General Walker vs. George De Mohrenschildt (Part 2)
(Photo: George De Mohrenschildt ca. 1970)
Now let’s quote directly from the 1976 manuscript by George De Mohrenschildt (DM) which his wife Jeanne released to the US House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in March 1977, entitled, I Am a Patsy! I Am a Patsy! This document reversed much of George DM’s testimony to the Warren Commission (WC) with regard to the mental stability of Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO).
In the next several weeks, we’ll explore how George DM’s reversals might best be explained by his feelings of guilt about condemning LHO while upon the WC witness stand. Still, George DM doesn’t link the puzzle pieces together for us. Lots of work is still needed from us to pull it all together into a unified portrait.
The immediate problem is that George’s 1976 manuscript fails to fully release his guilt in a full confession. He continued to defend himself from any genuine blame for any role, intentional or not, in the tragic fate of Lee Harvey Oswald within the tragic context of the JFK Assassination, especially where it involved the resigned General Walker.
Marina Oswald told the FBI that LHO had attempted to murder Walker at his Dallas home on April 10, 1963. In the weeks to come, we will show that:
(1) George DM was a close companion of the Oswalds from about September 1, 1962, through April 13, 1963;
(2) George DM despised the resigned General Walker, whom he regarded as a fascist, a racist, and a threat to Democracy;
(3) George freely shared these views with LHO;
(4) George DM had other friends in Dallas with the same opinions; and
(5) at least one of George’s friends also shared his views with LHO, in a fairly pushy manner.
If we can establish all this, then we will argue that this tiny, liberal group in Dallas most likely played an unintentional but significant role in LHO’s decision to attempt to murder Walker in Dallas. We will argue that George was aware of this situation, and that his awareness explains much of his behavior during 1963 that would otherwise remain vague.
This perspective on the evidence will take some time to develop. George does not lay it all out – either for the WC or for the HSCA. Yet let us begin. Our goal in this thread will be to show that the theme of the resigned General Walker is the theme that most effectively links the puzzle pieces within George’s 100-page manuscript. Let’s begin by showing George’s 1976 confessions such as they are.
COMPARING GEORGE DM’S WC TESTIMONY WITH HIS 1976 MANUSCRIPT
Let’s compare seven points from George DM’s WC testimony with corresponding sentences from his 1976 manuscript.
(1) GEORGE’s WC TESTIMONY ON LHO’s ALLEGED BRUTALITY:
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. …Jeanne and I said, let’s go and see what is going on…So, we drove up there to that apartment…and indeed Marina had a black eye…She said, “He has been beating me.” …So, I said, “You cannot stand for that….And she said, “Well, I guess I should get away from him… Bouhe… called us in and asked us to take her away from him… It was because of his brutality to her…
1. Here’s what George said in his 1976 manuscript:
* I must say that I never considered Lee capable of a truly violent act. Marina annoyed him, he beat her up, but she scratched him back and hurt him worse. Lee regretted his acts, but Marina did not.
* Lee threatened to destroy her toys and clothes, but he did not do it. Look how he accepted our intervention... I am not a very violent person, but I would not stand for somebody else to take away my wife and my only child, whatever the reasons were.
(2) GEORGE’s WC TESTIMONY ON LHO’s ALLEGED IGNORANCE:
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. I did not take him seriously…He was a semi-educated hillbilly. And you cannot take such a person seriously. All his opinions were crude, you see……His mind was of a man with exceedingly poor background, who read rather advanced books, and did not even understand the words in them. …He did not understand the words – he just used them. So how can you take seriously a person like that? You just laugh at him.
…I never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important…
…A mixed-up individual, uneducated individual, without background. What government would give him any confidential work? No government would…
2. Here’s what George said in his 1976 manuscript:
· Incidentally, I never saw him interested [more] in anything else than Russian books and magazines. He said he didn’t want to forget the language – but it amazed me that he read such difficult writers like Gorki, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev – in Russian!
· I taught Russian at all levels in a large University, and I never saw such a proficiency in the best senior students who constantly listened to Russian tapes and spoke to Russian friends. As a matter of fact, [some] American-born instructors never mastered Russian spoken language as well as Lee did.
· Lee read Russian classics and discussed some at length with me, especially I remember “The Idiot” by Dostoevsky – a psychoanalytical study. He understood the pre-revolutionary life in Russia, which I did not know but heard about from my parents.
· His agnosticism was the type of Jefferson’s or Franklin’s – and it was fine. He was not an aggressive atheist who wanted to impose his point of view with violence. He must have read Toynbee and Bertrand Russell because his argumentation against organized religion was solid.
· I found Lee a most interesting and invigorating individual; he never bored me.
(3) GEORGE’s WC TESTIMONY ON LHO’s ALLEGED INSTABILITY:
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. Well…his life is an example of his instability. He switched allegiance from one country to another, and then back again; disappointed in this, disappointed in that, tried various jobs. …He hated his jobs. He switched all the time.
3. Here’s what George said in his 1976 manuscript:
* That Christmas eve both Marina and Lee were well dressed and looked very elegant. Lee…blossomed and was the hit of the party. Naturally a good conversationalist (if he wanted to be), both in English and Russian, he was outgoing and friendly. Possibly because the people were more liberal than usual, his behavior was exemplary. Serious, attentive, and polite, he answered questions intelligently... He reacted well to the surroundings.
* …It was the first time that I saw him truly shine in the crowd. He enjoyed the evening and insisted staying there to the end of the party.
* Lee said, “I do not want to tell lies. My purpose is to improve Soviet-American relations…People here should know how decent and generous Russians are. How well they treated me, a simple American ex-Marine, with kindness and generosity – I did not find anything monstrous in Soviet Russia.”
(4) GEORGE’s WC TESTIMONY ON LHO’s ALLGED KILLER MANIA:
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. The fact that we took his wife away from him, you know, was the result of his outbursts and his threats to his wife. Well, that he will beat the hell out of her. I… seem to vaguely remember that Marina said that he would…beat her sometimes so hard that he will kill her. So that is the reason we went out there and said – well, let’s save that poor woman… George Bouhe…was actually physically afraid of him. He told me, “I am scared of this man. He is a lunatic.”
4. Here’s what George said in his 1976 manuscript:
* I did not know Lee to be a dangerous man, a man who would kill like a maniac without any reason…He was rather an admirer of Kennedy’s. Lee’s connections, when we knew him, were fairly liberal, egalitarian, not communist…
* Lee Harvey Oswald might have been sometimes violent, like almost anyone amongst us…to someone who might want to hurt him and his family. But to assassinate the President he rather admired, just for the glory of it, is entirely foreign to his personality.
* I became receptive to some of Lee’s ideas, listened to them, discussed them freely and came to look at him as a friend, almost a son.
* We remember with sadness how much Lee was devoted to her [to baby June]. “He is an unusually loving and tender father,” I mused aloud while driving.
* …Lee was the same since his childhood, which made him such a beautiful and worthwhile person to me.
(5) GEORGE’s WC TESTIMONY ON LHO’s HATRED OF JFK:
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. A Utopia. I knew what he was looking for – Utopia. And that does not exist any place. He could not find it in the States, he could not find it any place…He could find it in himself, in a false image of grandeur that he built in himself. But at the time that we knew him that was not so obvious. Now you can see that, as a possible murderer of the President of the United States, he must have been unbelievably egotistical, an unbelievably egotistical person.
5. Here’s what George said in his 1976 manuscript:
* Lee actually admired President Kennedy in his own reserved way. One day we discussed with Lee Kennedy’s efforts to bring peace to the world and to end the cold war. “Great, great!” exclaimed Lee. “If he succeeds, he will be the greatest President in the history of this country.”
* Kennedy’s efforts to alleviate and to end segregation were also admired by Lee, who was sincerely and profoundly committed to a complete integration of Blacks and saw it in the future of the United States. He told me once, “I am willing to fight for racial equality and would die fighting if necessary.”
(6) GEORGE’s WC TESTIMONY ON LHO's RIFLE:
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. I did not know even that he was interested in weapons ‘til the day…I think when my wife saw his gun. I didn’t know he was interested.I didn’t know he had the gun. I didn’t know he was interested in shooting or hunting.I didn’t know he was a good shot, or never had any impression.
The controversy begins when Marina testified about what George said the night that Jeanne found LHO’s rifle in the Oswald apartment three days after the famous shooting at the resigned General Walker on April 10, 1963.
In her initial statement, Marina said that before entering their apartment, George said, “How is it possible, Lee, that you missed?” If that was true, it would prove that George knew about LHO’s rifle before Jeanne found it. It took the WC several days to finally settle the issue. Let’s look directly at George’s 1976 manuscript:
6. Here’s what George said in his 1976 manuscript:
* And, naturally, the incident with the rifle activated all this insane activity.
* Again, Jenner gave me a hint at the beginning of the interrogation. He asked me: “Didn’t you know that Oswald tried to shoot General Walker?” I answered, “Of course not. My pot-shot joke was in a dubious taste but only a joke nevertheless.”
* “But Marina said you knew about it, you said it yourself,” continued Jenner.
* We can see her statement. She quotes me: “How is it possible, Lee, that you missed?” I was supposed to have said that before entering the apartment and seeing the rifle. That would make me Lee’s co-conspirator, of course.
So, initially, at this point in her testimony, and knowing this was incorrect, George wondered whether Marina was trying to deflect blame from her own side. After all, she herself knew about the Walker shooting yet she never told the police. George also wondered if perhaps her English translator got it wrong. George didn’t need to wait long for his answer.
* However, in a few more sentences, she said, “George de Mohrenschildt didn’t know about it, he was smart enough to have guessed it.”
* Marina’s deposition again, exactly: “De Mohrenschildt did not know anything about the shooting. Simply he thought that this was something he thought Lee was likely to do. He simply made a joke and the sting of it hit the target.”
Then attorney Rankin asked Marina the same question from another angle:
* Mr. Rankin asked her: “From your knowledge, were they close enough so that your husband would make George De Mohrenschildt a confidante of anything like that?”
* Marina answered, “No matter how close he might have been to anyone, he would never have confided such thing.”
(7) GEORGE's WC TESTIMONY ON LHO SHOOTING AT WALKER
Mr. De MOHRENSCHILDT. I didn’t want him to shoot Walker! I don’t go to that extent you see…. I didn’t want him to shoot anybody! But if somebody has a gun with a telescopic lens you see, and knowing that he hates the man, it is a logical assumption you see…I definitely knew that, either from some conversations we had on General Walker, you know – this was the period of General Walker’s, you know, big showoff, you know.
The key phrases in that WC testimony with regard to the resigned General Walker are: (1) “knowing that he hates the man”; and (2) “I definitely knew that ...from some conversations we had on General Walker.”
This is something that the WC attorney should have dwelled upon – but failed to do so. The core point is that: (a) LHO hated General Walker; and (b) George DM “definitely knew that” by actual conversations between LHO and George on the specific topic of the resigned General Walker. Now let’s compare that text with the following from George’s 1976 manuscript.
7. Here’s what George said in his 1976 manuscript:
* It’s hard to say whether Lee would have confided in me…I tend to agree with Marina. Had he done so I would have certainly persuaded him not to follow such a foolish enterprise.
Why was it “hard to say” whether LHO would have confided in him? Either LHO did or he didn’t. George merely “tends to agree with Marina.” But Marina was 100% certain that LHO would never have confided anything about the Walker shooting with George. So, why would George find it “hard to say?” We find George’s choice of words to be ambiguous.
* As much as I dislike fascists, I would have been against such a violent action against such an insignificant man like General Walker.
We find it interesting that George DM would use the word, “insignificant,” when speaking of General Walker, because in that context it is obviously a word of contempt. George says he “would have been against” the attempted murder of Walker – but his language here is evidence that in 1976 George DM also “hated the man.”
* We used to call him for laughs “General Fokker”.
This is an extraordinary confession -- that during 1962-1963, George DM and LHO used to go around mocking General Walker with an obviously crude innuendo, calling him, “General Fokker.”
We must ask how this subculture of hating General Walker could have failed to contribute to LHO’s attempted assassination of General Walker on April 10, 1963 in Dallas?
How could an educated man like George DM have failed to recognize this? Furthermore, George DM let his fangs show when speaking further of the resigned General Walker, saying:
* I do not blame General Walker (we called him jokingly General Fokker) whom I never had the pleasure of meeting for calling me a dangerous radical. Here is a puzzle – what is the “pleasure of meeting” someone in the face of an insult? Is it not actually a threat?
* I stupidly laughed at a bullet which might have killed him...This joke cost me a lot of money by hurting badly many of my business contacts.
Here is another puzzle – George “stupidly” laughed at the bullet that missed Walker.
But was George sorry for that? Not at all – he was only sorry for the money that he lost when his business partners scattered.
* Marina testified also that Lee indeed considered General Walker a fascist [whom he] tried to kill as the most dangerous man for this country.
Here George DM directly aligned himself with LHO's attempt to murder General Walker at his home in Dallas, because Walker was allegedly a “fascist.”
George DM says he didn’t want LHO to shoot Walker – but it is clear that George DM despised Walker, and he joined LHO in mocking Walker, and he aligned himself with LHO’s bullet. Does this not make George DM at the very least an accessory after the fact?
In summary – George DM offers us a bit of history in his 1976 manuscript that he didn’t tell the Warren Commission in 1964. George and Lee Harvey Oswald had a common bond – they both hated the resigned General Walker from late 1962 through early 1963.
This will be our starting point. There is, of course, more.
