Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald

Rave Review!

I couldn't put down this non-fiction well-written book that is a page turner. Baker makes the whole period surrounding the JFK assassination come to life and she has many side-bars that explain the characters involved. Medical history also comes to life as the origin of the cancer epidemic we are now experiencing is explained by author Baker as dating from events from this period in New Orleans.
The most important thing about this true-life thriller is that Lee Harvey Oswald becomes a "person" not just some strange outsider. I'd rather not give the plot away, and urge readers to read the introduction after finishing the book

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#kim

I got kicked out

This book is a real eye opener concerning the details of Lee Har

This book is a real eye opener concerning the details of Lee Harvey Oswald during the summer of 1963, and his role in U.S. covert activities. It is also a testament to his innocence as Kennedy’s assassin.
I started following the Kennedy assassination when it happened. I was 27 years old, living in New Orleans, and working as a secretary on St. Charles Avenue. When it came out that Lee Oswald, the accused assassin, was from New Orleans, and had handed out pro-Castro leaflets just a few blocks from where I worked, I became even more deeply interested in his history. At that time I believed the government, as most people did, when it told us that he was the lone assassin, a communist sympathizer and a nut. 
When Jim Garrison, the D.A. in New Orleans, and a man I already admired, began investigating the assassination a few years later, I read everything about it. I believed him. I absorbed everything he had to say on the matter, and followed closely as the case unfolded. I was even interviewed myself by Time (or Newsweek, can’t precisely recall) because I lived (in 1967) in the same apartment complex where one of Garrison’s “men of interest” lived. The magazine was interviewing his neighbors to find out if we knew of anything suspicious.
i was disappointed and angry when Garrison was vilified by the press and the federal government and thought, “What are these people so angry about, and why are they trying to shut him up?”

Later it came out that almost all the people that Garrison was investigating, including Clay Shaw, whom he tried, were CIA! Very interesting to say the least. There is also no doubt that Oswald was CIA, or FBI Intelligence, because of his knowing Russian, his easy defection to Russia, and his easy return! Also his strange, otherwise unexplained activities. Yet in the investigation by our government after the assassination. none of Lee’s involvement with U.S. intelligence came out! Everything in their reports about him was negative – to say the least.
Judyth Vary’s book, “Me and Lee,” fills in huge gaps for me. I had often wondered why Oswald acted the way he did in New Orleans that summer of 1963. I had often pondered why he was given a job at the Texas School Book Depository at least a month before the assassination, and was so conveniently there on November 22, 1963, ready to “participate” in the murder of the president. Who put him there and why? It could not have been Lee himself. How would he know that the president was coming to Dallas and that his motorcade was going to be diverted to bring him right in front of the building that he, Oswald, worked in? If Oswald was involved, he had to be part of a conspiracy. And if he was a patsy, as he insisted, that still proves a conspiracy: not only to kill the president, but to shut up those who could throw light on the perpetrators. 
I found in Judyth’s book a likeable Lee Harvey Oswald. He and Judyth were noble people, who cared about the weak and oppressed. I related to that. My mother and I (from Mississippi and WHITE) first moved to New Orleans in 1950 and felt segregation was wrong! My mother and I (15 at the time) sat in the back of the streetcar, behind the little dividers that said “Colored Only” and even were confronted once by the conductor, who stopped the streetcar and came back to try to make us move! My mother argued back, and refused. The conductor gave up. In reading Judyth’s book, I thought, “Lee and Judyth are my kind of people.”
Mrs. Baker’s book is believable, but you have to actually read it to see that. Just on the surface to many it may sound phony, especially the part she played in helping to make the bioweapon meant to kill Castro. But when you understand that Judyth was a science whiz as a teenager, and how she came to be in this situation in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, it all falls into place. The details she gives about the cancer research and the pursuit of a bioweapon to kill Castro are just so complex, it would be very difficult to make up. Oswald’s participation made sense, since we now know of his deep involvement in covert activities that summer, and his association with Dr. Mary Sherman and David Ferrie, leaders in the project. 
I had often wondered about why Oswald was seen in Clinton, LA with Ferrie and Shaw. It appeared to have something to do with the voter registration drive; but the real reason is more consistent with the bioweapon activities. Garrison knew about the Clinton trip, but did not know the true facts of it. Judyth explains it all, and clears up the questions. 

She also has hard documentation that she knew Lee, because she worked at Reily’s Coffee Company when he did and signed his time cards! She was actually hired to cover for him, which proves they were working for and with the same people covertly! Her book explains a lot about the reasons Oswald was employed at Reily’s, and how some of his covert activities revolve around Guy Banister’s office. She also has a living witness today in Mrs. Lewis, who says she double dated with her husband and Lee and Judyth several times and considered them “lovers”. 
I am extremely familiar with all of the parts and landmarks of New Orleans that Mrs. Baker talks about in her book. I can vouch for the accuracy. She would have to be a genius to make all the stuff up, when everything hangs together so perfectly. Of course, she was and is a genius; it is a pity she was cast aside as a cancer researcher and never allowed to study medicine because she had the “bad luck” to be caught up in a covert scheme. She could not ethically test the bioweapon on living people, even criminals; and so she was kicked out and banned from a career in medicine! Enforced by the director of the project, Dr. Alton Ochsner, of whose clinic today (ironically) I am a patient.
I thank Judyth Vary Baker for filling in so much of the details of Oswald’s life during that summer of 1963 in New Orleans. The book is an exciting page turner. It is written like a novel, and has something for everybody. But it also has pages and pages of photos and notes that tell so much about the people and places involved during that summer. So much truth is there that it should be of great interest to anyone wishing to know more about what went on in 1963 before and after the assassination of Kennedy, and the subsequent killing of the man who had been set up as a patsy: Lee Harvey Oswald.

Jim Garrison said that Oswald killed nobody, and was in fact a hero. Those who believe this as I do, will love the book. Those who do not yet know or accept the truth, will have much of the truth revealed. I highly recommend “Me and Lee” to all.

Someone finally tells the TRUTH about Lee Oswald.  Judyth Baker

Someone finally tells the TRUTH about Lee Oswald.  Judyth Baker had the courage to stand up and tell what really happened
even after so many witnesses died so they could not talk.  I could NOT put this book down.  Read every word!!!

Not worth the read

The writing comes on as a lonely girl with a pipe dreeam of being some one she wishes she had been. Most of it is filled with a cooks tour of New Orleans and her life or lack there of. Much of the info she was given was out right wrong. Especially her view of what the CIA was doing and what part she played in the research end. The publishers should be ashamed of themselves for not checking on the facts

Interesting

Well written and engaging, but it is impossible for the reader to assess the author's story.

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