Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Carro was, however, touched by the boy’s plight. For one thing, Lee seemed like a little lost boy, particularly compared to some of the mentally defective, even psychotic kids—often hardened criminals, burglars, and murderers—with whom Carro had been dealing. Carro also understood something of the culture shock Lee underwent when he came to New York, still wearing the jeans that were common in Texas but unknown in the city, and speaking with a soft southern accent amid the harsh accents of the Bronx. Carro himself had come to New York from Orocovis in his native Puerto Rico at the age of nine, speaking not a word of English, and lived in a tiny Puerto Rican enclave surrounded by black East Harlem. Carro understood what it was like for Lee to be taunted for his accent and dress by New York kids who “wore pegged pants and talked in their own ditty-bop fashion,” but he also understood that not all boys reacted as overtly as he had as a Spanish-speaking nine-year-old injected into East Harlem. Carro told the Warren Commission that looking back, he saw no propensity for violent behavior in Oswald at the time, nothing he could equate with the Puerto Rican and Negro youth with whom he was familiar, kids that cried out to say “that they exist and that they are human beings” and who committed violent acts “just to get their one day in the sun, the day when all the papers will focus on them and say ‘I am me. I am alive.’”184 For the moment, Carro, to Marguerite’s chagrin, made it very clear that Lee would indeed have to report to him once a week, like it or not, and then set out to find an appropriate place for treatment for Lee, which, because of waiting lists, et cetera, he was unable to do.185

  In the few remaining weeks of the spring semester, Lee returned to school at P.S. 44 and, even with his long absences from class, managed to finish with generally low but passing marks. Surprisingly, a teacher gave him an “O” or “Outstanding” for “Social-Participation.” This makes no sense since it contradicts all we know about Oswald at the time, and in fact, the very same report refers to him as “Quick-Tempered, Constantly Losing Control, Getting into Battles with others.”186 Indeed, the lack of social participation was a large part of Lee’s problem, in Carro’s view. Lee told him he didn’t like the teachers, the school, or the children. “I like myself,” he said. And his mother? “Well, I’ve got to live with her,” Lee said. “I guess I love her.”187

  Marguerite was another problem. Carro felt the boy would respond to therapy, that he needed to be brought out of his shell, but for the therapy to work, Marguerite had to be involved, and Carro realized that Marguerite herself felt threatened, and was convinced that she had nothing to do with Lee’s problems. Even if Lee did go into the therapy he needed, if his mother communicated her own resentment, resistance, and negativity about it to the boy, the time and effort would be wasted. Carro saw that Marguerite was so involved with herself that she would blame anything and anybody but herself for Lee’s problems. These, she insisted, would take care of themselves if the authorities stopped pestering him and her.188

  In July, Robert came to New York while on leave from the Marine Corps, and was on his way to the Marine base at Opa-locka, Florida. It had been a year since he had left his mother and brother in Fort Worth to enlist, and he had a lot of catching up to do. They were very glad to see him, but, oddly, he heard nothing of the troubles Lee had been having, or the family’s knotty involvement with the Children’s Court. Eventually, Marguerite did mention to Robert that Lee had had to appear before “a Negro judge” because he had been absent from school too much, but Marguerite brushed it off as something that never would have happened in Texas, and Robert did not get the impression it was a serious matter.189

  Lee couldn’t wait to take Robert to the nearby Bronx Zoo and, proud of knowing his way around, give him a detailed explanation of the New York subway system. Lee, all of thirteen, took Robert to the top of the Empire State Building, pointed out places of interest, and planned his brother’s itinerary for the next week, from Wall Street to the Museum of Natural History.190 One Sunday Robert went up to Marguerite and Lee’s apartment in the Bronx for a Sunday dinner with a date that John’s wife, Marge, had arranged for him. When John, Marge, and their child arrived shortly thereafter, Lee left the room. Rather than join everyone for dinner, he came to the table, took what he wanted, and went into the next room to watch television. John tried to talk to him, but Lee, uninterested in anything John had to say, shrugged him off.191

  When Robert’s leave was up, Lee accompanied him to the bus terminal to see him off to Florida. To Robert, Lee still seemed to be just a normal, healthy, happy thirteen-year-old boy who was enjoying himself.192

  Carro continued through the summer to try to find some help for the boy. Early in September, he was turned down by the Salvation Army, which thought Lee, according to his psychiatric report, too severely disturbed for them to be able to help.193

  On the day Lee’s probation was up and he was due in court, September 24, 1953, Marguerite rang Carro to explain that she was unable to appear and there was no need for it anyway, as Lee had made a “marvelous adjustment” and was now regularly attending his school classes. Apparently Marguerite told Carro—brazenly gilding the lily—that Lee had even been elected president of his class at P.S. 44. Indeed, Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler, misreading Carro’s summary report to the Children’s Court in 1953, said Carro’s report reflected that Oswald had been elected president of his class. But a closer reading of his report shows that Carro had only been told this by Marguerite, and Carro told the Warren Commission that Lee “had not become president of the class that I recall.”194

  Marguerite’s fabrications and protestations didn’t work. Carro explained that Lee would still have to continue under supervision for a time, and suggested group therapy at the court’s own treatment clinic, an outpatient facility on 22nd Street, since intake had finally opened up there. Marguerite would have none of it. Later that day, a Justice Fogarty continued Lee’s probation another five weeks, to October 29.195 In mid-October, just before Lee’s fourteenth birthday, Carro was informed by Lee’s homeroom teacher at P.S. 44 that Lee’s attendance record had indeed improved—he had been absent only one day and three half days—but that his conduct was atrocious, and Marguerite was refusing to cooperate with the school authorities. “During the past two weeks,” Mr. Rosen reported to Carro, “practically every teacher has complained to me about the boy’s behavior. He has consistently refused to salute the flag during early morning exercises. In many rooms, he has done no work whatsoever. He spends most of his time sailing paper planes around the room. When we spoke to him about his behavior, his attitude was belligerent. I offered to help him,” Rosen said, but Oswald said, “I don’t need anybody’s help.” As indicated, notations on his report card said he was “quick-tempered,” “constantly losing control,” and “getting into battles with others.” On October 29, when Lee was again due in court, Marguerite rang Carro to explain she couldn’t be present owing to her work. The judge, his patience exhausted, told Carro to try to refer Lee to the Berkshire Industrial Farm or, if they were unable to take the boy, to Children’s Village.196

  By the next court day, November 19, the situation seemed to be improving. Lee’s teacher told Carro that Marguerite had finally appeared at the school and that Lee was now getting along very well in school. He had even resumed saluting the flag. Marguerite asked a Justice Sicher to discharge Lee from the court supervision, as he was no longer a problem and she was capable of coping with him. Sicher didn’t buy it. He explained to Marguerite that Lee was in need of treatment and that it was in Marguerite’s interest to cooperate with whatever plan the court offered. He told Carro, who apparently was still unable to place Lee, to refer Lee to the court’s own psychiatric clinic, which Carro himself had earlier suggested to Marguerite, and at the same time try a referral to the Protestant Big Brothers organization.197

  Marguerite, again, did not want Lee to get the recommended psychiatric treatment nor did she want him to get involved in the Big Brothers program. She told
Carro, “Why are you bothering me? You’re harassing me. He’s back in school. Why do you want him to go to the clinic for? Why do we have to see the Protestant Big Brothers for? He has brothers. What does he need [more] brothers for? Leave me alone. I don’t like New York.”198

  On the evening of January 4, 1954, when a Mr. Groetz, a member of the Big Brothers program, called on Marguerite and Lee at their apartment, Marguerite was as adamantly opposed to outside help for Lee as ever, and told the representative she had quit her job and was planning to leave New York for New Orleans. He advised that Lee was still on probation and could not be removed from the court’s jurisdiction without the court’s permission.199

  When Marguerite testified to the Warren Commission ten years later, her story was different. According to her, Groetz had told her that absconding to New Orleans was a good idea. “So, I said, ‘Is it alright? They won’t arrest us and bring us back?’ He said, ‘No, there’s no extraditing’—that was his words.”200 When Carro heard about Marguerite’s plans, he wrote to ask her to come in to see him. The letter was returned with the notation “Moved, address unknown.”201

  Marguerite was right about one thing: there was no “extraditing.” The Children’s Court had no extra-state jurisdiction, and, after ascertaining that the Oswalds were no longer in New York—although it had not been able to determine whether they were then in New Orleans, or, according to one story, in California—the court finally closed Lee’s case on March 11, 1954.202

  Carro, who had been sympathetic to Oswald’s plight at the time, remained sensitive to Oswald in his testimony to the Warren Commission in 1964. For instance, he was not inclined to make too much of the fact that the thirteen-year-old had been refusing to salute the flag, putting it down to little more than being “a little disruptive in class,” and he had even deliberately refrained from mentioning it to the press after the assassination for fear they would say, “See, fifteen years ago he refused to salute the American flag. This is proof.” Carro said he did not want to see that type of newspaper headline. He also told the Warren Commission he did not see Oswald exhibit any Marxist leanings.203

  But something that Carro knew nothing about had happened to Lee. Many years later Lee told Aline Mosby, a reporter interviewing him in Moscow about his defection to the Soviet Union, “I became interested [in Marxism] about the age of fifteen. From an ideological viewpoint. An old lady handed me a pamphlet about saving the Rosenbergs…I looked at that paper and I still remember it for some reason. I don’t know why.”204

  Actually, Lee left New York City with Marguerite when he was fourteen, and he was probably thirteen at the time of the incident, which most likely took place on Mother’s Day, May 10, 1953, just three days after he was released from Youth House. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted in March of 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage in providing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, were then on death row at Sing Sing in New York, awaiting execution on June 19. (Both were executed.) Oswald biographer Jean Davison determined from the files of the New York Times and the Communist Party’s Worker newspaper that women recruited by an ad in the Worker had passed out leaflets for the New York Committee for Clemency for the Rosenbergs on May 10. While the content of the leaflet is unknown, Davison wrote that the committee harped on two themes. First, the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of an unjust court—much as Lee, in his mind, probably thought he was a victim of Children’s Court. The other theme was linked to the use of women for the leaflet team and the choice of Mother’s Day for the demonstration—the fact that Ethel Rosenberg would leave behind two small boys orphaned if she were executed.205

  While it’s too much to assume that a single pamphlet turned a thirteen-year-old into a committed Marxist, Lee had probably found a metaphor for the outward expression of his disaffection with life, for the rage of a child who believed he had been abused and neglected, not only by his mother but also by the schools, the courts, the entire system. Here were others decrying persecution and exploitation, people who were potential friends and allies in what appeared to be a friendless world.

  Lee’s Communism had always been an attitude rather than an activity. He never even found out how to join the Communist Party, either in the United States or in the Soviet Union—where, after all, it wasn’t much more difficult or dangerous to do than joining the Elks or Odd Fellows here in the states. He claimed to many that he had read Das Kapital by Karl Marx and The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, but beyond its most fundamental principles and cosmetic generalities, such as rectifying inequality, which he undoubtedly sincerely believed in, there’s not too much more trace of Marx and Engels in his rhetoric, and no indication that he ever read, much less studied, other important Marxist authors like Trotsky, Gramsci, Marcuse, and Adorno. Much of his Marxism was in the vein of Let’s Pretend. However, it gave him the concept and theme he needed so badly to express himself. He was never comfortable talking about himself or his feelings, and it was only when he resorted to the political that he became fully animated and expressive.

  Lee’s fantasy had once been nourished by the television series called I Led 3 Lives, about a man who had been a Communist for the FBI. Now he was about to become a Communist for Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Marguerite and Lee fled New York in early January 1954 and turned up in New Orleans, where, for the time being, they stayed with Marguerite’s sister Lillian and her family on French Street. Both of the Oswalds seemed happy to be back, after what Marguerite described in a May letter to her son John as “the ordeal in New York.” She wrote to him that “it was almost a tragedy, but a little love and patience did the trick.”206 Lee enrolled in the eighth grade at Beauregard Junior High School on January 13.207 Beauregard was at the far end of Canal Street—the city’s main thoroughfare—three stops from the end of the streetcar line, down by the famous cemeteries with the elevated graves owing to New Orleans’s high water level. The school drew its students from a pleasant, largely working-class, residential area called Lakeview.208

  The Oswalds stayed with the Murrets for only a few weeks before Marguerite found an apartment on St. Mary Street, which she rented from her old friend, Myrtle Evans, who gave her a bit of a break on the rent for old times’ sake.209 The move put Lee in a different school district, but Marguerite continued to use the Murrets’ address to avoid moving Lee to yet another school when only four months of the term remained.210

  Life in the “Big Easy,” the sweltering seaport on the Mississippi River, was not all that easy for the Oswalds, although Lee did seem to get along a little better at school there than he had in New York. But if he had been taunted for his southern accent in New York, here, in the city of his birth, his speech was thought to be offensively Yankee,211 some of his fellow students at Beauregard even calling him “Yankee” as a nickname.212* His grades of 73 in English, 70 in mathematics and social studies, 78 in industrial arts, 72 in physical education, and 74 in science were above the passing grade of 70 at Beauregard, though below the average grade of 79–80,213 but his attendance improved—he was absent only a few days in what remained of the school year.214

  Lillian saw Lee off and on during this sojourn in New Orleans. He liked seafood and knew she followed the Catholic practice of meatless Fridays, so he showed up on several Friday evenings for dinner. He sometimes came on Saturday mornings too, and Lillian would give him money to rent a bike in City Park. She and her daughter bought Lee new clothes.

  “Why are you all doing this for me?” he asked.

  “Well, Lee, for one thing,” Lillian said, “we love you, and another thing we want you to look nice when you go to school, like the other children.”

  Lee was not gracious about it. “I don’t need anything from anybody,” he told her on one occasion.

  She took issue with him. “Now listen, Lee, don’t you get so independent that you don’t think you need anyone, because we all need somebody at one time or another.”215

  Lee made an attempt at team sports at Beau
regard. He told Aunt Lillian that he wanted to get on the baseball team at school but had neither glove nor shoes, and Lillian not only gave him a glove one of her sons had used but also arranged to get a pair of cleated baseball shoes, which her son-in-law sent over from Beaumont, Texas. Lee got off the team as quickly as he got on, but he never discussed it with Lillian and she never found out what happened.216 Relations between Marguerite and her friend Myrtle Evans became strained, partly, it seems, because Marguerite had difficulty meeting even the reduced rent, and partly because of Lee, whose conduct Evans didn’t approve of. He was no longer the small boy she had once known, but a “difficult teenager,” and Evans was shocked at the way he would, on his return from school, demand to be fed. If Marguerite was downstairs visiting with her, Lee would come to the head of the stairs and shout, “Maw, how about fixing me something to eat?” Marguerite would “jump up right away and go running upstairs to fix something for him.” Lee, she said, was very spoiled because Marguerite “poured out all her love on him, it seemed like.”217