A HEARSE PASSED BY ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON

On October 5, the Dallas Times Herald had one of the most unusual pictures ever to appear on its front page. A hearse is moving down Commerce St. through Dealy Plaza, alongside the book depository building, where, back in 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That in itself would not be so unusual since such vehicles must make their way down that busy street most every day, but this hearse contained the body of Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of the President. And this is 1981, eighteen years after Lee Harvey Oswald was laid to rest in a Ft. Worth cemetery!

You have probably read news reports of the legal battle that raged for three years between Marina Oswald Porter, Oswald’s widow, and Robert Oswald, his brother, over the exhumation of the body. An enterprising British author, Michael H. B. Eddowes, concocted the theory that a Russian spy murdered the President and that it was he, not Oswald, that was buried in Ft. Worth. He pressed his case for a decade or so, and’ finally gained Marina’s support in asking the court for permission to open the grave. Oswald’s brother got a restraining order, but in the end failed to have his way, the court ruling that he had no claim in the case.

A team of pathologists settled once for all that the one buried in Rose Hill cemetery was indeed Lee Harvey Oswald. The doctors knew that Oswald had had a mastoidectomy when he was 6, which left a hole in an ear. They also had his dental records. After four hours of meticulous analysis they announced their findings to Marina and Mr. Eddowes, who spent $10,000 to have it done, and then to the waiting world. Ouida and I were among the ones waiting. I had told her that it would be the story of the decade if the body turned out to be that of a Russian spy. I was willing to take the word of the reporters who served as pallbearers back in 1963, all of whom saw the body and testified that it was Oswald in the casket, whom they had seen alive. But Marina and Eddowes had to be convinced. Marina told reporters that she hoped that the nightmare she had lived for 18 years was over. Eddowes, with straight face, told the media that the result of the autopsy surprised him.

As I read the news items I felt compassion for Robert Oswald. He worked here in Denton when this tragedy struck his life, and he is apparently a decent man. He said he fought the exhumation for the sake of his living family. It was no doubt painful to him to read the detailed description of how the pathologists went about their work, as I did, which told of how the skeletal head was removed and placed on a separate table where it was x-rayed many times, along with all other sorts of things. When he lost his case, he requested an on-site examination, but Marina wanted a complete autopsy. Finally, he asked that it not be on a Sunday, for religious reasons. But Marina chose Sunday so that publicity would be at a minimum. When the bulldozer pulled up to his brother’s grave before dawn on Sunday, October 4, Robert Oswald wept.

There was a gaping hole at Rose Hill cemetery for most of that Sunday. Gawkers and the curious were kept away during the disinterment, but during the day they snapped pictures and bore pebbles away as souvenirs. One man crawled into the open grave and had his picture made. Three circles of police provided security for the pathologists as they did their work. It all struck me as something right out of a weirdo detective novel, and not exactly complimentary of the human race.

Then there was that picture on the front page of a metroplex daily. I cannot but admire the reporter for his enterprise. He perched himself and waited for the body of Lee Harvey Oswald, duly autopsied, to take the same route the President took back on Nov. 22, 1963. He snapped the picture when the hearse was in the exact spot of the presidential limousine when the President was shot. The book depository building in the background neatly framed the picture. There was the window, clearly discernible, from which the assassin did his ugly deed.

Ah, if I were but a poet --- after the order Edgar Allen Poe!

I can only quote the Preacher: “I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.”

The Oswald saga vexes my spirit more than most citizens in these parts, for a friend of mine at Bishop College, where we both taught years ago, was one of Oswald’s best friends. This professor, a Russian who taught Russian, was a kind of godfather to the Russian immigrants in Dallas, including Oswald and his Russian wife. Once when I was in this professor’s home, he and his wife, also Russian, told me their story. I was surprised to learn that he and Lee Harvey philosophized together, reading Tolstoy and Dostoevski in the original Russian. I was led to remark, “He doesn’t sound like the pipsqueak the papers make him out to be.” The he compared him to me! “Dr. Garrett, he was a lot like yourself --- philosophical, high-minded, concerned for others.” I asked him if Lee Harvey had ever mentioned John F. Kennedy to him. Only once, he answered, and that was when Kennedy was elected. “Maybe we have a President now that will do something for the poor black people,” Oswald told him.

Puzzled by this report from a friend, a reputable Ph.D. that I trusted, I asked how such a person as he had described could become an assassin. He was fully confident that Oswald was not Kennedy’s assassin, that he had been framed, just as he said he had before he himself was killed, saying, “I am a patsy,” which is a matter of record. My friend assured me that Oswald was a man of causes, and that if a cause had led him to kill Kennedy, he would have affirmed it, proclaiming his cause.

Knowing that his testimony was in the Warren Commission report and that he had testified in Washington to the FBI, I asked him if he had told the FBI all these things. He had. Then he and his wife laid this on me: the FBI knows as well as we know that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill the President.

For a time I sat in on my friend’s class in Russian, wanting a taste of the language. I came to know him as a kindly, reasonable, committed professor. One day after class he introduced me to a friend who had come to visit him, a highly intelligent international TV producer, who also had an amazing storehouse of information about the Warren Report and the Kennedy assassination. While the prof went about his business, this gentleman spent an hour explaining to me how duped the American people were by the Warren Report.

All this intrigue, national and international, preserved my curiosity even after I left Bishop College. The last time I called my friend he exulted in his usual manner, “Ah, Dr. Garrett! Some of your former students and I were talking about you this very day!” Then I heard that he was to be interviewed again by the new committee appointed to reinvestigate the assassination. But the night before he was to appear before the committee he was found dead in his room. They said my friend, Dr. George de Mohrenschildt, died at his own hands. I am not so sure.

I recall how he shared with me his convictions that Kennedy died from a Cuban conspiracy that made use of Lee Harvey Oswald, who had spent time in Cuba. The Cubans killed him because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in which, as they saw it, the President betrayed them. Among his last words to me were, “The Cubans are good Catholics. One day some of them will confess it.”

This was the story that came to mind once more when I saw the picture of the assassination site on the front page of the Dallas paper. Oswald was back at Dealy Plaza, after 18 years in the grave. And on the front page again. A story that is not likely to die, even if he and the President did. It is macabre.

It illustrates how illusive truth is and how vulnerable man is. One can see why the Preacher would look at our kind of a world and conclude: “All is vanity and vexation of spirit.”

But to those of us who believe it is not all that crucial to know the mysteries of evil or the secrets that lie buried in degenerate hearts. God knows and He is in control. And Jesus lives and he is Lord! Nothing else really matters that much, in spite of our curiosity.

(I will add parenthetically just for the record that I have no theory about the assassination and have no interest in postulating one. This is a story that I rarely tell, and when I do I am told that I should turn it over to a national publication, but what is better than sharing it with the readers of Restoration Review? If we could just sip some Russian wine along with it to give it the proper flavor!) --- the Editor

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.  ---Jean Paul Richter

He had lived long enough to know that it is unwise to wish everything explained.  --- Sir Thomas Coningsby