Moscow to implicate the Trotskyist movement, The attempt, said the highest body of the Fourth International, "in. place of nelping to expose the hand of the racists and the police in this affair, seeks to continue the campaigns of slander against a wing of the workers movement which, for more than thirty years, has been systematically made victim of such slanders and provocations."
Meanwhile, in New York, the allegations of the Dallas police that they had found copies in Oswald's quarters of The Worker, the weekly publication which reflects the views of the Communist party of the USA, and The Militant, the weekly Trotskyist newspaper which has been published since 1928, as well as correspondence on letterheads of the American Communist party, led ‘to official statements to the press from these two movements.
The publishers of The Militant said that they had found that Oswald had been briefly a subscriber. in December 1962 he sent in $1 for a four~ month introductory subscription and renewed for another four months at $1, the subscription expiring in September with no further communication indicated in the records.
"The mere fact that a person subscribes to a publication," a representative of The Militant said, "is no indication of whether or not he is sympathetic to any position the publication espouses ~~ sometimes just the opposite,"
Arnold Johnson, a leader of the Communist party of the USA made the following comment: "We get many letters every week from people who are not Communists including students, faculty members and others who are interested in the subject and from many also who are anti-Comaunist, who ask for | information,
"T answer all such letters from the public asking for information, and it is possible his letters are among those. This does not make Lee Oswald in any way associated with the Communist party -- no more than it
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makes the hundreds of others who write for information or than it makes the newspapermen who call up for information,” ;
The American Civil Liberties Union, the largest organization of its “kind in the United States, also reported that Oswald had sent in a $2 cash contribution on November 4 along with a filled-out membership application,
The ACLU is nonpolitical and nonpartisan. It has defended victims of all political persuasion, tneluding avowed fascists. Ernest Angell, board chairman, said that the ACLU is "concerned solely with the defense of the. Bill of Rights" and believes in "free speech, advocacy of opinion, reason and open debate," It intervenes in cases where it hag reason to believe that the constitutional rights of a defendant have been infringed,
>. V.T,bee, national director of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, on “November 25 once again denied that Oswald had ever "represented" the’ organization, He made a’ plea for "understanding, integrity, justice andpeaceful resolution,"
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL