Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  The Gus Hall–Benjamin J. Davis

  Defense Committee

  END McCARRANISM

  The executive director of the defense committee wrote back on December 13, 1962, thanking him, but politely declining his offer of help.1024*And in response to another poster Lee had submitted, this time to the Worker (“Read The Worker If you want to know about Peace, Democracy, Unemployment, Economic Trends”), on December 19, 1962, Louis Weinstock, general manager of the Worker in New York, wrote Lee and, in as delicate a way as he could find, told him the paper wasn’t interested in using the poster-like blowup Lee had submitted. “Your kind offer,” Weinstock said, “is most welcomed and from time to time we shall call on you.” In other words, thanks but no thanks.1025†

  On December 28, George de Mohrenschildt picked up Lee and Marina in his big convertible to take them to a holiday party at Declan and Katya Ford’s house. En route they stopped by the Sanger-Harris department store, where Jeanne worked as a designer, to pick her up. The de Mohrenschildts pitied the young couple for their isolation and wanted to do something to relieve the gloom of the holidays. Jeanne had called Katya and asked permission to bring them, and she even arranged for one of her neighbors to babysit June. Katya had hoped she had seen the last of the Oswalds—a sentiment no doubt shared by many of her guests, some of whom thought the de Mohrenschildts were again being deliberately provocative—but she could hardly say no.

  Marina was delighted to see George Bouhe again and kissed him on the cheek, to Lee’s palpable scorn. “Why are you sucking up to him?” he asked her when he got the chance. He then put on another display of caddishness by devoting virtually all of his time and attention, to Marina’s increasing concern, to Yaeko Okui, a young Japanese woman who had come with Lev Aronson, a Latvian who played first cello in the Dallas symphony. Lee and Yaeko sat on the steps at one end of the room and talked about Japanese and American customs as well as ikebana, the art of flower arrangement, which Yaeko was certified to teach, while Marina ate her fill and gathered at the piano with others to sing Russian songs.

  Lee was also attracted to the Fords’ daughter Linda, who found him staring solemnly at her while the rest of the party laughed at comedian Vaughn Meader’s takeoff on President Kennedy on the best-selling album The First Family. Linda was so troubled by that stare that she remembered nothing else about the party.1026

  Whatever joy Marina got from getting out of the house for the Fords’ holiday party was dashed just three days later, on New Year’s Eve, traditionally a much more important celebration in the Soviet Union than Christmas, which the atheistic Communist government shunned. To her great disappointment, Lee turned in early, about ten, and left her to celebrate by herself. When the momentous year of 1963 began at midnight, she was in the bathtub, imagining it was full of champagne and thinking of her friends in Minsk and the good times they were having. Later, so troubled she could not sleep, she sat at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to Anatoly Shpanko, the medical student who had asked her to marry him. Might she not have been happier with him?

  Much later she reconstructed the letter for Priscilla McMillan. In the letter, which she starts with “Anatoly Dear,” she tells Anatoly she is writing him, as he requested, about her life in America. She tells him she feels “very much alone,” that her relationship with Lee had changed from what it was in Minsk, and that he no longer loved her. She says she is “sad” that an ocean separates her from Anatoly and she has “no way back” to him. “How I wish you and I could be together again,” she writes.

  Marina then alludes to a time in Minsk when Anatoly had held himself back (presumably a reference to sexual intimacy), saying, “You did it for me, I know,” but adds that if he hadn’t, “everything might have turned out differently. But maybe, after the way I’ve hurt you, you would not take me back.” She closes with “I kiss you as we kissed before” and a postscript: “I remember the snow, the frost, the opera building—and your kisses. Isn’t it funny how we never even felt the cold?”

  Marina was in tears as she finished the letter. She kept it for several days before mailing it.

  On Monday, January 7, 1963, Lee came home from work with the letter in hand. Marina had mailed the letter showing Lee’s post office box as a return address. The postage rates had gone up one cent and the letter was returned for insufficient postage. Lee asked Marina what the letter was about and asked her to read it to him. When she refused, he read it to her, although he broke off before he finished.

  “Is it true what you wrote?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” she said. Marina recalls, “And of course he hit me, but he did not believe this letter was sincere.”

  “Not a word of it is true,” he insisted. “You did it on purpose. You knew they changed the postage and the letter would come to me. You were trying to make me jealous. I know your woman’s tricks. I won’t give you any more stamps. And I’m going to read all your letters. I’ll send them myself from now on. I’ll never, ever trust you again.”

  Marina would recall that “it was a very ill-considered thing” she had done, and Lee’s hitting her had been “the right thing to do. There [were] grounds for it.”

  He made her tear up the letter in front of him. And he was true to his word. From then on he made Marina hand him all of her letters in an unsealed envelope so he could search them for secret messages to Shpanko or anyone else who presented a threat, however distant, to his domination of her.1027

  Apart from his pathological need to keep Marina a prisoner at home, and continuing to be physical with her on occasion, Lee, perhaps chastened by Marina’s letter to a former suitor, was now a more considerate and affectionate husband, according to Marina. He did the vacuuming, carried out the garbage, washed the dishes, turned down the bed at night, and generally made himself useful. On weekends, when Lee was off from work, he followed Marina around wherever she’d go, even coming with her to the landlady’s to borrow the vacuum cleaner shared by all the tenants. He “wore me out with his kisses,” Marina told Priscilla McMillan. Lee granted Marina two indulgences—deciding if and when they would have children, and staying in bed when he awoke in the morning. He got up by himself, made his own breakfast, and left coffee on the stove for her. His increased affection for Marina was not at little Junie’s expense. He did not trust Marina to bathe June without endangering her, and would happily climb into the bath to play with his baby, ordering Marina to bring them the baby’s bath toys and clean up the water they splashed on the floor.1028

  That first month of the year brought very disquieting news to Oswald—there could be another invasion of his beloved Cuba. One of the first issues of the Militant that Oswald received early in January commented on the speech Kennedy gave at the Miami Orange Bowl on December 29, 1962, in which he declared to the anti-Castro Cubans who had been repulsed by Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs, “I can assure you that this [battle] flag will be returned to this [Cuban] brigade in a free Havana.” The Militant called Kennedy’s remarks “the most barefaced and disgusting display of immorality, ignorance, and bad taste ever put on by a U.S. President.”1029 In the January 21 edition, which Oswald would have gotten, the Militant quoted Castro as saying Kennedy was acting “like a pirate,” Castro declaring, “Mr. Kennedy, too much blood has flowed between you and us.”1030

  On January 14, Oswald enrolled in a night-school typing course at Crozier Technical High School in Dallas, paying a tuition fee of $9.00.1031 How serious Oswald’s interest in typing was is open to question. Evidence suggests that he was already planning a change of career, as an assassin, and he may well have undertaken the typing classes as a cover for more sinister activities.

  If there is one thing Lee Harvey Oswald had, it was pride. That undoubtedly was the main reason he normally resisted help from third parties for him and his family. Concomitantly, the thought of owing his brother Robert and the U.S. State Department weighed on him. As his friend George de Mohrenschildt observed, “I ask you where do you
find another man in Lee’s position, on the verge of starvation [obvious hyperbole], who would be in such a hurry to repay a government loan, which would be very difficult to collect from a poor man like Lee? But somehow Lee felt this obligation very sincerely.”1032 Although Oswald usually didn’t have two nickels to rub together, by October 7, 1962, he had finally managed, through scrimping, to pay off his loan to Robert, even though Robert had insisted he wait until he was making more money, and, after paying $10.00 month on his $435.71 State Department loan, he sent in two money orders totaling $106.00 on January 25 to pay that off.1033

  Just two days free of debt for the first time since he returned to America, on January 27, 1963, Oswald ordered a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver from a Los Angeles company named Seaport Traders Inc., enclosing $10.00 in cash as a downpayment on the full price of $29.95, the balance to be paid COD. He signed the order form, “A. J. Hidell,” age “28.” (He was twenty-three.) He gave his Dallas post office box, 2195, as his address. The form had to be countersigned by a witness who could attest that the person ordering the gun was an American citizen who had never been convicted of a felony. Oswald obliged by signing as his own witness, using the name “D. F. Drittal.”1034

  The gun was in fact a very poor one in terms of accuracy. First, Seaport had arranged for the gunsmith, L. M. Johnson, to shorten the barrel from five inches to two and a quarter inches, considerably reducing its accuracy—the company had a demand for the shorter weapons, presumably from those who wanted to conceal them on their persons. The muzzle had been recrowned, the front sight reset, and the cylinder rechambered to take the more popular .38 Special cartridges (as opposed to .38 Smith & Wesson cartridges), although the barrel had not been changed. Since the .38 Special cartridge was of slightly smaller diameter, the bullet wobbled slightly in the barrel, which further reduced the weapon’s accuracy. The pistol might be okay at very close range, but no target shooter would want to use it.1035

  January also brought new troubles for Oswald, both at work and in his marriage. By mid-January he must have realized that his days at Jaggers were numbered. He had been employed there over three months and was expected to start pulling his own weight, but his work, which required a great deal of precision, was sloppy, and, as indicated, his manner annoyed his fellow workers in the cramped darkroom quarters. John Graef was being remarkably patient with Oswald, even though the finished jobs Lee turned in had to be redone far too frequently, much more often than the work of other employees. Oswald had to know that Graef’s patience would not be without limit.1036

  Also in January, the Oswalds’ marriage took a sharp turn for the worse. They continued to bicker, and Lee slapped Marina from time to time, but there were sweeter moments too. Then one night, while laying in bed together in the dark, Lee told Marina something about his old girlfriends. Marina jumped from the past to the future, asking him to tell her if he ever intended to be unfaithful.

  “If I were planning it, I wouldn’t tell you,” he said. He was suddenly struck by a new thought. “Have you been with any other man since we were married?”

  Marina, always brutally candid, answered yes. She told him about her assignation with Leonid Gelfant in Minsk when Lee had gone to Moscow. She told him everything, including the fact that Leonid had proved impotent.

  “Why?” Lee asked.

  “Because he was a virgin. And I wasn’t about to be his teacher. I never wanted to see him again.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “I ran into him once or twice on the street.”

  “And nothing happened?” Lee pressed.

  Marina laughed. “You were home. Where on earth could we go?”

  Lee could not or would not believe her. “You’re making the whole thing up,” he insisted.

  “No, I’m not,” Marina said, insisting on telling him the painful truth, with nothing to lose if she told him the lie she knew he wanted to hear except a splinter of her own honesty. But perhaps sensing she had gone too far, she tried to explain that the experience had taught her a lesson, and it had taken away any desire she would ever have for anyone but Lee.

  Lee still wasn’t convinced that Marina had been unfaithful. They had agreed that if either of them used the phrase “word of honor,” the other had to tell the truth—he made her give him her “word of honor” that everything she told him was true. She did, and he still did not believe her.

  The next morning he returned to the subject. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “You women are all alike. You want to make a man jealous.” Then Lee, the arch-nonconformist, took the modern male conformist view, adding, “If I ever see you with another man, I’ll kill him right off,” as if the male stranger, more than his wife, would have been the one who breached a moral responsibility to him.

  Marina, amused, and perhaps wondering about his logic, asked, “And what will you do to me?”

  “We’ll see about that.”1037

  It is impossible to tell what the real impact of Marina’s confession had on Lee or how much it contributed to the darkness that was beginning to fall on him. Overtly, though, he claimed not to believe her. He made it clear to Marina that he thought she had written her letter to Anatoly Shpanko knowing it would fall into his hands and make him jealous, and he now decided that her tale of the encounter with Leonid Gelfant was another ruse for the same purpose. Since he was an inveterate liar himself, it was an explanation that came easily to mind, and it may be that it was what he really needed to believe. There were, after all, only two elements of his life over which he had any control, his baby daughter and his wife, and his control of Marina was slipping, as her brief escape from him had shown. Keeping her ignorant of English would work only for awhile, and the act of beating her was only an admission that he could not keep her in line except by physical force.

  For the moment, Lee and Marina were locked in the deadly symbiotic embrace of emotional neediness, each of them utterly reliant on the other to fulfill this need. The descending spiral of the battered woman syndrome, neediness leading to ever-dwindling self-esteem and lack of confidence, is well known. Priscilla McMillan had come to believe from exhaustive conversations with Marina that Lee was in fact much the weaker of the two. The proposition is easy to entertain. One has only to imagine which of the two would have thrived if he or she had come to the United States separately: Marina, with her new-found friends who were so willing to help, or Lee, whose abrasive personality and towering ego, unsupported by even normal capabilities, made him so offensive to everyone. Lee seemed doomed to fail at everything, including his marriage, which he was keeping together by intimidation and brute force. And he seemed to be keeping himself together, as he had as a child, by his turn to fantasy. His wife’s confessed infidelities were just attempts to trick him. And if the world would not present him with the grand position he imagined as his due, he would invent one all of his own.

  On January 28, the day after he ordered the pistol, he started the typing course at Crozier Tech. The classes met only three evenings a week, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, from a quarter after six to a quarter after seven. Not only did Lee miss a lot of classes (he was dropped from the class after a little over two months because of his absences),1038 but Marina noticed he rarely got home from work before seven on any evening of the week, whether there was a class or not. He would then spend a lot of time in the kitchen, ostensibly to practice typing on a printed keyboard there, but he was also studying bus schedules and a map of Dallas. When Marina asked why, he told her he was trying to figure the quickest way home from Crozier Tech, but that couldn’t have required much planning. The night school was a few blocks from Jaggers, and he had been returning home from there for months.1039

  Apparently what he was really doing was plotting the assassination of Major General Edwin Walker.

  Lee Oswald was still in the Soviet Union when Major General Edwin A. Walker received worldwide attention stemming from an April 13, 1961, story in the tabloid Overseas Weekly that Wal
ker, a decorated war hero in the Second World War, had been indoctrinating the troops of his command in West Germany, the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division, with literature published by the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society, and had given a speech to a group of mainly military dependents in which he said that Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and former secretary of state Dean Acheson were “definitely pink.”1040

  Walker denied the allegations, denouncing the Overseas Weekly as “immoral, unscrupulous, corrupt, and destructive.” The controversy snowballed all through the spring of that year. President Kennedy eventually ordered an investigation by the Defense Department and Walker was relieved of his command and transferred to army headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany. On June 12, the army gave him an administrative “admonition” (not considered punishment by the army) for his speech and for refusing to heed superior officers’ advice against participating in “controversial” activities beyond the scope of his military duties. But he was cleared of the main charge against him. The army concluded that the “pro-blue” program initiated by Walker in his division was “not attributable” to any program of the John Birch Society.1041 Although originally destined to command the Eighth Corps in Texas, he was derailed to Hawaii as assistant chief of staff for training and operations, a much less glamorous position.1042 It looked as though a third star might never be pinned to his collar.