Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald, by Judyth Vary.
Don’t laugh. It’s a ridiculous title, I know. I laughed when I read it, too. I swear to god, I didn’t buy it. Somebody left it on the boat. Talk about creepy. Some crazy woman wrote a love story about her supposed affair with Lee Harvey Oswald—and she actually got published!! The gods must be crazy. Then it occurred to me that it might be a novel. But it’s not. She’s serious.
To preface: I lost interest in anything concerning the Kennedy assassination ages ago. Like most people my age, I just gave up trying to sort out all the bullshit and a trance-like ennui permanently set in. Mention it to me and my eyes immediately glaze over. But one day, after this book lay around getting mouldy for a few months, I finally snuck a peek at the thing. Within the first few paragraphs I discovered that Vary went to high school near where I did in Florida—only she just happened to have the highest student IQ in the state at the time. OK, that was mildly interesting. And like me, she spent time in medical research—only she was doing it on her own at home in her bedroom complete with rats when she was fifteen. Her work was recognized by Dr. Alton Ochsner of Tulane and Roswell Park Cancer Institute before she even got out of high school. She was getting guidance from two Nobel Prize winners in biochemistry before she went on her first date.
I kept reading.
I soon found that the amount of source documentation she provides to back her claims concerning Oswald is almost overwhelming; the footnotes take up at least a third of the book’s text. She provides photos of many of the documents listed. There are two extensive Appendices and the book is very well indexed. Vary evidently never threw away a scrap of paper, a receipt, a movie ticket, a streetcar chit, a letter, or a paystub during the entire time she lived in New Orleans. She even provides photo copies of Oswald’s paystubs going back to 1961.
Her story is amazing and convincing. The idea that Oswald may not have been the shooter, or even on the fourth floor of the book depository at the time of the shooting is actually, to me, for the first time ever, believable—thanks to Vary’s obsessive documentation. Equally important was the strange cancer research Vary was recruited into by deception at the time at Tulane University, Charity Hospital and the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans—and how it all tied in with Oswald associates Jack Ruby, Guy Bannister, Carlos Marcello, Clay Shaw, E. Howard Hunt, Ochsner and some important medical personnel who were murdered after the assassination, including David Ferrie and one of the most important cancer researchers of the time, Dr. Mary Sherman, with whom Vary had worked closely. Vary now lives in Norway and I’ve emailed her. She’s doing well, but misses her kids. This book has a lousy title that appeals to the wrong audience entirely.
And it did surprised the hell out of me.
Composing members:
0
