Only one man has the distinction of having written a book dealing with Lee Harvey Oswald before November 22, 1963. That man was Kerry Thornley, also known as Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, one of the founders of Discordianism, a strange hybrid of Zen and anarchist philosophies that gained some notoriety in the sixties.
The story goes as somewhat: Thornley and Oswald served in the Marines together, where both shared unorthodox outlooks on Orwell, Marxism, other strange "isms" I'm sure. Oswald made quite an impression on the young Thornley, and was subsequently worked into the structure of one of Thornley's novels. "The Idle Warriors". Having this odd friendship in his past, Thornley found himself testifying later before the Warren Commission and being dragged down via subpoena to New Orleans for Jim Garrison's infamous trial of Clay Shaw.
While in New Orleans, Thornley, who had always bought the official story of Oswald's guilt, began to run into some rather strange characters, the sorts that seem to haunt every awning and alley of the Crescent City. A man calling himself "Gary Kirstein" who Thornley would later believe was in fact Howard Hunt, seemed to have odd foreknowledge of events like Nixon's downfall and the Charles Manson affair, as well as CIA mind control experiments. Many of these conversations with "Kirstein" shaped Thornley's later thinking, that Oswald may have in fact been a CIA agent, and that the so called "MK Ultra" mind control experiments conducted by the CIA were much larger reaching than believed, stretching out to fringe cult groups.
Thornley was a close friend and correspondent of Robert Anton Wilson, and had a central role in shaping Wilson's own tolerant zenarchist paranoia, a very subjective philosophy of chaos and open mindedness that I find attractive, maddening, and never boring.
