Free Republic

Hours after his younger brother Lee Harvey Oswald, the presidential assassin, was gunned down in the basement of the Dallas police station, Robert Oswald wrote a $710 cashier’s check to a Fort Worth funeral home as he made arrangements for his brother’s burial. The purchase included a No. 31 Pine Bluff coffin and vault, a dark suit and flowers. More than five decades later, the simple pine coffin — now badly deteriorating — is at the heart of an unlikely epilogue to the drama that gripped the nation on Nov. 22, 1963. Three days after he assassinated President Kennedy from...

A Fort Worth funeral home is being forced to return a coffin that held the body of Lee Harvey Oswald to his brother after attempting to sell it for $87,468, according to news reports. By concealing the coffin’s existence from Oswald’s family members and later offering it for sale, Allen S. Baumgardner Sr., the owner of Baumgardner Funeral Home, engaged “wrongful and wanton and malicious conduct” Judge Donald J. Cosby of the District Court in Fort Worth ruled, according to the New York Times. Oswald was originally buried in the pine bluff casket after killing President John F. Kennedy on...

It may have been a mystery at one time, but not 50 years later. The fingerprints of the Soviet intelligence service and its Cuban affiliate are all over Oswald. One of the main controversies covered superficially in the program was Oswald’s trip to Mexico City—a favorite place for foreign communist governments to contact communist agents living in the U.S. PBS claimed that Oswald visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies looking for a visa, but was rebuffed by communist officials. It said, “…in the end both the Russians and the Cubans rejected him. All his plans to fight for Castro and...

About seventeen years after the murder of John F. Kennedy, I was given the opportunity to watch an archived film of the President's last public remarks, a short speech to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, Friday morning, November 22, 1963.Having been impressed, I still remembered a line or two, and I briefly searched for what I hoped would be unedited footage. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find what was to be found had been heavily edited.There may be better copies of his full remakrs out there, but I did finally stumble on one unedited whole tape with...