BUD SAID:
How many times did he [Wesley Frazier] say he didn't pay attention to the bag?
BARB JUNKKARINEN SAID:
Have you read anything on these two [Frazier and Linnie Mae Randle] besides Posner? Doesn't seem like it.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Bud doesn't need to read anything about Buell Wesley Frazier (other than Frazier's WC testimony) in order to know that the question Bud asked in his last post is a very good and valid inquiry.
The fact is, when we read Wesley Frazier's 1964 Warren Commission testimony, Frazier tells the Commission TEN SEPARATE TIMES that he wasn't paying very close attention to Oswald's paper bag or the way that LHO was carrying that bag on the morning of 11/22/63.
Let's take a look (these are all quotes from the mouth of Buell Wesley Frazier, via his Warren Commission session on March 11, 1964 [emphasis added by DVP]):
"I noticed there was a package laying on the back seat, I didn't pay too much attention and I said, "What's the package, Lee?""
"I will be frank with you, I didn't pay much attention to the package because like I say before and after he told me that it was curtain rods and I didn't pay any attention to it, and he never had lied to me before so I never did have any reason to doubt his word."
"Like I say, I didn't pay much attention to the package other than I knew he had it under his arm and I didn't pay too much attention the way he was walking because I was walking along there looking at the railroad cars and watching the men on the diesel switch them cars and I didn't pay too much attention on how he carried the package at all."
"I will say I am not sure about that, whether it was folded over or not, because, like I say, I didn't pay that much attention to it."
"Like I said, I remember I didn't look at the package very much, paying much attention, but when I did look at it he did have his hands on the package like that."
"Well, you know, like I said now, I said I didn't pay much attention--"
"I didn't pay much attention, but when I did, I say, he had this part down here, like the bottom would be short he had cupped in his hand like that and, say, like walking from the back if you had a big arm jacket there you wouldn't tell much from a package back there."
[End Frazier Quotes.]
And then there's also Wes Frazier's testimony at the 1986 TV docu-trial ("On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald" [see the video below]), which includes this exchange between witness Frazier and prosecutor Vince Bugliosi:
BUGLIOSI -- "Mr. Frazier, is it true that you paid hardly any attention to this bag?"
FRAZIER -- "That is true."
BUGLIOSI -- "So the bag could have been protruding out in front of his body, and you wouldn't have been able to see it, is that correct?"
FRAZIER -- "That is true."
RELEVANT EXCERPTS FROM "RECLAIMING HISTORY":
"[Buell Wesley] Frazier's statements that the rifle was tucked under Oswald's armpit is hardly as definitive as the critics claim. While Frazier's description of how Oswald carried the rifle was consistent in all of his statements to investigators, it was clearly inferable from his Warren Commission testimony that this was only an assumption on his part based on his limited view.
Frazier told the Commission that "the only time" he saw the way Oswald was carrying the package was from the back, and that all that was visible was "just a little strip [of the package] running down" along the inside of Oswald's arm.
[...]
Since he could only see this small portion of the package under Oswald's right arm, and because he didn't notice any part of the package sticking above his right shoulder...Frazier assumed that it must have been tucked under his armpit, telling the Commission, "I don't see how you could have it anywhere other than under your armpit."
Although the critics have been quick to embrace Frazier's conclusion, it should be repeated that he told the Commission over and over (no less than five separate times) that he didn't pay much attention to the package or to the way Oswald carried it.
[...]
In other words, and understandably, Frazier was confused. So we don't even know, for sure, how Oswald was carrying the rifle in front of his body, which Frazier could not see.
[...]
The most likely scenario was postulated well by Dan Rather [in 1967], who rhetorically told his audience, "You can decide whether Frazier, walking some fifty feet behind and, in his own words, not paying much attention, might have missed the few inches of the narrow end of such a package sticking up past Oswald's shoulder"." -- Vincent Bugliosi; Pages 409-410 of "Reclaiming History" (Endnotes)
David Von Pein
October 2, 2009
