Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  That same Monday afternoon, Ruth and Marina went to visit Ruth’s neighbor across the street, Dorothy Roberts, for coffee, and Lee’s problem of finding a job came up in the conversation. Linnie Mae Randle, another neighbor from a little farther down the street, was also there, and she mentioned the fact that her younger brother, Wesley Frazier, had recently found work at the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza. Wesley had mentioned that there might be another opening there. Marina asked Ruth if she would call the Texas School Book Depository, which she did.1519 Roy Truly, superintendent of the Depository, was encouraging—he told Ruth he would be happy to talk to Lee if he applied in person,1520 and when Oswald called that evening to speak to Marina, Ruth told him about the opening.1521

  The next day Oswald went to the Book Depository, where Truly gave him an application to fill out. Lee claimed to have lived in Dallas “continuously,” following a pattern of deleting from his records, where possible, all traces of his recent stay in New Orleans. He listed his last job as his three-year service in the Marine Corps, his reason for leaving being his “honorable discharge.” There was no point in giving references to Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall or the Reily coffee company, both of which had fired him. Roy Truly was favorably impressed. He had assumed he was interviewing a recently discharged veteran with a young family, and he didn’t bother to check Oswald’s application, which also claimed experience in clerical accounting from his military service, and with a kind of typing machine and filing system. He thought Lee quiet and well mannered—he was pleased that Lee addressed him as “Sir,” a southern custom that was no longer in evidence in Dallas by the 1960s.

  Truly wanted to give him a chance. The job was temporary but Lee told Truly he was happy to have any kind of work. Truly told Lee he could start work the next day, Wednesday, October 16, the beginning of a two-week pay period. Lee would be filling book orders, which involved retrieving the required books from the warehouse stocks on various floors of the building and delivering them to the shipping department on the first floor. His hours were 8:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., with forty-five minutes off for lunch, and he would be paid $1.25 an hour. Lee filled out a form for withholding tax but asked for permission to leave the entry for the number of dependents blank for a few days, since he was expecting his second child any day.1522

  Both Lee and Marina were elated with the new job, however temporary and unskilled it might be. “Hurray, he has got a new job,” Marina rejoiced to Ruth.1523 Lee liked, he said, “working with books,” and it was a lot cleaner than working on the greasy machines at the Reily coffee company. He liked Roy Truly too, but he still had his sight set on a better job, perhaps another one involving photography.1524 For the next few weeks he turned up promptly every morning and did a satisfactory job,1525 but he kept to himself—perhaps even more so than he had in his previous jobs—and none of his fellow employees got to know him. No one reported a real conversation with him.

  “The boy…talked little to anybody…I never heard him talk to anyone,” Truly said.

  “I don’t believe nobody knew him too well. You might say he wouldn’t have too much to say to anybody. He just stayed all to hisself,” a coworker, Jack Dougherty, said.

  Geneva Hine, who worked at the credit desk on the second floor, would always say “good morning” to Lee when she’d occasionally see him at the beginning of the day, but he’d avert her glance and not respond. She never saw him smile or laugh, and asked his supervisor, William Shelley, “Who is that queer duck you have working down here?”

  The janitor, Eddie Piper, saw Oswald all the time, but when asked by Warren Commission counsel, “Did you ever talk [with] him?” he replied, “No, sir.”

  “Did he ever speak to you, say ‘Hello’ or anything of that sort?”

  “No, sir. If he did, you hardly ever heard him.”

  “Did you ever speak to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he ever reply to you that you can remember?”

  “If he did, I didn’t ever hear him. He’d mumble something and he would just keep walking.”1526

  Although Oswald had always been uncommonly reclusive and unsocial, at past places of employment he had struck up remotely passable associations with at least one employee(e.g., Dennis Ofstein at Jaggers). Now, if possible, he had withdrawn even deeper into his psychological funk hole, most probably because his Cuban dream had been shattered and he could see he was going nowhere with his life, with little hope of extricating himself from the nothingness of his existence.

  Oswald soon met Linne Mae Randle’s brother, Wesley Frazier, at work. Frazier introduced himself to Lee and offered to give him a lift to and from Irving every day, but Lee said he wouldn’t be going there during the week. However, he did ask Frazier if he could take him there at the end of each workweek for the weekends. Frazier said he’d be happy to, and that Friday, October 18, after work Frazier drove him out to Ruth’s place,1527 where a pleasant surprise awaited him. Lee turned twenty-four that day, and Marina and Ruth had prepared a small birthday party, with wine, table decorations, and a cake Ruth had baked. Michael Paine was there too—he usually came to dinner on Friday evenings. When they brought in the cake and sang “Happy Birthday,” Lee was so nervous, touched, and self-conscious that he cried and couldn’t blow out all the candles at once, even though there were fewer than the two dozen called for by the occasion.

  Lee told them he wanted a special present—he wanted the baby to be born today, on his birthday. “I don’t like late birthday presents,” he joked. “I don’t accept them.”

  “You won’t keep your baby?” Marina asked. “We’ll see.”1528

  That night Lee was extremely solicitous of Marina, who was feeling the strain of the long pregnancy. Veins in her ankles and legs had burst and her ankles ached. Lee massaged and kissed them and promised he would never put her through the ordeal of pregnancy again.

  The next morning, October 19, he scoured the classified ads in Ruth’s newspapers in search of a secondhand car and a used washing machine, which he wanted in preparation for the day when Marina, June, and the new baby would come to live with him in an apartment in Dallas. Of the two, the washing machine was more important. He knew that the upkeep on old cars was costly and he didn’t really mind taking the bus, but he did not want Marina washing the diapers of two infants in the bathtub. Marina was happy that his first thought was of her, and her happiness lasted through the whole day. She nevertheless remarked, when the Oswalds went to bed that night, “You know what, Alka? I never think of Anatoly, but last night I dreamt about him.”

  “And what did you dream?”

  “We kissed as we always did. Anatoly kissed so well it made me dizzy. No one ever kissed me like that.”

  “I wish I did,” Lee said.

  “It would take you your whole life to learn,” Marina said, as subtle as a blunt ax.

  According to Priscilla McMillan, whose only source was Marina herself, Lee did not show any trace of the jealousy he usually felt when Marina needled him with remarks about her boyfriends, particularly the glamorous Anatoly, who so much resembled, in her mind, President Kennedy. He just put his hand over her mouth and said with surprising restraint, “Please don’t tell me about the others. I don’t want to hear.” In spite of Marina’s staggering tactlessness or her desire to needle him in partial retaliation for all his past abuse of her, he kissed her, they made love, and Marina was exceedingly happy. It was the last time they would ever be intimate.1529

  On Sunday evening, October 20, Ruth cooked Chinese food for dinner, but Marina felt sick at the sight of it. Even though she felt no labor pains yet, while the others ate she got her things ready for the trip to the hospital, and the pains appeared later in the evening. Lee wanted to go to the hospital with her, but someone had to stay with the children and there was nothing he could do at the hospital anyway—husbands were rarely allowed to attend the birth of their children at the time in Texas—so Ruth drove Marina to Parkland and waited w
ith her until she was taken into the labor room.

  Lee had put himself as well as the children to bed by the time Ruth got back from the forty-minute drive, and although Ruth thought he was still awake, she didn’t disturb him. She called the hospital around eleven and learned that Marina had had a baby girl after only about two hours of labor. She gave Lee the news on Monday morning before he returned to Dallas with Wesley Frazier.1530 Frazier brought him back to Irving after work that same Monday evening, but Lee seemed reluctant to go with Ruth to visit Marina at Parkland. Ruth guessed that he was worried the hospital would find out he was employed and charge him for the expenses of the delivery, but she told him that they knew that already. When they were admitting Marina, the staff had asked Ruth whether Lee was employed, and Ruth had told them the truth. It made no difference—the medical care was still going to be free.

  Lee then decided to go, and he appeared to be delighted with the new child, even though it was not the boy he had been hoping for. Forgetting his promise the previous night, he told Marina that the next child would be a son, but she informed him that she had had enough—she did not intend to go through ten babies just to get a boy. “You’re right,” he agreed cheerfully. “Whatever you say. Besides, a girl doesn’t cost so much. She gets married. You have to educate a boy.”

  He didn’t like the name Marina had given for the birth certificate: Audrey (for actress Audrey Hepburn) Rachel. He thought Rachel sounded “too Jewish.” He preferred “Marina.” She went along—the next day the certificate was altered to read: Audrey Marina Rachel Oswald. In fact, though, the new child was always and still is called Rachel.1531

  Lee asked Marina whether she had had stitches and an anesthetic, and was pleased when she told him she required neither. And she was also pleased that he treated her like some kind of heroine. She later wrote, “Monday evening Lee visited me in the hospital. He was very happy at the birth of another daughter and he even wept a little. He said that two daughters were better for each other—two sisters. He stayed with me about two hours.”1532

  According to his landlady, Oswald spent “95%” of his time in the rooming house sitting in his room, although Mrs. Johnson, who owned and operated a restaurant as well as the rooming house, was not around all the time, and she admitted that the house was large—with twenty-two rooms, seventeen of them let to roomers—and she spent a lot of time at the back, where she might not have been aware of the comings and goings of the tenants. Other than to a nearby washateria, she never saw Oswald go out at night. Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper, was on the premises more often, and said Lee “was always home at night. He never went out.” She said she was aware that he was visiting friends “out of town” on the weekends. Both women were also aware that he never spoke to the other roomers, even when he joined them for a few minutes to watch television in the evening. “That man never talked,” Mrs. Johnson would recall. “That was the only peculiarity about him. He would never speak.” When Warren Commission counsel asked Earlene Roberts, “Did you ever talk to him about anything?” she replied, “No, because he wouldn’t talk.”

  “Did he say, ‘Hello’?”

  “No.”

  “Or ‘Goodby’?”

  “No.”

  “Or anything?”

  “He wouldn’t say nothing.”

  “Did you ever speak to him?”

  “Well, yes—I would say, ‘Good afternoon,’ and he would just maybe look at me—give me a dirty look and keep walking and go on to his room.”

  Mrs. Johnson recalled that he arrived home about half-past five every afternoon and made a phone call in a foreign language, switching to English if anyone came near enough to the pay phone on the wall to overhear him. Mrs. Johnson thought the effort foolish, and Marina, on the other end of the line, would get perturbed at his suddenly changing to English and also thought it foolish on his part.1533

  Marina said he normally called her twice a day—once during the day and once from the rooming house after work. He would always ask about June and sometimes tell Marina he loved her.1534 He occasionally ate breakfast at a small restaurant across the street and down a ways from the rooming house, kept mostly bread, jelly, and lunch meat in the kitchen refrigerator, and drank a half a gallon of milk every day. He would sometimes eat in the kitchen if no one else was there, but more frequently in his room, which was all right with Mrs. Johnson since he kept his room in spotless condition.1535

  He was very probably listening to his Russian-made shortwave radio too. Although the Warren Commission displayed no interest in Lee’s shortwave radio, which was the size “of a small mantelpiece clock,” it was recovered from his room at Beckley and is now in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., though it was never assigned a Warren Commission exhibit number.1536 On the afternoon of the assassination, Mr. Johnson told a reporter from the Dallas Morning News that Lee was “always in bed by 9:30 or 10:00 p.m.” and that he “would retire early and listen to his small radio.”1537 Radio Havana’s first English broadcast began at nine in the evening, Dallas time, the second at eleven, and, as noted earlier, was easily heard in Dallas.1538 If Oswald had listened to Radio Havana in his room on the first night he moved in, October 14, which is more likely than not, he would have heard, among other things, the announcer speaking about the “hypocrisy” of America offering Red Cross aid to the island, which had just been devastated by Hurricane Flora (the hurricane had missed Florida just ninety miles away), while at the same time “trying to smash the Cuban Revolution in every way it can,…trying to deprive the Cuban people of food by its [economic] blockade…Just a few days before the hurricane the U.S. government was boasting of the pain and misery it was causing Cuba. That was U.S. policy—to cause Cuba as much pain and misery as possible. That was going to lead to the overthrow of the Cuban government—remember? We cannot be expected to say ‘thank you very much’ to an offer from the U.S. government that is now, in the middle of our suffering, maintaining a trade blockade with Cuba.”1539*

  Radio Havana kept up a steady drumbeat of propaganda against the United States through October and November, and it is more likely than not that Lee Oswald was hearing Havana’s every complaint. Even if he did not, the Dallas Morning News he would pick up in the lunchroom at the Texas School Book Depository was full of accounts of ongoing high tension between Cuba and the United States. And he continued to maintain subscriptions to various periodicals, including Time, the Worker, the Militant, and some Russian periodicals.1540

  In any case, on Wednesday evening, October 23, just three days after the birth of his daughter, Lee reentered the political arena. He attended a meeting (believed to be the first political meeting he had ever attended) sponsored by the Dallas United States Day Committee, an ultra-right-wing group that was proposing “United States Day” as a counterpoint to “United Nations Day,” which was to be held the following day in Dallas and featured Adlai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the United Nations, as a speaker.

  Lee was more of an observer than a participant in a crowd of a thousand, who heard the main speaker say that they stood on “a battleground identified on this stage as U.S. Day—the symbol of our sovereignty. Tomorrow night there will stand here a symbol of the communist conspiracy and the United Nations.” Lee would hardly have thought of Ambassador Stevenson as a fellow Communist, but he was no doubt more interested in the speaker than the message. He had seen him before, including once for a few seconds through the sights of his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. It was the man he had tried to murder, Major General Edwin A. Walker.1541

  Over the next two days the news was absorbing, if disquieting, for an ardent supporter of Fidel Castro like Lee Harvey Oswald. Thursday morning’s Dallas Morning News carried a United Press International account that revealed the presence of “special forces troops of the U.S. Army…in Guatemala on a secret mission, apparently either to train Cuban exiles for another strike against Fidel Castro or to instruct Guatemalan troops in anti-communist tactics.” Another st
ory told of the State Department’s rejection of Castro’s request for an end to the economic blockade of the island to help it recover from a recent, disastrous hurricane. “Our policies toward the Castro regime,” the department said, “have been determined by its communist character, its hostility toward the United States, and its efforts to overthrow other governments in the hemisphere by violence, terror, and subversion.”

  Radio Havana finished its broadcast Thursday evening, October 24, with a reading from Cuba’s official state newspaper Revolución that accused President Kennedy personally of the murder and mayhem resulting from recent raids on the island by militant Cuban exile groups: “The CIA acts under the direct orders of the President, in this case Mr. Kennedy, and is responsible solely to him for their activities and adventures. When they launch a pirate attack against the Cuban coastline, and murder a militiaman or a teacher, when they commit acts of sabotage against a Cuban vessel or industry, they are acting under direct orders of the U.S. President.”1542

  It is hard to know what Lee Oswald, if he was listening (as it is reasonable to believe he was), made of such statements. He once told Michael Paine, in referring to the Communist Party’s Worker, that one could tell what “they” wanted you to do by “reading between the lines.”1543 It is just speculative, but if Revolución was ready to blame President Kennedy personally for the CIA attacks on Cuba, Lee Oswald probably agreed, and he may also have discerned, “between the lines,” what people sympathetic to Cuba’s plight were expected to do.