General Walker and George DeMohrenschildt (5)
- edwinwalker
- 2 hours ago
- 13 min read
For just about 60 years now, a widespread rumor survived that George De Mohrenschildt (hereafter DM) was a CIA agent and perhaps the CIA “handler” of Lee Harvey Oswald (hereafter LHO). In future posts we’ll deal with these melodramatic rumors – but for now we have a special background to review.
We’ll begin with a five-minute video of George and Jeanne DM in 1964 (courtesy YouTube) in which they repeat their WC stories about accidentally finding LHO’s rifle at the Oswald apartment on April 13, 1963:
Next, let’s return to George’s 1976 manuscript and Jeanne DM’s testimony to the US House Select Committee on Assassinations (hereafter HSCA) in early 1977. George committed suicide on March 29, 1977, and three days later, Jeanne delivered George’s 1976 manuscript to the HSCA along with a special photograph which will be our focus today. Here’s an excerpt from George’s manuscript:
Another possible reason [for Lee shooting at Walker] is the inscription of Lee’s photograph, which we received posthumously, and Marina’s inscription on it.
George wants to explain why LHO shot at the resigned General Edwin Walker on April 10, 1963. George’s term, “Lee’s photograph,” refers to another ‘Backyard Photograph,’ never seen by the Warren Commission (hereafter WC). It looked like the famous photo that Life Magazine had published on February 21, 1964, but there was an “inscription” on it, which George ascribed to Marina Oswald.
The WC had two poses of LHO with his weapons in his backyard, namely Commission Exhibits (CE) 133A and 133B. Oddly, Marina repeatedly testified that she took one and only one photograph of one and only one pose of LHO (with their cheap Imperial Reflex camera). I believe her.
The WC attorneys didn’t because they held in their hands two different poses. So, they pressured Marina to “admit” that she had taken both photographs. They just wouldn’t take no for an answer, and they browbeat her relentlessly until she tentatively changed her mind.
The WC attorneys didn’t want to look deeper – but in 1979 the HSCA attorneys had accumulated seven different ‘Backyard Photographs’ in three different poses. Here is the HSCA list:
CE 133A LHO with palms near stomach (Life Magazine, 2/21/1964)
CE 133B LHO with elbows in his sides, hands outward
CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt Like CE 133A, sharper, more background, signed and dated
CE 133A-Stovall Like CE 133A, but cropped
CE 133C-Dees LHO with forearms at sides, wrists forward
CE 133C-Stovall Like CE 133C-Dees, but cropped
CE 134 Like CE 133A, but enlarged
Marguerite Oswald told the WC that she saw a fourth pose but destroyed it. It showed LHO holding his rifle over his head with both hands. That would be four poses in eight versions.
Now we can see why Marina’s claim to taking only one photo is a problem. Even if she “accidentally” took two poses of LHO and his weapons, then who took the other two poses?
It remains possible that some photography buff had used sophisticated photographic equipment to forge the various versions of the Backyard Photograph. It’s also possible that LHO was that photography buff, since he had access to sophisticated equipment at his place of work at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, from October 11, 1962 till April 1, 1963.
(Sworn testimony affirmed that LHO made his fake ID for Alek J. Hidell on that equipment. Maybe he was laid off precisely because he used company equipment for his own projects. The dates do coincide.)
All of that is interesting – but let’s focus on George DM’s 1976 manuscript, and on this new photograph that Jeanne handed over to the HSCA, namely, CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt. George wove his own story of “accidentally” discovering the photo.
BACKGROUND OF THE DISCOVERY
Before George DM and Jeanne moved to Haiti in May 1963, they stored most of their furniture and bulky possessions at a Dallas facility called “Southwestern Warehouses.” From 1963 to 1966, George led a geological crew in Haiti to seek oil and other natural resources there. But it was a bumpy three years, because in April 1964, the WC sent George a subpoena to testify as “the man in Dallas who knew Oswald the best.”
The stigma took an increasingly heavy toll on George’s career. By mid-1966, George’s exploration contract was terminated, and George and Jeanne moved back to the US. For a few months they bounced around the US, but by early 1967 they returned to Dallas.
THE DAY OF DISCOVERY
Let’s read the account from his own pen, peppered by some of our own observations:
In February of 1967 we finally found a suitable place to settle down. Before that we moved from one place to another and visited our children in California and Mexico. The place called conveniently “La Citadelle” was exactly fitting to us, and was ample enough to accommodate all the furniture which had been stored in the warehouse since the beginning of 1963... (George De Mohrenschildt, 1976, I Am A Patsy! I Am A Patsy!)
The context is simply that George and Jeanne chose to recover some of their furniture and bulky possessions from their unit at “Southwestern Warehouses.” George continued:
Four years storage at the Southwestern Warehouses began to exhaust us financially. I thought of abandoning the whole junk and leave it to the warehouse – it’s good sometimes to start anew. But there were books... And so we went to the warehouse with an old, faithful friend, always ready to help and to pick up some old junk for himself, and, before our furniture was taken out, we began looking through the accumulation of various and sundry items that could be eliminated.
George withholds the date of this event, as well as the name of this “old, faithful friend.” George continued:
I was less interested in this task, so I chatted with my friend, a good guy who had followed us on many of our trips, while Jeanne was finishing the selection of things to take and to discard.
Now George is ready to spring his melodrama:
Suddenly, she rushed out of the warehouse with a crazy look on her face, shouting excitedly: “Look, look, what I found!”
She dragged me to the pile of open crates, and I saw inside a slightly familiar-looking green box. “What the hell is this?”
“This is the box with the records I gave Marina before our departure!” she shouted.
“How did they get there? We left them such a long time ago?” I asked.
“I haven’t the slightest idea, I considered them lost.” Jeanne was stumbling for words. This was so weird. “I had used them myself to learn English when I came to this country. They served me well. Then I loaned them to Marina long before our departure for Haiti,” she said.
Why so much commotion over a box of English record albums that she thought she’d lost? There was something very special inside that box of record albums – CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt. but George wove his story slowly:
“Remember how punctually honest Lee was,” I said. “He would not keep any of our belongings. But how the hell did they into this warehouse? Possibly he remembered where we were storing our furniture; or maybe he gave the package to Glover to whom we had loaned some of our furniture and who finally added it to the rest of stored boxes at the Southwest Warehouse?”
In this paragraph George feigns surprise over finding CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt in his possession, inside his storage room which had been locked for four years, when (he claimed) neither George nor Jeanne ever saw that photo before in their lives.
George’s only explanation was that LHO himself must have delivered Jeanne’s “lost” English records to the only person with the storage room key – George’s “old, faithful friend,” Dr. Everett Glover (also a WC witness).
Yet Everett Glover had previously told the WC in March 1964 exactly what happened. Michael Paine brought the record player and albums to Glover’s house around the time that Ruth Paine drove Marina Oswald to New Orleans (May 10, 1963). George DM didn’t know this because the JFK tragedy had moved Everett Glover to cut George DM out of his life. George recalls this.
This remains a mystery to this day, because we lost track of Glover, a good guy who got so frightened of his very slight acquaintanceship with the “President’s assassin” that he moved out somewhere without leaving an address.
I see another explanation. It is also possible that George knew hat he had possessed CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt since he received it personally from LHO on April 5, 1963. George struggled to convince the world that he and Jeanne never saw it before in their lives – otherwise they surely would have handed it over to the WC in 1964. He tap danced around this:
My wife began taking the albums out of the box and as she opened to see if the records were not broken, she shrieked almost hysterically. “Look, there is a picture of Lee Oswald here!”
So, George DM claimed that he and Jeanne had accidentally found CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt inside a record sleeve. Adding more detail, George cited various conspiracy theories since 1964 that accused Life Magazine of printing a Fake Backyard Photograph on its cover of February 21, 1964 – as part of a government conspiracy to frame an innocent LHO for the JFK Assassination. George said he had “always wondered” if the photo was a fake.
Now, George exclaims, he finally had proof that the Life Magazine photo was genuine, because in February 1967, he had his very own copy – signed on the back by LHO! George continued:
We stood literally frozen stiff, Lee staring at us in his martial pose, the famous rifle in his hands, like in a Marine parade. It was a gift for us from beyond his grave.
“What did he mean by leaving this picture to us?” I wondered aloud. “He was not a vain kind of a person.”
Then Jeanne shouted excitedly again: “look there is an inscription here. It read: “To my dear friend George from Lee.” And the date followed – April 1963, at the time when we were thousands of miles away in Haiti.
George waxes melodramatic: it was “a gift from beyond the grave.” Interesting – but the dates don’t match up. George and Jeanne DM’s 1964 sworn testimony to the WC is contradicted! That last sentence was obviously untrue. Read it again: “And the date followed, April 1963, at the time when we were thousands of miles away in Haiti.” The specific date of LHO’s signature was April 5, 1963, and George and Jeanne were still in Dallas on that date.
In fact, George and Jeanne testified to the WC that they personally visited the Oswald’s Neely Street apartment the night before Easter Sunday – April 14th, 1963. So, they were still in Dallas and still in contact with the Oswalds.
They also told the WC that they departed for Haiti “at the end of May 1963.” There are nearly two months between April 5 and the end of May – when George and Jeanne were still in Texas. They had plenty of time to receive that signed photo directly from LHO himself.
But why would George lie about it? Again, the context was Ex-General Walker. George seems to wish to hide anything about his involvement with LHO’s Backyard Photograph as it pertained to General Walker. George continues:
Then I slowly turned the photograph and there was another epitaph, seemingly in Marina’s handwriting, in Russian. In translation it reads; “This is the hunter of fascists! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Was this added by Marina to mock LHO? George saw the expression as ambiguous – its positive aspect was US anti-fascism – and its negative aspect was its laughter at a poser. In his very next sentence, George openly accused Marina of writing that insult! George wrote:
The confirmation that Lee considered me his best friend flattered me, but Marina’s message expressed a chilling scorn for her husband.
George called it “Marina’s message.” But his accusation faced two legal problems here: (1) Marina testified to the HSCA that she didn’t write it; and (2) HSCA handwriting experts confirmed it wasn’t her handwriting
We’ll return to George’s attacks on Marina Oswald later. Here, George was aiming for another point entirely. Read his next sentence:
Anyway, if he was a hunter of fascists, and we agree with such a description, who was she, making fun of him?
There’s the point in this section. We saw in our previous blog post how George portrayed himself as a loyal American anti-fascist and he also portrayed LHO as a loyal American anti-fascist. Fascists were the real enemy, while George and LHO remained on the anti-fascist side.
From February 1967, when they found CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt, until 1977 when Jeanne revealed it to the HSCA, they had showed it only to their closest friends. Some reacted with disgust. Others praised LHO as an anti-fascist hero who would have never assassinated “the most liberal and race conscious President in the history of the United States.” That was George’s firm position in his 1976 manuscript.
But even that point was secondary for George’s 1976 manuscript. He had a deeper secret.
THE De MOHRENSCHILDT PHOTO IN 1977
On March 29, 1977, George committed suicide. On April 1, 1977, Jeanne DM handed over to the HSCA George’s manuscript (1976) as well as the only Backyard Photograph signed by LHO himself, CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt (1963). Let’s examine his inscription:
To my friend George from Lee Oswald 5/IV/63
Impartial experts confirmed that this particular handwriting was LHO’s. The date is Russian style, as “5/IV/63” stands for April 5, 1963. (The day is interesting because it was five days after LHO was fired from his job at Jaggars-Styles-Stovall, and it was five days before LHO took a pot-shot at General Walker.)
If LHO gave this signed photograph to George on the day (or week) that it was signed, why didn’t George and Jeanne hand it over to the WC in 1964? In 1976 George explained that neither he nor Jeanne knew anything about this photograph because they were “thousands of miles away” when LHO signed and dated that photograph. But no; they were still in Dallas for seven weeks after April 5.
But even if we accept George’s explanation, a major stigma remains. The photo’s signature, date, and dedication could obviously implicate George DM in the General Walker shooting. Yet, if George wished to urgently hide this implication – why didn’t he simply burn CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt, as Marguerite Oswald had burned the Backyard Photograph that came into her hands?
The pathetic answer is that George hoped to make money from it – because of what he wrote next. Soon after February 1967, George decided to contact Life Magazine with his story about finding CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt. Here’s what George wrote:
We did not show the photograph to any authorities. To them Lee Harvey Oswald’s case was closed, and we did not want any further involvement…
But I did write a letter to a friend, one of the editors of LIFE Magazine, explaining that I had a message from Lee Harvey Oswald…I added to my letter a short resumé of the facts – how this picture came into our possession.
Immediately I received a call from my friend saying that LIFE had a team working on Oswald’s case, a team of investigators, because the Magazine had doubts about the Warren Commission’s conclusions.
The next day a reporter assigned to the assassination case called me and we talked for a long time…Like ourselves, he saw Marina’s inscription and gave it the same meaning as we did.
He said, “We shall use it as a main feature of our special edition if and when we know something definite about Oswald’s involvement or of his innocence.”
A special issue of LIFE Magazine! Maybe the feature article! A cover story! Lots of money! George thought of the money because he had just lost his lucrative oil exploration contract in Haiti.
There was an uphill battle. Marina Oswald testified to the HSCA that she wrote nothing on CE 133A-de Mohrenschildt, and HSCA handwriting experts confirmed her word. Yet George wanted his Life Magazine reporter to publicly blame Marina for the inscription.
Why? Possibly because he wanted the inscription to sound negative, nagging, and mocking – when actually the inscription could also be read as totally positive. Perhaps the laughter was not mockery but a celebration! Is it possible that George DM himself wrote that celebration? (An HSCA handwriting expert wanted to check this out but was halted by HSCA chiefs.)
George noted that his Life Magazine reporter also believed that Marina wrote that inscription as a mockery of LHO as a poser of a “hunter of fascists.” This led to George’s closing argument:
How could a hunter of the fascists be the assassin of a young and liberal President?
Going by his writings, George continually told LHO that Walker was a fascist – and encouraged the anti-fascist side of LHO’s personality. Despite all this, George claimed ignorance about LHO’s shot at Walker until after the fact.
George said that the Sunday after the Walker shooting, he simply “guessed” that LHO was Walker’s shooter, because, as he said, “Walker happened to live down the block from us.” I take this to mean that the local news was flooded with reports about the Walker shooting – so the topic was always on his mind.
I will stipulate that George had nothing directly to do with LHO’s shooting at Walker, but I also opine that George DM and Volkmar Schmidt (and perhaps Everett Glover, Michael Paine and others) openly promoted a hatred of General Walker to LHO.
Perhaps this began in late January 1963, when a Grand Jury acquitted General Walker for his role in the deadly Ole Miss riots. This timeframe loosely corresponds to the times when Marina observed LHO starting something secret – “for two months and maybe little bit longer” before the Walker shooting. George and Volkmar watched the news with interest. Walker was like Hitler, according to Schmidt.
Starting in February 1963, General Walker went on an eight-week “Midnight Ride” coast-to-coast speaking tour with the racist Reverend Billy James Hargis. From mid-February through early April 1963, they made headlines in major cities in the South and Southwest.
With each passing week these reports dismayed George and Volkmar. They likely shared their rage with LHO – and possibly this motivated LHO’s secret decision to shoot Walker. Soon after Walker returned to Dallas from his speaking tour, LHO tried to murder General Walker at his home. Afterwards, when Marina demanded to know why, LHO said, “Because Walker is like Hitler.”
I maintain that George DM and V. Schmidt (and perhaps E. Glover and M. Paine) bear some of the guilt in the Walker shooting. I also think this is an important clue in deciphering the JFK Assassination.
General Walker later in life expressed a certainty that RFK had hired LHO for the attempt on his life – so, perhaps the Walker shooting was the last straw that provoked Walker to the breaking point. Both JFK and LHO would die on the same weekend in Dallas.
If so, then perhaps the Walker shooting was the catalyst. Perhaps, too, George DM dimly recognized this, and chose suicide over a fulsome contemplation of that possibility.
Thank you,
--Paul Trejo, MA
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