From: Kathy Wheat Fife (79) ~ 3/1/00 Alumni Sandstorm After reading all the Kennedy stuff [...] I am going to type out a 2 page excerpt from a book written by my (former) uncle's brother [who] worked for John Connally before the assassination. He was a JAG attorney in the US Navy for many years. [...] He was privy to some incredible information about Lee Harvey Oswald and has a very interesting perspective of what may have happened that day. There are a few more mentions of the incident in the middle of the book. Here goes: One day we got a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald. The name meant nothing to us then. The letter was long and handwritten and was mailed from Russia where Oswald was living with his wife, Marina. It was addressed to "The Honorable John Connally" who was then the secretary of the navy in the Kennedy Administration. It had been processed routinely in the secretary's mail room. Someone there decided that I, as special counsel to the secretary, should "staff" the letter. The decision was logical because the letter had legal overtones. Also, the mail room had a limited choice. The secretary's personal staff consisted of only four people. The naval aide was Captain Bill Anderson, who had been skipper of the nuclear submarine Nautilus on her historic voyage under the ice at the North pole and was later to become a congressman from Tennessee. Colonel Ed Wheeler, later to become a lieutenant general and a hero of the Vietnam War, was the marine aide. Commander Jim Jenkins, the special assistant for public affairs, was my close friend from days of duty together in Naples, Italy. Jim was destined to become the secretary for Health, Education and Welfare for the state of California. Still later he was deputy counsellor to President Ronald Reagan, under Ed Meese. I, as special counsel, was the fourth. So it fell to me to decide what to do with the letter. It was essentially a complaint from Oswald about the character of his discharge from the Marine Corps, and a plea to Connally to use his authority as secretary of the navy to change the discharge to one more favorable. Those unfamiliar with the US military services should know at this point that the Marine Corps is part of the Navy Department. Even the secretary of the navy needed to remind himself of this fact from time to time to avoid oversights damaging to delicate Marine Corps sensibilities. Connally had a sign over the door leading out of his office that read, "Remember the Marines." It reminded him to call the Marine Corps commandant to apprise him of important decisions before they became public. The flamboyant commandant at the time, General David Shoup, could become particularly peevish if this were not done. When Oswald left the Marine Corps and went to live in Russia, he was given an administrative discharge that was less than commendatory. As I recall, he was discharged as "undesirable." He thought that characterization unfair. Later events were to prove the epithet to have been exceptionally mild. The letter was an attention getter. You don't find many Marines defecting to the Soviet Union. I sent to the Marine Corps Headquarters for Oswald's record, and studied the circumstances of his defection and subsequent discharge. There were no conflicts of fact between his letter and his record. A review of the statutes and regulations governing administrative discharges led to the conclusion that Oswald's discharge was in complete compliance with all legal requirements. That, however, was not the end of it. The secretary can exercise clemency if he feels that there are strong extenuating circumstances. He may also intervene if an applicant's service was exceptionally meritorious. Neither applied to Oswald. He had been a lousy Marine. So I prepared the usual two papers that accompany all correspondence going into the secretary's "action" basket. The first was a brief, setting forth everything I thought the secretary needed to know in order to make an informed decision. It concluded with a recommendation for action. The second was a paper for the secretary to sign that would put the recommended action into effect. In Oswald's case, my conclusions were that his complaint had no legal basis, his request was without merit, and that Connally should not involve himself in any way. I recommended that he refer the letter to the commandant of the Marine Corps for "appropriate action." This phrase meant, in clear officialese, that the secretary was washing his hands of the case. The commandant could do with it as he wished. No one could doubt that the result would be. It was a kiss-off. A day or two later, Connally called me into his office. He had obviously read the entire file and was intrigued. We discussed the case for half an hour or so, and at the end he said, "I agree with you, Andy--this is the way we should handle it." He then signed that second piece of paper that sent Oswald's letter on its way, we thought, to oblivion. But that's not exactly the way it turned out. On 22 November 1963, while riding beside President Kennedy in a motorcade in Dallas, John Connally, then governor of Texas, was shot through his arm and lung by Lee Harvey Oswald. President Kennedy was shot and killed in the same incident. The history books say it slightly differently--that Connally was wounded during Oswald's assassination of President Kennedy. The assumption is always that Oswald was shooting at Kennedy and that Connally was hit by accident of as a secondary target of opportunity. Could it not, however, have been the other way around? In spite of all the investigations, including that of the Warren Commission, and the continuing fascination with and theories about the event, no one has yet to come up with a credible motive for the shooting of Kennedy by Oswald. Against this, we know for a fact that Oswald once asked Connally for help in what may have been cri du coeur. He was turned down flat. What greater motivation does a psychopath need? Thus, by fortune I am able to provide a footnote to history. "A Journey Amongst the Good and the Great", memoirs by Andy Kerr. -Kathy Wheat Fife (79) ********************************************