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Chapter 3 Images of Oswald On June 3, 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to the State Department: "Since there is the possibility that an impostor is using Oswald's birth certificate, any current information the Department ofState may have concerning subject will be appreciated ;'l Hoover's request may be the first hard copy suggesting possible confusion over the alleged assassin's identity, but that confusion would multiply throughout the next twenty years, culminating in October 1981 with the exhumation ofthe body buried in Oswald's grave.2 Indeed, the shifting status ofLee Harvey Oswald in images and narratives again exemplifies the plight of representation in the assassination debates, marking a point at which its instability reached its uncanny limits. The Backyard Photos Narrative accounts of Oswald's activities and minibiographies of him were compiled and circulated immediately after the assassination. Butnone ofthe photographs that accompanied these texts implicated him directly or could be categorized as evidence proving Oswald was responsible for the shooting .3 However, more incriminating photographic evidence would make its way into the public domain by February of the following year. On the day after the assassination, Dallas police allegedly discovered two photographs while searching the house of Mrs. Ruth Paine, the boarding house where Marina Oswald lived at the time ofthe assassination. Each allegedlyshowed Oswald standing in the back yard, a pistol holstered to his hip, holding the murder weapon, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, and two left-wing publications , The Worker and The Militant. When confronted with these photographs later that day, Oswald told his accusers that the pictures were forgeries , that his face had been superimposed onto someone else's body. News ofthe existence ofthe photographs made the papers ofSunday, November 24, but the photos were not published until the following year, when one of them ran on the front page of the Detroit Free Press on February 17, 1964. According to a Newsweek magazine article from March 2, a set of photographs , including one of Oswald holding the alleged murder weapon, had been offered anonymously to a Life photographer. After initially refusing the offer, Life purchased the photo from Marina Oswald's business advisor 71 for $5,000. However, other sets of Oswald photos were also in circulation, one ofwhich was purchased by aDetroitFree Press reporter for $200. Before Life could run the Oswald-with-rifle picture on the cover ofits February 2I issue, the Detroit paper featured it on page I on the nth. Obtaining the photo from the Detroit Free Press) the Associated Press supplied copies to interested buyers so that the New YorkJoumalAmerican of February I8 and the New York Times ofthe 19th, were also able to scoop Life's cover story.4 Regardless of where the photo ran first, by the end of February 1964 it had been prominentlyfeatured on newsstands across the country. The cover ofLife read: "Lee Oswald with the weapons he used to kill President Kennedy and Officer Tippit." Inside that week's issue, Life ran the photograph uncropped and told its readers: "Dallas police have confirmedthat this is the rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository." Oswald's posthumous prosecution was sustained by such journalistic reports, many of which neglected to include words such as alleged or accused before Oswald's name. Though the mainstream press had almost unanimously declared his guilt since November 22, visual evidence linking Oswald to the murder had not been presented to the public until the distribution ofthis photograph a full seven months before the Warren Commission concluded its investigation and published its findings. Yet this imagery, like so much other imagery, operated within its own discursive formats, which were in turn regulated by various institutional demands. Thus it was not just a case of various publications printing the same photograph and accepting it as a reliable representation of the truth. The reliabiliry ofthe photograph was not simply reflected by these publications - it was manufactured by them. The competition of the journalistic marketplace and the sensational nature of the photograph may well have compelledLife) theNew York Times) and others to run the photograph without much atrention to its authenticity, without probing the very circumstances of its production which were so essential to its status as evidence. Exactly how the journalism community deployed such imagery came under the Warren Commission's scrutiny, and it was through the commission's investigation that the demands of layout and publication were revealed to playa crucial role in the construction of...

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