Indisputable Evidence for Harvey & Lee

[Michael T. Griffith]

Quote from: John Tonkovich on July 04, 2020, 04:02:50 PM
. . . these garbage conspiracy theories - Harvey and Lee, Lifton, etc. - make the whole research community look like a bunch of tinfoil hat loons.

Actually, Lifton's theory has received powerful confirmation from ARRB-released documents and from other disclosures and research over the last decade. You might want to read the five-volume work Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, written by Doug Horne, who was the ARRB's chief analyst of military records.

As for the Harvey and Lee theory, I think the problem with it is not that there is no evidence for it (there is plenty) but that it sounds so wild and exotic and has some profoundly disturbing implications. I must admit that for a very long time, I ignored the theory because it seemed so fantastic, like something out of an overly imaginative spy novel. But, like it or not, there is solid evidence for the theory.

The Oswald autopsy, far from debunking the two Oswalds theory, actually constitutes evidence for the theory. Investigative journalist Dick Russell discusses the autopsy in chapter 18 of his book On the Trail of the JFK Assassins (2008).

When journalist and author Joe Patoski decided to write an article about the two Oswalds theory for Texas Monthly, he did so only because he thought the theory was ludicrous and crazy. But, after spending some time looking at the evidence, he came away stunned by some of it and concluded that there might be something to it. Patoski was impressed by two pieces of evidence: Hoover's 1960 memo about someone possibly using Oswald's birth certificate and the account of Frank Kudlaty that Oswald attended a junior high school in Fort Worth and that he handed over Oswald's school records to the FBI. Patoski tracked Kudlaty, and Kudlaty confirmed the account:

There is in fact a memo from J. Edgar Hoover written in 1960 saying “there is a possibility that an impostor is using Oswald’s birth certificate.” But an even more intriguing moment occurred for me when Armstrong began talking about Frank Kudlaty. Kudlaty was the vice principal at Stripling Junior High in Fort Worth, where I was a student on November 22, 1963. Kudlaty told Armstrong of handing over Oswald’s school records to two agents from the FBI the day after the assassination. According to the Warren Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald attended junior high schools in New York and New Orleans but not in Fort Worth. The FBI denies the existence of the Stripling records.

I tracked down Kudlaty in Waco, where he now lives in retirement after a lengthy career as a school administrator in several Texas cities. He related the incident that turned out to be his brush with infamy. The day after the assassination, Mr. Wylie, Stripling’s principal, asked him to pull Oswald’s records and hand them over to FBI agents. Kudlaty recalled those events and briefly examined the records before handing them over. “I do recall the grades were not good,” he told me. That has bothered him ever since. “A person of that mind could teach himself Russian and pass himself as Russian? I don’t think so,” Kudlaty said.

The Hoover memo and that short conversation with Kudlaty put more doubt in my mind than the two days I spent with Armstrong and his blizzard of documents. Is there a good explanation for what happened to those records? Was Kudlaty wrong? And what was Hoover talking about in that memo, and what’s the story behind it? I don’t know the answers and I’m not going to devote my life to finding out. But here was one undeniable, strange, and tantalizing fact in the memo and the personal testimony of a man I knew and respected, and that almost had me going. It was enough to let me understand why a man like Armstrong has fallen under the spell of the Two Oswalds. (https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/the-two-oswalds/)