justme1952@[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.
>
And that proves what? Nothing. Connally went to his grave insisting that
the SBT was nonsense. So that alone disproves the SBT?
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