S8 Ep365: Guest Author: Paul Gregory Headline: Escalation: From General Walker to New Orleans Summary: In April 1963, a shaken Lee confessed to Marina that he had attempted to shoot General Edwin Walker. Following this, Lee moved to New Orleans to manufacture crede
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Headline: Escalation: From General Walker to New Orleans
Summary: In April 1963, a shaken Lee confessed to Marina that he had attempted to shoot General Edwin Walker. Following this, Lee moved to New Orleans to manufacture credentials as a pro-Castro radical, hoping to manipulate his way into obtaining visas for Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Article: On the night of April 10, 1963, Lee returned home visibly agitated and confessed to Marina that he had fired a shot at General Edwin Walker, a planned assassination attempt that Marina kept secret to her later regret. Following this event, Lee moved to New Orleans to establish himself as a pro-Castro radical, hoping to use these fabricated credentials to secure a visa for Cuba and the Soviet Union, though his focus remained on international travel rather than a plot against Kennedy at that time.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batson with Paul Gregory. My longtime colleague, he's at the Hoover Institution, |
| 0:09.2 | and Paul and I have talked about this book for years. I've read pieces of it. And now that I |
| 0:13.5 | have the whole thing, I'm completely confounded. I thought I was figuring Lee Harvey Oswald out |
| 0:18.8 | in the bits and pieces that Paul and I talked about over the years. |
| 0:22.2 | When you put it all together, there are leaps here that Lee Harvey Oswald, the immature, delusional, arrogant, and extremely violent young man, he makes leaps that you can't see coming. |
| 0:34.7 | If, Paul, if this was a novel, I would say it lacks very similitude. So let's get on |
| 0:39.2 | to what happens next. You're back at school. It's April of 1963. The Oswalds have been separated. |
| 0:46.5 | They've come back. I believe at one point, Lee Harvey Oswald, Marina was living at a friend's house. |
| 0:52.3 | She'd been given a place by the Dallas Russians to hide from Lee's abusing. He came by, got on his knees, begged her, wept. She went back with him. But it's now April 63. And I believe they're living in Dallas. You'll help me, Paul. I believe that at this point, they're living in Dallas. |
| 1:17.3 | And the night of April 10th, what does Lee do that night and what does Marina make of it? |
| 1:29.2 | That night, Lee did not come home at the usual time. He came home very late, and he was visibly shaken. |
| 1:38.0 | When she noticed that he was not home at the normal time, she looked through his things and found a letter to her, which contained, written in Russian, very bad Russian, by the way, which gave her directions as to what to do if he did, if he was not able to come home. |
| 1:58.7 | And as I recall, there were instructions about a number of things, financial, and so forth. |
| 2:07.5 | He eventually came home around 11. |
| 2:09.8 | He was quite agitated, very agitated, according to Marina. |
| 2:15.6 | And he confessed to her that he had attempted to assassinate |
| 2:21.1 | General Edwin Walker, who was a leader of the John Birch Society in the Dallas area. |
| 2:28.2 | He had fired a single shot. |
| 2:31.3 | He did not know if he hit the target. |
| 2:36.1 | Marina obviously was quite upset about this, about his confession, and told him that he |
| 2:46.5 | should not, he cannot try anything like this again. |
| 2:52.3 | In later testimony, which is important, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.