John Edward Pic didn't hesitate on Nov. 22, 1963.

When he heard that a man suspected in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a 24-year-old former Marine with Russian ties, was in custody in Dallas and had been identified, Pic acted.

But his sense of duty couldn't quell the dread, shame, helplessness and anger.

The Wilford Hall laboratory technician, a staff sergeant, presented himself to his superior officers at Lackland AFB and informed them that Lee Harvey Oswald was his estranged brother.

That information was kept under wraps from the FBI for several days, said former San Antonio FBI special agent Thomas Berge, who interviewed Pic at Lackland and again at his home on Westville Drive behind Hull Elementary.

“I was surprised that Oswald had a brother out there,” said Berge, whose responsibility was Lackland and who was one of about 30 agents from the San Antonio FBI office running down leads on Oswald.

San Antonio agents were in the thick of the Kennedy case principally because of Oswald's mysterious bus trip to Mexico City in late September 1963 to obtain a visa from the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban Consulate.

He was unsuccessful and allegedly argued and brandished a pistol. Oswald's return trip in early October 1963 brought him to San Antonio one early morning.

What occupied his thoughts on that long bus trip back is unknown, but he annoyed a passenger trying to sleep by reading with the overhead light on, ate a banana and was questioned by a Mexican immigration officer at the checkpoint south of Nuevo Laredo. He did disembark in San Antonio, a witness told the FBI, but he didn't contact Pic.

Flood of tips

After Oswald was killed on Nov. 24, 1963, by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, the FBI office here was inundated with calls that he'd been seen in San Antonio before the assassination — at a Holiday Inn; at the airport; hitchhiking south of town. Intrigue lurked everywhere.

Agents were sent to Laredo to check flop houses and cheap hotels. One former agent believes Oswald practiced shooting his Italian rifle in Mexico, entering through Del Rio.

Folklore shared among former agents that the FBI had discovered a tree stump used as a target couldn't be confirmed.

“We brought a lot of heat, a lot of manpower to the case,” said Berge, 88 and retired in Maryland. Often, it led nowhere.

But Berge wasn't happy the Secret Service and the Office of Special Investigations at Lackland had interviewed Sgt. Pic first. When a detachment commander refused to make him available, Berge pulled rank.

“I said, 'Lyndon Johnson is the president of the United States and we're the FBI, the agency that investigates. And if you want me to send something back to Washington, D.C., and tell him you can't make him available, we can do that.' He said, 'Just a minute, let me go back and talk to him.'”

Pic appeared. He explained he hadn't seen Oswald since Thanksgiving 1962.

At that gathering in Fort Worth, the last time all three brothers were together, Pic was shocked at how different his brother looked. Oswald told his brothers how hard life was in Russia. But he didn't talk politics. Pic later recalled “a chip on his shoulder.”

Prior to that, he hadn't spoken to his youngest brother for a decade. Pic had told Air Force investigators in 1959 that Oswald was “dead to me” when he defected to Moscow.

“He wasn't a problem at all. He was cooperative,” Berge said about Pic, who was stationed at Lackland in August 1962.

But a second, testy, interview was required — this time with Pic's nervous wife, Margaret, at their home. Oswald's oldest sibling — he was 7 when Lee was born in October 1939 — had failed to mention something: Oswald had once pulled a knife on Pic's wife.

John Pic died at age 68 in Lynn Haven, Fla., in April 2000. Friends said the New Orleans native and father of five was proud of his Southern roots and never lost his accent, his love of chicory coffee or his stubborn streak.

He rarely talked about Lee. One neighbor was so stunned by learning about his family tie to the JFK killing, after knowing Pic for years, that she dared not mention it again.

In the year before he died, Pic studied the Bible with his pastor, Paul Workentine.

“He believed he was a sinner who deserved God's condemnation,” Workentine shared in an email. “He knew he was going to heaven only because of God's undeserved love.”

Workentine didn't pry about Oswald.

“John was a very private person, especially when it came to his brother,” he said.

Maybe it was too painful for him to revisit their childhood, when they lived together under their domineering mother's roof with her different husbands in New Orleans and in Texas.

His first stepfather, Oswald's father, was strict and doled out whippings. The family was poor and the brothers were placed in an orphanage at various periods. Lee Harvey Oswald slept in his mother's bed until he was nearly 11.

Pic, a highly regarded veteran of the Coast Guard and the Air Force, was questioned extensively about his brother by the FBI, the Secret Service and OSI immediately after the assassination, and gave sworn testimony to the Warren Commission well into 1964.

Oswald had once “idolized” his oldest brother (who he called Pic) and “were best of friends.” As a boy, Oswald had played chess and Monopoly with his brothers.

After John Pic and middle brother Robert Oswald signed up for military service and left home, Oswald became ungovernable and violent. Margaret Pic had witnessed Oswald's temper and contempt for his mother in New York in 1952.

Testifying after the assassination, Pic chalked up the problem as he explained why Oswald had joined the Marines: “He did it for the same reasons that I did it and Robert did it, I assume, to get from out and under the yoke of oppression from my mother.”

The bespectacled airman, described in a local newspaper report as “a short chubby man” bore somewhat of a resemblance to the contemptible Marguerite Oswald.

But he made no excuses to Warren Commission attorneys in May 1964.

“I believe that Lee Oswald did the crime he was accused of,” Pic said. “I always had a feeling that some great tragedy was going to strike Lee in some way or another, and when this happened I figured this was it.”

He admitted to an eerie premonition about his enigmatic brother on the morning of the assassination. He resented that there was no reconciliation — physical or spiritual.

The Secret Service didn't allow John Pic to attend his youngest brother's funeral.

Walking out the front door of their new home in Lackland Terrace, the Pic's oldest children, John Jr. and Janet Ann, could cut through a small grassy drainage creek to Hull Elementary.

“The kids still do that,” said Betty Jane Segovia who now owns the home. But the neighborhood is much changed from Nov. 22, 1963.

Back then, William Burke, once a budding sculptor at Trinity University, was in his first year of teaching at Hull, instructing sixth-graders. Oswald's nephew was one of his brightest students. Burke was unaware of the connection.

Before the assassination, that tidbit would've meant nothing — even to John Pic Jr. He'd only met his uncle Lee once in Fort Worth, about a year before at the Thanksgiving gathering. He was the one with the pretty Russian wife who spoke funny.

After that terrible weekend, the family tree would remain a secret. Imagine how the tragedy unfolded for Oswald's 11-year-old nephew. The scene inside Room 11 at Hull Elementary that Friday afternoon turned chaotic after Principal Marvin Heskew made the announcement that Kennedy was dead.

“I remember having to restrain one of my students from attacking a classmate who actually cheered when he heard that Kennedy died,” said Burke, recalling he asked the children to put their heads on their desks and pray for the slain president. Marilyn Ryan burst into tears.

Other classmates, like Marianne Nichols and Donna Cowan, recalled the yelling taking place not too far from where Oswald's nephew sat.

At home, where the family members still were unpacking at the new house, which they bought just two days earlier, came the news that his uncle Lee was arrested in the slayings of a policeman and Kennedy.

The Secret Service monitored and restricted his father's phone calls and correspondence to his middle brother, Robert, who was in their custody. Then, Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered on live TV. His nephew never showed his feelings about it to his friends.

“I can't even imagine,” Cowan said.

Another classmate close to the boy recalled Oswald's nephew telling “me my first dirty joke,” but was in the dark about this.

“It's mind-boggling,” said Burke, who in his grief made a Kennedy sculpture as a tribute which was displayed at Hull for years.

“As I look at John, he gave no problems that whole year. He was one of the nicer kids. He didn't show any emotion. He didn't even mention that Lee Harvey Oswald was related to him. I think his daddy and mom said, 'Hush-hush on this one.'”

The toll of the boy's family secret isn't known. But records show at least one teacher noticed he sometimes “took on too much responsibility at once.”

Oswald's nephew later attended Ross Junior High and was set to attend the newly built Jay High School but withdrew on Aug. 8, 1967. The reason: military transfer.

hsaldana@express-news.net

John E Pic