The Death of a President

by William Manchester

  Oswald was aware of this. Significantly, he attributed the President’s success to family wealth; as he saw it, Kennedy had had all the breaks. Like many delusions this one had a kernel of truth. The President was ten times a millionaire. But that was only one of a thousand differences between them. One man had almost everything and the other almost nothing. Kennedy, for example, was spectacularly handsome. Although Oswald’s voice hadn’t yet lost its adolescent tone, he was already balding, and he had the physique of a ferret. The President had been a brave officer during the war, and while strapped to a bed of convalescence he had written a book which won a Pulitzer Prize. Oswald’s record in the peacetime service had been disgraceful, and he was barely literate. As Chief Executive and Commander in Chief, Kennedy was all-powerful. Oswald was impotent. Kennedy was cheered, Oswald ignored. Kennedy was noble, Oswald ignoble. Kennedy was beloved, Oswald despised. Kennedy was a hero; Oswald was a victim.

  Since childhood Oswald had been threatened by a specific mental disease, paranoia. In the end the paranoiac loses all sense of reality. He is overpowered by a monstrous feeling of personal resentment and a blind craving for revenge. No one can predict what will trigger the catastrophe in any given case. But we now know that the firestorm in Lee Oswald’s head ignited on the evening of Thursday, November 21, 1963.

  His mother did not know it. Marguerite wasn’t even aware that her son lay in a bed less than ten miles from her. She had seen neither him nor her daughter-in-law for over a year, and had made no attempt to find out what had become of them. The truth is that she didn’t seem to care. She had her own lonely life to live, and after laying out tomorrow’s white uniform she sank heavily into bed. She wanted to be asleep before midnight. She liked to rise early and watch daytime television.

  At 4:40 P.M. Thursday, while the Kennedys were deplaning in Houston after their peaceful forty-five-minute flight from Kelly Field, Lee Oswald had ended his day’s work in Dallas and begged a lift to suburban Irving in the battered black nine-year-old Chevrolet of Wesley Frazier, a scrawny Alabaman and fellow employee. To the best of Frazier’s recollection, Oswald had approached him a few minutes after both had learned, from the map on the front page of the afternoon Times Herald, that tomorrow’s parade would pass the warehouse.

  “Could I ride home with you this afternoon?” Oswald inquired.

  “Sure,” said Frazier. “Like I told you, you can go home with me any time you want to. Any time you want to see your wife, that’s all right with me.”

  Then it struck him that there was something odd about today’s request. In the past Oswald had gone to see his wife on Fridays, for the weekend, and this was a Thursday. Ordinarily he spent the week in a Dallas rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Avenue.

  “Why are you going home today?” Frazier asked.

  “To get some curtain rods,” Oswald explained. “You know—to put in an apartment.” Frazier, unaware that Oswald’s furnished room on North Beckley was already equipped with jalousies, nodded understandingly.

  The trip from the warehouse to Irving was a toboggan ride over a rolling, ten-lane concrete highway which passes through a singularly barren tract of land bordered by heavy industry, filling stations, and night clubs. Oswald said nothing, but Frazier didn’t think that peculiar; he was often moody. Today, however, his thoughts must have been remarkable. Sometime, probably during the afternoon, he had slipped into the Book Depository’s shipping department and fashioned a brown paper bag to conceal a bolt-action, clip-fed, 6.5 millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Oswald owned such a weapon. Last winter, under the assumed name of “A. Hidell,” he had sent a coupon from the American Rifleman and a money order for $21.45 to Klein’s Sporting Goods, Inc., in Chicago. In return a gun bearing serial number C2766 and a four-power telescopic sight had been shipped to Dallas Post Office Box 2915 on March 20. Using the same alias, Oswald had ordered a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, but the smoke screen was clumsy, even for him. Both order slips had been in his handwriting, Box 2915 was rented in his name, and in his wallet he carried a crude counterfeit Marine Corps certificate of service identifying the bearer as “Alek J. Hidell.”

  The revolver was in his furnished room. The rifle was hidden in a brown and green blanket which, together with several sea bags containing his personal belongings, was stored in the cluttered garage of Michael R. Paine at 2515 West Fifth Street in Irving, a few steps from Frazier’s home. Oswald was going home to get it now. His earlier conversation with Frazier, coming directly after the news that the President would be within easy range of the warehouse tomorrow noon, leaves very little doubt that the two events were connected.8 Yet there is every reason to believe that his decision at this point was tentative. He had not quite reached the point of no return, and his behavior after he reached Irving suggests that it would have taken very little to dissuade him. Despite Oswald’s envy of the President, John Kennedy was not the central figure in his life. That person was Marina Oswald. Like his rifle, his wife was at 2515 West Fifth Street, and he went to her first. Only after she had turned him away, only after she had made it emphatically clear that she did not want him—only then did he reach for the gun.

  The Paine home was deceptive. From the outside it was a modest, one-story, four-room frame house like hundreds of thousands of others in the Southwest. The built-in garage was used for storage, which is not uncommon. Although the interior showed little taste and was almost barren of feminine charm, it was practical and comfortable. The living room, facing the street, was equipped with a sofa, a high-fidelity set, and a new Zenith television set. The kitchen in the rear was dominated by a large, sturdy table. The garage was off the kitchen, to the left; on the right there were a bathroom and two small, rather sparsely furnished bedrooms shielded by white Venetian blinds. The building was an ordinary suburban home. It was the people who made it extraordinary.

  Michael Paine, the head of the household, was not in residence. He was a slight, fair, rather wispy design engineer at the Bell Helicopter plant in Fort Worth. His father was an ardent Communist, and as a boy Michael had tagged along to party meetings and had tried to wrestle with Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. He found the people at the rallies too intense, the books too steep. He had a hazy conviction that the world needed changing, but he felt that the change needn’t be so drastic. It was a girl who provided him with the prescription for milder tonic. Michael was introduced to his future wife, Ruth Hyde, at a folk dance meeting, and after their marriage on December 28, 1957, he became a minor participant in the sociopolitical movements of which she was the driving force, notably the East-West Contacts Committee. The committee encouraged pen pals in the Soviet Union; Ruth was the chairman. Unfortunately, interest in reform wasn’t enough to keep the Paines together. In September of 1962, just before their fifth wedding anniversary, they separated. He moved into an apartment. She remained in the house with their two children.

  Ruth was the stronger parent, and by far the more interesting. The daughter of a physician and an ordained female Unitarian minister, she was a graduate of Antioch and a Quaker convert. Her appearance was equally striking; in the autumn of 1963 she was a slender, dark-eyed brunette of thirty-one, with a soft, musical contralto voice and handsome, if slightly equine, features. She impressed everyone as a pious, highly intelligent young matron. There were almost no lengths to which Ruth Paine would not go as a Samaritan. She was charitable, she was a regular blood donor at Parkland Hospital, and when, five months after she and her husband parted, she encountered a fair-haired twenty-one-year-old Slavic girl badly in need of comfort, the consequences were predictable. They met at a party on February 22, 1963. Lonely, Ruth needed a crony. She sought the girl’s address on the spot and then wrote to her. Her new acquaintance had something to offer in return for friendship. Ruth’s work in the East-West Contacts Committee had stimulated her interest in the Russian language. As a native of the Soviet Union her protégé could be her teacher.

  Thus Marina Nikolaevna Oswald be
came the link between her husband and the Paines. Ruth, at the same time, became her chief benefactor. To be sure, other people—members of the Fort Worth-Dallas Russian community—took a benevolent interest in the girl. But Ruth’s bonhomie eclipsed theirs. Indeed, since Michael was absent, the relationship was largely confined to three people. Henceforth the lives of Ruth, Marina, and Lee would be tightly bound together. The husband and the older woman became rivals for the friendship of the blonde wife, while she apparently toyed with first one and then the other. It was a new situation for Marina. She had been born the unwanted, illegitimate daughter of an Archangel dyevushka; she had never learned her father’s identity. In some respects her background resembled Lee’s. As a child she had been a disciplinary problem, and on at least one occasion she had seriously contemplated suicide. But Marina had one enormous advantage which he lacked. Physically she was far more attractive. She aroused protective instincts and invited rescue. Her husband had spirited her away from the U.S.S.R., and now Marina was about to seek Ruth’s help and protection.

  Even before Ruth’s appearance the Oswalds’ marriage had become a cruel farce. In Minsk Lee had thought he had found a beautiful dedicated Communist who would forever be his Marinenka, his submissive darling. Only the beauty had been real. On every other count she had proved a disappointment. He had expected her to scorn the world that scorned him and reject the materialism of a capitalist society which was bourgeois and which he couldn’t afford anyhow. Instead, she herself had become a parody of a bourgeois housewife, hounding him for new gadgets and movie money, jeering at him because he was such a poor competitor in the capitalistic wage market, and ridiculing him because he failed to gratify her sexual appetite—because, as she told him in front of others, he was “not a man” in bed.

  At first he snapped “Malchi!”—“Shut up!” Then, being Lee, he literally struck back. Shortly after his return to America his mother, before bowing out of the picture, had noticed that her lovely daughter-in-law’s face was marred by a black eye. To Marguerite it was clear that, as she later put it, “Everything was not according to Hoyle, as we say in our American way of life.” But to depict the husband as a brute and his wife as a cowering innocent would be incorrect. It was much more complex than that. In the spring of 1963, when Ruth was seeing a great deal of the Oswalds, she observed that they were always “arguing and bitching at each other, and neither seemed to know what to do about it.” Actually, Marina was the better fighter. She knew his weaknesses, and she was a quick girl with a knee. Eventually it was Lee who capitulated, Lee who allowed her to shut him in a bathroom as punishment, Lee who sank to his knees in the dark and wept bitterly as the greater darkness of his private nightmare enveloped him.

  Once Ruth and the Oswalds had become well acquainted, Marina behaved like a minx with Lee. Openly flattering Ruth in front of him, she would undercut him, telling him that Ruth’s Russian had become better than his. This was no trifle, and it showed the sureness of her feline instinct. Lee’s attainments were limited enough as it was. His marksmanship might convince his wife of his masculinity, but the prospects for demonstrating it in urban Texas were few. (He was already plotting to create opportunities, though; on April 10, 1963, when the friendship between the two women was beginning to blossom, he tried to impress Marina by killing Major General Edwin A. Walker with his new mail-order rifle. As he squeezed the trigger the General moved, and the shot missed.) In mocking his one linguistic achievement Marina was going for the jugular. Ruth knew it; she was well aware of the game; she realized that her Russian really wasn’t as proficient as Lee’s.

  Two weeks after his attempt on the General’s life, Lee left Texas to look for a job in New Orleans, and Marina moved in with Ruth. This first such arrangement was brief; it ended in May, when the Oswalds were reunited. Despite her misgivings, Ruth reluctantly drove Marina and the baby to Louisiana. Almost at once the quarreling began again, and Ruth, feeling, as she recalled afterward, “very uncomfortable in that situation,” left them. On May 25 Marina sent her a strange letter. She was simultaneously playing both the ill-used wife and the separated friend: “I’m ashamed to confess that I am a person of moods. And my mood currently is such that I don’t feel much like anything! As soon as you left all ‘love’ stopped, and I am very much hurt that Lee’s attitude toward me is such that I feel each minute that I bind him,” she wrote. Her husband wanted her to leave America, “which I don’t want to do at all.” Lee had told her “that he doesn’t love me, so you see we came to mistaken conclusions. It is hard for you and me to live without a return of our love—interesting, how will it all end?” In any event, she wanted Ruth to know that “my feelings toward you are sincere and I like you.… I kiss and hug you and the children.”

  Ruth Paine acted swiftly, and, perhaps, imprudently. Perhaps to her Lee seemed like Michael—a man who couldn’t decide whether or not he wanted his wife. In any event she had a plan to settle everything. On June 1 she informed Marina that she was preparing to divorce Michael, and on July 11 she made a suggestion: “If Lee doesn’t wish to live with you any more, and prefers that you go to the Soviet Union, think about the possibility of living with me.… I would be happy to be an aunt to you and the children.” She had money from her parents, she explained, and there would be other money coming in from Michael. The following day, in a letter written at 2 A.M., she declared: “I love you, Marina, and want to live with you. I hope that you and Lee will agree.”

  The die was cast. Ruth was anxious to come south again, to bring Marina back and have a civilized discussion—“to talk with Lee about everything.” She wrote again two days later, adding details and begging for a reply. The answer was effusive. “Dear, dear Ruth!” Marina responded. “… Sweet Ruth, I am so grateful for your good and sympathetic heart.” Nevertheless she had not made a final break with her husband. “Lee sends greetings,” she wrote, “but he doesn’t know about the content of your letters.” Once before, she revealed, she had threatened to leave him for Ruth, and he had been stung. “Many times he has recalled this matter to me and said that I am just waiting for an opportunity to hurt him. It has been the cause of many of our arguments.” Ruth refused to be discouraged. She plunged ahead, planning their new life together and asking Marina to address her by the familiar Russian “thou” (“ty”). In a letter postmarked August 11 Marina complied, adding a “kiss and embrace.”

  Late in September Ruth drove down to fetch Marina, Marina’s young daughter June, and a carload of miscellaneous Oswald belongings back to Texas. Lee Oswald’s last real home had been broken up. He had never had much; now he was left with nothing. It was a critical moment for him, and Ruth noticed that he “looked very bleak” when he kissed his wife and daughter good-bye. His attempted flight to Cuba followed two days later, and when that failed he rejoined the two women in Texas on October 4. But neither of them wanted him. By now Ruth had established a more stable relationship than anything he had ever offered Marina. She was a better companion, a more successful breadwinner, and a more efficient householder. To be sure, he was a male. But his wife had found his virility wanting.

  In Irving Ruth provided a more settled environment than the unwanted Archangel bantling had ever known. Emotionally secure, Ruth trained the girl to correct her own Russian. Lee, who felt threatened every minute, hated to be corrected, and he had gone so far as to forbid it. Ruth owned a Chevrolet station wagon and could take the whole family on outings; Lee didn’t even have a license. Shabby apartments had been the best shelter he could afford. Ruth had a comfortable house complete with shiny appliances, a deep-freeze, a sunny yard, a sandbox, and swings. Her $80 weekly check from Michael and her other resources provided them with a steady, adequate income. On October 14, in a letter to her mother, she frankly admitted that her own marriage was on the rocks and disclosed that she was setting aside “mad-money”—“money to move east on.” Marina’s husband was no match for that; he continued to be impecunious. Nor did Ruth’s advantages over him
end there. As a college graduate she was both authoritative and informative. She could casually discuss what she called “parent-child relationships” and “in-person dialogues,” and she could refer to her own ambition for “some expression of myself that is larger than the duties of being a wife and a housekeeper.” Knowledgeable about the world, she was a source of practical advice about matters which perplexed Lee. As a veteran deadbeat he should have known where to get free medical advice for his pregnant wife, but it was Ruth who steered her to Parkland’s free clinics. Lee himself became Ruth’s almsman. It was she who gave him Sunday driving lessons, she who set up his job interview with Roy Truly, she who resolutely took charge when he was her guest. On his visits she was a generous hostess, offering him unlimited access to the TV set for football games and movies of violence, which enthralled him. Her typewriter was available for his pretentious appeals to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, and she loaned him her copies of the Dallas News.