Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  On Tuesday morning, November 12, Oswald rode back to his job with Wesley Frazier. Since Frazier told the Warren Commission that once he and Oswald started to drive from Irving to Dallas that day, he never stopped anywhere,1590 Oswald probably mailed his letter to the Soviet embassy earlier in a neighborhood mailbox. The letter was postmarked “Irving Nov 12 5-PM 1963 Tex.”1591

  That evening, Agent Winston Lawson flew into Dallas from Washington and the next morning, Wednesday, November 13, conferred with Forrest Sorrels. They discussed the Adlai Stevenson incident, which they did not want to see repeated during the president’s brief appearance in Dallas ten days hence. The danger posed by “extremist…right wing groups” preoccupied them throughout the time they worked on arrangements for the visit. Both the Trade Mart and the Women’s Building at the fairgrounds presented certain security drawbacks, but they were confident they could handle the problems once the decision was made in Washington.1592 The next day, Thursday, November 14, Kennedy’s special assistant, Ken O’Donnell, informed Special Agent Gerry Behn that they had decided on the Trade Mart. Behn immediately called Dallas to inform Lawson.1593

  Late that afternoon, when Lee made his usual after-work phone call to Marina, she asked him not to come out to Irving that weekend. She was growing uncomfortable about the burden she and the children were placing on Ruth, and Lee had been there three days the preceding weekend. Ruth had said nothing to her, but she knew that Ruth was planning a birthday party for her little girl on Saturday and that Michael was going to attend it, and Marina definitely felt that all four Oswalds would be too much for what would be a family occasion. Lee made no objection and said he would do as she wished. Marina told him not to stay cooped up in his room the entire weekend, to take a walk in the park. Ruth got on the phone to tell Lee that because of the birthday party, she wouldn’t be able to take Lee back to the driver’s license place in Dallas. Lee was under the impression that he needed a car to get his learner’s permit but Ruth assured him that he didn’t, that he could go there without a car, which surprised him.1594

  That Friday, November 15, a week before President Kennedy was expected to visit Dallas, the Dallas Morning News reported that it was “unlikely” there would be a motorcade through the city. According to the Morning News, the decision as to whether the luncheon would be given at the Trade Mart or the Women’s Building had not been made—though it had been—but it was likely that the president would be driven to the luncheon directly from Love Field by the most convenient artery. That afternoon, the Times Herald was able to announce that the luncheon would indeed take place at the Trade Mart off Stemmons Freeway.1595 The next day’s Morning News now said there would be a motorcade but that “the route of the Dallas motorcade has not been firmly established. The President is expected to travel over Lemmon Avenue or Cedar Springs Road to the downtown area, then west on Main Street before turning north after driving through the Triple Underpass. If he stays on schedule he would pass through the downtown area about noon.” Nothing was said about turning right off Main at Houston and left again on Elm in front of the Texas School Book Depository Building.1596

  Lee got over to the Driver’s License Examining Station on Saturday morning well before the regular noon closing hour, but he found a big crowd of people before him waiting to be served—the result of the station’s having been closed the preceding Saturday for the election and again on Monday for Veterans Day. He told Marina over the phone that afternoon that officials told him there was no use waiting in the long lines because he wouldn’t have had time to take the test anyway. He did, however, get an application form, which he took home to fill out. It was found among his belongings at his North Beckley rooming house after the assassination. He had not yet completed it.1597 Lee told Marina he had taken her advice and visited the same park they had been to in the spring. She told him to be sure to “eat better” over the weekend, knowing he was prone to eat poorly, almost starve himself when they were apart. In another phone call that evening he assured her that he was not starving himself, that he found a restaurant where he could get a steak and fries with salad and dessert for just $1.25.1598 Marina told Priscilla McMillan that Lee did not call her on Sunday, November 17, which was uncommon for him, but Ruth Paine says she is not sure he did not call. In any event, Marina missed Lee, and when she noticed June playing with the telephone and saying, “Papa, Papa,” that evening, she impulsively asked Ruth to call him at the number he had given them—she could have dialed the number herself, but she knew someone other than Lee would probably have answered the pay phone and she would be unable to converse in English with that person. Ruth made the call and asked for Lee Oswald. The man at the other end told her that there was no one in the house by that name. Ruth, astonished, asked, “Is this a rooming house?” and when she was told it was, asked, “Is this WH 3-8993?” “Yes” came the answer. But there was no Lee Oswald rooming there. Baffled, Ruth thanked the man and hung up.1599

  The next day, Monday, November 18, Oswald turned up at work as usual,* and he called Marina, as he usually did, at lunchtime. She told him that Ruth had tried to call him and asked him where he had been. “I was at home watching TV,” he told her. “Nobody called me to the phone. What name did she ask for me by?” Marina told him that Ruth had asked for Lee Oswald. There was a long silence from Lee. “Oh, damn,” he said finally. “I don’t live there under my real name.” Lee proceeded to scold Marina for trying to reach him at his rooming house. But Marina was even more angry with him. What was all this foolishness about? He told her he didn’t want his landlady to know his real name because she might read in the paper that he had been to Russia and been questioned by the authorities.

  “It’s none of her business,” Marina said.

  “You don’t understand a thing,” he said. “I don’t want the FBI to know where I live, either.” He ordered her not to tell Ruth about his alias.

  Marina remained angry. “Starting all your foolishness again,” she said. “All these comedies. First one, then another. And now this fictitious name. When will it all end?”

  He told her he had to get back to work and hung up.

  Although he had ordered her not to say anything to Ruth, Marina couldn’t contain herself and told Ruth. She felt herself between “two fires,” loyalty to Lee and the fear that he was once again up to no good. That night he called again. Marina told Ruth she didn’t want to speak to him, but Ruth insisted—she couldn’t tell him that his wife would not come to the phone. When Marina did, Lee was insulting, addressing her as a devushka, a word that means something like “wench,” but more cruel in Russian than it would be in English.

  “Hey, wench,” he said, “you are to take Ruth’s address book and cross my name and telephone number out of there.”

  Marina would not hear of it. “It’s not my book and I have no right to touch it.”

  “Listen here,” Lee snarled, “I order you to cross it out. Do you hear?”

  Marina responded, “I won’t do it.”

  He started to scold her in a way she had never heard before. She hung up on him.1600

  On Tuesday afternoon, November 19, 1963, the Dallas Times Herald ran a page 1A headline about President Kennedy’s major foreign policy speech given the previous night before an audience of one thousand at the Inter-American Press Association convention in Miami Beach, Florida: “Kennedy Virtually Invites Cuban Coup.” The first paragraph read, “President Kennedy all but invited the Cuban people today to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime and promised prompt U.S. aid if they do…The president said it would be a happy day if the Castro government is ousted.”1601

  That morning’s Dallas Morning News reported, for the first time, the exact motorcade route: “From Love Field to Mockingbird Lane, along Mockingbird Lane to Lemmon, then Lemmon to Turtle Creek, Turtle Creek to Cedar Springs, Cedar Springs to Harwood, Harwood to Main, Main to Houston, Houston to Elm, Elm under the Triple Underpass to Stemmons Expressway and on to the Trade Mart.�
��1602

  Even if Oswald, who avidly read newspapers (the previous day’s Dallas Morning News at work each morning in the domino room,1603 and the evening Dallas Times Herald, which he frequently bought out on the street), never read this article, there can be no question that by word of mouth, everyone at the Texas School Book Depository Building had to know that the presidential motorcade would pass by the building that Friday. It was clear to Oswald, then, that in three days President John F. Kennedy, the leader of worldwide capitalism and an avowed enemy of Fidel Castro and the Castro revolution, would be driven past the Book Depository Building, presumably in an open car, right past the building where he worked, right below those windows he had looked out so many times.

  No one can possibly know what was going through Oswald’s mind during these three days before the assassination. But a few things we do know. He had once written, “I wonder what would happen [if] somebody was to stand up and say he was utterly opposed not only to the governments, but to the people, [to] the entire land and complete foundations of his socically [society].”1604 He had also once written to his brother Robert from Moscow, “In the event of war I would kill any american who put a uniform on in defence of the american government—any american.”1605

  In a sense, Oswald had been at war with America ever since he could remember. He had been at war with the whole world. He had tried to fashion a new life for himself more than once, only to be thwarted at every turn. His career in the Marine Corps had ended in ignominy. His defection to the Soviet Union had petered out in a dead-end job in a factory. His return to America had been ignored. His job as a “photographer” led to nothing. He shot at General Walker and missed. His career as leader of a pro-Cuban political group had failed to attract a single follower. In Mexico City, representatives of Cuba and the Cuban Revolution seemed utterly uninterested in his devotion. Was there any battle in this war of his he could win? Oswald’s motive for killing Kennedy is discussed in depth in the “Motive” section of this book. But was it possible he was thinking that if he killed Fidel Castro’s most powerful enemy, he might avert the assassination of Castro, forestall the invasion of Cuba, and bring him at last to the status he craved as a hero of the Cuban Revolution? And that if he died in the attempt, Castro would see what Cuba had lost when its petty bureaucrats frustrated his ardent desire to serve the cause?

  Additionally, since we know Oswald wanted to leave his footprints on the sand dunes of history, even naming his diary the Historic Diary, could it be that, like so many people, he felt fate was intervening in his life and sending him a message, nay, a command? I mean, could it really be pure chance, and nothing more, that the most powerful man on earth was going to pass right beneath his window? No one can ever know, but is it possible that, along with other toxic currents, the thought entered his mind that he had a historic duty, for whatever reason or reasons he conjured up, not to deny the hand that fate was now giving him? That he couldn’t fail to show up for his rendezvous with history?

  That Tuesday, Lee worked all day, but very uncharacteristically did not call Marina even once, much less twice, as he virtually always did.1606 On Tuesday evening, Radio Havana’s English-speaking broadcast said that “since last March the [U.S.] Central Intelligence Agency has itself been organizing all attacks on Cuba…We know the ships they came on, including the famous Rex that sails out of West Palm Beach on missions against Cuba.”1607

  He worked a full day on Wednesday, November 20, also, but again did not call Marina.1608 Marina told Ruth Paine, “He thinks he’s punishing me.” She was angrier with him than he was with her, and she was perfectly willing to let him sulk.1609

  Late that Wednesday night, Oswald took a load of his clothes to Reno’s Speed Wash, a washateria a half block away across the street at 1101 North Beckley. While his clothes were being washed and dried, the janitor noticed that he spoke to no one, sitting and reading magazines until closing time at midnight. When the merchant patrolman requested him to leave because the speed wash was closing, Oswald ignored him and continued to read for an additional five minutes.1610

  On the morning of Thursday, November 21, Oswald dressed and left for work, his head roiling with the grandiose scheme that, if he dared to carry it out, would finally ensure his place in history. Based on his conduct later that evening with Marina at Ruth Paine’s residence, he probably had not made up his mind yet. But all the circumstantial evidence shows the thought clearly was in his mind, and it had to be intoxicating. Befitting the moment, he expansively offered himself a treat. Instead of making his breakfast in the rooming house, as he usually did, he went over to the Dobbs House restaurant at 1221 North Beckley, just short of two blocks away on the other side of the street. He had been there before, often enough for the waitresses to recognize him. Dolores Harrison cooked a couple of eggs for him, but when the other waitress, Mary Dowling, served him, Oswald complained that he had ordered them “over light,” and they were “cooked too hard.” He accepted them anyway.1611

  Later that morning, but before the ten o’clock break, Lee asked Wesley Frazier if he could ride out to Irving with him that evening. That was okay with Frazier, but it dawned on him it was only Thursday, and with the exception of the Monday night in October the day after Marina had given birth to their daughter Rachel, Lee had never driven out to Irving with him on anything but a Friday. “Why are you going home today?” he asked Lee.

  “I’m going to get some curtain rods,” Lee said. “You know, put in an apartment.”

  By telling Frazier this, a lie that was demonstrated to be such (see later text), Oswald showed he had already come up with a story to cover up the fact that, absent a reconciliation with Marina, he was going back to Irving a day early to pick up his rifle for the following day.

  “Are you going to go out to Irving tomorrow night too?” Frazier asked Oswald.

  “No,” Oswald answered.1612

  Probably sometime during the course of that day Lee improvised a bag to contain his rifle from the heavy, brown wrapping paper and three-inch paper tape used in the shipping department.1613

  Marina was surprised when she saw Wesley’s car stop in front of Ruth Paine’s house to let Lee out early that evening. Not only had he never come out on a Thursday evening before, but even on the weekends he had always asked Ruth’s permission to come.1614 At the London trial I asked Mrs. Paine, “On Thursday, November 21, 1963, did anything unusual happen with respect to Mr. Oswald?”

  Paine: “Well, yes, he came out that night. And it was the first night he had come out on a weeknight, and it was the first time he had ever come without asking permission.”

  “You were surprised?”

  “I was very surprised, yes.”

  “Was Marina a little embarrassed and surprised at this?”

  “She was, yes. She said to me—she apologized for his not asking whether he could come, and she expressed her surprise.”1615

  Marina was still angry about his use of a false name at his rooming house and did not go to greet him. In fact, she was pleased that he had come, but she wasn’t about to let him know that. He found her in the bedroom. She asked him why he had come.

  “Because I’m tired of living alone and because I got lonesome for my girls,” he said. He told her he didn’t want her to continue living with Ruth Paine, and if Marina wanted him to, he would “rent an apartment in Dallas tomorrow.”

  He tried to kiss her, but she turned away and ordered him to clean up and change his clothes. Docilely, he did as he was told. When he had showered and changed, he again demanded a kiss, and this time he blocked her exit from the bedroom until she submitted, unwillingly, still angry.

  “He tried to talk to me,” Marina would later tell the Warren Commission, “but I would not answer him, and he was very upset…He tried to start a conversation with me several times, but I would not answer.”

  “Enough,” he finally said, angered by her rejection. “You get too much spoiling here.” He told her he was “goin
g to find an apartment tomorrow and take all three of you with me.”

  “I won’t go,” Marina said.

  He said she would, or he would take the children.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “Just you try nursing Rachel. You know what that’s like.”

  He told her he had gone to see the FBI and told the agents not to bother her anymore. She didn’t care about that. She went out to the backyard to gather the laundry from the line, and Lee went into the garage.1616

  Since we know from all the evidence that he brought his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to work with him the next morning, it was probably then that he attended to it. Neither Ruth nor her children were at home; Marina would be occupied at the clothesline for a few minutes. He didn’t need much time. We know the carbine, wrapped and tied in its blanket, was lying on the floor. He quickly removed the two parts—the short barrel with its mounted telescopic sight and the stock with a sling improvised from a camera strap—and placed them both in the heavy, brown wrapping paper bag he had fashioned most likely earlier that day. From somewhere he gathered the cartridges. He carefully arranged the blanket to look exactly as it had when the carbine was still in it, left the new package containing the rifle someplace where it would not attract attention,* and went out to the backyard to help Marina bring in the clothes.

  Again he asked her to come live with him and their children in an apartment in Dallas. When she once again refused, he told her she preferred her friends to him, and that she obviously didn’t love or need him anymore. She responded that they had already agreed that she would stay with Ruth through the coming holiday season, and they might as well save their money till then. Besides, she said, she would just be lonely in an apartment in Dallas while he was at work.