Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  That same day, a Sunday afternoon, Oswald announced to the group of visitors in his home that he had lost his job at Leslie Welding in Fort Worth, the rent was overdue, he was moving to Dallas, and he needed another job fast.* Marguerite was there, as well as a good many from the Russian community—George Bouhe, Anna Meller, Elena Hall and her former husband John, the de Mohrenschildts, their daughter Alexandra, and Alexandra’s husband Gary Taylor.923 Lee’s story was not true—he “hated” his job at Leslie Welding and was planning to walk away from his employment there in a day or so without even giving notice—but none of his friends knew that, and they immediately addressed the problem. The group agreed that Dallas was a better place for Lee to seek employment since it was a much larger city than Fort Worth, and Elena Hall saw a way to make that possible. She invited Marina and the baby to live with her on Trail Lake Drive in Fort Worth until Lee found work in Dallas.924 John Hall interjected that he would call his father, who was with the Murray Gin Company in Dallas, where Lee might find work in the machine shop.925 It was agreed that Marina could stay in Dallas for the first couple of days with the Taylors, since she was scheduled to have six teeth, rotted to the roots, extracted at the Baylor University Dental Clinic in Dallas on Monday and Wednesday. (George Bouhe paid the fee of sixteen dollars or so for Baylor University senior-class students, who practiced on people who could not afford a regular dentist, to perform the dental work on Marina.)926† In the meantime, the Oswalds’ skimpy belongings would be stored in Elena Hall’s garage in Fort Worth.927 Marina and Lee accepted the invitation, and she and the baby left with the Taylors for Dallas that night.928

  The next night, Monday evening, Robert Oswald helped his brother remove Lee and Marina’s belongings from Mercedes Street, and the Halls drove the belongings over to Elena’s home in a pick-up truck that belonged to the dental laboratory where Elena worked. That night, October 8, Lee took a bus to Dallas.929

  For Oswald the move would be a new beginning. He would not see his mother again until after the assassination, which was more than a year in the future. He would shun his brother Robert too. He would never say or write anything about his real reasons for closing out one phase of his life and starting yet another, but the news about General Walker, who lived in Dallas, may have had something to do with it.

  Oswald’s last day of work at the Leslie Welding Company was October 8, 1962. The following day he simply failed to appear on the job. The company had no idea what happened to him until it received his letter stating that he had moved permanently to Dallas.930 As indicated, the story he had told Marina and their friends from the Russian community about losing his job was not true. His foreman at Leslie Welding, Tommy Bargas, regarded him as a good employee, one who might have turned out to be a pretty good sheet metal man, and Bargas never had any intention of terminating him.931

  Why did Lee lie about being laid off? He may have felt that Marina’s Russian friends would be more likely to relieve him of the need to support her while he engineered the move. He didn’t really need to lie, as the emigré circle would no doubt have helped her anyway, whatever their distaste for her husband, but he probably wanted to ensure their help in taking care of Marina and June until he could get on his feet in Dallas. In other words, while continuing to sneer at their materialism, he may have now been consciously reaching out to them in making a move to Dallas he could not have pulled off without them.932

  The first day in Dallas, October 9, Oswald rented a box at the main post office on Ervay Street, number 2915, giving his address as 3519 Fairmont Street in Dallas, the address of Alexandra (George de Mohrenschildt’s daughter) and Gary Taylor, though he never lived there.933 He had asked Gary Taylor for permission to do this, and Gary had said all right.934 Two days later he submitted a change-of-address form asking that mail addressed to Mercedes Street in Fort Worth be forwarded to the box in Dallas.935

  At some time between October 9 and 11, Lee was interviewed for a job by Samuel Ballen in Dallas. Ballen, a close friend of George de Mohrenschildt’s, was a financial consultant, a senior officer in several corporations, and the head of an electric log reproduction service company. De Mohrenschildt had called Ballen and asked him if he could help Lee with a job. Ballen spent two hours with Lee, and told the Warren Commission that although “I started out being attracted somewhat toward him…and I also started out feeling very sorry for the chap…and wanting to help him…I just gradually came to the feeling that he was too much of a rugged individualist for me, and that he was too much of a hardheaded individual, and that I probably would ultimately regret” employing him at Electrical Log Services, one of his firms, feeling that he “probably would not fit in” with his coworkers.936

  On October 9 and 10, Lee also appeared at the Dallas office of the Texas Employment Commission, where he was interviewed by an employment counselor in the clerical and sales division, Helen Cunningham. She was expecting him because Anna Meller’s husband, Teofil, had called her, explaining the Oswalds’ predicament, and told her that he and other friends had been trying to help the young family. Lee scored well on a battery of aptitude and other tests. A note on his application form states that he had “outstanding verbal-clerical potential,” and further, that he was “well-groomed and spoken, business suit, alert replies—expresses self extremely well.”937

  Lee told the counselor at the commission that he hoped to qualify in the future for a work program at Dallas College or Arlington State and get a BBA, but because of financial problems and family responsibilities, these plans would have to be delayed.938

  The next day he was referred to a graphic arts firm, Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, which was looking for a photo print trainee. There he made a good impression on John Graef, head of the photographic department, and was hired. The next day he started training to make prints of advertising material at $1.35 an hour, decent wages at the time. He had been out of work less than a week.939

  He did not, however, send for Marina in Fort Worth because he really did not have the money, in spite of his penny pinching. According to the Warren Commission’s meticulous reconstruction of his income and expenses, he had at most $22.34 to his name at the end of September, less if he had bought anything not covered by the Commission’s estimates.940 In the four months he had been in Fort Worth he had earned or otherwise had taken in about $476, but he had also repaid about $140 of the $200 Robert had lent him, plus $60 of the State Department loan.941 He did not have enough money for the first month’s rent on even a very modest apartment.

  On October 15, three days after starting at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, he moved into the YMCA,* where he stayed through October 19 at $2.25 a night. In a goofy, spur-of-the-moment flash of inspiration, he gave “Toro, California” as his place of residence.942 He could hardly have expected that the YMCA would bother to check on his residence, so he was muddying a trail that no one was following. Moreover, his Let’s Pretend spy tradecraft left something to be desired: the childish deception, as with many more he would devise in the coming months, still left an arrow pointing back to him in his one-time duty station at El Toro in a way that giving any one of thousands of other American towns and cities would not have.

  Although Lee left the Y after the night of October 19, it would be nearly two more weeks before he and Marina moved in together again. Nobody, including Marina, who merely recalls that Lee “rented a room in Dallas,” knows where he stayed between October 19 and November 3 when he wasn’t with her,† although he worked through that period at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. The separation from Marina was not a result of the quarrels between them, however much some of the Russians hoped it might be.943 Lee kept in touch with Marina during the three days she was at the Taylors in Dallas, visiting her there,944 and during the month and a half she returned to Fort Worth to live with Elena Hall, visiting and telephoning her as well as sending her letters there.945‡

  Thinking about this period later, Marina wrote, “No matter how much we quarreled, I knew he loved me and t
he family, and I trusted him. We quarreled only because he had a difficult character and because that was the only way he could love. But he did not think that these quarrels could break up the family, so I forgave him everything.”946

  As for the Russian community, once Lee secured a job, he apparently felt free to be as directly insulting to them as he liked, despite the fact they were continuing to help Marina. For instance, on the first evening after he started work at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, Lee rang Bouhe, the one who had helped Lee and Marina the most, from a pay telephone, and informed him that he was “doing fine,” with no word of thanks, no small talk, nothing, though he did, only in response to Bouhe’s question, say he was doing some type of photographic work before he quickly hung up. To underline his contempt for Bouhe, he repeated the childish stunt of calling Bouhe, saying, “I am doing fine. Bye,” and promptly hanging up several times over the next few days. Bouhe had had enough. He resolved to do nothing more for Oswald, a conclusion reached by the other emigrés as well. They would continue to do what they could for Marina, but Lee—probably to his perverse satisfaction—they wrote off. He was incorrigible.947

  Around this time, Lee started receiving copies of the Worker through his new post office box. The front page of the October 2 and 7 issues focused on “the fascist character of Gen. Edwin A. Walker” and warned “the Kennedy administration and the American people of the need for action against him and his allies.” Two weeks later the Worker asserted that Walker’s financial backers were “extreme right-wing groups.”948

  Lee was settling down to work at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. For the first couple of days, he did little but follow John Graef—the man who hired him—around to learn the ropes. The company’s business involved producing special photographic effects, principally for advertising. The work was meticulous, demanding not only in terms of correct measurements and angles but also in the use of many different development processes as well as grades and contrasts of printing paper. The company expected the on-the-job training to take two or three months.949

  Since Graef could not work with Oswald full-time, some of the burden of training Oswald fell on another employee, Dennis Ofstein, who was Oswald’s age and also a military veteran. Ofstein had started at Jaggers about seven months earlier and had already begun to work with the complicated cameras on simpler jobs, and he showed Lee, he said, “how to operate the cameras, and how to opaque negatives and make clean prints, and just the general work around there.”

  Ofstein found his new colleague difficult. Oswald barely got along with the people who worked alongside him, speaking to them only enough to learn what he had to do, and his relations with them worsened as time went on. Space in the darkroom was tight, and a worker might have to squeeze by a colleague working with tongs over a developing tray, but Oswald would just burst through head-on. He would take over the Bruning machine, which produced proofs of their work, with no regard for whoever might still be using it or the jobs they were trying to finish. He never asked anyone to go to lunch with him, nor did anyone ever eat lunch with him, although Ofstein, at least, asked him. Both Ofstein and Graef offered him rides home or to catch a bus after work, but Oswald never accepted.950

  Ofstein had studied Russian for a year at the army’s foreign language school at Monterey. He did not do well there but understood a little of the language. Like Oswald, he too had resided abroad. He had been stationed in Germany. It would be many months, though, not until February 1963, before he learned anything about his coworker’s sojourn to the Soviet Union or even, for that matter, that Lee’s wife was Russian.951

  On November 3, Lee, now having a steady job and income, rented a sixty-eight-dollar-a-month apartment for himself, Marina, and June at 604 Elsbeth Street in the Oak Cliff district of Dallas.952 On Sunday, November 4, the Taylors helped Lee and Marina move their belongings from Elena Hall’s home in Fort Worth to the apartment using a rented trailer.953

  The reunion of the Oswald family in a new place for a new start did not turn out to be a happy one. Marina was disheartened by the crummy apartment Lee had chosen for them. Alexandra Taylor agreed. It was a hole. “It was terrible,” she said, “very dirty, very badly kept, really quite a slum.” The floor slanted and had big bumps in it, and the exterior was as depressing as the interior, “a small apartment building…two stories, overrun with weeds and garbage and people.”954

  That night, Marina described the place as “filthy dirty—a pigsty,” and didn’t even want to move in, but she was a trooper and stayed up until five in the morning trying to scrub it clean, without much help from Lee. After he cleaned the icebox, he told her he still had a night left at the YMCA that he had paid for so he might as well use it. It was another lie. He hadn’t been at the Y for days, and he probably went back to wherever he had been staying the previous two weeks that no one seemed to know about.955

  The new beginning was really just a resumption of their old fights, but with a new savagery, and the small Russian community of friends was still hanging on to Marina, off stage.*

  Mr. and Mrs. Mahlon Tobias, the managers of the apartment who lived in one of the units, were aware of the frequent fights, and other tenants complained about the noise from the fights and the baby crying so much that she kept them awake at night. One reported that a window in a backdoor to the flat was broken, apparently in connection with a fight.956

  Marina was making no secret of her sexual problems—she told the de Mohrenschildts, right in front of Lee, “He sleeps with me just once a month, and I never get any satisfaction out of it.” George was somewhat taken aback by her crude and straightforward confession to “relative strangers,” as he still regarded themselves to be at the time.957 Relative strangers they may have been, but the fact is that by the time of the move to 604 Elsbeth Street, the de Mohrenschildts were just about the only friends Lee had left.

  Baron George de Mohrenschildt is God’s gift to the conspiracy theorists. Foreign born, intelligent, urbane, multilingual, well connected, well traveled, eccentric, unconventional, with contacts in the CIA, he seems too extravagantly endowed with qualities not to have played some hidden role in the assassination.

  De Mohrenschildt was born in 1911 in a small town near the frequently shifting Polish-Russian border, bearing the blood of many nationalities in his veins, which was not uncommon among the European aristocracy with their international family ties. The name, originally Mohrensköldt, was Swedish, and the family descended from Baltic nobility at the time of Sweden’s Queen Christina.958 All of the men in the family, including George, were entitled to call themselves “Baron,” although none of them did. George’s Uncle Ferdinand had been first secretary of the Russian embassy in Washington in the time of the Romanovs and married the daughter of Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo. George’s older brother, Dimitry, a prestigious scholar at Dartmouth, also shunned the title.959 George and Dimitry’s father, Sergei von Mohrenschildt, had been marshall of nobility in the province of Minsk and a representative elected by the landowners in the local government. At the same time, he was opposed to both czarist repression and the prevailing anti-Semitism of the period. He eventually resigned his post in order to direct the affairs of the wealthy Swedish family Nobel in Russia, a post that took the family to the oil fields of Baku, then to Moscow, and eventually to St. Petersburg, where they were when the revolution broke out in 1917. George was then six years old. The family fled back to Minsk, but when the Bolsheviks drove out the German occupying forces, they also jailed Sergei von Mohrenschildt, who, though a classic liberal, openly opposed the Bolsheviks. He was released through the good auspices of some influential Jew whom he had protected from persecution years before.

  He was thereafter appointed by the Bolsheviks to the Belorussian Commissariat of Agriculture in Minsk, but it wasn’t long before he was in trouble again, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to live out his life in exile in Siberia with his wife and younger son. Sergei had opposed on
principle, even though he was not very religious himself, the atheistic Bolsheviks forcing their irreligion and godlessness on others. And when they asked him at a court hearing, “What kind of government do you suggest for Soviet Russia?” and he answered, “A constitutional monarchy,” that sealed his fate. While their mother searched everywhere for influential friends who could help the family, young George “remained on the street making my own living somehow.” He was ten years old.

  Jewish doctors in Sergei von Mohrenschildt’s prison came to his aid. They told him to eat little and feign illness, while they advised the government to allow him to return home until he grew well enough to survive the journey to Siberia and the harsh life there. The ruse worked. Sergei was released and promptly fled with his wife and young George in a hay wagon to a family estate just across the border in Poland, near Wilno. Meanwhile, George’s brother, Dimitry, who had been under a sentence of death by the Bolsheviks for being, as George said, “a ferocious anti-Communist” who was a member of the Russian czarist navy at the time of the revolution, was later released in an exchange of prisoners with Poland. For Dimitry’s mother, the relief was short-lived. She died in 1922, when George was eleven. The de Mohrenschildts lost the estate to expropriation by the Communist regime, somehow managed to get it back, then sold it off piecemeal to the tenants. Dimitry left for America and an academic career, while George remained with his father in Poland until he was eighteen, when he briefly attended the Polish Cavalry Academy. At twenty he went to Antwerp, Belgium, to take a master’s degree at the Institute of Higher Commercial Studies. Five years later he went on to the University at Liège, where he earned his doctorate in international commerce in two years. He also owned, with a girlfriend, a successful boutique for ski clothing, but in 1938, as Austria fell to the Anschluss and Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Wehrmacht as a result of Chamberlain’s concessions to Hitler at Munich, he broke with his partner and departed for the United States.960