ustxtxb_obs_1970_07_24_50_00012-00000_000.pdf

that’s your environment We’ve sat at home and watched our earth rise over the horizon of the moon. A civilization that can accomplish that should accomplish anything. Wouldn’t you think we could keep Earth unspoiled for ourselves and future generations? We can begin by refusing to litter. UNITED STATES BREWERS ASSOCIATION, INC. 905 International Life Bldg Austin, Texas 7/17:1 Archives, which were already being utilized in books published as early as 1967. That is something of a handicap to Newman. For example, he is intrigued to find in the Exhibits mention of a notice of attempt to deliver a parcel to Oswald at the Paine home in Irving two days before the assassination. What would the contents of that parcel have revealed about Oswald’s activities and associates? Why was there no investigation into this matter? Had Newman’s research encompassed the material in the Archives, he would have learned that the matter was followed up. The parcel, on which 12c was due, was delivered in a second attempt on November 21 or 22, 1963; it contained a newspaper or magazine \(Commission Document No. That information may only serve to disappoint Newman, because it does not advance his imaginative and sometimes ingenious hypothesis. His theme is that a motive for all of Oswald’s alleged acts can be confidently deduced, although the Warren Commission blunderingly failed to 12 The Texas Observer do so. Newman is convinced that Oswald was politically motivated and that it was fanatical belief in the Cuban Revolution and zealous admiration of Castro that inspired all his actions. Because President Kennedy was an enemy of and a threat to the Castro regime, Oswald decided to remove him never mind that, as Oswald himself pointed out under interrogation, Lyndon Johnson would be an equal or greater danger to Cuba. As for General Walker, his constant agitation for the overthrow of Castro by force provoked Oswald to cold-blooded determination to eliminate lkim. It is at that point that Newman parts company with the Warren Commission. While he agrees that Oswald alone and unaided shot JFK and then Tippit, he argues that Oswald with one or more accomplices made the attempt on Walker’s life on April 10, 1963. In Newman’s best of all possible worlds, we have both a lone assassin and a conspiracy! But Newman’s hypothesis rests on the fallacious premise that JFK was killed by a lone assassin. At this point in time it should no longer be necessary to belabor the bankruptcy and fraudulence of the “single bullet” or the “lone assassin” theories. The fact that Newman constructs a case that superficially seems coherent, sophisticated, and inventive cannot overcome the fatal deficiency of his basic assumptions. Moreover, Newman himself has been such an obsessive Castro-watcher since 1959 that he creates the clear impression that he has projected onto Oswald a single-mindedness which mirrors Newman far more than the alleged assassin. NEWMAN’S FIXED idea leads him to unfair presentation of the evidence at times and occasionally to wholly insupportable, indefensible, and irrational inferences. An example of his unfairness arises when he contends that Oswald methodically tried to conceal his presence in Dallas in order to avoid his being implicated in any attack on General Walker, and that he registered under the false name “0. H. Lee” at the Beckley Street rooming house for that reason. Not until several hundred pages later does Newman acknowledge that a week earlier Oswald freely had given his real name at Mary Bledsoe’s rooming house, only to be abruptly evicted without explanation at week’s end. Mrs. Bledsoe objected to Oswald’s phone conversations in a foreign language and to his frequent use of her refrigerator, but Oswald did not know that. He may have feared that his political notoriety had made him unwelcome and decided that a pseudonym would reduce the risk of a second eviction at the Beckley Street establishment. That, in fact, is more or less what he told his wife. Newman, however, suggests that Oswald gave his real name to Mrs. Bledsoe because he intended to stay at her rooming house only a short time which is still inconsistent with his thesis as well as with the factual record. Progressing from the unfair tothe insupportable, Newman engages in the dubious self-indulgence of investing cabalistic or cryptographic meaning into letters of the alphabet and arithmetical numbers so as to prove Oswald’s alleged preoccupation with Fidel Castro and the 26th-of-July Movement. Newman cites the recurrence of the digits 2 and 6 in Oswald’s addresses \(602 Elsbeth, 1026 North two digits together do not appear in many other of Oswald’s addresses \(4905 He also argues that “D. F. Drictal” \(a fictitious name on the mail order form for from “Castro” and “Fidel”. The pseudonym, however, is not “Drictal” but Drittal, as may be seen from the published Newman mis-read the name, as one might first assume. He knows that Oswald misspelled it and that he had really intended to write “Drictal”! Personally, I do not accept Newman’s credentials as a