Lee Harvey Oswald’s Aristocrat Handler, and Why Bill O‘Reilly is Completely Full of Sh*t

He's a fraud... And I have the receipts to prove it.

On a warm Florida afternoon in March 1977, the crack of a gunshot rang through the second-floor study of an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion. George de Mohrenschildt—Russian émigré, petroleum geologist, and perhaps most notably, friend, confidant and most likely handler for Lee Harvey Oswald—was found dead from an alleged self-inflicted head wound from a 20-gauge shotgun.

The timing was impossible to ignore: it was the very day that received a subpoena the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations.

In his 2012 book Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot, former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly reminisces about his assignment as a young, 28-year-old intrepid reporter who found himself on de Mohrenschildt’s doorstep at the moment of the gunshot.

“As the reporter knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian, assuring that his relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald would never be fully understood,” O’Reilly recounted. “By the way, that reporter’s name is Bill O’Reilly.”

The only problem? Bill’s story is fabricated bullshit, a lie concocted by O’Reilly, dis-proven by a recorded phone conversation between himself and Gaeton Fonzi. In the recording, O’Reilly can be heard telling Fonzi that he’s planning to travel to Florida to investigate de Mohrenschildt’s suicide.

“I’m coming down there tomorrow,” O’Reilly said. “I’m coming to Florida. … Now, OK, I’m gonna try to get a night flight out of here, if I can.”

This evidence is further validated by two former colleagues of O’Reilly at WFAA-TV in Dallas, where O’Reilly worked at the time, Tracy Rowlett and Byron Harris. Both say he was in the TV Studio in the Lone Star State, not Palm Beach, when de Mohrenschildt died.

“Bill O’Reilly’s a phony, there’s no other way to put it,” Rowlett told Media Matters.

“He stole that article out of the newspaper,” Harris added. “I guarantee Channel 8 didn’t send him to Florida to do that story because it was a newspaper story. It was broken by The Dallas Morning News.“

O’Reilly was also incorrect about the ownership of the home, which belonged to C.E. Tilton. De Mohrenschildt and his 33-year-old daughter Alexandra were guests there.

O’Reilly used the de Mohrenschildt suicide theory as a marketable angle in his pedestrian paean to the lone gunman theory but couldn’t fit him neatly into his narrative, admitting the enigmatic man’s presence in Oswald’s life was inexplicable. O’Reilly called de Mohrenschildt a man who “may” have CIA connections. However, while promoting his book, O’Reilly later admitted de Mohrenschildt in fact did have CIA connections. “We couldn’t find out this man George de Mohrenschildt with CIA contacts, what he was doing with Oswald,” O’Reilly said. “Oswald as I said, loser, lowest rung. This guy (de Mohrenschildt) is an aristocratic Russian with CIA connections. Why was he around? We couldn’t really nail that down.” De Mohrenschildt himself admittedly was friendly and did freelance work for the Agency.

O’Reilly also acknowledged that de Mohrenschildt helped Oswald get a job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a company that did photographic work for the U.S. government, particularly in relation to photos taken by U-2 spy planes. This was a topic familiar to Oswald. As a radar technician in the Marine Corps at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan, Oswald was privy to many covert CIA U-2 spy missions. O’Reilly neglected to mention de Mohrenschildt’s connections to Johnson and Texas businessmen. Again, the dots are not connected.

In O’Reilly’s forced explanation, de Mohrenschildt’s presence in Oswald’s life remains inexplicable, yet it does little to clarify the Kennedy assassination. There is much more to the enigmatic Russian.

Before his alleged suicide, De Mohrenschildt had only recently begun talking to journalists and investigators about his role in the events surrounding Kennedy’s assassination. “I feel responsible for the behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald… Because I guided him,” he had confided to Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans weeks earlier. “I instructed him to set it up.”

During a trip to Europe with Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt had begun providing fragments of a scenario in which Texas oilmen, working with intelligence operatives, plotted to kill the president. Hours before his death, he had intimated to HSCA investigators that the CIA had approved his contact with Oswald.

Who was de Mohrenschildt? Why did he have extraordinary connections to powerful figures in American politics, intelligence, and business? And lastly, why would he befriend the misanthropic Oswald?

Behind the façade of a distinguished petroleum consultant lay a man with extraordinary connections. De Mohrenschildt maintained personal relationships with George Herbert Walker Bush, who was a big hat in the Texas oil industry at the time, and with members of Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle. From October 1962 until April 1963—a critical period before the assassination—de Mohrenschildt became unusually close to Lee and Marina Oswald.

When questioned by the Warren Commission, de Mohrenschildt initially stated that he was attracted to Oswald due to the man’s remarkable fluency in the Russian language.

“I taught Russian at all levels in a large university, and I never saw such proficiency in the best senior students, who constantly listened to Russian tapes and spoke to Russian friends,” de Mohrenschildt said in his assessment of Oswald. “As a matter of fact, American-born instructors never mastered the Russian-spoken language as well as Lee did.”

The statement was puzzling—Oswald’s command of Russian was actually quite poor, and he struggled to communicate with his own Russian-born wife. Years later, de Mohrenschildt revealed a different story: his contact with Oswald had been initiated at the suggestion of Dallas CIA operative J. Walton Moore, directly contradicting the agency’s official position that Oswald was of no interest to them.

De Mohrenschildt was an anti-communist political refugee, and he and his wife embraced the sexual freedom of the sixties. A report compiled by the Dallas Police Department depicts an uninhibited couple who would entertain guests with erotic films. De Mohrenschildt would openly brag about frequently wearing his wife’s panties. Compare this with Oswald, the young stuffy, rigid, communist ideologue. Yet, their friendship makes perfect sense within a hidden context of intelligence gathering and potential manipulation. This context connects to future CIA Director Bush.

In 1950, de Mohrenschildt had started an oil investment firm with Eddie Hooker, Bush’s roommate at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts—establishing an indirect but significant link between Bush’s circle and the man who would later become Oswald’s handler. As renewed inquiries into Kennedy’s death gained momentum in 1976, de Mohrenschildt grew increasingly paranoid. He wrote directly to Bush, by then Director of the CIA:

Dear George,

You will excuse this hand-written letter. Maybe you will be able to bring a solution to the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere.

Either FBI is involved in this or they do not want to accept my complaints. We are driven to insanity by the situation. I have been behaving like a damn fool ever since my daughter died from [cystic fibrosis] over three years ago.

I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people—I do not know. But to punish an elderly man like myself and my highly nervous and sick wife is really too much.

Could you do something to remove the net around us?

This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you any more. Good luck in your important job.

Thank you so much,

Sincerely, G. DeMohrenschildt.

The letter was an obvious attempt to call off surveillance at a time when, with the HSCA hearings, new inquiries into the assassination were being opened, and people who had been involved were dying. Bush, though in an important government position, took the time to answer, perhaps as a precaution, deflecting the accusations of surveillance as paranoia:

“My staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of Federal authorities in recent years,” wrote Bush in reply. “The flurry of interest that attended your testimony before the Warren Commission has long since subsided. I can only suspect that you have become ‘newsworthy’ again in view of the renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination and, thus, may be attracting the attention of people in the media.”

House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator Gaeton Fonzi would find Bush’s address in de Mohrenschildt’s briefcase after his death, under the entry “Poppy.” Only intimates called George HW Bush “Poppy.”

Despite claiming he was unable to remember where he was on the day Kennedy was shot, there is evidence Bush Sr. was in Dallas that morning. He would promote the lone gunman theory until his death, never missing an opportunity to advance this narrative, famously snickering at Gerald Ford’s funeral after calling Oswald a “deluded gunman.“

De Mohrenschildt also cultivated relationships with Lyndon Johnson’s closest advisors and desperately tried to reach him in the months leading up to the Kennedy assassination.

In April 1963, after months of what some researchers describe as “grooming” Oswald, de Mohrenschildt traveled to Washington and sought a meeting with then-Vice President Johnson. Instead, a letter from Johnson’s office directed him to meet with Colonel Howard Burris, Johnson’s Air Force aide—whose unlisted phone number would later be found in de Mohrenschildt’s personal address book.

The true circumstances of de Mohrenschildt’s death remain disputed. Though officially ruled a suicide, questions persist. A nearby tape recorder captured the security system beeping—indicating someone had entered the house—moments before the fatal shot was heard.

More striking still was de Mohrenschildt’s dramatic reversal regarding Oswald’s guilt. In an unpublished manuscript titled I am a Patsy! I am a Patsy! written shortly before his death, the man who once helped paint Oswald as an unstable misfit for the Warren Commission declared him “probably innocent of the Kennedy assassination.”

The story of George de Mohrenschildt—with its web of connections to power brokers, intelligence agencies, and the accused assassin—remains one of the most compelling and unresolved threads in the tapestry of the Kennedy assassination.

His death silenced what might have been crucial testimony, leaving behind questions that continue to echo as loudly as that final gunshot in Palm Beach.