Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  From Laredo, Lee traveled to Dallas via San Antonio on Greyhound bus number 1265, following Interstate 35. The bus left Laredo about 3:00 in the morning and arrived in Dallas about 2:20 p.m. on the same day.1477 Per the Warren Commission’s calculations, Oswald left New Orleans on his Mexican adventure with around $215, and when he arrived back in Dallas he had approximately $130. The entire trip, including transportation, lodging, food, and miscellaneous expenses, had cost him the grand total of $85.1478

  Lee Oswald’s brief stay in Mexico City has become a happy hunting ground for dedicated seekers of a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Less than two months before the murder, Oswald made contact with the embassies of two hostile Communist countries, the Soviet Union and Cuba, and, as would be the case with any ordinary citizen visiting Mexico, there can be no certainty about how he spent all of his time in Mexico City or whom he might have met there. It has been claimed that he met socially with Cubans in Mexico City, that he made open threats against President Kennedy in the presence of Cuban embassy officials, and most improbably of all, that someone else posed as Oswald for the visits to the embassies. All of these matters, and many more, of course, will be discussed in depth in the conspiracy section of this book.

  When Oswald arrived at the bus terminal in Dallas on Thursday afternoon, October 3, his financial predicament was tight but not desperate—he had enough, presumably, to rent an apartment, although he needed a job fast. He didn’t even take the time to call Marina at Ruth Paine’s house in Irving to let her know he was back from Mexico,1479 instead going straight to the nearest office of the Texas Employment Commission to register for work1480 and file another claim for unemployment compensation.1481 That done, he spent the night at the YMCA, where he registered as a serviceman to avoid paying the membership fee.1482 He also gave his last address as “Toro, Cal”—his last duty station in the Marine Corps had been at El Toro. He had no way of knowing that FBI agents were once again on his trail, but they were. On Tuesday, October 1, Jesse Garner had informed FBI agents in New Orleans that the Oswalds had left their Magazine Street apartment in New Orleans on September 25.1483 The day that Lee arrived back in Dallas, FBI agent Jim Hosty, notified by the New Orleans office of the bureau that Marina had left New Orleans in a station wagon with Texas plates and driven by a woman who spoke Russian, launched a new search for the Oswalds in Dallas.

  There wasn’t much to go on, but Hosty went to the immigration office to see if it had any information, and he tried to find out what Russian-speaking American with a station wagon might be a friend of Marina Oswald’s. He drove over to Fort Worth to check Lee and Marina’s old neighborhood and attempted to locate Robert Oswald, who, he learned, had moved to Malvern, Arkansas. He requested the Little Rock office of the bureau to contact Robert to see if he knew where his brother was. He doggedly searched whole neighborhoods in Dallas and Fort Worth where the Oswalds had been before. It was a lot of work but more or less routine for the FBI. It wasn’t particularly urgent and it wasn’t very successful. The Oswalds had, at least for the time being, disappeared.1484

  Hosty might have picked up Lee’s whereabouts earlier had he thought to check the records of the Texas Employment Commission in Dallas, since Lee had given the commission Ruth Paine’s address and phone number as his address. Oswald also truthfully told the employment commission that his last place of work was the “Wm. B. Reily Co.” in New Orleans. He more or less had to do that, since it was already in his record that he had been collecting his Texas unemployment compensation in New Orleans and he needed proof that he hadn’t been shirking work. At the same time, he lied and stated on his application for a work form that the type of work he did at the coffee company was “photography,” which certainly suggests that he was hoping for another job in that field. He noted his experience with radar in the Marine Corps and claimed four months of employment as a shoe salesman and a year as a general office worker in New Orleans in 1961.

  Lee impressed the official who took his application, who noted that Lee was “well-groomed and spoken, business suit, alert replies. Expresses self extremely well.”1485 The next day Lee responded to a newspaper ad for a trainee in typesetting at the Padgett Printing Company. The idea of the severely dyslexic Oswald working as a typesetter is startling, but it suggests that Lee may have been unaware of his own limitations. He claimed on his application that he had been a “cleark” at Louv-R-Pak. Oswald made a good impression on the department foreman at Padgett. However, unfortunately for Lee, the superintendent, Theo Gangl, was a good friend of Bob Stovall’s at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. He wrote on the bottom of Lee’s application, “Bob Stovall does not recommend this man. He was released because of his record as a troublemaker.—Has communistic tendencies.”1486

  That same day Lee enrolled at JOBCO, a private employment agency located in the Adolphus Tower in downtown Dallas. His application there, like the one at Padgett, omitted any mention of his work in New Orleans and listed Jaggers as his last place of employment. He said he had been in the Dallas area for the last fifteen years. He listed George de Mohrenschildt as his closest friend, although George had been in Haiti since June and could no longer be contacted at the Dickens Street address Lee gave for him.1487

  Later, in the early afternoon, Oswald finally called Marina in Irving to tell her he had arrived back in Dallas from Mexico City the previous day. He asked Marina to have Ruth pick him up in Dallas. Marina, who told Lee she was already upset with him for not calling as soon as he arrived, said that Ruth couldn’t come to pick him up. “Ruth has just been to Parkland Hospital this morning to donate blood. She shouldn’t be driving now to pick you up.”

  Ruth left to go grocery shopping, returned in something less than an hour, and was astonished to find Lee already there—he had hitched a ride with an accommodating black man who had gone out of his way to drop him at Ruth’s, where he spent the weekend.1488

  The Oswalds took care to conceal Lee’s Mexican excursion from Ruth. He told her that he had been to Houston but had not been able to find work there, so he was now looking for employment in Dallas.1489 To Marina he told all, about all the places he had been to in Mexico City, and including the fact that he did not like Mexican girls. He told her that the officials at the Soviet embassy refused to have anything to do with him. And he referred to the officials at the Cuban embassy with whom he had dealt as “bureaucrats” and said their system was similar to the Russians—“too much red tape.”1490

  Although Lee, Marina said, had always been “crazy about Cuba,” they didn’t talk about Cuba any longer after the Mexican trip because, as Marina put it, “I was just sick and tired of this.”1491 They talked about their living arrangements for the next couple of months. Marina, nearing the term of her pregnancy, did not really want to live with Lee for the time being—she preferred to be with “a woman who spoke English and Russian.” Lee was not invited to move into the house, which was already sheltering two adult women and their three children, as well as, from time to time, Ruth’s husband Michael, a frequent visitor. Lee told Marina he would look for a furnished room in Dallas, as it would be considerably cheaper than renting an apartment until she came back to live with him.1492

  In the meantime, Ruth was content for him to stay with them that weekend as well as subsequent weekends, even finding Lee to be a welcome visitor. Either that weekend or the next, he planed down some doors that had been sticking and generally ingratiated himself, adding “a needed masculine flavor.” Ruth, realizing that Lee had to be depressed about looking for work, came to like him better than she had before and described him in a letter to her mother as a “happy addition to our extended family.” He played with her little boy, Chris, watched football on TV,1493 and read the papers, in one of which, the Dallas Morning News of Sunday, October 6, he probably noticed the ad “Furnished Rooms Oak Cliff,” reading beneath, “GOOD HOME—Bedroom, living room privileges, café, washateria, cleaner, bus door, $7 up, 1026 N. Beckley.”1494 Oak Cliff was their
old neighborhood in Dallas, and the reference to this rooming house attracted him.

  On Monday morning, October 7, around noon, Ruth obligingly drove Lee to the intercity bus terminal in Irving, two or three miles he would otherwise have had to walk given the paucity of public transportation in the suburb.1495 On the way to the bus station, Lee asked Ruth if Marina could stay with her until he found work. Ruth answered that Marina was welcome to stay as long as she liked.1496

  Inasmuch as his Cuban plans had been dashed, it is unknown at this point what Oswald intended to do with Marina. However, unbeknownst to him, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow would narrow, if not eliminate, his options. The same day Ruth drove him to the bus station, October 7, the ministry, acting on the recommendation of the Leningrad KGB (Marina’s Leningrad relatives did not want to take her in, her stepfather telling the KGB she was a person of loose morals), refused her request to reenter her homeland.1497*

  Back in the city, Lee’s first order of business was to get out of the YMCA, which he thought too expensive.1498 He turned up at the rooming house on 1026 North Beckley, but there were no vacancies. Mrs. A. C. Johnson, who owned the place, had just rented her last room, but Lee apparently liked the location, so Mrs. Johnson told him to keep an eye out for the “For Rent” sign she posted whenever she had a vacancy.1499

  Later that afternoon Lee found another place at 621 North Marsalis in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas. It was about a mile southeast of the Beckley address that had caught his fancy and farther from the city center, but it too was on a bus route. He found Mrs. Mary Bledsoe in the backyard, told her he was just out of the Marine Corps, showed her snapshots of Marina and June, and gave her seven dollars for a week’s rent in advance.1500 About forty minutes later he reappeared with the larger of his two bags and moved in, bringing with him his shortwave radio (which Ruth Paine had recognized as of Russian manufacture), which he apparently retrieved from Irving that first weekend. Mrs. Bledsoe recalled that Oswald came with “a clock wrapped up,”1501 but there is no record of a clock among his possessions, and the radio was found at Beckley Street after the assassination. With his shortwave radio, Lee was capable of listening to the nightly propaganda broadcast in English emanating from Havana.

  Before settling in, Lee walked to a nearby grocery store and returned with some milk, peanut butter, sardines, and bananas. Mrs. Bledsoe discouraged him from using her refrigerator by pointing out it was small, but he put his milk in it anyway, which she didn’t like, then ate the rest of the food in his room, which she also didn’t like. But she said nothing because she “wanted to get along” with her new tenant.1502

  Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Lee went job hunting, but to no avail. On Tuesday, even Mary Bledsoe tried to help him get a job by making calls for him, because she felt he was a nice-looking young man and really wanted a job. “He was not lazy,” Marina would say.1503

  Worried about Marina’s health and little Junie during this period, Lee telephoned Marina twice a day.1504 Friday, Mary Bledsoe noticed, Lee spent the whole day in his room.1505 Even though Lee had just moved in, his habits started to wear on her. One day she heard him talking on the phone in a foreign language, and she didn’t like that at all. Also, his return from job hunting in the afternoons disturbed her naps, and she didn’t like his “big-shot” attitude, his eating in his room, and getting ice from her refrigerator. So she decided to put an end to the rental. On Saturday he appeared with his little overnight bag and said he was leaving for the weekend. She told him no, he was going to move. She would not rent the room to him for another week. She just didn’t like him anymore.1506

  That weekend at Ruth Paine’s house was much like the preceding one. Ruth had taken Marina to the hospital on Friday for a checkup, and everything seemed to be in order—Ruth was impressed by the quality of care Marina was being given. Lee wanted to use Michael Paine’s drill press to put a hole in a Mexican peso so Marina could wear it. Ruth didn’t want him to use Michael’s shop tools, but he persuaded her he knew how to do it. On Sunday, she agreed to give him a driving lesson in her car, and he climbed in and started it. Ruth, knowing he did not yet have a learner’s permit, did not want him to drive on the streets, but in the end she allowed him to navigate the three blocks to the parking lot of a closed shopping center, where he practiced starting, stopping, turning, backing, and other simple maneuvers. He was not particularly adept at it, and Ruth insisted on driving when they headed for home.1507 He told her that weekend that he had received the last of the unemployment checks due him, and that it had been for less money than he usually got. She thought he was “very discouraged” that he hadn’t been able to find a job.1508

  On Saturday evening of that weekend, Lee and Marina shared a banana and she put her head in his lap, dozing off now and then while he watched old movies on television, two films back to back, Suddenly and We Were Strangers. She watched the latter film, but not the former,1509 although she knew the first one involved “an attempt to kill a president at a railroad station with a rifle from a house.”1510 Eerily, both movies involved political assassinations.

  Suddenly was a nine-year-old B-thriller starring Frank Sinatra and Sterling Hayden. Directed by Lewis Allen from a script by Richard Sale, Sinatra plays a psychotic ex-serviceman who has been hired to assassinate the president of the United States when he gets off the train in the small western town of Suddenly for a vacation in the nearby Sierras. Sinatra and two accomplices masquerading as FBI agents take over the house of an attractive young widow whose family they hold hostage. The house overlooks the train stop, and the upper windows provide a perfect location for a shooter with a high-powered sniper’s rifle mounted with a telescopic sight. From the window, one sees a dark limousine about two hundred yards away waiting for the president to arrive. In the end, the president’s train passes through Suddenly without stopping, and the would-be assassin eventually meets his death at the hands of the local sheriff, played by Hayden.

  The second film, We Were Strangers, directed by John Huston and written by Peter Viertel, was even older, dating from 1949, and based on the overthrow of the Cuban dictator Geraldo “the butcher” Machado in 1933, but it was a better film, with splendid performances by John Garfield, Jennifer Jones, and a cast of psuedo-Cubans such as Pedro Armendáriz, Ramon Novarro, and Gilbert Roland. Garfield plays an American expatriate who takes up the cause of China Valdez (Jennifer Jones), who joined the Cuban underground after her brother was killed by the chief of the secret police. Garfield develops a plan, involving the building of a tunnel, to blow up the dictator and his entire cabinet when they congregate for a state funeral. His plot fails and Garfield dies a hero’s death, which sparks a popular uprising, and the film ends with the Cuban people dancing in the streets at the fall of the dictatorship.

  The impact of these films on Lee’s fantasy life cannot be known. He never discussed them with anyone beyond remarking to Marina that the content of the Cuban film was similar to the actual situation then existing in Cuba and that he did not like the conspirators’ plans in We Were Strangers because, as he said, “that was the way they did it in the old days.”1511

  However, as to the movie Suddenly, with someone possessing the unbalanced and homicidal (remember the attempt on General Walker’s life) mind Oswald did, there is no way that his seeing the movie can casually and automatically be dismissed out of hand as having played no part in his forming the intent to kill Kennedy from his sniper’s nest window at the Texas School Book Depository the following month. Author John Loken, in his book Oswald’s Trigger Films (in which he includes We Were Strangers and The Manchurian Candidate, also starring Frank Sinatra, which the author speculates Oswald may have seen when it was shown in Dallas in late December of 1962), wonders about the effect Suddenly and We Were Strangers could have had on a psyche as combustible as Oswald’s, and said that if these movies “provided only five to ten percent of the stimulus for his act, their influence would still be momentous.”1512 After all, it w
as a newspaper clipping about the murder, by gunshot, of the king of Italy that helped inspire the murder of President William McKinley in 1901.1513 It is noteworthy that Marina told author Priscilla McMillan that while watching one or both movies, every now and then Oswald would sit up straight and strain toward the television set, greatly excited.1514

  One person we know felt there may have been a connection or at least a possible one between Suddenly and the assassination—Frank Sinatra. Sinatra had enough clout in the movie industry by 1963 to have Suddenly “taken out of distribution after hearing that President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had watched ‘Suddenly’ only days before November 22, 1963.”1515

  On Monday, October 14, Ruth had to take her Russian typewriter into Dallas for a repair, so she, with Marina and the kids, dropped Lee off near the unemployment office.1516 Lee picked up his bag from Mrs. Bledsoe’s rooming house1517 and later that day went back to the rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Avenue and rented a room from Mrs. Johnson for eight dollars a week.* The room was tiny, little more than a large closet—Mrs. Johnson called it her “library” because it once did serve as her library and “that’s what it was built for,” she said, but it had four windows and was light and airy. He told Mrs. Johnson that he would take it until a larger one became available, but by the time one did, he liked it so well he didn’t even bother to look at the other room. It was certainly an improvement over Mrs. Bledsoe’s. There was a television set in the main room for all the tenants, and when Lee asked Mrs. Johnson if he could put milk and lunch meat in the refrigerator, she said that would be fine with her. Oswald registered—as “O. H. Lee”—and moved in immediately.1518