Saint Lee Harvey was Good with Kids!
- Fred Litwin
- 19 hours ago
- 12 min read
Subtracting the weekends that Oswald spent in Irving at the home of Ruth Paine, where his wife Marina was living at the time, leaves 29 days in total that he spent at the house of Gladys and Arthur Johnson. During this time, Hall and her brothers interacted on a daily basis — and not in any small manner — with the man who would be accused of murdering President Kennedy. Oswald helped sixth-grader Pat repeatedly with her reading and math homework at the dining room table.
He played with Hal and Mike outside in the yard for hours on end after returning from work each day. Pat remembers one marathon play session of Lee and her brothers lasting three hours. She recalls that on one occasion, Lee stepped into the house and, upon finding the boys camped out in front of the TV set watching Westerns, announced: “Let’s go play.” The three of them went outside and played “Cowboys and Indians.”
What a nice guy! Good with children and even helping them with their homework.
I don't know how true all of this is. I visited the rooming house in November 2025, and it gave me the creeps. It is dark, dingy and I couldn't wait to leave. I have a hard time that the Johnson family would invite Oswald to their dinner table. Oswald was never known to be sociable and I am sure there was quite a bit of separation between the family and the people who roomed there.
But it is totally irrelevant. Lee Harvey Oswald was a violent man who regularly beat his wife and who had taken a knife to his own sister-in-law. Oh, and he killed JFK, JD Tippit, and had recently tried to kill General Walker.
Lee Harvey Oswald had shown a propensity for violence when he was living with his mother in New York City. He pulled a knife at his half-brother's wife:
Marina even attempted suicide: (page 327)
In Russia, women would always tell you, “After your honeymoon, don’t let your husband dominate. What goes on in the beginning is how it will be later.” So, she and Lee both stood their ground. They would argue and slam doors. But there came a day when he hit her. She was so ashamed. She left Lee and went to her aunt. She doesn’t remember what their fight was about, but she thought, “I’m not going to take it.” She left. Lee had slapped her with an open hand on her cheek, and she went and knocked on Valya’s door—it was late at night. Her aunt asked, “Who is it?” and when Marina said, “Can I come in?” Valya said, “Are you alone?” Then Marina heard Uncle Ilya say, “Tell Marina to go back home.” Her aunt stood up then to Ilya. She let Marina in. Her uncle said, “This is the first and last time you are coming here after you have a fight with your husband. Come here together once you patch everything up, but don’t come here alone. If you want a marriage, solve your own problems. Don’t visit this place every time you have something wrong.” At the time, Marina thought he was cold-blooded, but now she would say he was right. Ilya had been cruel but wise.
When she went home the next day, Lee said it would never happen again, he was sorry, but she remembered how just before he got violent, he had turned very pale and his eyes had no expression, as if he were looking at her from very far away.
In Minsk, he hit her only three or four times. That is not what she found degrading in Russia. It was that KGB was always bugging whatever they did, and then the FBI got into their act in America. Now, she was having to dissect her life for interviewers one more time. So, who was worth it, and what for? Why did she have to explain herself to anybody? She didn’t want to talk about Alik hitting her. Because that put him in a bad light. How could he defend himself from a crime she doesn’t think he committed if people have mental pictures of him beating her?
Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, killed police officer JD Tippit, tried to kill General Walker, hit his own mother when he was young, pulled a knife on his sister-in-law and physically abused his wife.
But he liked children!
For some strange reason, tyrants like to show that they are good with children.
The first example of now ubiquitous “politician with non-related small child”, was an invention of ever-busy Soviet sycophantic propaganda machine. On July 1, 1935, in Pravda was an illustrated story of a girl Nina Zdrogova, who gave a bouquet to Stalin, and was rewarded with a bag of chocolates and cherries. Almost a year later, on June 29, 1936, Pravda printed what was to become a famous and ubiquitous image instantly, the above photo (by one M. Kalashnikov) showing Stalin with a small girl from the Buryat-Mongol Republic, Gelia Markizova.
In many respects, Gelia was an archetypical Stalinist icon. Firstly, she was a girl. Stalin told Sergei Eisenstein, “We cannot allow any small boy to behave as though he were Soviet power itself,” for the latter’s heroic depiction of a young Soviet martyr in Bezhin Meadow. Then, as befitting an unthreatening girl, Gelia was non-Russian. Stalin depicted himself not only as a father wedded to Mother Russia, but also as a stern paterfamilias of the Soviet Empire, an ironic sight in a country where newspapers reported trials of children as young as ten for counterrevolutionary behavior.
Heinrich Hoffmann's first volume of photos of Adolf Hitler after the Nazi takeover in January 1933 was called Jugend um Hitler – "Young People around Hitler" – and was intended to demonstrate Hitler's special connection with "his" Volk by way of what was said to be his especially strong affection for children. Unusually for Nazi propaganda, which often focused on men and purported manliness, the photo book shows at least as many girls as boys, all of them conforming to the National Socialists' racist ideal. Indicatively, the caption under one two-page spread reads, "Many German tribes … but one race." (Later editions would change this to "Many German tribes … but one young generation.")
The numerous photos of Hitler with children were a way of compensating for the fact that Hitler – who was childless, officially had no relationship with a woman, and had supposedly forgone any private life to serve Germany alone – could not be portrayed as a paterfamilias at the head of the state. Hoffmann's media firm also produced a great many postcards showing Hitler with children, including Joseph Goebbels's children congratulating Hitler on his birthday and many similar scenes.
Ok, I know a lot of people will get upset with my comparisons. How on earth can you compare Oswald with Hitler. There is no comparison. I could have show a variety of other murderers with kids. It's just that a standard procedure to humanize bad people is to show them with children, or with dogs.
But people change. While George de Mohrenschildt might have thought that Oswald did not kill JFK, he clearly believed, at the time, that Oswald might have shot at General Walker. Ernst Titovets knew Oswald in the Soviet Union, but he was a different man once he returned to the United States.
I wrote a whole book about my own political changes. The friends who knew me in Toronto in the early 1980s knew me as a hot-headed leftist. I am not that person any more.
Context is everything.
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