Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Delgado, Oswald’s squad leader, got to know Oswald well and described him (when he wasn’t fighting or arguing) as a “very quiet, intellectual young man. A loner, who liked to listen to classical music and play chess.” Someone who believed “our present form of government didn’t have anything to offer to the common people, and he resented our way of life, you know.”372

  That spring of 1959, on May 5, the men in the company who weren’t noncommissioned officers went out to the firing range to qualify again with the M-1 rifle. Oswald’s score dropped from a 212 (sharpshooter) two and a half years before to a 191, just barely qualifying him as a marksman. Throughout the years, most conspiracy theorists have ignored Oswald’s score of 212, only mentioning his 191 (which, after all, still meant he qualified with the M-1 rifle) for the proposition that Oswald was a poor shot and, hence, could not have achieved what the authorities said he did in Dealey Plaza. I wanted to put this in its proper perspective for the jury in London, particularly since I knew defense counsel Gerry Spence would call Delgado, if I didn’t, to repeat his Warren Commission testimony that Oswald’s performance “was a pretty big joke.” Delgado said that Oswald got a lot of “Maggie’s drawers” (when one misses the target completely, and at the pits behind the target they wave a red flag from left to right).373 So I called Delgado as my own witness. Delgado conceded that although he viewed himself as a good shot, he had only fired a 192. More importantly, and as previously indicated, he acknowledged what is well known, that in the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, one’s score on the rifle range when “shooting for the record” is very important, that promotion during one’s military career “is going to be based, in part, upon that.” It’s so important, in fact, that if you don’t qualify, “you have to start basic training all over again.” When Oswald fired for the record at the beginning of his military career, when his score would be very important to him, we know he fired a 212. But at Santa Ana, Oswald was about to be released from the Marines and therefore his performance on the range no longer meant anything to him. When I asked, “So you got the impression that he wasn’t even trying on the range, is that right?” Delgado answered, “Yes.” He said Oswald demonstrated his lack of interest by not taking care of his rifle like his fellow marines did, and he, as Oswald’s squad leader, would get in trouble because the gigs (demerits for minor infractions) Oswald got were a reflection on him. When I asked Delgado if he felt Oswald “could have done better [on the range] if he tried,” he responded, “Right,” and said that he did not attribute his relatively poor showing on the range in Santa Ana to his being a poor shot.374

  Another marine who became friends with Oswald around this time at Santa Ana was Kerry Thornley, an acting corporal who was in a different squadron (Thornley in MACS-4, Oswald in MACS-9) but barracked next to Oswald, and they’d talk off-duty. Thornley was someone on whom Oswald made a vivid impression. When, months later, news of Oswald’s defection to the USSR reached Thornley, he realized that he had the subject for a novel—the story of a marine disillusioned by experiences in Japan who defects to the Soviet Union. The novel, The Idle Warriors, was completed but still unpublished by the time of the assassination—and in fact it would not be published in full until 1991.

  “My first memory of him,” Thornley told the Warren Commission, “is that one afternoon he was sitting on a bucket out in front of a hut, an inverted bucket, with some other marines. They were discussing religion…It was known already in the outfit that I was an atheist. Immediately somebody pointed out to me that Oswald was also an atheist.” Oswald took no offense at the remark. Instead, he asked Thornley with a little grin, “What do you think of Communism?” Being an atheist obviously didn’t necessarily mean one was a Communist (though the converse would almost necessarily be so), and Thornley told Oswald he “didn’t think too much of Communism.” Oswald replied, “Well, I think the best religion is Communism.” Thornley said he “got the impression that he said this in order to shock. He was playing to the galleries I felt.”375

  They were an odd couple, united by amorphous leftist views—by 1964 Thornley had no compunction about describing himself to the Warren Commission as an “extreme rightist” or libertarian, but at the time of his brief acquaintance with Oswald he was still thinking of himself as a radical leftist, an example of the observation that people on the opposite fringes of the political spectrum are closer to each other than to those in the middle. Thornley was under no illusions as to Oswald’s views. “Definitely he thought that Communism was the best—that the Marxist morality was the most rational morality to follow that he knew of. And that Communism was the best system in the world.”376

  For all of Oswald’s talk, Thornley thought that Oswald’s Communism was largely theoretical, even “idle.” Oswald, he judged, “‘was not militant,’ the type who would be ‘storming the Bastille, so to speak.’” In other words, he didn’t think Oswald would get personally involved in trying to overthrow this country by force or violence. “I don’t think he felt he had to do that. I think he felt that would inevitably happen some day and he was just getting into the swing of things by doing this his way. I don’t think he felt that he could do much to promote the Communist cause or hinder it.”377

  From a personal standpoint, Thornley thought Oswald to be “extremely unpredictable,” with a “definite tendency toward irrationality at times, an emotional instability.” He said Oswald “got along with very few people” in the unit and “seemed to guard against developing real close relationships.”378

  Throughout early 1959, Nelson Delgado shared Oswald’s enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution and Castro, whom he wholeheartedly supported, and he played along with Oswald’s fantasies—they were going to leave the corps and go to Cuba, where, unlike their hero William Morgan, they would even have the benefit of honorable discharges. They believed Delgado’s speaking Spanish would be useful, and Oswald had ideas of how a government should be run much in tune with Castro’s, so they would become officers and lead expeditions to the other islands in the Caribbean still under the yoke of tyranny, get rid of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and so on.379

  When Oswald asked Delgado how one could get close to the Cubans, and Delgado told him, “The best way to be trusted is to know their language, know their customs,” and offered to teach him Spanish, Oswald took him up on it, bought a paperback Spanish-English dictionary, and really worked at it. Before long, he was speaking and understanding at least rudimentary Spanish. “He could speak a common Spanish like ‘How are you? I am doing fine. Where are you going? Which way is this?’”380 When Oswald kept asking Delgado further questions on how to get in touch with the Cubans, Delgado, at a loss, suggested the Cuban embassy. Eventually, Oswald told him that he had, indeed, gotten in touch with the Cubans, but Delgado thought Oswald was fibbing—that is, until one day when he went into Oswald’s room to borrow a tie and noticed a letter from Los Angeles addressed to Oswald in his open footlocker. It had an official Cuban government seal and “he was telling me there was a Cuban Consul [there]” and he “was in contact with them.”381

  One Friday night shortly thereafter, Delgado was waiting for his train to Los Angeles in the Santa Ana station when Oswald walked in. Delgado spent every other weekend in Los Angeles, but to his knowledge Oswald never left the base—“He always had money, you know, he never spent it. He was pretty tight.” Delgado recalled that when they went to movies on the base, “nine times out of ten I ended up paying for it.”382 The two chatted amiably on the trip up to Los Angeles but never discussed where Oswald was going or why, and they parted company on arrival. Later Delgado learned that Oswald did not stay for the weekend but returned on Saturday night. Delgado was curious about where Oswald had gone because he normally dressed casually in sport shirts, but on that occasion he wore a dark suit, white shirt, and tie.383

  Around the same time that Oswald began to receive much more mail than he had before, he had an odd visitor at the main gate. The man must have been a civ
ilian, otherwise the guards at the gate would have let him in, and it must have been after nine at night, because civilians could not come on the base after that hour. Delgado and Oswald were both on guard duty that night, so Delgado had to persuade a marine to relieve Oswald for a few minutes. Oswald spent a very long time in conversation with the visitor at the gate, a lot more than an hour, while the marine who relieved Oswald bitched constantly at Delgado to get Oswald back on the job. Delgado connected this visit in his mind to Oswald’s letters from the Cuban consulate, although he had no real evidence for that.384

  It wasn’t too long before Delgado started to have questions about Castro. Like many Americans, Delgado was increasingly disturbed by the direction the Cuban Revolution was taking, and the show trials and executions reported in the American press rapidly cooled his ardor for Castro. “I couldn’t see that,” Delgado said, “when they started executing these people on just word of mouth.”* Oswald, though, dismissed the news reports as biased, distortions of the facts, retaliations for the fact that the Cubans had stemmed the outflow of profits to the United States. Delgado didn’t buy that.385 It was clear to Delgado that Oswald revered Castro, was obsessed with him, and thought he was a great man.386

  Some of the things Oswald wanted to talk about were becoming distinctly odd. He wondered where someone who committed a crime in the United States might be safe from extradition—although why he thought nineteen-year-old Delgado could provide sound advice on that score is a question. Delgado guessed that, apart from Cuba and the Soviet Union, a criminal might be safe in Argentina. Oswald then showed him a safe route for defecting to the Soviet Union—he believed you could evade official interference by going through Mexico and Cuba, something that he had apparently learned from stories about two other defectors. He even sketched a map of the route on a piece of scrap paper.387

  It finally dawned on Delgado that all this was something more than the usual barrack’s bull. Oswald was really making plans, and “that’s when I started getting scared.” Delgado even put in for a transfer to another barrack in order to put some distance between himself and Oswald, although Oswald was gone before any such change came through.388

  There was one other incident that stuck in Delgado’s mind, a trip to Tijuana, the big border town in Mexico just south of San Diego that was a favorite haunt for randy servicemen. In late May or early June, a couple of marines offered to pay for the gas if Delgado would drive them down there. To his surprise, Oswald agreed to go along—he had never taken up any of Delgado’s invitations to accompany him to Los Angeles or anywhere else. After wandering around and drinking in a few of the night spots in downtown Tijuana, Oswald said, “Let’s go to the Flamingo.” The club was about two miles out in the country, but Oswald was able to tell Delgado how to get there and where to turn, as though he had been there before. No one recognized Oswald there, but he did seem to know his way around, which was odd because it was Delgado’s impression that his buddy, who was so assiduously trying to save money, never left the base.389

  Other than the Tijuana visit, the trip on the train to LA, two dates in Santa Ana that had been arranged by a squad mate who thought Oswald would like to meet his attractive aunt, an airline stewardess who was studying Russian preparing for a U.S. Department of State foreign-language test,390 and one time to apply for a passport, there doesn’t seem to be any other evidence of Oswald leaving his El Toro base in eight months.

  One of Oswald’s fellow marines, Mack Osborne, once asked Oswald why he never went off base, and Oswald told him he was saving his money “because one day he would do something which would make him famous.”391†

  At some point after Oswald’s probable contacts with the Cuban embassy or consulate in Los Angeles, he abruptly mentioned other plans to Delgado—to attend a college in Switzerland.392 As early as March 19, he had applied to Albert Schweitzer College in Churwalden, Switzerland, a small institution in the central canton of Graubünden that specialized in religion, ethics, science, and literature. He wrote to the school that he hoped to attend it for the third term, running from April 12 to June 27, 1960. Still only nineteen, he gave his age as twenty (possibly because he would be that age by the starting date), described his occupation as “student,” and claimed fluency in Russian equal to a year’s schooling. He boldly lied that he had completed high school by correspondence with an 85 percent average, equal to a B+. His special interests, he wrote, were “Philosophy, Psychology, Ideology” and “Football, baseball, tennis, Stamp collecting.” His private reading consisted of “Jack London, Darwin, Norman V. Peal, Sciencetific books, Philosophy, ect.” He had taken part in a “Student body movement in school for controll of Juvenile Delinquency” and claimed membership in “Y.M.C.A. and A.Y.A. associations.” His vocational interest was “To be a short story writer on contemporary American life.”393

  He wished to attend Albert Schweitzer “in order to aquire a fuller understanding of that subject which interest me most, Philosophy. To meet with Europeans who can broaden my scope of understanding. To recive formal Education by Instructers of high standing and character. To broaden my knowledge of German and to live in a healthy climate and Good Moral atmosphere.” He also claimed, “I do speak a very little German” and gave the names of two fellow marines as his references.394 He was accepted, and on June 19 he sent the college a letter enclosing his registration fee of twenty-five dollars.395 In the meantime, on March 23, he took steps to cover his lack of a high school diploma by taking a General Educational Development (GED) test from the Armed Forces Institute, often accepted by colleges in lieu of the diploma. The standard scores on five tests were correlated to a percentile of the population: in English literature, on which he scored best, he placed in the 34th percentile; in English composition, in the 76th; in social sciences, in the 69th; in physical science, in the 79th; and in mathematics, in the 58th percentile. The results were then reduced to three grades, unsatisfactory, satisfactory, and with distinction—Lee passed, being rated satisfactory.396

  Since Oswald’s passion for Castro and the Cuban Revolution was white-hot at the time, his intention to attend the staid Albert Schweitzer College is jarring to say the least, and cannot be taken at face value. On the other hand, it is equally hard to see, if it were all a ruse, what the purpose of that ruse would be.

  On June 6, Lee wrote to his brother Robert, “Well, pretty soon I’ll be getting out of the corp and I know what I want to be and how Im going to do it, which I guess is the most important thing in life.” He offered, however, no further details.397

  At that time, Lee did not expect to leave the Marine Corps until December 8, 1959, six long months later, since the forty-five days of his confinement in the brig had to be added to the term of his enlistment, which otherwise would have been up on October 24.398 But something that offered a quicker out occurred to him. The previous December, while Lee was home on leave, Marguerite had injured herself while working at the candy counter at the Fair Ridgelea store in Fort Worth. She had dropped a large glass jar of candy while trying to get it from a shelf above her head, and it hit her on the nose.399 Marguerite had presented a workman’s compensation claim400 that she was getting nowhere with, and wrote Lee to tell him of her woes. In her letter he saw his opportunity to get an early discharge. He wrote back,

  Dear Mother

  Recived yur letter and was very unhappy to hear of your troubles, I contacted the Red Cross on the base here, and told them about it. They will send someone out to the house to see you, when they do please tell them everything they want to know, as I am trying to secure an Early (hardship) discharge in order to help you such a discharge is only rarely given, but If they know you are unable to support yourself than they will release me from the U.S.M.C. and I will be able to come home and help you.

  He went on to stress the importance of making the “right impresstion” on the visitor from the Red Cross and suggested that she make it clear that “I have been your only source of income.”401

&nbs
p; That was pure scam, since he had not been a source of any income to her, much less the only one, but he immediately moved to give that claim some credibility by opening, on July 22, two allotments to her from his service pay, a Q Class and a D Class allotment. The latter was a fixed amount deducted from the serviceman’s pay and sent directly by the government to whomever the serviceman designated. The Q allotment could be made only to dependents, and the government, after verifying the dependency, contributed part of the amount. Marguerite would receive her first—and last—monthly checks for August, $91.30 on the Q allotment and $40.00 on the D.402

  Though it had all started from the injury to Marguerite’s nose that her son Robert noticed, “a little swelling” in the upper part,403 Marguerite rose to the occasion, supplying Lee with compelling documentation to use with his application for an early discharge. When he filed for a dependency (popularly known as a hardship) discharge on August 17, he attached a letter from Marguerite’s attorney and two affidavits from friends, one of whom stated that Marguerite’s doctors had told her that “there is no cure for her.” The other friend noted that Marguerite “was very nervous and has a great deal of trouble breathing.” Both stated that her health did not permit her to hold down a job. Her doctor, a doctor of osteopathy, described her condition as “traumatic arthritis of tempero-mandibular and cervical joints and also right maxillary sinusitis and 5th cranial nerve neuritis.” Marguerite’s affidavit stated that as a result of her injury she had for awhile received disability payments of twenty-one dollars a week, but they had been discontinued because the insurance company doctors thought there was nothing wrong with her. With no income she had to sell all her furnishings for two hundred dollars and work for two weeks as a housekeeper at twenty-one dollars a week plus room and board, but had to quit because her employer was a drunk. She was incapable of holding an eight-hour-a-day job because she could not breathe or sleep at night, and “also, I must constantly blow my nose.” Neither of her two older sons, Robert or John, were able to help her because they had families of their own. “I have no money to use for living expenses and I must have my son at home now to provide for me.”404