Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 400: JFK / Lee Harvey Oswald Part I - Lone Nut

Episode Date: February 15, 2020

On this, our 400th episode, we finally begin a deep dive into the vast lore surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, starting with the life of one of the central characters in the story, Lee Harvey Oswald. "Chill" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)License: CC BY (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Episode 400, boys. Wow. 400.

400. That's 600, maybe 650 hours of just last podcast on the left. Good Lord. Think about that. Side stories. We've been doing that for almost two years now. Good times. It's like another 100 hours.

We have almost 800 hours of content. Jesus Christ. Well, I'm not sure if that's good for the world or not, but we're still doing it. 800. And you know what it took? It took 850 hours of last podcast and left to me for me to finally hone my abilities to get myself so tight, so ready to perform, so on the ball, so clever that I'll deliver the first joke of the episode 400, which is, uh, it's a shame that JFK got those neckties

from Target. Come on, guys. You know what? We're actually done. We're done with the series before. I haven't even introduced what show this is yet. Welcome to the last podcast of the leftover. I am Ben Kissel staring at the beautiful face of Marcus Barks.

It's me, and then we've got just a showman extraordinaire, Henry Zabrowski. One of the sharpest comic minds of the 21st century. Sadly, that's true. Fart? You failed it. I feel really good today. I feel really tight. I am the Bob Hope of this chair.

Indeed you are. And much like Bob Hope, the troops love you. Yeah. All right. Well, why did Henry bring up JFK, episode 400? You probably guessed it at this point. We've got a mind blowing series for you ahead. We are talking JFK.

It's finally time. It's finally time. It's time. And I actually, you know. It's time. I've seen his brains explode so much in the last like 10 days. I do. I said I had a theory before the show started and Marcus said, yeah, get it out quick, Kissel.

So I don't, after you guys hear this, I don't think we even need to do this series anymore. Okay. Who assassinated JFK? It was suicide. You think about it. You think about it. JFK, he was done being president. The Russians hated him.

The Italian mob wanted him dead. His wife hated him because Jackie was just staring at him and being like, you're having sex with all of these celebrities. His back hurt. JFK, he had a gun in his hand. Boom, boom, boom. And JFK set up Lee Harvey Oswald to take the fall so that Lee Harvey Oswald could take the fall so JFK didn't look like someone who would commit suicide in the eyes of the public.

The only way this, that would be more perfect is if we were sponsored by Ziploc and you could just hear the sound of it zip and we're like, that's it. Case closed, air tight. It was suicide. I thought you were going for the direction that JFK was asking for it, driving around to convertible. Strangely enough, I did do some research on the car, Marcus. And do you know that car?

They just brought it in. They gave it a new paint job. They put the top on it immediately, then Nixon rode around in it, LBJ rode around in it, it lasted until Carter. And I'm like, can't you just get a new car? But I have no idea why I did research on the car, what I did. Now the assassination of JFK is, when you really get down to it, the tale of two stories. The first is the story of a crime, plain and simple, quite possibly the most famous crime

of the 20th century. On November 22nd, 1963, the president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was murdered by an assassin's bullet while riding in the back seat of an open top limousine as his motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Now as far as what everyone can agree upon when it comes to November 22nd, 1963, that statement of facts is pretty much where it stops. Damn. Yeah.

The car had four wheels and we're done agreeing. I know that there was two shadow wheels and the other person who knew that was the man himself, Lee Oswald. They say the term Lee Oswald is said, I think approximately nine million times in every single documentary I've seen. They never say Harvey. Huh. As far as where the shots came from, who pulled the trigger, what the motivations were, or

even how many shots were fired, it's all up for heavy debate. And that brings us to the second story of the JFK assassination, the creation of modern conspiracy thought born from a muddled explanation of the event from the United States government. Much of this muddling has to do with the Warren Commission, which was supposed to be the government's end all be all when it came to providing a full explanation to the public as far as means, motive and opportunity went. And you're telling me the government made it more confusing when they released all of their findings?

It did sort of feel like the equivalent of putting a banana peel in a paper bag and just farting on top of it and just giving it to America being like, we did it. We did it. Unfortunately though, the Warren Commission was full of glaring omissions and useless material, but perhaps its most glaring flaw is that the conclusions it reached are exceedingly unsatisfying. As such, it created the largest conspiracy vacuum of all time. So what if we just have Stephen King write the ending to our report?

You know, don't really tie up all the loose ends. Actually, I've got a great idea. What we'll do is, because there's one woman on the Warren Commission, right? And we have her be at the center of this kind of circle of big men. And it's sewer system, they being chased by a clown, right? The clown is Lee Arby. I say all these senators take term real on that secretary and we call it a day. Oh, so Mr. King, you want a gang bang to end the Warren report?

Is that right? When you repeat it back, it doesn't sound as good. Well, to put it into perspective, over 2,000 books have been written about the JFK assassination, blaming everyone from the CIA to the Italian mafia to rogue Cuban exiles, and in some cases, all three and more at the same time. There is no really way. I actually don't know if you can put it into words just how complicated the JFK assassination conspiracy gets and just how much material has been devoted to it in the last, how many years been?

So it's like in over 60 years, right? Is it 60 years? It's like 50. Oh. But it's close to 60 years. And the way that Marcus described it too, which kind of sticks with me, is that this is an example of name salad. Every one of these conspiracies, as we'll get to later in our series,

you'll see that it's name after name after place and date. It is kind of where you see the meme of Charlie Day, the idea, the memeification of a conspiracy theorist with the whiteboard and all the yarn, connecting all the people to the shit. This is the egg that all that kind of came out of, and it makes it exceedingly difficult to read anything about it. Cue up Avril Lavigne's complicated, because that's what this is about to get. Now we're going to cover as many of these conspiracies as we can in the latter half of our series.

And while it's impossible to cover every single one, we're certainly going to do our best to talk about everyone's favorite theories. Now the government line is that John F. Kennedy was murdered by a radical leftist named Lee Harvey Oswald, often referred to as a low-nut by the news media writers and other various commentators. That's how everyone describes Oswald as low-nut. Low-nut. Sounds like the name of a masturbation magazine. How sad that is. It's just a mirror.

It's a reflective cover low-nut magazine where you just jerk off looking at yourself frowning. Yeah, just those horrible self-mirrors they used to put on the back of cereal boxes where you could see yourself eat twic or eat tricks for some reason. Now I don't know about Ben, but there is a consensus here, at least between Henry and myself, that Lee Harvey Oswald is at least partially responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy. And we will eventually reveal what theory we think is most plausible. He got an assist. Okay.

But before we get to that point, we're going to treat these episodes as we treated our Joseph Mengele series. The first three parts will be a story of crime, and ultimately, a criminal named Lee Harvey Oswald. See, Oswald has been portrayed over the years as everything from a CIA patsy to a CIA— I'm a patsy! I'm a patsy! The best line in the world, and then I was re-watching a lot of the footage, obviously, of him being taken from the interrogation room out parade in front of the reporters. And when he says I'm a patsy, it's still deep inside, and I go, he said it. Look, he said it.

My favorite thing about that footage is the poor camera of people, the old men, who are just like... So he's moving again. Okay. Yeah, he's been portrayed as everything from a CIA patsy to a CIA secret agent to a KGB operative working for the Russians from the very start. But from what we can surmise, Lee Harvey Oswald was nothing more than an antisocial misanthrope, or, to put it inelegantly, a chronic dickhead. Yep, he had asshole items. Yeah, that's a strange doctor's appointment right there.

Concerning Oswald's supposed ties to the intelligence community, I think this one quote from one of his few friends sums it up. He said, quote, I never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important. And that's where I got you. Every time. You just think I might be too stupid, but actually, I'm just stupid enough. Thank you so much for defending me, friend, but also that was really me. Famously after Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder of the president, he shouted on camera to reporters that he was nothing more than a patsy. I'm a patsy. I'm a patsy. And many conspiracy theorists took him at his word when he said this.

What this statement actually revealed, though, was something much simpler. This was the wailing of a pitiful soul who spent his entire life blaming others for his own numerous failings and failures. But when it comes down to Lee Harvey Oswald's story, it's actually the story of three major crimes. Two murders in one very rarely reported assassination attempt that occurred months before November 22, 1963. There was an interesting quote from the devil's chessboard that was written by David Talbot that called Lee Harvey Oswald. I thought it was a very interesting line. Lee Harvey Oswald was one of those bright, lost, fatherless boys whom society finds inventive ways of abusing. So we're not going to hire you here at the bumper sticker company.

It just doesn't fit. No, no, okay. Well, listen to another one of my ideas. Listen to another one. Grief is the wail of my love's last sleep. What about something like ass, grass, or gas? No one rides for free. That's the kind of bumper sticker. Here's one I was saving for the end. How about just go Lakers? Well, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Lee Harvey Oswald is not how unique he is, but how similar his pathologies, beliefs, and demeanor is to so many other murderers we've covered over the years on this show.

Because Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't just a murderer. He was also a domestic abuser, a fucking horrible one at that. Like he was a bad fucking dude. I guess that upon redipping into the world of Lee Harvey Oswald, because honestly, I haven't read a lot about this shit since high school. This is the story of the JFK assassination, which I think is very common for many of our listeners. That's the story that got me into weirdo thought. I was 15. I remember being drawn to the JFK assassination conspiracy books in the occult section, immediately reading about Lee Harvey Oswald, and as you reread him,

because I remember, in high school, I was just like, fucking CIA's, looking the goddess by their puppet strings, man. And I'm still halfway there. So you were like a nerd macho man Randy Savage in high school? I think in high school you were like, yeah, I think in CIA. Snap and do an apple juice. I was reading now about Lee Harvey Oswald. So first, when I remember first reading about him,

he's this sort of pitiful idiot that got pulled into deep to all these machinations of the CIA. And then you really read the details of Lee Harvey Oswald's life, and he was an incredibly violent man and a terrorist family from when he was a little kid to an adult. Put simply, he was a pathetic, entitled, self-centered, contrarian jackass with a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur that led him down a road of crime that eventually ended in murder. Are we talking about Bono? Now our main source for the Lee Harvey Oswald section of the story is case closed by Gerald Posner,

who was coincidentally the same dude who wrote the main source we used for our Mengele series. Fantastic writer, great researcher. And this dude, this is like our legit good boy source. Yes. Like case closed is the, this is the one that's like, yes, it has all the facts and all the correct time lines. Again, it's the no fun book that we will come to and we will try to parse out the truth later on, though. It's not. No fun? I find it amazingly interesting and fun.

No, I do too. I, you know, because we're, shh, Marcus, we're nerds. Yeah, don't tell anyone. It's not until we get to my boy, my boy Jack Ruby, when things start getting really complicated, we start reading some books that they took out of print. I feel horrible for this guy. Posner is his name. Gerald Posner, yeah. Gerald Posner, he wrote the book and he's like, case closed. Now with this, everyone will know the truth.

And then all of a sudden someone's like, I heard Ben Kissel said it was suicide. It's like, okay, well, I guess the case has been real. I spent years telling everyone that he was just about to get a raise as president. He never would have committed suicide, but it is really sad. The, the opening chapter to the newly revamped, he had, he did a re-release of case closed and the whole beginning prologue is him just being like, this case has ruined my life. People have hunted me at my home. People have surrounded my family at the mall yelling, you don't know the truth. You don't know the truth.

And it's like, man, it was fucking 60 years ago. Yeah, my God. But you know, that is an interesting point though. That is how powerful this is. 60 years ago when the emotions are still so fresh and people are still so passionate about it, there's really nothing in history where people will still start screaming after four cooers at a bar about JFK as if it was 1970. I'm going to put the Holocaust up there.

That's a big one. And that one time that wide receiver from the giants caught the ball on his helmet. Those are two big parts of history that people are very emotional. Absolutely. Now admittedly, there are a few inaccuracies in Posner's book, but those inaccuracies are the sorts of mistakes made in any historical account. As I have yet to read a history book that doesn't get at least a few details wrong. You know, like the books that we read on the Donner Party, on Bonnie and Clyde, on Jonestown, on Rasputin,

all of them have contradictions and all of them have little mistakes because it's impossible to get everything right. And also, we don't know exactly what happened in every single fucking situation. I don't even know if there is objective reality, Marcus. Let's start there. Let's start there. But when it comes to something as contentious as the JFK assassination, some people use small mistakes to either discredit the entire thesis

or use those mistakes to claim further conspiracy with the powers that be, particularly the CIA, misinformation versus disinformation. And that's one of the interesting things about the JFK assassination. Having the opinion that there was not a gigantic conspiracy within the government to murder the president is actually somewhat taboo. But I think this de facto assumption hides something important. And it's something that the CIA wants hidden. You see, the CIA likes the world to think that they are an omniscient,

legally clever, all-encompassing, infallible beast with tentacles that can and do reaching control every corner of this earth. Well, because it benefits them and us in a way, right? Even though I do not agree with the CIA, them having a position of untold, mysterious power sort of works from their perspective as a way to deter people working against America, right? Thinking that, oh, we can't go against the CIA. They'll kill their own fucking president to change shit.

And it's like, I just looked up, I just typed in the words, what are the CIA doing right now in the Google? And they started to Instagram, but they are killing a bunch of people in Afghanistan, apparently. Of course. But the so-called deep state did not exist in the 60s any more than it exists today. Although it is interesting that many people who argue for the deep state's involvement in the Kennedy assassination will completely dismiss the claim that it still exists as ridiculous. Now, I do believe that there was a CIA cover-up when it comes to Lee Harvey Oswald,

but I don't think that it was a cover-up to hide their involvement. Rather, it was a cover-up to hide their lack of involvement. Fucking to eat that piece of shit. Think about that. Roll that around your fucking head for a second. Live Marcus's life. His whole life of doubt, of shadows and mysteries and yelling at his poor, poor wife. Obviously, in-depth research, there's been a lot of work done on this episode,

and this series will definitely entail a lot of detail. How many pickles did you eat during the research process? I just want the audience to get a sense of how deep we're about to go. Are we talking three jars of pickles or are we talking six flasks? I'm going to say four cheeseburgers. Holy crap. You ate it. You ate it.

I thought you and Carolina share a cheeseburger a day. No, no. I actually am not as unhealthy as you people think I am. I'm fine. You people? Okay. You people. Wow.

Wow. I ate a fair amount of Hobnobs, all right? You don't got to tell me. It's just something about how if we had been doing this series like 10 years ago, it would have been you fucking sucking down whiskey. Same thing the way we used to raise it. It's like chain smoking cigarettes, like reading microfiche. Like now it's you on a standing desk, eating Hobnobs,

but typing with the risk guards. No. I have to start using risk guards. I have to protect myself from carpal tunnel. Of course. Starting to set up. Absolutely. Well over the years, the CIA and the FBI have wasted a bevy of resources on harassing

and monitoring people who weren't dangerous. Peaceful agitators like Martin Luther King or harmless intellectuals who just had some curiosity towards communism at one point in their life. Meanwhile, people like Timothy McVeigh and his entire network of white supremacists, the 9-11 hijackers, and of course, Lee Harvey Oswald, end up slipping through the cracks and therefore are able to change the course of American history. See the American intelligence community, just like every other organization, is staffed by regular people.

And regular people fuck up and make bad decisions every second of every day. No, no Marcus. It's the central intelligence agency. Are you not understanding the acronym? They're brilliant minds. No way could they fail. But if the all-powerful CIA is shown to sometimes be incompetent and fallible when it comes to saving American lives, then they lose what makes them powerful in the first place.

The belief that they are capable of anything. I think it does pop a lot of people's balloons though, right? We're the concept of the CIA. You shine a light into it. We're just an office where people work and they are government workers. They are cops, technically, and spies, and they do work for the U.S. government. But they are not the shadowy worlds that used to be. It's not like the kind of untold power they had during the OSS days, during the fucking

van or like Bush, the old baddies, the old dudes, and how they kind of, they did have more involvement centrally in our government. And so it's hard because people want that villain. They want it so much. It's nice to have. It's almost comforting to think that there is this capable organization that is both, we can never understand because, again, it's a sign that things are under control and not total chaos.

Well, the way Gerald Posner put it is when you put the weight of JFK versus the weight of Lee Harvey Oswald, just two men. Against each other as just two men, the scales don't balance. Right. Life is not fair. Life is just, it's one of those where it shows that the little dweeb can take out the most powerful person in the world. Yeah.

I mean, and to be fair, though, for every one person that slips through the CIA's net, a thousand are stopped. I mean, there's a reason why we haven't had a major international terrorist attack in almost 20 years. But infallible, the CIA is not. However, that's not to say that the CIA and many other organizations didn't want John F. Kennedy dead. The CIA itself, the military industrial complex, right wing extremists, left wing extremists,

the mob, and even his own vice president, Lyndon Johnson, all had reasons to rejoice in JFK's death. This is why JFK needed to bring everyone together and just say the sentence, I know I've angered a lot of you, and just try to bring them in. He just needed one trip to Margaritaville, and all of this could have been done and saved. So you think JFK should do a Ben Kessel HR trip? Yes. Or he just is like, let's get all the apologies done in one evening.

But for somebody that was banging all of these actresses that he was, I mean, I guess that was a part of it. He straight up had so many enemies and then when he went into Dallas, he went into one of the most dangerous places in the world for him. It's amazing. He had all of these forces trying to kill him and the one that got through, or at least partially got through, was this little nothing dweeb. Yeah.

I'm sure we'll get into it, but it would have been a good day to have a roof on the car, but I'm sure we'll discuss it. Well, we absolutely will. Now if I could compare Lee Harvey Oswald to anyone in history, I'd compare him to someone like Rasputin. Really? Yeah. As we said in the series about Rasputin, he began his life as a simple Russian peasant,

but eventually rose to such a level of power and influence in the Tsar's court that the world would be an entirely different place had he never existed. Lee Harvey Oswald is much the same type of figure. Of course, not a power broker and not in a position of influence, but the fate of the entire world hinges on November 22, 1963 in ways we can't even imagine. Also there's no way he had a ding-dong the size of Rasputin's. He wouldn't have been able to aim and would have thrown off his entire gravitational structure. There's no way he could have done it with a ding-dong the size of Rasputin's.

No, he had a tinier penis, so it got harder. That's true for tinier penises. They get harder than big penises. I've seen different documents and big ones get just fine, just hard, hard just fine. It takes him a while though. Had Kennedy not been killed that day, the world would be a fantastically different place. At the very least, Kennedy surviving that day in Dallas means no escalation in Vietnam and no Watergate, and without these two massive fuck-ups, American politics would be a much

different scene than what we're putting up with today. He was at least planning to roll back out of Vietnam. That was one of his main tenets, I believe, that he was going to try and get us out of there, which would have changed everything. No Watergate, no Forest Gump. Of course, that hotel wouldn't have all the cool, punny things about Richard Nixon, whatever you go to the Watergate Hotel, which is awesome in Washington, D.C., by the way. They've always been very good to us, but I also have the inverse.

Do we get the 65 Civil Rights Act? Do we get the Voting Rights Act? Do we get those progressive legislations that Kennedy had pushed forward without his death? Because that was sort of the consolation prize for LBJ. I would argue that the anger and betrayal felt over the Vietnam War and Watergate. It just disappears, and maybe, just maybe, the country focuses more on civil rights. Because we're not pissed off about everything else. The country is much more united, it's nowhere near as divided, and perhaps more things get

done and we would be in a better place now than we are today. So we definitely have a lot better car practice, because the back on JFK was so horrible, you would have perfected it. I also wonder if this was a massive lesson to the United States of America that taught us that negative chaos allows for the government to actually obtain a lot more control. When you throw everybody in a tizzy, and everybody's just, I mean, when you're so mad at the president, I don't want to bring this to dune, but the part of God Emperor of Dune, the whole thing is that you've got to create a villain in order to create peace, right?

You create a localized, everybody hates this person, so you create this kind of static order around everybody else, because you're directing their fury up to the top. Where Nixon helped do that, right? Where he helped create this kind of divide between the people and the state, but they also use that too. It's all fucked up. I cannot believe you brought Dune into this. I will get to him in book five.

I'm almost done. No, I'm almost done. I have to bring up the thing that I always bring up, which is the Big Lebowski, where it's just like Jeffrey, where Jeffrey Lebowski's just looking at Walter and just be like, what does this have to do with Vietnam, Walter? What does it have to do with Vietnam? Big Lebowski doesn't exist. That character doesn't exist.

That's the thing, man. Art is different. Movies are different. Music in particular. CCR? With CCR? I mean, yeah, they're still around, but you don't have fortunate son. I mean, that's the thing.

Without the anger of the Vietnam War, you don't have the Stooges. You don't have suicide. You don't have fucking punk. There's so much that happens because of these events, and there's so many ripples that happen from November 22, 1963, that it actually kind of makes Lee Harvey Oswald one of the most consequential figures in American history. I want us to continue, and I'm sorry, but I'm going to put my weird cap on. Because Vietnam worth it for CCR, the bands, some of the greatest protest, Neil Young,

some of the greatest protest music of all time, the Iraq War. We had horrible songs. I mean, that was all horrible, but again, bad Neil Young songs. But Vietnam, man, Rockin' in the Free World's a great song. Would you give up Apocalypse Now? I mean, you name it. It is my favorite movie. You just sound like the man that created the pet rock, arguing for Vietnam.

Now, I'm not saying we would be in a utopian society, nor am I arguing that John F. Kennedy was some sort of saint or some sort of savior, because we'll get into his many failings and the possibility of him even losing the 1964 election because of the CIA in episode three. But the fact remains that because of Lee Harvey Oswald, the world changed. And the story of how Oswald came to be in the Sniper's Nest that day is absolutely fucking fascinating. Awesome.

So, without further ado, let's start our series on JFK by getting into the life story of one of the most pivotal and pitiful figures in American history, Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald! Oswald! Oswald! Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans in 1939 to a single mother, single because Lee's father died of a heart attack two months before Lee was born. Naturally, this did not have a positive effect on his mother, Marguerite.

Even though conspiracy authors try to paint Marguerite as a loving positive character, her other sons, besides Lee, paint a much different picture of the woman who raised the most infamous assassin of the 20th century. Lee's brother Robert described Marguerite as a domineering, controlling woman, high strong and unable to accept the fact that her husband was dead. So scary coming home from school, seeing a bunch of your dad's old clothes on a broom, her just saying, Thee!

Thee! Thee! Thee! Thee! Thee! Now, grief is understandable, but Marguerite completely abandoned her children and sent two of her sons to an orphanage following her husband's death while the infant Lee was passed between her sister, housekeepers, and babysitters.

That was until the age of three. By then, Lee was old enough to be shoved off to an orphanage as well, and he spent another gear away from his mother before she pulled all the boys out of the orphanage in 1944 and moved them from New Orleans to Dallas. It sounded like Marguerite was a very classic narcissist where she was so wrapped up in her own grief and her own story, because as she will upload her feelings of insecurity and slash superiority to Lee as he grows up, where she believed that she was supposed to be some other character in another important chapter of the world.

She thought that she was the special lady, and now she's stuck in this thing and this narrative of being poor with all these kids didn't fit with the way she viewed her life, though she just got rid of the kids. Sounds like a family structure that it's similar to a vodka red bull. You've got your insecurities mixed right there with all the security in the world. Hey kids, you ever been raised by a vodka red bull? I tell you what, I'm great for 15 minutes, but then I am vomiting. Well, in Dallas, Marguerite married a man named Edwin Eckdal, and because his work required

a lot of relocation, Oswald lived in 13 different places before he was 10 years old, which would have been okay if he'd had the support of at least one parent. But Marguerite and Eckdal fought constantly, and Marguerite by all accounts was a selfish entitled person who never took responsibility for anything, and when Eckdal left, Lee replaced him as Marguerite's companion, and Lee became Mother's special little boy. I'm Mother's special little boy, I'm just a so special mom nose, mom nose, I get that milk, I get that milk as soon as it's made, I get that milk as soon as it hits that nipple, I get that milk, I'm punching that belly button, I hold it to my mother.

Hey Lee, how old are you now? You're still breastfeeding? I'm seven years old. Seven, okay. I think he breastfed normal. Probably. Probably. Let's see, Marguerite.

Yeah, he didn't do it standing on his hands, he's still a person. That'd be funny too, but you, Kizzle breastfed to was like 14. I breasted eight. No, that's disgusting, no I didn't, whatever. I was very close to my mother as a child, I didn't talk a lot, would you stop? You treated her like a hamster water bottle until you had chest hair. See Marguerite couldn't keep friends because she always found an excuse for a disagreement, she was a pain in the ass, neighbors hated her because she was constantly starting fights

and she constantly complained about how the unfairness of life had cheated her out of something better, nothing was her fault, it was all life's fault. So she's one of those women where one of the first sentences out of her mouth is, I don't like drama. I don't like drama, drama likes me, it's like, okay. I'm just like, I'm just one of those people, I avoid drama, like I'm not into drama, don't bring your drama to me, but I tell you what, Bridget is a bitch and she should be fine. Well this entitlement was passed on to Lee, as Marguerite consistently told him that he

was better and brighter than all the other kids while providing him with zero education or guidance on how to actually achieve and earn that distinction. During one of my mom's crisis periods when I was younger, at one point, I do mean this, she did seat me in the car and she said, Henry Thomas, you have psychic powers. I spoke with a psychic who said in a previous life, you are an alchemist and you need to make sure to use your powers for good and not for evil. And I just remember being 10, just going, nice. Nice, yeah, I have a psychic power but we're going to go to In-N-Out Burgers now, mom.

Sweet. Yeah, yeah, I bet it, mommy. I bet it, oh, I'm going to start hitting daddy and now I'm going to grab the wheel of the car while we're driving, mommy. Well because of this, Lee grew up sullen, angry and violent. Why was he so angry? His mom loved him. I mean, this doesn't sound like, it sounds like a doting mother, but.

No, his mom did not love him. His mom was trying to use him as an extension of herself. I see. Like he wasn't actually a person to her, like she was just an extension of her own ego. Okay, I see. So not so much a mama's boy who got everything from his mother, more like used as an, I see. Kind of, so, I mean, he did, I mean, he was extremely spoiled, but that's not good for a kid.

Right, okay. One neighbor named Hiram Conway, who lived two doors down from Lee for three and a half years, said Oswald was an almost vicious child who would throw rocks at all the other kids just for the fun of it. Just to see him get hurt. Why are you making that face like you did that all the time, Ben? I mean, who were the kids? We don't kids are very mean.

Cause you're a fucking goon, you're a born goon, and you throw boulders at people. No, I did not throw boulders at people. No, I'm just saying. You're like Donkey Kong, with warm barrels and ladders at people that are just trying to walk the street. You're larger and you do get more attention, but that's why you technically should be giving gifts. You should be wearing one of those like Nordic shirts, like the old style Santa Claus, like

Santa Claus. If you were my size, you would have been in prison 20 years ago. The ideas that you have of the freedoms of a large man are insane. Another neighbor said they saw Lee chasing his half-brother John with a butcher knife, and when Lee couldn't catch him, he threw the knife so hard at his half-brother that it stuck in the wall. Again, you've got a far away look in your eye. Because I have a horrible joke, oh it hurts, how couldn't he catch his half-brother, you

know, cause he doesn't have legs. Henry started this thing with the neck-tie joke and then it just, I'm derailing the whole thing. Sorry. Well, when the neighbor turned to Marguerite in shock, she dismissed the attempted stabbing is just a little scuffle. Jeez. They only throw in the knife because I didn't get the harpoon gun in the mail.

Well, even so, when half-brother John moved to New York City and got married in 1950, Marguerite and Lee followed two years later and brought their dysfunction into the half-brother's home once more. He didn't want him there. No, and they didn't ask him either. They just rolled in with Lee Harvey Ozil, a little psychopath, and a mom. Marguerite is just fucking shrieking and crying about how everything's unfair. Very histrionic woman.

Just taking over, what I imagine is not the hugest place because it's an apartment on the upper east side. Yeah. Well, on one occasion, Marguerite asked Lee to turn down the TV. So Lee pulled out a knife, threatened her, and punched her in the face. Oh, no, some kind of remote control, mommy. Why some kind of remote control, mommy? I don't think so.

Do remote controls have knives? Daring later testimony, Marguerite downplayed the incident by saying, and I've wouldn't that big. Well, just, it's, I guess the remote control hadn't come along yet. They're going to save this entire scuffle from happening. But after that incident, half-brother John reached his limit and made Marguerite and Lee leave. They moved to the Bronx, and even though Lee was enrolled in school, he refused to attend

and Marguerite didn't make him go. How did they get enough money to keep on moving? I mean, it's not that cheap to uproot yourself all the time. I'm not sure. I mean, she was working. I don't exactly know what she did, but do you know what Marguerite did for a living? I honestly do not know. I don't know.

It didn't say in any of the books that I read, it's just things were really cheap. Things were cheaper than they all know in this economy. That's very true. So during all of this time, Lee Harvey Oswald was viewed as like, so the mom, all of this kind of all, all of this kind of built, I think, to him starting coming at her with the knives, because the way it started, she doted upon him, right? She said all of this shit about how he was a genius and stuff, but she also told him that he was very physically fragile and that you can't go and play sports with the other

boys. And he says like, so what am I supposed to do, mommy? Just like, that's why we're putting you in tap dancing lessons. So Lee Harvey Oswald took tap dancing lessons, which I can only imagine is just him just going, oh, you want me to do T for two, huh? I want to do T for two. Guess what? I only do T for one baby.

If you would have done tap dancing outside of the, uh, when he was being arrested, I'm a patsy. Combined with tap dancing. I think you got illegally let him go. Well when Oswald was finally sent to a youth house for refusing to go to school, a psychiatrist with the improbable name of Renatis Hartogs said that Lee had the potential for explosive, aggressive and assaultive behavior. Yeah.

He has all sorts of fucked up very, very many, a lot of yelled at the nurse. He yelled at me and I was like, Hey now, let's think about this for a second because I'm a hypnotist, which is true. Renatis Hartogs. This is where we're going to do a little bit of, let's do it a side swipe here. Do you think this is when they started training him for MKUltra and they started giving him LSD? This is true because doctor, so-called doctor, Renatis Hartogs, right?

He was a part of a, he had legit connections to the training facilities of MKUltra and was one of the proponents of using LSD for mind control operations. And so all of a sudden it's very connected together. But for some reason also then, Renatis Hartogs, after all this happened, after Lee Harvey Oswald left his charge, he was fired for having sex with a client where he very, he's a professional hypnotist. This is true. He was a professional hypnotist and he got fired for having sex with his client because

he basically manipulated a schizophrenic woman into believing that the only way to cure her was for her to have sex with him. Professional hypnotist. That's why never be in a room with a professional hypnotist ever. I agree. Like, they tried to say, obviously he ended up getting, you know, got his license removed and all that stuff, but they asked him what his defense was and his defense was, there's no, is there a crime to inseduction?

Well, when you do it like that, surprisingly enough, there is. Very clear crime. So, okay, let's just, we'll put a button on that rabbit hole, but let's just say that indeed something like that, it did happen and you are trying to recruit people for MKUltra. What is it about Lee Harvey Oswald that would make him recruitable? He's an asshole. He has knife skills, but they're like, okay, can he tap? Oh, he does not tap.

Well, then he's in. That's incredible. We are going to put him immediately on this, the CIA summer stock program, just immediately doing the CAA's version of Oklahoma. No, they were doing MKUltra experiments at Harvard. They were doing it on people like Ted Kaczynski. They weren't doing it on truant boys in the Bronx. Okay.

He's a good human bullet. I mean this. He would say it a lot. Yes, he is useless, but maybe he's so useless. He's useful. Yeah. I don't know, because you don't want, he's so unpredictable though. Yep.

You want someone who is predictable. Exactly. No, no, no, sometimes though, you want another that's unpredictable that can make a bunch of messes, and then a predictable person has to come and deal with. That's the power of being unpredictable. Sometimes you want to be unpredictably predictable. That's the thing is that Lee was by no means untethered from reality. He just thought that reality revolved around Lee.

Emotionally isolated and lacking any affection or family stability, Lee developed a vivid fantasy life in which he was a being of omnipotence and power, and the situation was only made worse by his mother. By 1953, Lee had been placed in an institution for disturbed boys and given mandatory psychiatric care, but instead of addressing the problem, the problem that her son was an asshole, Marguerite blamed the New York court system for being unfair, and so she took Lee back to New Orleans. Did you say that kids have all the power now?

But honestly, Lee Harvey Oswald just been like, I ain't going to school. And they're like, they have to be like, all right, so he just walked down the street with his weird little 1950s white shirt on with the cigarettes stuck in the sleeve, like kicking mailbox and stuff, just saying, I ain't going to school. The conspiracy theorists like to either mitigate or outright ignore Lee's vast psychological problems in childhood, saying that the tests on his mental state were inconclusive and that Oswald was nothing more than a tense, if withdrawn boy. That records and the accounts of neighbors show that Lee Harvey Oswald's background when

it came to his early childhood is far more in line with some of the more dangerous people we've covered on this show rather than the life of a secret agent. So when the Oswald's returned to New Orleans, Lee was a spoiled self-centered teenager who would stand at the head of the stairs in his home and scream at his mother to come make him something to eat. He's holding McNeely. If you listen to the stories about Holden's childhood, it sounds like this. He was scary to his parents.

And no matter what Marguerite was doing, she stopped everything to take a plate of hot food to Lee's room. But that's not all. But what kind of childhoods the two of you have? I got it. I got it. You're telling me I got room service up in this? I need something to eat, mommy.

I need something to eat. Oh, Henry Thomas, you've already drained me dry this afternoon. I'm not some kind of heifer. I'm not from Nebraska. Hey, mommy, you're going to have to go out and get me somebody else's milk. OK, Henry Thomas, let me get my bucket. Just a tyrant. The tyrant in Queens.

Furthermore, Marguerite had moved her teenage son to a red light district in New Orleans, which meant that Lee was growing up in a community of crime and corruption. Lee also showed a small propensity for animal cruelty. Once daring a fishing trip with a group of neighborhood children, Lee laid all the fish he'd caught that day down on the bank and left them to die rather than throwing back the small ones or even keeping the larger ones to eat later. It seemed as if all he wanted was to watch him suffer. It's interesting because when I read about that same event in my mind, it's like, yeah,

yes, he is killing these fish wantonly, but it also was sort of like a protest because he had he was not well liked as a kid, like generally like he had friends and shit. But it seems that he did that specifically just make the other kids upset more than anything where he went like, yeah, I caught a fish and they're all like, OK, because they would go and they throw the smaller ones back and he take he's like, I'm keeping this one. And he would like put it on the lawn and they'd catch another one like, hey, see, got another fish. And they're like, great, do what you got to do with it.

And then he'd like throw it down, smoke a cigarette, even though he's 11, just like watching all the kids like ride the thing and him staring at the mean like, I can do this all day. We're like, do it. Do it. We're fishing. We're hanging out. OK, I mean, not the not the worst animal cruelty we've ever heard.

It's not. No, but it's still animal cruelty. It's still wanting to watch a living thing suffer. Was it possible he was just trying to progress evolution with those fish all just started to breathe oxygen for the first time, didn't need water anymore. But even though Lee sounds like a massive pain in the ass, he still managed to make a couple of friends and one William Wolfe bonded with Lee over a shared love of history because Oswald was smart enough to be curious about history, but still self absorbed enough

to only apply it to himself. Hey, man, you ever see pictures of goblins? They're always in groups. Goblins love friends. That's true. So at this friend's house, Lee discovered a book about communism and something inside Lee's head immediately identified with communist thought. And before William knew it, Lee was scouring New Orleans for a communist cell to join.

He's about 14. I mean, it is a little bit like Roger Stone. It's just a little bit like that's not normal for a 14 year old. But I guess it does require a level of interest in society, though, which is interesting. It does. It does. But it kind of reminds me of kids that wanted to be punk, but the way they started it was just by putting glue in their hair.

When William Wolfe's father heard Lee extolling the virtues of communism in his own home, he kicked Lee out the door. But the damage was done. From that day forward, Lee Harvey Oswald would at least claim to be an ardent communist. Now it's a matter of conjecture as to why communism appealed to Oswald so strongly. But we think that it might have something to do with Lee's contrarian nature. See in 1955, in America, about the most provocative thing you could be was a communist. If you were an out and out communist, you were hated and somewhat feared and you certainly

got attention. But I actually don't think Lee Harvey Oswald believed in anything to put it in modern parlance. Lee Harvey Oswald was a troll. There it is. There he is. I wonder if he believed in anything or not. I get to that's one of those eternal questions about the inner nature of Lee Harvey Oswald because he does walk the walk quite a bit.

Like he does throw a lot of the terminology around and he says to espouse it. But I really do, my heart of hearts tells me, reading about what the way he does his performative communism to everyone around him, it does seem he's doing it just to be a pain in the ass. We've all known that guy. Many of us were friends with him in college and still are today. But besides that, Oswald was probably also just looking to belong to something. And communism gave Lee everything he was looking for when it came to being a part of a group.

Because the whole point is to be a part of a group. The whole point is to be a part of something. It reminds me quite a bit of Berkowitz and Gacy. This is kind of where it comes in because they both love their groups. Like Berkowitz became an evangelist Christian. Gacy became part of the JC's very famously. But those guys actually kind of made friends within their circles. And like Lee Harvey Oswald only ever made enemies.

No one ever liked him even when the communist community. And I think it comes down to because it's just easier to make friends with somebody when they're a little bit chunky. He was too thin. The whole problem is is this entire episode going to conclude with then he went on Jenny Craig and was able to get up to the book depository and he shot Kennedy because finally he was on the right meal program. You got to eat first to act right.

That's true. You got to eat right to act right. I agree with that. So by the time Lee was 16 he dropped out of school and started working menial jobs where he would extol the virtues of communism to his coworkers casually commenting the president Eisenhower should be killed for exploiting workers. I literally knew 10 of these guys when I worked at the Strand. It's why they work there.

They were hired there because of their ranting at customers. Many have wondered why Oswald was able to talk so openly about his allegiance to communism without any real repercussions when so many Americans during this time were being destroyed for something as small as attending one communist meetup 20 years previous. Those of you unfamiliar with this time in American history the 1950s were the time of the Red Scare and many Americans believe that communism was insidiously gaining a foothold in America in order to change the system from the inside out. I don't want health care.

So to prevent this supposed threat thousands of people in both the government and in the entertainment industry in particular were blacklisted from working if they had even the smallest connection to communist thought even if you had gone to a communist meeting in 1924 if it came out during the McCarthy hearings in the 50s you were booked. I'm not going to go watch a commie actor. I'm not watching a commie actor as the customer I'm fine with the purge get rid of him. It just sucks if you bought a sickle from a Polish guy in 1925 you could not write movies anymore.

Okay. But for the most part the people being blacklisted were people of influence or at the very least people who might have some consequence on the lives of others. Lee Harvey Oswald was no such person. He was of no consequence and therefore not worth the effort because again governmental organizations are run by actual people with limited resources and running down a teenage clerical worker wasn't exactly at the top of their fucking list. I tell you what though I went outside of the CA building I told you what I wanted then I

told them I told them what I was you know what the guy said you know what the guy said you know they nervous tell me you know they nervous tell me he said I'm small potatoes really you know I tell him you know I told him buddy you know buddy actually I'm big potatoes I'm bigger potatoes than you think these these potatoes are going to come rolling out so big that you don't want to do with them you're not going to have a microwave to be able to deal with how big my potatoes are. Hey CIA boss there's an unemployed chef outside he's talking about potatoes do you just want to come in do you want to cook for us.

I'd love to use the bathroom no problem those are some big potatoes. Even though Marguerite pretty much waited on Lee hand and foot she was also an overbearing oppressive figure he wanted to get the fuck away from her so when Lee came of age he joined the Marines partly to get away from his mother and partly to belong to something. That is quite fascinating though right obviously he couldn't be that much of a communist if he's going to going to join the Marines when the U.S. was actively at war with communism. At the time I mean it was something to do because all of his brothers had all done the same thing he wanted to get the fuck away from his mother he didn't know how and he

knew that his brothers had all gotten away from her by going to the Marines so he figured alright I'll do it too. We have nagging mothers to thank for half of the people in the military. Yes I thought my father joined the Navy but he also he truly emulated his older brother. What you'll see too is he kind of modeled a little bit of his life off of his older brother which kind of created this inner competition just within their family because the older brother left the nest right and made a life for himself where he got a wife and kids and he's leaving a so-called normal life in the 1950s and his mom kind of opposed them towards

each other like she kind of made them fight each other she put them in competition essentially saying well Lee you'll always be the most special boy because you stayed home with mommy you stayed home and your your brother fucked off and left the family which kind of it was weird it's all this like this push and pull of hate and love and it also tells you how much he truly believed in communism you know if he was truly into this shit then yeah he wouldn't have joined the Marines but it tells you it's more of an act. We also it's a slippery slope because he joined that flight club too where the little boys learned to fly which is a crazy program to think about in the 1950s they just taught

fucking 15 year olds how to fly planes they would take these kids and and then that ended up being fucking wildly connected deeper into Lee Harvey Oswald's life when we find out his flight teacher from when he was 14 years old is some big he's embroiled deep in the Cuban conspiracy world who said flight club I thought he was really into Nikes hell yeah bro fuck that up Henry is that the guy he's talking about is the guy that Joe Pesci played and the movie JFK yeah he had he has the yeah the pasted on eyebrows yeah and he wore a wig with a chin strap they really could have a telegraph that he had alopecia a little bit more and JFK because it just looked like he was wearing a bad costume yeah yeah yeah

so Lee Harvey Oswald reported for duty and by November of 1956 he was able to hit a 10 inch bullseye from 200 yards eight times out of 10 wow far from the terrible shot that many conspiracy theorists make them out to be I mean some just don't mention his shooting record while others out and out lie and speaking of the movie JFK the most egregious example comes from Jim Garrison who was famously played by Kevin Costner Garrison said that Oswald was quote a notoriously poor shot and had an abysmal marksmanship record in the Marines is just a straight lie Marcus can we go back and take that the proper way the Kevin Costner performance way of the way he said it because you can't you can't escape the gravity I'll

try I'll try it again well Oswald was no Taurus the Paul shot and had an abysmal marksmanship record in the Marines aren't you that dickhead who made a baseball stadium for ghosts are you the defense attorney in the project what's going on here what are you I mean well Lee Harvey Oswald I mean he was average for the Marines but that still means that he was a fucking excellent shot by any other metric I will take average for the Marines any day yeah very yeah I mean I tell you what if I was gonna kill JFK I'd use a grenade that'd be sweet as fuck cuz that's my favorite video game weapon of all time I love grenade launchers yeah and shit like that and you just fucking use a rocket launcher and blow up that whole

shit but you know again I can't rewrite history no you can't I've been playing days gone grenade is too slow you get sniped right in the head by the time you throw it yeah he's he doesn't always talk about a little side conversation for Marcus and that's why you got to cover yourself the other way to really cover yourself at C4 and run in there while he's having sex with Marilyn Monroe right and she's there he's just like oh Marilyn I'm gonna come all over and I'm like wait a second mayor hey hey whoa whoa whoa and I was like well I'm so glad that you came Secondary of State and I was like what not surprisingly nobody in the Marines like oh Marilyn I'm gonna come up inside him guts oh my god what is it who is that it's me Henry's

a brouska I'm here to assassinate hey I Henry there I couldn't help but notice your tiny pity there wouldn't you want to join in on making love to this beautiful woman with me son I'm just yes sir mr. president took this line to get to a JFK having sex with Marilyn Marilyn Monroe impression I'm happy we got there we got there and now we actually he waited a full hour yep episode 400 we only have approximately five more episodes of the series for me to do those jokes and not surprisingly nobody in the Marines liked Lee Harvey Oswald not necessarily because he was a dick but mostly because he was just a meek alienating figure which that earned him the nickname Ozzy Rabbit and that was eventually turned into bugs as in bugs bunny okay it's

not cool not the worst name gonna like Ozzy Rabbit yeah it's not bad bugs now he did try to fit in at first by being funny probably because someone told him that's how you get people like you but since Oswald had no sense of humor whatsoever just failed miserably hey Private Thompson come here right down to me give me a knock knock oh yeah knock say knock knock oh I say knock knock it's a big a joke structure oh I'm sorry Lee I didn't know we were doing a bit a joke here I'm okay knock knock fuck you buddy I'm busy no no no no Lee Lee you're supposed I fuck you buddy knocking on my door without calling me no you're supposed to who's there don't tell me what the fuck no I'm not telling you but if you wanted that's the point

of the knock knock I say knock knock and then you say who's there coming to my house I didn't invite you to my home you just show up invite yourself over to my home knock knock who's there say orange I am playing you wizard games with you okay well instead Oswald fell back on aggression by trying to one up everyone in every conversation seizing on any small mistake made and berating the other person with those mistakes again a fucking troll would not berate a bunch of Marines like they will get upset with you look what happened to Pat Tillman oh yeah I mean that's the thing is that Oswald when he was growing up he was always a year older than everybody else because he had moved around so much that's just the

way it happened when it came to school and and since he was older than everyone else that meant that he was usually bigger than everyone else and paired with his aggressive tendencies that meant that Oswald was a fucking bully the whole time growing up doesn't that mean he was like left behind can't you just be like yeah cuz you were left behind in school you dummy every single one of my bullies was left behind not a single one of my every single one of the kids that used to beat the shit out of me or broke bones or anything like that all to the letter every single one of those kids had been left behind at least once and in one case had been left behind twice that's a strategy that's a fighting strategy

you understand that you put yourself in a new way class you just put yourself on the way class below and Lee Harvey Oswald what it was not he wasn't tiny but he wasn't big but just watching him just imagining him screaming and all these Marines is just he just he never tried man he never got it he didn't understand what it was about making friends everybody had to come to him everybody had to worship him and pay fealty to him they had to ask him questions this is where it started all of these this weird shit he kind of wanted to be worshipped yeah he did well and the Marines that shit didn't fly I mean Oswald it was only what five eight and he had pretty much my build and had no fighting skills at

all so Oswald routinely got his ass kicked by the other Marines but of course Oswald believed that he was a great man and the fact that no one else saw it caused great frustration even though he again did absolutely fucking nothing to set him apart from his fellow soldiers eventually Oswald was stationed in Japan where he very quickly accidentally shot himself in the left arm while screwing around with a 22 caliber derringer he bought just for fun see that's funny now he's finding humor but it's also the way he played it off because he did it in sort of an embarrassing way where it happened and then he tried to act all dignified because he like walked into the room he they heard in a gun go off while he was doing whatever

in another room and he walked out he's just like I appear that shot myself he said it like it was like it was normal like he like he fucking dropped the jar of peanut butter right he's getting a sense of humor here well as a result he was passed up for a promotion and was assigned kitchen duty as punishment charges were brought up and he was found guilty given 20 days hard labor find 50 bucks and demoted to the rank of private because doing something like this like the Marines just looked at him go what kind of fucking idiot are you we were told that you were big potatoes big potatoes don't shoot themselves in the arm you see you you'd say one more thing about my potatoes I swear to God I'm gonna show

you my oranges there you go see knock knock who's there who's there I didn't invite you to my home but you said orange and we're getting there and actually Oswald saw none of this as his fault and he started down the same train of thought his mother had taught him to follow when she took him out of the home for the disturbed boys and moved him back to New Orleans from New York if you don't find you shooting yourself in your arm to be your fault you have a psychological problem like there's no other possible answer society did not do that no not possible no your mother did that to you it was a derringer yeah it wasn't even that it's not even a complicated of a gun it's one bullet he shot an entire

year guns worth of bullets into himself well the way he saw it the problem in the Marines wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald the problem was the United States of America yeah man and so Oswald began to seriously think about defecting to what he thought was the communist utopia of the Soviet Union so much fun over there when I think the word utopia the first things that come into my mind is the brown and gray world of the USSR wonderful during his last few months in the Marines Oswald would try to read Russian newspapers he'd play loud Russian music in the barracks and he did this all this shit so much that all the rest of the Marines started calling them Oswald Kovic which of course he fucking loved and he made

everyone call him Oswald Kovic she honestly that's what you do you lean into the nickname and I guess he did that he called everyone comrade pepper his he pepper his conversations with da and yet oh my god what did he fucking study abroad kids are using the word comrade again and I just have to say don't use it I like it I hate the word comrade what's wrong with comrade because we have a words called friend or buddy or pal or Bob comrade so much more fun you are quickly doing we're losing Marcus and unfortunately Sammy Hagar ruined the current usage of the term amigo I I would use it more I love Sammy Hagar but it's just his use of it it really it destroys the entire word yeah I mean Lee Harvey Oswald also owned

copies of dust copy tall just kept him in his bunk and oddly also own copies of mine comp an animal farm which are about the most anti-communist books you can get just mixing it up yeah but there's mixing it up honestly you gotta hold different we gotta have a lot of different sources see how other people think about stuff sometimes it helps to get another perspective yeah yeah but animal for isn't animal farm an analogy for what happened during the Holocaust no for what happened during Stalin's Russia during Stalin's yeah yeah yeah so it's an anti-Solonist anti-authoritarian four legs good two legs bad blah blah blah it's almost like he didn't know what he was talking about but I tell you what dust copy

tall is my favorite album by Helmut Helmut but again nobody cared about any of this because Oswald was of no consequence nobody thought that Lee Harvey Oswald was someone to take seriously I mean he was a Marine telling everyone I am a communist on a military base no one gave a shit can that really be blamed on him I guess that I struggle with this question all time like how did he make it as long as he did within the Marines while he was spouting all this horseshit is it just like can you just be so annoying and lame that you just nobody cares it's like you surpass your un-American activities during the height of anti-communist fever in the country you could just be that much of a loser yeah you you take yourself

out of competition for being a real communist I think so like I think you really can be such an asshole that people don't care about anything you do they just don't take you seriously because again if you're not a person of consequence and you're not a threat who cares yeah I mean I guess also we were kind of at a relative time of peace we got the Korean war the Korean war is gonna come up but I guess also maybe that was it after the Korean War this is after the Korean War Korean War is done yeah that's weird when was that 50s I thought oh we're not okay now this is like 1959 well eventually Oswald got out of the Marines on a dependency discharge owing to who else but his mother a candy jar had fallen off a shelf and smack

margaret right in the face and although that's how he got out of the marines that's how he got out of the Marines which kind of makes me think they wanted him out of the Marines but that is also how horrible candy used to be you could just die if like a jar of candy fell on you because it was just half bricks yes it was musket bullets that you had to suck on for hours there was no pleasure it was a duty and he used to be a chore to teach you patience that you have to suck on concrete until you wear it down with your lips until you get the just real apricot flavor center that it's just but that's what you deserved it was literally as we had a sacrifice for our boys we did it was called rock candy as

a matter of fact I think I mean I Oswald every single performance review he had got had been exceedingly low he'd been in the brig I think twice for fighting and various other activities I think the Marines just wanted him fucking gone right and eventually he found a doctor that signed off on the discharge and Oswald went back to America cold and bitter his time in the Marines had been a total fucking failure didn't go out in Japan at all then he went out a little bit I mean we'll get to that here here in a bit but yeah he did go out a bit well from there Oswald decided it was finally time to begin his defection to the Soviet Union now a lot of people make a big deal as to how Oswald got the money

to travel to Russia but the truth really isn't that outlandish Oswald had saved $1500 from his Marine pay which amounted to about 75% of his total salary damn now Oswald did go out here and there while he was in the Marines and he claimed to have paid for no less than eight sexual experiences in Japan I would love to know what those are for Lee Harvey Oswald I do know what three of them are because this is all stuff he told his wife okay he said that one was thin and very promiscuous I remember going being with her and I said hey what do you think of my potatoes she said that they were big oh no kidding one was much older than he was yeah and one was a big lady who'd cook for him hey there you go he's

got the trifecta that's every type of lady that's perfect but for the most part like Lee Harvey Oswald just stayed in his barracks in red so saving most of his salary is not a ridiculous notion whatsoever all the rest of the other Marines like actually used to bully him cuz he never went out he never really chased after women he never really did anything they'd call him Mrs. Oswald and when they came home drunk they'd fucking grab him turn on the shower and throw him into the shower fully clothed I agree with him yeah well he liked to he liked to read when they all went out he read his communist lecture books and they'd go out then he'd come back and he'd lecture them about how they lead frivolous

lives that they are all you know helping the capitalist system and then they'd give him the old wonton treatment yeah throw him in the shower and as to why he only had $200 in his bank account upon leaving for Russia cuz that's brought up again and again and again he only had $200 probably just had the rest in cash it's not that hard to figure out that's a smart way to travel yeah but there's way but there it is see this whole world is very murky because that's the one thing that the Russians do incredibly well they've always been evil tricksters they're fun they're I kind of think they're fun I think that maybe they're you think Russians are controversial opinion a little bit yeah I'm not saying all

their shit but the way they like to play with people's minds the tourist world there was all controlled by the KGB it was like North Korea yeah yeah no I mean and Henry just said it was fun it is kind of fun because it's like you didn't understand that you going to visit Russia it's like almost you're kind of also on a job interview to be a spy you don't know that that's happening until you're like at the burgers are getting a fucking repair which is just just bread it's just bread with soaked in milk and you're like oh man oh this is not what I expected you know and they're like you would have put it on snow no you work I think you're making milkshakes I think we're a great greatly confusing the

Soviet Union with the world of Dune nothing fun about it milkshakes in Russia are just cups of milk that you swirl the milk around and hand it to somebody now when Oswald tried to defect in 1959 it was a requirement that any foreigner visiting the USSR had to have a visa and purchase a preset package store like I said just like North Korea is today you're essentially on a track a person came you had a guide that was assigned to you and you had to hang out with that person the whole time what a lucky guy that must have been to pick up Lee Harvey Oswald no this was he had a sour faced woman that seemed to be fine she she seemed to have a good time but there's not a lot of good times going on no not in

the Soviet Union now conspiracy theorists who believe that Oswald was quite possibly a Russian KGB agent like to say that Oswald's visa application turnaround was suspiciously fast but this is because they are working on assumptions not facts whoa that was the meanest thing you've ever said about someone the way that you looked assumptions not facts it's like I'm sorry well out of the thousands of tourist applications only a few were given full reviews and the average turnaround between application and answer was only two days damn however that isn't to say the KGB wasn't involved in the process for those of you who don't know the KGB was Russia's intelligence agency these people along with the CIA and

the FBI were the real soldiers of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR and they were just as feared as our own intelligence agencies were Marcus the real soldiers of the Cold War were the hockey teams but the KGB was very capable thorough and also mean spirited in a funny way well let's see this breakdown of how they played Lee Harvey Oswald well the KGB had defectors that came over to America side for one reason or another and the most valuable Russian defector in the history of the Cold War just happened to have jurisdiction over Lee Harvey Oswald's time in the Soviet Union this man Yuri Nosenko was effectively imprisoned and tortured by the CIA for five years after he defected just to make goddamn

sure he was actually defecting and wasn't just a KGB double agent this is the kind of stuff that I read I read about the CIA and this and this go through that like it really is very scary they had a lot of power they got to work very autonomously during this time period and got to do kind of whatever the fuck they wanted so this guy the as soon as they kind of think you're a spy because he showed up just saying like I'm ready to come to America I'm ready to be in America I have all these secrets I'm gonna tell you guys all the shit that I know from the KGB they then have to they just fucking go through every inch of your life forever trying to figure out like they watch you personally

with the process of this was insane because this guy went to the continent went to an American diplomat and told them hey I want to come over it was two more years before they actually brought him over because they had to check and make sure it's like this guy isn't gonna be a double agent and then even after he came over they kept him in prison for five years didn't let him have a toothbrush all his fucking teeth fell out you gotta get the dentures you know they barely fed him they kept moving him from place to place they kept him locked in a fucking attic for like two years before they finally said like all right you're good what do you got you passed the test here's 40 McDonald bucks enjoy yourself

um and we actually also are going to gift you a franchise of McDonald's no kidding well it was Nochenko who had jurisdiction over tourists coming into the USSR and he remembered Lee Harvey Oswald because Lee Harvey Oswald was a memorable fucking weirdo he said that the KGB was not interested in Lee Harvey Oswald in the least bit yes Oswald was a marine but he was so low on the totem pole that he had nothing to offer that the KGB didn't already know the KGB had plenty of sources in the military already and plenty of sources all over America Lee Harvey Oswald was just some fucking doofus see a lot has been made in the conspiracy world about Oswald's time in Japan because the base where Oswald was

stationed also happened to be the home of America's U2 spy planes one of our biggest fucking assets also another MK ultra hotspot which is very very interesting he has another connection was this the place at at sugi airbase that John that Lee Harvey Oswald I almost said John Wilts booth Lee Harvey Oswald was given LSD as a part of his MK ultra training I don't know I don't think so but I don't know but they said he showed up saying I will give you all of these secrets I worked at the at the U2 base I I'll tell you everything that I know and their responses be I love this sentence he's like there's nothing he can give that these battles had not have already sung to the world for them to hear interesting

very Russian yes now it is true that the Russians managed to shoot down a U2 spy plane soon after Oswald arrived in the Soviet Union highly suspicious however that information was most likely given by Vernon Mitchell and William Martin who were two high ranking in SA operatives who defected to the USSR in 1960 if anybody had that fucking information it was them and not Lee Harvey Oswald because Lee Harvey Oswald had no access to anything having to do with the U2 plane because anything having to do with the U2 was highly classified but Lee Harvey Oswald did have the recipe for that military mac and cheese which is a very nice I think that what's important to remember is that when you're making military mac and

cheese that you want to make sure that there's no cheese in there well Oswald did work as a radar technician in air traffic control for a period of time but that was separate from what the U2 was doing those that they did not just bring in the fucking U2 spy planes on the same air traffic control that everything else is brought in everything having to do with U2 operations was classified in a completely different secret fucking warehouse but since Oswald had no real information the KGB just didn't want him and when Oswald tried to apply for Soviet citizenship they fired out just denied his request so like no we don't want you not only because he didn't have any information but also because he was obviously

mentally unstable well he started in his tourist package he gets picked up from the airport they're driving around and like this is the Kremlin this is a water fountain and at some point he's like I'm gonna move here I'm gonna be a spy for you guys like he just tells his tour guide I want to be a spy right and the KGB guy who's obviously KGB guy he must be wearing a lanyard or something or they get a special type of hat or like some kind of eye patch or something the tourist department was full of KGB agents yeah and so they're like okay we'll see what he's got because it's so funny how like it's it's almost kind of informal they're like this guy wants to be a fucking spy let's see what he does

so they go and they get all his bullshit together and then he walks into the room just being like I'm the guy I'm the one who's gonna bust it open and they're all like I I don't I don't I'm sorry comrade I do not think that you are the guy all right hold on hold on let's test let's see if he's the guy okay Lee knock knock you get out of my damn it get out of my home and so after his citizenship was denied in a dramatic gesture or as a last ditch effort stay in the country Oswald lamely attempted suicide by slitting his wrists in the bathtub knowing full well that his tour guide would be coming in to check on him within the hour see there is something nice about dictatorships where they keep an eye on you 24 seven but

he couldn't even defect he was so dumb yeah but he couldn't even defect well he definitely made up for their assumption that he wasn't good enough at anything that's for sure well this is what he wrote in his journal which he so grandiosly called his historic diary journal it's a journal I am stunned six o'clock evening received word from police official I must leave the country tonight at 8 p.m. as visa experts I spilt that wrong on purpose I am shocked my dreams I retired in my room I have $100 left I've waited for two years to be accepted my fondest dreams are shattered because of a petty official because of bad planning I plan too much 7 p.m. I decide to end it soak wrist no w because I want to say

the word faster in cold water to numb the pain I slashed my left wrist and plunged rich in the bathtub of hot water I think when Rima comes at 8 to find me dead it will be a great shock somewhere a violin plays as I watch my life whirl away I think to myself how easy to die and a sweet day to violins a little poetic in a Lee Harvey Oswald communist art kind of way a little dramatic very dramatic he is the son of a woman who doesn't like drama I tell you what I don't like drama come to me I'm a no drama mama but if Bridget says one more fucking word in a meeting say throws me on a robust one more time I'm gonna put her in her trash can I'm gonna roll her down a hill okay well it's better than shooting

the president now even Oswald himself said in the fucking entry he was well aware that someone was coming to find him in less than an hour after he slid his wrist and he went across he didn't go up he didn't go up the road he went across the tracks and again this is not a recommendation nor a nor this is like yes it was a cry for help it was a cry for I mean not even and not even a cry for help really wasn't I mean the suicide attempt was not the point was not his own death no it was and it was not psychological nature the whole point was to be like I'm trying to show you how serious I am about staying in Russia I'm real serious but then it was barely a cut he actually was nowhere near

dying no hmm and but the shitty thing is it worked Oswald was sent to a psych ward for three days where it was concluded that he was mentally unstable but with this the KGB had a choice to make and strangely enough geopolitical events had a bearing on that choice the obvious choice was just send him home give him fuck out of here just go but while Oswald was convalescing in a psych ward president Eisenhower was holding a meeting at Camp David with Nikita Khrushchev the premier of the Soviet Union now these Cold War meetings were highly delicate affairs no one wants to give an inch and an American with a big fucking mouth being sent back to the United States with slashed wrists would be bad optics for the USSR so to keep Oswald

out of the spotlight they deemed him harmless and extended his stay in Russia without giving him citizenship but Oswald just wouldn't keep quiet and three days after his release from the hospital he attempted another dramatic gesture he went to the American embassy through his passport down on the consul's desk declared himself a Marxist and told them that he was going to tell the KGB everything he'd learned about military radar while he was in the Marines I am not an American he was saying to scream and be like take my citizenship please take my citizenship like he's screaming at this diplomat and they're the guys just staring at him because you know what am I he's an American in Russia he's just doing his job

he's just trying to and he's just goes whatever he said whatever man it's fucking it's Friday it's too late in the day to start the paperwork come back on Monday I guess they didn't take him seriously at all or at least they didn't like it was just a whatever type of moment you know and as far as why Oswald was not immediately picked up by the Americans are detained at the embassy it's again about optics the Cold War between the US and the Russians was largely a war of perception and if it got out that a Marine was attempting defection then it would look bad for the United States again this is a highly delicate time they're going to make a meme about this this is going to go viral guys we better be very careful

better keep them over there better not rubble feathers maybe he'll get on Samantha B wouldn't that be fun if he was a guest on Samantha B because of all this oh my god so instead of bagging him and sending him back to the US the consul took the discrete route he contacted someone the Marines told him hey there's some fucking idiot over here that says he's going to tell the KGB all about our radar so the Marines just changed the codes the guy they just changed the codes over at the Air Force Base where Oswald was stationed and that was it is that the is it the private that doesn't know any knock knock jokes yeah we remember him he's a real you tell him you tell him again that I did not invite him I set out

a dinner for one there's dinner for one tonight I also think it's very interesting just how coordinated everybody's efforts were I know that this is where conspiratorial thought just that it's very base comes out but the fact that the Cold War was happening so on the outside US and Russia are the Hemet enemies blood enemies about to destroy the world in order to make sure that one has more power than the other they are ready to do a nuclear war do a full no holds bar mutual destruction we're going to destroy but on the inside they are delicately agreeing of like how do we move through these waters it's it's real this is why conspiratorial thought kind of gets fucking jammed in here because you have to

see that like no our governments they really do all kind of collude I'll use the word collude in order to the there are backdoors to everything yeah while the we get one message they are all working in a whole separate world it's diplomacy yeah it is absolutely diplomacy and I think the Cold War at least on this micro level it was a lot of it was about plug in holes you know little hole kind of it's the little little Dutch boy on the diet just going and plug in hole after hole after hole I can't just say plug holes without you to giggling yeah yeah this is having fun I missed the boy now Oswald never went back to the embassy but he wrote in his historic diary that the experience had filled him with elation

oh really oh yes of course it was such a huge dramatic gesture but they didn't care okay but it but it was the gesture he had done it but he got it out but when you make the gesture and then they react with a it's Friday I don't I've just had so many of these screaming at a man behind a desk on a Friday afternoon and they do that be like which come back on Monday the guy especially when I was working in an office yelling to be heard it's hard man I was I was in the middle of something I'll come back on Monday okay okay but despite this dramatic gesture the CIA didn't open a file on Oswald for another year they really should have they really this is the CIA being like you got to take him kind of serious yes

he is really pushing hard here this is you know it's what we're talking about yeah incompetence so to further keep Oswald occupied to make damn sure he knew nothing the Soviet government set him up with a job in Minsk as a metalworker at a radio and TV factory even though Oswald had told them he'd much rather do something involving economics or politics you're gonna send me be a sheet metalworker I want to I want to be in the government sir no man to each man's abilities right isn't the idea of socialism the idea is you're supposed to go and do what you are born to do Lee Harvey Oswald which is build televisions yep you got to go do this job I mean that we're gonna factory he believed in that ideal until he

got into the system and realized that his means were pretty fucking meager what do you mean I don't get to be the leader I figured that I figured that I would be the leader and that's why I kind of like communism this is where the troll stuff though for the KGB comes in right so they put him in this little factory job but all the same time now they are actively watching Lee Harvey Oswald yeah as a part of it and one of the guys I believe it was Yuri his what they the way they described him is that they wanted to see his potential they wanted to see what he would do they called the term a they said that he might be a good dangler but I'm not quite certain what that means but it seems that what it is it's like

a essentially it's a distraction this is what I was saying they like the unpredictable ones too they like people that go and be like he is a great dupe that we can use we can weaponize maybe I use the right type of dude right right and so they put him in a relatively like he got a good apartment assignment it was fine it was average but the thing about the apartment assignment is that it it's average right but most people had to have roommates and live together in kind of group homes right and share bathrooms and shit he got a technically a cuss position which also diametrically opposes him to the new friends that he's gonna have and then they slowly but surely started flipping all of the friends that he was making naturally

at the factory to inform on him so eventually Lee Harvey Oswald was just in a roving world of human microphones all telling the KGB immediately what he's doing meanwhile he's just fixing televisions and screaming how bad the food is interesting if you are in Berlin there's a great museum that shows you what the Soviet living conditions were like did you do that museum the DDR museum yes yes I mean that's that's East German that was yeah that's East German living conditions but yeah it is a fascinating museum it's a great fucking museum and I love dance dance revolution that was so much fun oh my god well I mean yeah Oswald's apartment in Minsk it was a little bit better because he did get his own room but it was

not the lavish VIP dwellings that a lot of conspiracy theorists try to make it out to be he didn't have a TV he didn't have a telephone but you know it was about average he should have brought home a piece at a time like that Johnny Cash song and built his own TV was 6787 yeah yeah but all the Soviet Union one was to get rid of Lee Harvey Oswald just got to get him out of the way I do love that everyone was just so confused on how to get rid of him he was just repellent but it shows also because they also they straight up could have fucking shot him but they look at him and needless to like let's see what he does yeah like literally let's see let's see what he fucking does we're gonna poke we're gonna poke

at him yeah we're gonna do all this kind of shit and see what is so they have put solid man hours and billable hours into just essentially goofing right this idiot it's the story of the man who knew too little he's starting to think they might actually be really into me because he was also living his life in a way that was very he was aware that he was being bugged as well and sometimes he would talk to his apartment knowing that he was being bugged and he'd keep the place really really clean and he turned his music on really loud when he was having like his conversations his very deep salon like conversations with the friends of his quote unquote that were just informants and Oswald was by no means

fluent in Russian no no really I mean he had a rudimentary grasp of the language he knew enough to make friends and go to work however it's up for debate as to whether Oswald actually made friends in Russia or if the KGB just assigned him friends to monitor his activities hey he he'll take it he'll take a lonely time out there either way though you know the interactions Oswald had in the USSR were mostly positive I mean even the KGB agents that were there to pump him for information they were at least friendly I mean whether they were trying to engage him in anti-Soviet conversations or whether they were trying to offer him secret information to try to get him to show his cards so we know he's a dumb shit let's just see

what kind of dumb shit he is yeah I mean what the Soviets were finding out was that Oswald had no cards to show he truly did just want to live there he thought it would be this perfect wonderful place he thought it was going to be Palm Springs but with bears it's actually just very sad yeah I mean they did make some last ditch efforts to see if he knew anything useful at all but all the information he had was outdated and even if he did have anything useful he'd been so goddamn loud about defecting that any information he might have would be totally tainted it would be useless if anything it would be disinformation by that point see when you have a defection again it's all about perception when someone comes over to your

side you want that person to be impressive Leadinghavre Oswald just wasn't a good look for the USSR he looked bad like he was you're not going to put this idiot on the fucking news and show everyone this is the type of person that's defecting to the USSR his head is so weird looking that for years conspiracy theorists thought that his pictures were essentially photoshopped because no one believed a head like his would be on a body like his so he's having a rough go of it here no one's taken him seriously the anchors building up inside oh yeah now concerning Oswald's personal life in Russia the novelty of having an American around was fun for everyone at first at first it was super cool to have this guy because

you could ask him anything you wanted to know about America but that soon wore off he became just another worker and that you know lessening of the luster that worked both ways once Oswald was no longer a local celebrity the allure of the Soviet Union disappeared because yeah he quickly found that life in the Soviet Union is just a regular fucking worker was harsh boring and gray it fucking sucked so I don't get to be the leader what he wanted to he just thought he was going to be like some revolutionary I don't know what the hell he thought he was going to be but no I mean you get assigned a place I understand I know that there's beauty and love and friendship in all areas of the world in all places that you work and live

but Lee Harvey Oswald came from America so going from America we it's pretty cushy here you didn't have to go to school he's saying I don't want to go to school his whole life and now he's forced to work in a factory and I mean you know it's it's very difficult out there you are well well at first you I think he does maybe think his friends are real he's probably starting to realize just how observed he is how much he's kind of is in this little fucking fishbowl and that's very intense way to live well Lee Harvey Oswald thought that being a defector especially a military defector was going to make him special you know and furthermore he grossly misunderstood what Russians think of Americans grossly misunderstood

well he thought that he would be exalted for it like he thought that he would be welcomed as a hero in the Soviet Union he would stay a hero in the Soviet Union and he also grossly misunderstood the fucking Soviet Union because he thought that it was going to be a classless Marxist society he thought that this was fucking paradise oh yeah but as Oswald's Russian skills got better he started to see how Russia actually worked at least how the Soviet Union actually worked he found that there was absolutely a class system here there was the privileged communist class at the top and the compliant worker class at the bottom and never the twain shall meet and Lee Harvey Oswald was starting to see exactly what a life in the

worker class was looking like so realizing that he was just as inconsequential in the USSR as he had been in the United States and realizing that his future in the Soviet Union was just going to be cold and fucking miserable he decided the United States lesser of two evils let's go back I want to go home gotta go back where's I want to go back where's he going I am not a Marxist I am an American I want my citizenship back and I want it right now Mr. Harvey we will give your citizenship back to you if you can answer one question knock knock if I have to do with this intrusion one more time yeah I'm sitting in my home alone and I don't need some random people knocking on my door we are to get there's no door cerebral

Joe you are not invited to my home I'm we're not even in your home however Oswald did not come home alone when he arrived back in America two years after leaving he came back with a wife and a child wait hold on a second when did that happen 19 year old Marina Prusakova was not at all impressed with Oswald's Russian skills which were rudimentary at best but she liked him because he was polite and he was foreign and she thought that an American would treat her better than a Russian you were safe you were safe you could not have been more wrong it sucks um this was I think this is also from season three of ninety day fiance oh well he proposed after a month of dating and the two were married on April

30th 1961 about a year after Oswald got to the USSR and from the beginning the marriage was absolutely fucking awful he didn't allow her to wear makeup and he was obsessed with keeping her figure ultra thin and boyish he told her that he found larger women repulsive because he said there was quote too much of them but he loved her because he could quote feel all their bones that's just nothing I treasure more in a woman than feeling each one of them bones I mean it's good to have bones so that's a positive Natalie and I spent hours I said I count each bone I could dig my my digits into yeah at what point does she slap you in the face because you're being disgusting she lets me get my druthers well

despite comments like these that Marina did not enjoy she still got pregnant and the two of them applied for reentry into the United States where Oswald flatly denied that he had ever renounced his American citizenship no me yeah I did that yeah weren't you just actually it's so funny you say Lee Harvey as well weren't you just in here a month ago screaming about how you defected as a matter of fact you threw your passport on this desk and I remember that now there must have been somebody else for as you can see I'm wearing glasses and so on January 26 1962 the Oswald's got their exit visas as far as why the Russians let them go they just wanted Oswald out of there it's more of a it's more like out of

here yeah I think it's more of like get the fuck out visa yeah I mean he was a useless man at best you know at best a drain on society and Marina didn't really have much to offer the state either so they let him and his wife go meanwhile Oswald was getting weirder when Marina gave birth her body produced too much breast milk so Oswald offered to suckle it out himself he's a husband and Marina went along with it but she was surprised and somewhat disgusted that he swallowed every drop when she assumed he was gonna spit it knew a bucket he's not a sommelier I mean yeah yeah we're gonna swish around a glass see the legs on it yeah I don't know if I could drink it I honestly think it would be more insulting to

spit it out yeah I am feeling a level of contradict I don't know what's more polite in that situation I think just suckle on your wife's breast this is the food for your child it's coming out of your wife's beautiful breast you're sucking it in your mouth I think if you go puh spit it out oh like that milk isn't good enough for your child it's not good enough for you it's not good enough for your fucking but oh but it's fine why did they just bottle it there's a middle ground here I think the middle guy well I don't like the USSR doesn't have breast pumps fucking in the USSR breast pumps you there's definitely there's a middle ground here I mean the middle ground is that you maybe suckle out a little bit you's like

mmm I swallowed a little bit that's kind of that's kind of tasty oh man I'm not really hungry right now though it's oh so I better spit all this out let me be nice you're JFK you're years before you're about to be shot by a random man you're like what are my assassins doing right now just JFK used to suck the cum out of whatever woman ended up in the Oval's office and spit it into the asshole of his brother all right I know that's controversial to say and not a lot of it's true but he that's our president all right so we can't look down on his actions just because it involves breast milk all right so at the age of 22 two years before the assassination of John F. Kennedy Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the United States

with a wife and child fully expecting a media firestorm upon his return on Lee's mind he'd spent two years in the mysterious Soviet Union and everyone would want to know exactly what he'd been up to and what it was like but when he arrived after a nine-day boat trip yeah oh uh-huh fucking no one showed up no one not a single member of the press and he was his brother said that he was legitimately shocked and okay I asked this question why in his mind would they show up at all because he's a great man well listen what he thought what he thought was that number one I live a life of great adventure my life is incredibly interesting to America is so fascinated with Russia and the inner workings of Russia right

I intrepid explorer from America fakes giving up my American citizenship in order to go to another country and observe and I was the boots in the ground to really tell the story of the USSR and almost how dare you for not being so concerned or so obsessed with my own story about and the information that I now have but my question is did he like reach out to USA today and just be like coming home just you know reach out to the New York Post like no no he just this is but this is psychotic because how would the press even know that he was coming home if he didn't shoot a metallogram I'm like I just don't understand why he thought that anyone would care when he's not actively seeking press I don't know if it's psychotic

it's just egotistical like he's narcissistic it's narcissistic yeah but even a narcissist like BTK will shoot him a letter every now and again and just be like just so you know I'm around that's technically just how BTK got caught because he got lazy into the email now Lee Harvey Oswald did get a visit from the FBI but the CIA never debriefed him because the FBI had already taken care of it and in the CIA's estimation someone is inconsequential as Lee Harvey Oswald didn't merit two passes. There's wiggity shit in there though Marcus that he might have been debriefed by a CIA guy we don't know like and that's one thing that the CIA did really well during this time period was just destroy objective reality

they would burn records all the time purposefully so they liked creating a lot of confusion so there was one I guess some mention of some guy swinging by his house but they go way out of their way to say oh we never visited him we never visited him which is also very strange because like actually you should have you probably should have all of the shit that he did I know the FBI technically I guess that is what they handle their jobs are to handle domestic terrorism or possible espionage but I know suppose God I don't know what they're supposed to do hands to God 2019 hindsight 2020 the FBI agent who interviewed Oswald so that he was rigid arrogant cold and insolent and when they asked him why he went to Russia

he got white around the lips tensed up and said I do not care to relive the past you don't do that only fools care about the past when an FBI director when an FBI agent calls you rigid it's not like they're out singing show tunes like you have to be notably rigid for an FBI to be like what are you talking about Jay Edgar Hoover was actively coming in women's panties during this entire time period he was the freakiest freaked whoever freaked but he was so unfreeky because he had to overcompensate for the freaky and sterile was around this time that Oswald started beating Marina she was understandably angry about the FBI coming around to poke their nose into her life and possibly the CIA as well but

Oswald responded by slapping her in the face and telling her he'd kill her if she told anyone and that was just the fucking beginning at this time they were living with Lee's brother Robert but since Oswald was back in the States mother Marguerite just couldn't stay away she demanded that they move into her one bedroom apartment in Fort Worth Texas and since they had nowhere else to go they complied fuck moving in with your mother into a one bedroom apartment with a new wife who does not speak English and a new baby with any luck will sell this as a screenplay it's it is like 8 30 p.m. on CBS yes place no not surprisingly Marguerite picked right back up where she left off telling her son that his

failing marriage not his fault none of it's his fault she even defended him beating his wife by saying quote they may be times when a woman needs to have a black eye yeah if she's in the UFC yeah I mean it's just at every turn this man is being made worse you know by this woman I just watched the Roy Cohn documentary and he had a mother very similar really where the mom just loved everything he did did he could do no wrong it just it's such be careful not to make a sociopath it's hard because they then the kid has to make it you know I mean close like but the story of Tiger Woods the story of Tiger Woods would be tragedy if because you know they say the Tiger Woods father I guess he like tied the

golf club to his baby hands to get him learn to do it but if he didn't become Tiger Woods he's like now that's an inspiring story if he just became a guy who killed a bunch of people oh it's abuse okay I mean I guess the Jackson five I mean I consider it abuse either way I think we're maligning probably an innocent man in Tiger Woods dad but uh it like the Jackson family yeah that's what it's uh that's abuse that was abuse yeah it was abuse to Jermaine to Michael it was training you are free speech jail still exists you know well Lee made things even worse for Marina by forbidding her to learn English because as he said if she stopped speaking Russian he would lose what little grasp he had on the language and

there was always a chance they might go back from Marina's perspective Lord Lee changed drastically after returning to America he was more irritable more of a reckless and even other Russian immigrants who befriended Marina could see that he was a mental case so Lee Harvey Altswald at his most charming was in the Soviet Union yeah yeah technically yes as a chief worker in a TV factory yikes that was when he that was him at his peak and I think a part of it was he had his Russian dream spoiled as according to historic diary we thought he had his Russian dream spoiled he then got nothing out of it because then he wasn't made a folklore hero in America for seeing like through the iron curtain and

coming back like he didn't see any of that shit so now he's living in a full he's living in full realization of his mediocrity right single apartment with his mom and wife with a kid in Fort Worth Texas yep it's called an assassin for it's called a recipe for an assassin mm-hmm and there was one Russian immigrant however who decided to befriend Lee Harvey Oswald his name was George de Morenchilt and even though he thrived on being provocative just like Oswald dead George was more of a good natured troll if he was around right wingers he talked about how much he loved communism if he was around leftists he'd advocate for fascism and in a movie that wasn't so good natured if he knew someone particularly

hated Hitler he would greet them with a hearty howl Hitler with this guy also might have been connected to the CIA and he might have been what is called an asset they was an agent he's one of the weird ass collection of side characters that the CIA likes to build up because this guy also had connections to the bushes he had connections to the I want to say the Vanderbilt's with some other big ol and the boobies he also had connections very weirdly to the boobies Jackie Jackie Os parents so he was weirdly deeply connected to this world that he might have been a minder for Lee Harvey Oswald on behalf of the CIA words which is why he also acted in these kind of extravagant ways because the CIA love people that bring

a dust cloud big pen like cloud of chaos with them everywhere they go I like what you've done there we're gonna have to cut those lyrics out of it's a small world I think that you're making some solid points oh yeah George was a wacky guy I mean he's some by by what standards by anyone stand okay yeah I mean show up to parties uninvited wearing only pants you know no shirt there's a wacky there's a wackiness there's a wackiness about it in a terrifying kind of way where now I have to go confront the man who just showed at the party showed up at the party with no shirt on those shoes odd just wearing pants and ask him to leave nicely we've had this conversation inside stories before about the the what is wacky

I mean to me wacky denotes it is fun Monday Wednesday Friday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday wacky is dangerously manic there it is yeah yeah it was later discovered that George they've been quite manic depressive okay yeah yeah and he did have signs of manic behavior I mean him and his wife would just walk around town wear bathing suits even in winter even in cold weather but at the time it was seen as very charming okay their characters their characters yeah all right now George had an interesting perspective on Oswald because he was just about the only friend Oswald had he said that all Oswald wanted was for people to be interested in him and if you showed him interest then he would blossom but nobody

wanted to show Oswald interest because Oswald was a mean contrarian wife beating piece of shit and everybody knew it and even though he was obviously beating Marina nobody said or did anything about it because they didn't want to lose her to a relocation they thought if we call the cops if we approach Lee he's either going to make it worse or he's just going to take her somewhere else remember this is 1962 you know shit wasn't shit was pretty bad when it came to domestic abuse yeah man the cops I guess they would just show up and tell you to move it along yeah okay meanwhile Lee had gotten a job at the Jaggers Chili's Stovall company which was a graphic design and printing outfit yeah they did

work for the military even though Oswald never worked on the military side of things what he did get out of this job though was enough of an influence to create an imaginary fantasy life about himself as a spy a spy because while he wasn't doing anything secret people were doing secret stuff all around him and it looks super cool that's cool this flame was even further fueled by Oswald's new obsession with the spy novels of Ian Fleming creator of James Bond so Oswald used the equipment at Jaggers to make poorly constructed fake IDs for himself using the name Alec Hedell and he rented post office boxes under this assumed name to further build out his fantasy life and to compare it to another serial killer

like we talked before a very very similar to John Wayne Gacy again leading a side life creating a whole separate persona for himself where he lived out this kind of fantasy world where now I wonder what I you know I don't want to go as far as saying like what he'd be like diagnosed with but I wonder if he sat with a psychiatrist or a therapist what they would say about the way he viewed himself and why he had to create these like fake fantasy worlds to add drama to every single thing that he did I wonder what the hell that is I guess it's it's some form of bipolarism like maybe I don't know now that would say it's more like narcissistic personality disorder probably just be on the show big

brother meanwhile the physical violence against Marina was getting worse where he's before he would slap her he was now full-on punch in her with his fists graviter by the throat and raping her whenever he wanted sex then came Operation Midnight Ride is this an operation he made up absolutely not no no put together by right wing evangelist Billy James Hargis and right wing extremist general Edwin Walker Operation Midnight Ride was a five week tour around Texas that had the purpose of fighting communism now I don't know much about Billy Hargis but general Edwin Walker was a particularly virulent piece of right wing shit besides just being an ardent anti-communist Walker was also an extreme segregationist who enjoyed

the support of such historical embarrassments as Senator Strom Thurmond and George Lincoln Rockwell leader of the American Nazi Party I do know one thing about Billy Hargis he used to rub Twinkies all over his body and let his dogs lick him off if I can fill it in can I just fill it in the information then Marcus if you're not gonna give me anything I'm gonna go with this guy he's a Twinkie Fogger and he lets dogs just lick it off yeah I heard he used to go into construction workers porter potties and take out full logs and smoke them like cigars I don't know just why not give this shit sure this guy didn't go fuck himself well in 1962 general Walker organized a small army to prevent the desegregation

of the University of Mississippi there his men used a high pressure hose from a stolen fire truck to assault US Marshals and a journalist was shot in the back and killed in the melee Jesus and in Dallas general Edwin Walker had found perfect home territory because Dallas in the early 60s was the location of some of the most hard right extremists with actual power in the entire United States ironically enough though general Edwin Walker was one of John F. Kennedy's biggest critics in Dallas and even set up his own home as a sort of headquarters for anti-kennedy sentiment in the state of Texas and like many on the hard right who tend to overcompensate general Walker was also closeted and had quite a few gay lovers

in and around Dallas all Lee Harvey Oswald knew though was that general Walker had all the makings of a fascist and if there's one thing that gets a communist blood boiling it's a goddamn fascist I'm gonna take off this brown paper bag that is my clothes and I'm gonna fight fascism as soon as I wake up from my nap from working at the TV factory this is the point of the show where I have to say I'm an agreement with Lee Harvey Oswald yeah man I mean there was a reason why we teamed up with the Soviets to fight the fucking Nazis everyone hates a fascist hey man can we actually um can we take that sentence and isolate it and this is where I agree with Lee Harvey Oswald can we get that and just just blast it from from car radio and as a result of general Walker's rising profile he became the first man to come into the sights of Lee Harvey Oswald sniper rifle and that's where we'll pick back up for part two of JFK oh my god awesome well this series is starting off just as amazing as I thought and hoped it would thank you Lee Harvey Oswald the man who was such a failure he couldn't even be a communist

but we are going to cover the rest of Lee Harvey Oswald's stupid short life next week then we're going to get deeper deeper deeper deeper and so the details of the actual assassination of JFK we're gonna learn a little about about him and then we're gonna do our best to attempt to cover as many of the conspiracy theories around JFK as much as humanly possible this is a little bit similar to our Jack the Ripper series yes and we're gonna try to do it without succumbing to as Henry said the word salad of most JFK conspiracy theories because they like to just throw out names and they don't really tell you who these people are or what they do uh so we're gonna try to make it as uh uh I guess as understandable as it possibly can be all I know is it's gonna be difficult all I know is Jan F Kennedy was killed by Jack the Ripper evidently I don't know I just heard those two names and I'm just putting why not thank you all so much for listening and welcome everyone to our first exclusive show on Spotify thank you all so much for your support throughout this transition

we put our big boy caps on and we've got this done I want to thank everyone who works at our company you guys all did such a wonderful job it's been a it's been a uh it's it's been it's been a labor of love yeah so thank you all so much for all of your support and yeah keep on supporting all the shows here on the last podcast network we have Abling and Stoppat page seven Whizbrew movie signs in the mad you just go down the list and you will have all of your uh kind of fun if you're your wrestling needs uh no dogs in space the music show of course if you if you want to check out no dogs in space we just finished our four part series on the Stooges so all of those episodes are out there if you want to go binge the first series and we got more stuff coming soon the Stooges the band it may not have been without vietnam honestly listen if you want to know more about that statement we go into it in fucking in detail we're also coming to you live

all throughout april we got 19 cities in 20 days yes right is that says it 19 shows 19 shows in 30 days shit we'll ever come on out we will be we will be there we have to be contractually yes we will be there uh but so we're looking at y'all fucking come see your asses we're gonna have so much fun excited for our new show come see us uh Lubbock looking at you yeah how's Lubbock doing like in Vegas I hope so how's Lubbock doing so far now what do we got Marcus what that's all right doing better in Vegas it could be worse yeah it could be worse doing better than Vegas put that on the side and entering Lubbock yeah honestly yeah so guys come out and see us get so excited to do this new show so excited to do this new show so excited that you guys see the book we have been busy beavers yeah the last couple years haven't we boys

we absolutely have I mean that's the thing is that you know we still got the fucking book coming out in april so you know if you haven't uh pre-ordered the book yet you know go on out and pre-ordered it's gonna be well worth your fucking money uh it's uh 300 pages it's full of beautiful illustrations it's a great fucking hardcover uh and you can get if you want an autograph copy and you can't come out to the live show you can get those on uh Barnes and Noble dot com those are for sale out there so if you want to get one of those for yourself or as a gift for a loved one uh those are available but you know if you want to support your local independent bookseller you can also pre-order them you can also pre-order a copy of your book uh from them no matter who you like to buy books from

absolutely it's available everywhere but yeah if you pre-order it it really helps us uh in those first couple of weeks yes it's a great way to support so far the numbers have been great thank you all so much for all for pre-ordering and yes support your local bookstores and strangely enough as we learned throughout this process Barnes and Noble is now an independent bookseller because that is the world that amazon has created for us yes it's very interesting as far as the publishers are concerned yeah Barnes and Noble is uh independent now what we're just a bunch of horny hungry beavers working on our dams and i hope you can come by and see what our logs been doing yeah yeah come gaze upon our logs all right they know they know what logs they know what we look like

all right everyone thank you all so much for listening we always appreciate you hail yourselves hail satan hail game a goose dilations everyone hail me and i guess uh big ups to vietnam for happening musically musically happy happy that it happened i guess ten it really it really would be completely different it would be i mean but you know still you still got like you know bob dillon we just all be listening to folk still oh i love folk yeah fine with that might still have metal sabbath yeah sabbath because i came from the uk yeah exactly yeah i came from the but i would say that uk might have just overtaken us i don't know i can see people looking right now with their episode be like they just closed up how is there another hour of this show oh it's

just us be like uh what band would be around dio dio i think would still be here uh would molly crew be molly crew might still be no molly crew wouldn't be here yeah no no they wouldn't be well let's uh let's wrap it up because i have to shit