Me & Lee

http://www.meandlee.com/

Judyth Vary Baker was once a promising science student who dreamed of finding a cure for cancer, but strayed from a path of mainstream scholarship at the University of Florida to a life of espionage in New Orleans with Lee Harvey Oswald.

In her memoir, Me & Lee – How I came to know, love and lose Lee Harvey Oswald, Judyth offers extensive documentation of how she came to be involved with cancer research at such a young age, the personalities who recruited her to move to New Orleans in 1963, how she was hired there – along with Lee Oswald – by Reily Coffee Co. and fired the same afternoon Lee was arrested for disturbing the peace on Canal Street, and how she became a participant in the development of a biological weapon that Oswald was to smuggle into Cuba to eliminate Fidel Castro.

Judyth shows the evidence and relates – from her first-hand experience – all she knows about the Kennedy assassination, her love affair with Lee Oswald over the summer of '63, her conversations with him as late as two days before JFK's death, his role as a deep-cover intelligence agent who was framed for an assassination he was actually trying to prevent, and how he was silenced by his old friend Jack Ruby.

From the flaps of Me & Lee cover dustjacket:

"If you want to stay alive, it's time to go into the catacombs. Promise me you will keep your mouth shut!"

Judyth Vary Baker was only twenty years old when she heard those alarming words. It was the strained voice of David Ferrie.

The date was November 23, 1963, the day after President Kennedy had been fatally shot in Dallas. Her co-worker, friend and lover, Lee Oswald, had been declared the "lone-nut" assassin.

Judyth knew this wasn't true, but what could she do? She was now living in Florida with her new husband, Robert Baker III, having left New Orleans in September of 1963 when Lee moved to Dallas after their summer-long affair.

Then came November 24th. Lee was shot — live on television — right before her eyes. Devastated, depressed and scared,

Judyth was told to lay low, to be a "vanilla girl," to trade her silence for her life. She knew things, secret things.

Judyth made a decision. She dropped her childhood dreams of finding a cure for cancer along with her first love: science.

Choosing survival, she soon buried herself in her family (raising five kids), her work and art. She resolved that, one day, she would tell her story. She would speak the truth so Lee's children, whom he adored, would know what their father really did and what he really stood for.

As a high school student, Judyth had independently discovered a method of accelerating cancer growth in lab mice, and came to the attention of top-echelon doctors and medical researchers, including renowned surgeon Dr. Alton Ochsner, a past president of the American Cancer Society and founder of the world-famous Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans.

After her sophomore year of college in Florida, Judyth landed a summer job in New Orleans with prominent cancer researcher Dr. Mary Sherman, a physician working with Dr. Ochsner.

Within days of her arrival, a man named Lee Oswald just happened to be standing in line behind her at the post office. This seemingly chance encounter began a relationship which drew her through the looking glass into a maelstrom, changing her life forever.

She soon found that, instead of working to find a cure for cancer, she was actually helping to create a super-cancer virus for the purpose of killing Fidel Castro. But there was an even more sinister side.

Over the next few months Judyth met several infamous figures surrounding Oswald: the fanatical ex-FBI right-wing racist Guy Banister, Mafia Godfather Carlos Marcello, club-owner Jack Ruby, and many others. She also became a friend and workmate of the brilliant but bizarre David Ferrie.

Unlike any other book about the events of that fateful year, "Me & Lee" is a deeply personal memoir relating the author's firsthand experience in New Orleans as lover and confidante of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Hamptons Hurricane: A Bankers' Katrina

Greg Palast
August 26, 2011
GregPalast.com

Don't worry: the bankers are safe. The sub-prime sharks, derivatives divas, media mavens and their hairdressers, their trophy wives and their trophies' personal trainers, the movers and shakers and money-makers, are all out of danger. Despite the warning that in a couple of days Hurricane Irene could well hit The Hamptons, the beach of the best of the ruling class will not lose a tan line.

I made sure they're safe. A couple of decades ago, I worked on an emergency evacuation plan for the county of Suffolk, New York, home of the Hamptons. It's the wealthiest county in the United States.

The Hamptons' hurricane plan is six volumes thick. The police and the politicians, the fire department and the first responders have their copies, their orders, their equipment and they are ready to roll before a single fake-blonde curl is ruffled by untoward weather.

The last hurricane to hit Long Island, far fiercer than Katrina, took two lives, not 2,000.

But then, the Hamptons isn't New Orleans, is it?

In 1992, a big storm washed into 190 houses on West Hampton Dunes, getting many grade-B film scripts very wet. The federal government, with your tax dollars, rebuilt every single home on the beach (average value then, $2 million each)—and even rebuilt the beach with an endless samba line of trucks filled with sand, care of the Army Corps of Engineers.

There's a photo of one, in case you'd like to move in. (Shouldn't we each get at least a weekend in the surf for our money?)

Now look at Patricia Thomas' home in the Lafitte Housing Project in New Orleans. I met her a year after the city flooded; she and her cousin and her cousin's two kids, just off the bus from refugee centers in Texas, were told that if they returned to their homes, they would be arrested. It's been six years and they still are not allowed back in. Doesn't matter: three years ago, their houses were torn down to make way for yuppie condos, for the nouvelle carpetbaggers who will enjoy Lafitte's locale near the French Quarter.

Last year, a judge ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers and the federal government were completely responsible for the flooding of Lafitte and half the city. [See the film 'Big Easy to Big Empty.']

Under the Constitution, the President and Congress must authorize payment to flood victims, as they did for the Westhampton luvvies. But for the Thomas family, Obama requested, and Congress, appropriated ... absolutely nothing.

What about the New Orleans evacuation plan? Where were their six volumes? When I watched the chaos in August 2005, I immediately called FEMA to ask for a copy of the plan. Why were there no busses to take out those without cars? The number of deaths should have been ZERO.

The answer: the New Orleans plan couldn't be found. The company paid to draft it, Innovative Emergency Management, couldn't find a copy either. Long after 2,000 drowned, I found the "plan": no provision at all for the 27,000 residents without cars. That's not surprising: the hurricane evacuation contractor had zero experience in hurricane evacuation. Rather, IEM's chief did have lots of experience in donating to the Republican Party.

This week marks the sixth anniversary of the biggest ethnic cleansing in America since the Indian wars of the 19th Century: the flooding of New Orleans. We will celebrate this weekend, by worrying that Hurricane Irene will make the President and his donors on Martha's Vineyard spill their daiquiris.

I met Patricia's cousin five years ago today when, as dusk fell, she was in tears, wondering where she was going to stay with her kids that night. "That's what I want to know, Mister, where we going to?"

Well, I know of some usually-empty and quite nice federal housing units on Westhampton Dunes....
*
Greg Palast's investigative report, Big Easy to Big Empty: the Untold Story of How the White House Drowned New Orleans is available as a free download at http://www.gregpalast.com/, provided by the Palast Investigative Fund, a 501(c)3 charitable trust, on the Sixth Anniversary of the New Orleans' flood.

Palast's continuing investigation of the flood and its connection to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, filmed for Channel 4 Dispatches UK, will be published in November by Penguin USA.