brick lot, however, uncertainty gripped him. During
> > the weekend after John F. Kennedy's murder, President Lyndon B.
> > Johnson had ordered the Secret Service to provide the Oswald family
> > around-the-clock protection at their home in Denton. A couple of weeks
> > later, believing the Oswalds to be safe, the Service bid them goodbye.
> > The family was alone.
>
> > One night, after visiting friends in Fort Worth, Oswald was
> > driving his wife and two children back home to Denton when he saw the
> > fla****ng lights of a police car in his rear-view mirror. He stepped
> > out of his vehicle to be confronted by a towering state trooper, who
> > informed him he had a defective headlight. License and registration,
> > please. The trooper inspected his license, then glanced down at him.
> > "Robert, are you Lee's brother?"
> > "Yes, sir."
>
> > He felt unmasked. So here it was. Welcome to the future. Hello to
> > his new life as leper, maybe. The big trooper kept looking him over.
> > "We're like two peas in a pot," Lee once had told Robert in his
> > mangled syntax, part of a letter from the Soviet Union in which Lee
> > recounted how he'd described their physical resemblance to his curious
> > new Russian wife, Marina.
>
> > The observation was at least half true. While Robert was slightly
> > taller at 5 feet 10 inches, and had a far more robust build than his
> > slight brother, their faces had a similarly long shape. Their blue
> > eyes took on a hooded, almost sleepy quality when sad or pensive.
> > Looking at one of them as a young man would always remind a stranger
> > of the other. The trooper scrutinized him. Robert braced himself. The
> > cop said, "Robert, I want you to know something. My wife and I have
> > prayed for your family."
>
> > In retelling the story 34 years later, Bob Oswald's voice quavers.
> > His jaw line trembles violently. He is a tough Marine veteran of
> > Korea, a man unaccustomed to displays of emotion around strangers. His
> > blue eyes bat and keep batting now, and he looks up at the ceiling a
> > little helplessly, as if stunned by this reaction from himself,
> > perhaps mortified. He excuses himself to walk out of his den and stand
> > ramrod-straight in the kitchen, drinking a glass of tap water,
> > flicking at his eyes, looking off with the mile-long stare he
> > sometimes gets.
>
> > Just as abruptly as he left it, he returns to the den and sits
> > back down.
>
> > "Copacetic," he says crisply. This means, let's go. This means he
> > is OK and can resume talking. This means, among other things, that
> > life since 1963 has been a regular exercise in keeping things
> > copacetic.
>
> > "None of us really knew what was going to happen back then," he
> > says. "I'd already thought of alternate landing places for us [to
> > live]. ... But, not long after the [assassination], we had so many
> > kind letters from strangers and friends. ... You learn so much about
> > the decency of people. We had phone calls from friends and neighbors
> > and strangers asking us if we needed anything, people saying they were
> > thinking of us. For the first time ever in my life, I felt strength
> > from other people. It was almost overwhelming."
>
> > WICHITA FALLS REFUGE
>
> > In the summer of 1964, Acme Brick Co. transferred him to Wichita
> > Falls in dusty north Texas -- not to get an Oswald out of the Denton-
> > Dallas area, believes Bob Oswald -- but simply because Wichita Falls
> > needed a sales coordinator. Regardless of the motive, the move placed
> > the family in an area that has largely respected their privacy for
> > more than three decades and let them live as ordinary people
> > unburdened by stigma.
>
> > "They'd come to the Little League games back in the early days,
> > and they were very reserved," recalls longtime friend Helen Seyler.
> > "They just quietly tried to be a part of the community. I think people
> > respected them for that. ... The nice thing is, they let you live your
> > life in these parts. People know plenty from personal experience about
> > families having black sheep sometimes. They know you can't hold that
> > against someone."
>
> > Still, if kindness predominated, snubs and cruelty lurked close.
> > "I guess it happens to us because this thing never goes away
> > completely," observes Robert Oswald's 40-year-old daughter, Cathy.
>
> > To this day, Cathy remains leery, bracing herself at parties for
> > the awkward moment or odd comment that might come her way when people
> > learn she's an Oswald. Among the members of her family, she bears the
> > most visible scars. She still can recall the moment 26 years ago at
> > Rider High School when her ninth-grade history teacher, a brash young
> > instructor who doubled as an athletic coach, unexpectedly asked her a
> > question: "Oswald, are you related to Lee Harvey Oswald?"
>
> > Her classmates wheeled. Stunned, she could not make her lips move.
> > Instinct accounted for what happened next. She picked up her books and
> > started walking hurriedly for the door.
> > The teacher turned belligerent: "Oswald, I asked you a question."
> > Just before she reached the door, the teacher said it: "Cathy
> > Oswald, I better get you out of my class before you assassinate me."
> > "It knocked the air right out of me," she remembers.
> > She sobbed in the bathroom. She became accustomed to crying out of
> > sight from crowds. During her freshman year at the local college, as a
> > nominee for queen of a big football game, she stood with her sash on a
> > stage alongside other contestants, awaiting a banal pageant question
> > about hobbies or goals like all the other girls were getting. The
> > master of ceremonies asked instead, "How does it feel to be Lee Harvey
> > Oswald's niece?"
>
> > Silence.
> > "I guess she's not going to respond," the host quipped.
> > She put down her sash, grabbed her car keys and raced home. "It
> > was the only time I saw my father that hurt and angry," she remembers,
> > but it wasn't her only hurtful moment in the autumn of 1975. A blind
> > date told her, at the end of an otherwise pleasant evening, that while
> > she was sweet and pretty, "I can't handle it that you're an Oswald."
>
> > A year earlier, two taunting boys had told her younger brother,
> > Robert, then a seventh-grader, that his uncle had killed a president.
> > He rushed home, crying uncontrollably.
>
> > "He thought they were talking about another uncle, one of my
> > brothers," Vada Oswald recalls. "He didn't really know anything about
> > an Uncle Lee. Oh, he knew he had some kind of relative named Lee, but
> > that's all. We'd never sat him down and talked to him about Lee. We
> > just thought the less said, the better -- that the more we could keep
> > him from it, the more it'd be lost."
>
> > LIMITS TO FORGETTING
> > There are limits to forgetting and losing anything, especially the
> > past. But the middling city of Wichita Falls -- population: 97,000 --
> > seems as good a spot as any to make the attempt. It looks like a good
> > place to get lost. It lies in an otherwise sparsely populated,
> > generally barren section of north Texas close to the Oklahoma border.
> > The area, called Texoma by its inhabitants, is a kind of cultural and
> > geographic no-man's land.
>
> > It is exactly 126 miles from Bob Oswald's brown-brick house here
> > on his quiet middle-class cul-de-sac to his younger brother's grave in
> > their old boyhood metropolis of Fort Worth. It's 126 miles south along
> > a big fat nothin', as some of the locals will tell you -- past the
> > water-leaching mesquite trees and the sallow Texas cattle ranches flat
> > and far as the eye can see, past the plains where a cold wind in
> > November has nothing to block it except ****vering man.
>
> > In about two hours, you leave the sameness and descend into a
> > tattered, honky-tonk section of Fort Worth, which is when you're
> > close. In the last mile and a half, you go past the tattoo bar, past
> > the body-piercing parlor and the pawnshop, past the taverns, past the
> > Peppermill Lounge and the Cowtown Inn. Then you turn into the
> > cemetery's parking lot, walk up a hill dotted by swaying oaks and sun-
> > burnt patches of grass, and you're there.
>
> > "OSWALD," the flat red gravestone reads. At 12 inches by 24
> > inches, it is the smallest type of marker in the 12 large gardens of
> > Rose Hill Cemetery, difficult to locate, intended to be inconspicuous.
> > Robert Oswald visits the spot unannounced and never with anyone except
> > his wife. "I don't have to be there to be there, if you know what I
> > mean," he says softly.
>
> > His two children, now adults, would gain nothing but pain, he
> > thinks, by seeing the small piece of granite. That would hurt him all
> > the more, because Robert carries enough pain for all of his family.
> > Over the years, he has seldom discussed his torment even with his
> > wife, unwilling to burden her. Instead, he'll sit up alone and think
> > and dream his dream of Lee.
>
> > "He handles things by himself," says his close friend, Eddie
> > Seyler, a retired budget officer at a local Air Force base. Not long
> > after the Oswald family's 1964 arrival in Wichita Falls, the two men
> > met when Seyler went to buy bricks. Helen Seyler later taught Robert
> > Jr.'s kindergarten class.
>
> > The Oswald and Seyler families became close, and the two men began
> > playing golf together in the mid-'60s. They'd ride in the same golf
> > cart, swapping news and jokes. With time, Eddie dared to broach the
> > assassination, asking Robert what he thought of some new theory being
> > advanced by skeptics of the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee
> > Harvey Oswald had acted alone.
>
> > "Eddie, it's nonsense, I think," Robert would say.
> > Seyler would press a little deeper.
> > "Eddie, I believe he was the only one involved."
>
> > The years flew by and the theories kept coming. The prosecutor in
> > New Orleans, Jim Garrison, declared he had the real killers of John F.
> > Kennedy in his sights, and a cottage industry of conspiracy books
> > followed. Lee's body was exhumed after someone convinced his widow,
> > Marina, that it was possible the body buried beneath the Oswald
> > tombstone was not Lee's but a spy's. A group of university
> > pathologists studied the corpse and concluded, "Nonsense."
>
> > At various points, Eddie Seyler wondered how his close friend was
> > holding up. "You doing OK with this?" Seyler asked him once as they
> > rolled along a golf course.
> > "Yeah, I'm handling it," Seyler recalls Oswald saying.
> > "You know, Bob, if you ever want to visit about it-- "
> > "I'm all right, Eddie. But thanks."
>
> > It was what Robert Oswald always said, more or less. Cathy Oswald
> > remembers childhood moments when she had the urge to ask her parents,
> > "Why don't you say something about it? Why don't you ask me something
> > once about what I think about it?... But I have a lot of admiration
> > for them. They wanted to protect us. ... My father had to be carrying
> > a terrible burden. I'm amazed by how he stood up to it."
>
> > Photos / Part I / Part II / Part
IIIhttp://www.ardemgaz.com/prev/oswald/index.asp
>
> > This article was published on Sunday, November 16, 1997
>
> Great article Raymond...Robert Oswald will go to his grave insisting
> that his brother was quilty and acted alone. Nothing over the past 44
> years has ever changed his opinion. If anyone knew Lee's thoughts and
> actions it was his brother.
comedy appears to be a stronger suit for you than JFK assassination
research, crone!
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