Bar Prez Who Met With Lee Harvey Oswald After JFK Assassination Dies at 94
A civil lawyer in Texas who became a part of history when he sought to protect the rights of accused John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before Oswald, too, was killed has died at age 94.
As calls began coming in from defense attorneys and law school deans concerned that Oswald didn’t have a lawyer after the Nov. 23, 1963 slaying of the nation’s president in a Dallas motorcade, the unassuming president of the Dallas County Bar Association, H. Louis Nichols, felt it was incumbent upon him to visit the notorious suspect in prison and see if he was being denied counsel, reports the Dallas Morning News.
Braving a media horde, Nichols, 47, went to the jail in which Oswald was being held and sat down on a bunk a few feet away from him, the article recounts. They talked a bit, and Oswald said he wanted a lawyer from New York or the American Civil Liberties Union and didn’t need any help from the bar association to find an attorney. Confident that he had done his duty as bar president, Nichols departed.
The next day Jack Ruby further stunned an already shocked nation by shooting Oswald to death on live national television.
Nichols, who continued to practice until he was 91, felt he was a part of history after that, and at one point was taken by a granddaughter to her fifth grade class’ show-and-tell session while the students were studying the Kennedy assassination, the newspaper reports.
“That day, he was show and tell,” says Jennie Nichols.
Her grandfather and an ambulance driver were the some of the last living witnesses from the era, according to NBC. Both died within the last week.
Additional coverage:
Dallas Morning News: “Remembering the man who helped JFK’s widow”
Kennedy Assassination (John McAdams site): “Testimony of H. Louis Nichols”
