Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Meanwhile, Marguerite and Lee had failed to appear at two hearings, on January 13 and 20, before the Board of Education’s Bureau of Attendance, and on January 27 Lee was finally placed on probation until June 20 and warned that failure to attend school in the interim would result in truancy charges being brought against him.156 But Lee’s truancy continued to the extent that between January 15, 1953, and March 11, 1953, he never attended one class.157

  In February, John, with his wife and infant son, visited Marguerite and Lee at their Bronx apartment for Sunday dinner, but as they arrived, Lee walked out, probably, according to Marguerite, on his way to the Bronx Zoo. Marguerite finally broached the subject of Lee’s truancy to John and told him that the school officials had advised her to seek psychiatric help for him.* Marguerite wondered how she could get him to a psychiatrist. John told her just to take him. But Marguerite told him that she couldn’t control Lee and he simply would not see a “head shrinker or nut doctor,” and it was evident to John that Lee had become the boss. Shortly thereafter, John’s ship went to sea, and he heard nothing further about Lee’s problems during that time.158

  Finally, on March 12, the attendance officer in charge of Lee’s case filed a petition in New York City’s Domestic Relations Court, Family Division (referred to as “Children’s Court”), which declared that the boy had been “excessively absent from school” and was “beyond the control of his mother.” Marguerite appeared alone before a Justice Delaney that day, and reported that Lee refused to attend the court proceeding.159 Indeed, one spring day an attendance officer for the school district, Victor Connell, found Lee at the Bronx Zoo. He noted that Lee was clean and well dressed but surly—he called Connell a “damned Yankee.” Connell returned Lee to school.160 On April 16, with Lee present (having been picked up pursuant to a warrant), Justice Delaney declared Lee a truant and remanded him to Youth House for three weeks of “psychiatric study.”161 This time it was serious. Two bailiffs took Lee from Marguerite right there in the courtroom. She saw him briefly a few minutes later, when the officers gave her a Marine Corps ring that Robert had sent to Lee, along with Lee’s other personal effects. They also gave her a slip of paper to inform her of the location of Youth House and when she might visit him there.162 A few days later, Lee’s probation officer, John Carro, interviewed Lee and found him to be “friendly and likable” and “fairly bright,” but indifferent to the situation. Lee told him he didn’t like his teachers or his classmates and just wanted to be left alone. Carro had a lower opinion of Marguerite, whom he interviewed on April 21, finding her “self-involved,” someone who blamed everyone else for Lee’s problems, and was reluctant to get involved in Lee’s treatment, seeing herself “as removed, as this having nothing to do with her.”163*

  Youth House, New York City’s detention home for delinquent boys who were remanded by the courts for a brief period of diagnostic study, was a dingy, jail-like building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, between First and Second Avenues, with barred windows looking out on tenements of the teeming city.164 Youth House ran its own school, P.S. 613, and maintained workshops for the children, a recreation department, facilities for group therapy, even its own hospital.165 Marguerite disliked Youth House intensely from her visit there with Lee. She complained that she had to wait in line with Puerto Ricans and Negroes and that her pocketbook was emptied by a guard because “the children in this home were such criminals and dope fiends and had [committed] criminal offenses.” They even removed the wrappers from the sticks of chewing gum she had brought for Lee. Lee didn’t like it either, according to Marguerite. He cried when he saw her. “Mother, I want to get out of here,” he said. “There are children in here that have killed people, and smoke. I want to get out.”166

  A psychologist, Irving Sokolow, subjected Lee to several tests, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the Monroe Silent Reading Test, and Human Figure Drawings. Lee scored 118 on his IQ test, some fifteen points higher than on the earlier test administered in Fort Worth, and indicating, per Sokolow, “present intellectual functioning in the upper range of bright normal intelligence.” All of Lee’s scores, Sokolow’s report of May 7, 1953, said, were above average for his age group, “appreciably so in verbalization of abstract concepts and in the assembly of commonly recognizable objects.” Sokolow thought “his method of approach was generally an easy, facile and highly perceptive one.” (As indicated earlier, the dyslexia from which Lee suffered was not yet recognized as a common disability, and it is impossible to tell how much higher he might have scored on an IQ test if he had not had this problem.)† By contrast, the report said that “the Human Figure Drawings are empty, poor characterizations of persons approximately the same age as [Lee]. They reflect a considerable amount of impoverishment in the social and emotional areas.” Sokolow went on to note that Lee exhibited “some difficulty in relationship to the maternal figure suggesting more anxiety in this area than any other.”167

  Robert Oswald, who first read Sokolow’s report long after the assassination, was not surprised by it. He thought Lee had good cause to feel anxiety about “the maternal figure.” Neither he nor John had been able to cope with Marguerite either, but they at least had each other for support, and after they escaped, both tried to have as little to do with her as possible. Lee had been left to cope with her all alone, and Robert didn’t think he had the strength to do that.168

  A week after Lee’s psychological test, Mr. Rainey, on the Youth House staff, recommended that Lee see a caseworker: “Lee has constituted a problem here of late. He is a non-participant in any activity on the floor. He has made no attempt at developing a relationship with any member of the group, and at the same time not given anyone an opportunity to become acquainted with him. He appears content just to sit and read whatever is available.”169

  The case was assigned to Evelyn Strickman, a young New Yorker and Hunter College graduate who had earned her master’s degree from Columbia’s School of Social Work the year before.170 She wrote the most extensive and perceptive report on Lee at this period of his life. The draft runs to seven closely typed pages, the rewritten version to five and a half, and includes a detailed account of an interview with Marguerite.171 Strickman found Lee to be a “seriously detached, withdrawn” boy who was “laconic and taciturn.” She also found “a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him, and it seems fairly clear that he has detached himself from the world around him because no one in it ever met any of his needs for love.” Strickman asked him what his mother’s reaction to his truancy was, and Lee told her that Marguerite had told him to go to school, “but she never did anything about it.” Strickman asked him if he wished that she might do something about it, and Lee finally said that his mother “never gave a damn about him.”172*This would not have surprised Robert either. At least since he was at Chamberlain-Hunt Academy he had been aware that the relationship between the other cadets and their parents “was not at all like the relationship we had with our mother. Maybe because she had to worry about supporting us she never had time to enjoy us. Other parents, it seemed to me, enjoyed their children. I just know that we learned, very early, that we were a burden to her.”173

  Strickman’s report said that “questioning elicited the information that he feels almost as if there is a veil between him and other people through which they cannot reach him, but he prefers this veil to remain intact.” She also persuaded him, with some difficulty, to talk about his fantasies, and he “acknowledged that some were about being powerful, and sometimes hurting and killing people, but refused to elaborate on this.”174

  Strickman also interviewed Marguerite, whom she described as “a smartly dressed, gray haired woman, very self-possessed and alert and superficially affable. Essentially, however, she was revealed as a defensive, rigid, self-involved person.”175 Remarkably, Marguerite began the interview by demanding to know why Lee had been remanded, and refusing to
wait for an explanation, wanted to know if he had been given a complete physical examination, and was particularly concerned about his genitalia. When she was told the examination had revealed “nothing unusual, she looked at once relieved and disappointed.” She had noticed that Lee had of late gotten big “down there,” and her worries about the genital area stemmed from the fact that Robert, on induction to the Marine Corps, had been found to have a hydrocele, a sort of watery blister in the penis of little significance.176

  In the draft of her report, which she dictated, Strickman said about Marguerite, “I honestly don’t think that she sees [her son] as a person at all but simply as an extension of herself. Interestingly enough, by the way, although Lee was a planned-for-baby, because her husband [and] herself wanted a girl, I take it she was rather disappointed at having a third boy.”177

  Strickman concluded that she believed “the root of Lee’s difficulties, which produced warning signals before he ever came here [New York], seems to lie in his relationship with his mother. Lee feels that while she always cared for his material needs she was really never involved with him and didn’t care very much what happened to him.” She thought Marguerite had “little understanding of this boy’s behavior nor of the protective shell he has drawn around himself in his effort to avoid contact with people, which may result in hurt for him. It is possible that her own negative attitude about casework help and probation officers may communicate itself to Lee, interfering with his chances for help.” She nonetheless recommended against placing Lee in an institution without first seeing whether he could be reached by therapy. “Despite his withdrawal,” she wrote, “he gives the impression that he is not so difficult to reach as he appears, and patient, prolonged effort and a sustained relationship with one therapist might bring results. There are indications that he has suffered serious personality damage, but, if he can receive help quickly, this might be repaired to some extent.”178

  Years later, Evelyn Strickman, testifying before the Warren Commission under her then-married name of Siegel, had a very vague recollection of Oswald, but from what she wrote in her report she told the Commission he was “a youngster who was teetering on the edge of serious emotional illness. Now, whether that included violence I am not prepared to say.”179

  The chief psychiatrist at Youth House, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, exhibited no such professional caution in his testimony before the Warren Commission, giving the flip side of the opinions offered in defense of Oswald by the Warren Commission critics. In the process, he embarrassed himself. Hartogs was a German emigré who had been educated in Frankfort on the Main and received his medical training in Belgium. He came to America in 1940 and took two further medical degrees, from the University of Montreal and New York University. Dr. Hartogs said he was used to dealing with children with serious mental problems, some of whom committed very serious crimes. He was intrigued by the “discrepancy” between the rather trivial reason for Lee’s remand to Youth House—inveterate truancy—and the seriousness of what he perceived to be the boy’s underlying personality disturbance.

  Hartogs interviewed Oswald and then selected him as the subject of one of the Youth House’s informal Monday-afternoon “seminars,” at which all of those who had dealt with the subject child would discuss the case in great detail. Typically, the house director opened the seminar; the social worker talked about the boy’s development, background, and early history; staff from the recreation department and household gave their views; the psychologist reported his findings; and the psychiatrist—in this case Hartogs himself—discussed the recommendations he was prepared to make to the Children’s Court.180

  The report to the court he dictated on May 1, 1953, is the only known report from a psychiatrist who interviewed Oswald. It reads,

  This 13 year old, well built, well nourished boy was remanded to Youth House for the first time on a charge of truancy from school and being beyond the control of his mother as far as school attendance is concerned. This is his first contact with the law. He is a tense, withdrawn and evasive boy who dislikes intensely talking about himself and his feelings. He likes [to] give the impression that he doesn’t care about others and rather likes to keep to himself so that he is not bothered and does not have to make the effort of communicating. It was difficult to penetrate the emotional wall behind which this boy hides [but] he provided us with sufficient clues, permitting us to see intense anxiety, shyness, feelings of awkwardness and insecurity as the main reasons for his withdrawal tendencies and solitary habits. Lee told us: “I don’t want a friend and I don’t like to talk to people.” He describes himself as stubborn, and according to his own saying he likes to say “No.” Strongly resistive and negativistic features were thus noticed but psychotic mental content was denied [psychiatric term meaning not present or found] and no indication of psychotic mental changes was arrived at.

  Lee is a youngster with superior mental endowment, functioning presently on the bright normal range of mental efficiency. His abstract thinking capacity and his vocabulary are well developed. No retardation in school subjects could be found in spite of his truancy from school. Lee limits his interests to reading magazines and looking at the television all day long. He dislikes to play with others or to face the learning situation in school. On the other hand he claims to be “very poor” in all school subjects and would need remedial help. The discrepancy between these claims and his actual attainment level show the low degree of self-evaluation and self-esteem at which this boy has arrived presently, mainly due to feelings of general inadequacy and emotional discouragement.

  Lee is the product of a broken home as his father died before he was born. Two older brothers are presently in the United States Army while the mother supports herself and Lee as an insurance broker. This occupation makes it impossible for her to provide adequate supervision of Lee and to make him attend school regularly. Lee is intensely dissatisfied with his present way of living, but feels that the only way in which he can avoid feeling too unhappy is to deny to himself competition with other children or expressing his needs or wants. Lee claims that he can get very angry at his mother and occasionally hits her, particularly when she returns home without having bought food for supper. On such occasions she leaves it to Lee to prepare some food with what he can find in the kitchen. He feels that his mother rejects him and really has never cared very much for him. He expressed the similar feeling with regard to his brothers who lived pretty much on their own without showing any brotherly interest in him. Lee has a vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which he tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations. He did not enjoy being together with other children and when we asked him whether he prefers the company of boys to the one of girls, he answered, “I dislike everybody.” His occupational goal is to join the army. His mother was interviewed by the Youth House social worker and was described by her as a “defensive, rigid, self-involved and intellectually alert” woman who finds it exceedingly difficult to understand Lee’s personality and withdrawing behavior. She does not understand that Lee’s withdrawal is a form of violent but silent protest against his neglect by her—and represents his reaction to a complete absence of any real family life. She seemed to be interested enough in the welfare of this boy to be willing to seek guidance and help as regards her own difficulties and management of Lee.

  Neurological examination remained essentially negative with the exception of slightly impaired hearing in the left ear, resulting in a mastoidectomy in 1946. History of convulsions and accidental injuries to the skull was denied. Family history is negative for mental disease.

  Dr. Hartogs then appended a summary for the probation officer, which included his recommendations to the court:

  This 13 year old well built boy has superior mental resources and functions only slightly below his capacity level in spite of chronic truancy from school which brought him into Youth House. No finding of neurological impairment or psychotic me
ntal changes could be made. Lee has to be diagnosed as “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive aggressive tendencies.” Lee has to be seen as an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by his self-involved and conflicted mother. Although Lee denies that he is in need of any other form of help other than a remedial one, we gained the definite impression that Lee can be reached through contact with an understanding and very patient psychotherapist if he could be drawn at the same time into group psychotherapy. We arrive therefore at the recommendation that he should be placed on probation under the condition that he seek help and guidance through contact with a child guidance clinic, where he should be treated preferably by a male psychiatrist who could substitute, to a certain degree at least, for the lack of a father figure. At the same time, his mother should be urged to seek psychotherapeutic guidance through contact with a family agency. If this plan does not work out favorably and Lee cannot cooperate in this treatment plan on an out-patient basis, removal from the home and placement could be resorted to at a later date, but it is our definite impression that treatment on probation should be tried out before the stricter and possibly more harmful placement approach is applied to the case of this boy. The Big Brother Movement could undoubtedly be a tremendous value in this case and Lee should be urged to join the organized group activities of his community such as provided by the PAL or YMCA of his neighborhood.181*

  On May 7, 1953, Lee was released from Youth House and he and Marguerite appeared in court once again, this time before a Justice McClancy, who reviewed Lee’s record and psychiatric report at some length. He warned Lee that he would have to return to school and stay there. There was no change in who Lee’s probation officer would be, John Carro.182 Marguerite was beside herself. She had taken an immediate dislike to Carro and, as she said, she was not one to “mince my words.” When Carro told Lee that he would have to report once a week, Marguerite said, “Mr. Carro, my son is not reporting to you once a week. This is not a criminal offense. He was picked up for truancy. He has assured the judge, promised the judge, that he would be back to school. He has promised you he would be back to school. Let’s give this boy a chance, and let’s see if he will go to school. And then, Mr. Carro, if he doesn’t go to school, then you can have him report to you.” Mr. Carro did not, according to Marguerite, “take that graciously.”183