DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Near the end of this 1992 video [at 3:03:25], I got a kick out of some of the comments made by Herbert Parmet (a New York history professor), who kept insisting that Lee Harvey Oswald never really said the word "patsy" after he was arrested on November 22, 1963.
Parmet kept insisting that the "only" place we're going to find the word "patsy" is in one of Mark Lane's books. (In other words, Parmet thinks Lane just made up this "patsy" lie.)
I hate to throw stones at a fellow LNer, but Professor Parmet's claim that Lee Oswald never said "I'm just a patsy" in November 1963 is simply laughable, especially since Oswald's "patsy" remark is undoubtedly the most famous utterance made by LHO during his two days in custody, and is a comment that anyone can easily hear for themselves via the many recorded copies of the remark that exist in various media formats.
For heaven sake, Oswald said it on live TV for everybody to hear at 7:55 PM on 11/22/63, per reporter Seth Kantor's original handwritten notes, as seen in the Warren Commission's Kantor Exhibit No. 3. So that is one more place where the word "patsy" is written down on paper too, in Kantor's notes.
I can't think of any student of the JFK assassination who hasn't heard the following famous recording at least a few times in their life. But evidently Mr. Parmet is one of the select few who has not heard it (as of April 1992 anyway):
Mr. Parmet also said, despite being a firm believer in the Warren Commission's single-assassin conclusion, that the reason LBJ created the Warren Commission in the first place was to "allay the fears" of the American public about there having been any kind of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.
And Parmet made that claim about the Commission's mission despite the fact that Howard P. Willens of the Warren Commission had testified at that same 1992 Government Subcommittee only an hour before Parmet's appearance, with Willens specifically stating that it was his own personal desire to try and FIND a conspiracy, vs. trying to "allay the fears" of the American public by covering up evidence of one.
David Belin and other Warren Commission counsel members have also expressed the very same sentiments in the past as well -- i.e., they wanted to uncover a plot, rather than cover one up.
But I guess Mr. Parmet simply does not believe the words of people like Willens and Belin, even though Parmet seems to fully support the lone-gunman conclusion reached by those men.
~shrug~
David Von Pein
February 4, 2010
