You can listen here to my extraordinary conversation with Ernst Titovets, a scientist who was close friends with Lee Harvey Oswald from September 1960 to November 1963. When these two young men met long ago, they shared ambitions to make something of themselves. Titovets was an aspiring medical student who spoke rudimentary English. Oswald was an ex-Marine living in a foreign county who sought to forge a new life. Titovets first told the story in his 2010 book “Oswald Russian Episode,” which got little media attention in the United States. He offered no theory of the assassination to flatter conspiracy theorists. Defenders of the official theory of Oswald’s guilt mostly ignored his account. Nonetheless, Titovets is that rarest of people: a living witness to the history of JFK’s assassination. Here are some highlights of our conversation. First Impressions of Oswald They met at the flat of mutual friends, a Spanish speaking couple named Ziger whose daughters were friendly with Oswald. “During that first meeting he had the possibility to learn a lot about me,” Titovets said (4:44). “…. At the end of the party, he suggested we go together. … He showed me where he lived and when we were about to part… I wanted to suggest my apology to him… I had asked him a lot of questions during that night, questions about how to pronounce this and that, and I wanted to thank him…. I tried to think of some nice phrase to thank him and nothing came to mind. At that time I was not that experienced with common English phrases. I said “I shall expose you,” when I meant, “I have been exploiting you.” “There was a sudden change in his attitude,” Titovets recalled. “There was a torrent of words and I thought with dismay I had lost my sparring partner. I was, well, in shock.” He realized that Oswald had gone through an ordeal when he arrived in Moscow and told Soviet officials he wanted to live in the Soviet Union. His request had gone up to the Politiburo, the highest level of the communist government. Oswald knew the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, was paying close attention to his every move. Titovets understood that Oswald had good reason to protect his “inner” self against being exposed. As Oswald erupted, Titovets feared he had lost his new-found English-speaking friend. But no. “Lee must have realized my situation,” Titovets went on, “and suddenly he calmed down, and I think he felt sort of sorry for his outburst. He said, ‘OK I’ll see you to you to your bus stop.’ On the way he suggested, ‘Let’s get together. Come over to my place.’” The exchange, Titovets said, was “interesting from a psychological point of view” because “it revealed something of Oswald’s character,” namely that “he was reasonable person.” “He wasn’t carried away with his emotions,” Titovets explained. “Another person would say ‘Go jump. I don’t want to have anything to do with you.’ But in this situation, he looked at my face, at my dismay, and he realized I didn’t mean that….. The moment he understood correctly … he was a changed man.” Oswald and Titovets began a friendship that would continue for three years and two months until Oswald was died a violent death in Dallas, Texas, some 5,500 miles away from Minsk. Oswald defended capitalism “It was at his place that we started to compare political societies,” Titovets says (10:05). At one point, they had “a rather hot exchange.” Titovets says he was the stubborn committed Soviet socialist who thought "we were the best of all.” He said Oswald—often portrayed as a fanatical communist—defended the American capitalist system in their exchanges. “You live here like slaves,” Oswald told Titovets, emphasizing his southern pronunciation, “Suh-laves.” Oswald added, “You can’t go abroad.” Even though Titovets was free to travel in the vast Soviet Union from Latvia in western Europe, to Siberi