Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  It is time to speak of larger purposes and awesome requirements:

  No man, having known, having lived, under the Russian Communist and American capitalist system, could possibly make a choice between them, there is no choice. One offers oppression, the other poverty. Both offer imperialistic injustice, tinted with two brands of slavery.

  But no rational man can take the attitude of “a curse on both your houses.” There are two world systems, one twisted beyond recognition by its misuse, the other decadent and dying in its final evolution.

  A truly democratic system would combine the better qualities of the two upon an American foundation, opposed to both world systems as they are now.

  This then is our goal.3

  Yet, Oswald does not wish to frighten everybody away. It is time for a disclaimer. Since he has learned (the hard way) that very few human beings will rush to take up arms against both world systems, one must hint that there will be help from the cosmos.

  We have no interest in violently opposing the U.S. Government, why should we manifest opposition when there are far greater forces at work to bring about the fall of the United States Government than we could ever possibly muster.

  We do not have any interest in directly assuming the head of Government in the event of such an all-finishing crisis.4

  Has there ever been a dictator who did not issue comparable statements in the early years of his revolution?

  Lee Harvey Oswald will, however, underline the dedication necessary for those who would choose to be part of the Atheian system:

  . . . only the intellectually fearless could even be remotely attracted to our doctrine, yet this doctrine requires the utmost restraint, a state of being in itself majestic in power.

  This is stoicism, and yet stoicism has not been effected for many years, and never for such a purpose.5

  And then, because he is Oswald, and cannot be content unless he can even cheat on his own system, he adds a coda to these presentations:

  sale of arms

  pistols should not be sold in any case, rifles only with police permission, shotguns free.6

  Yes, these have been his writings in his time of preparation for terminating the life of Edwin A. Walker.

  10

  Waiting for the Police

  From an FBI report: She advised that about midnight that night, OSWALD came rushing into the house in a very agitated and excited state and his face was very pale. As soon as he entered the house, he turned on the radio. Later he laid down on the bed and MARINA again noticed how pale he was. She asked him what was wrong and he confessed to her that he had tried to kill General WALKER by shooting at him with a rifle but didn’t know whether he had hit him or not. He said he wanted to find out on the radio . . . MARINA said she became angry with OSWALD for shooting at General WALKER and he replied to her that General WALKER was the leader of the fascist organization here and it was best to remove him . . .

  She stated OSWALD did not have the rifle with him when he returned to the house . . . 1

  Thirty years later, this is the way she recalls his return to their apartment on Neely Street:

  He was out of breath. He was back—yet he was not. Still somewhere else. She showed him the note he had left, and he said, “Don’t ask me about that.” He turned on their radio. Nothing was there for him. She kept asking questions, and he kept saying, “Don’t bother me.” She went to bed and lay waiting for him, and now she can’t remember what time it was—but he was still in the other room, still waiting to hear something on that radio. Then he turned it off. He looked shocked. “I missed.”

  She said, “What are you talking about?”

  He told her, “I thought I’d shot General Walker.”

  Of course, she jumped out of bed. “Are you crazy? What right do you have? Who is General Walker?”

  He said, “Look how many people would have been spared if somebody had eliminated Hitler.”

  He told her that General Walker was a pro-Nazi kind of person. A fascist.

  She said he had no right to eliminate anybody.

  He repeated himself. He said, “Look how many people would have been spared if that had been done to Hitler.”

  She said, “Maybe it was good for Hitler’s time, but not right now. Not in America. Change your system.”

  It is an odd, near-improbable conversation. He has just found out that he missed. An unlikely miss. He had been thirty-five yards away. He had been looking at Walker through a four-power scope. In the crosshairs, Walker’s head was large. One could not miss. As soon as he had squeezed the trigger, Lee had been off and running. And with what fear! Walker’s bodyguards might catch him if he remained long enough to take a second shot. So he had run—exaltation must have accompanied his fear.

  Then he buried the rifle—in what a fever!—came home, and waited for confirmation. Now, the radio had told him that he missed. His anguish has to be intense: Once again he is the sorriest Marine in the training platoon. At that moment, he blurts out the truth. He has to tell someone that he has taken a shot at Walker. And missed!

  The conversation about Hitler is not as easy to believe. Not for that moment. Perhaps Marina misremembers and it took place next day. Since we cannot know, let us go back to her account:

  According to Marina, he soon fell asleep. He looked exhausted. Like a dead man. She began to walk around, just as she had been pacing for hours before he came home. Once again, she was listening to the night outside. Such a quiet street. She remembers thinking that at any minute police would be banging on their door. She had no idea if he had done it alone or with others—he never gave her one detail. She did ask him where his rifle was now, and he answered, “I left it where it will not be found.”

  She looked at him asleep and got in beside him, but he took up all the bed. He was spread out, arms and legs extended, his bare bottom up, his backside open to the night air.

  GENERAL WALKER. . . . It was right at 9 o’clock and most of the lights were on in the house and the shades were up. I was sitting down behind a desk facing out from a corner, with my head over a pencil and paper working on my income tax when I heard a blast and a crack right over my head.

  MR. LIEBELER. What did you do then?

  GENERAL WALKER. I thought—we had been fooling with the screens on the house and I thought that possibly somebody had thrown a firecracker . . . Then I looked around and saw that the screen was not out, but was in the window, and . . . I noticed there was a hole in the wall, so I went upstairs and got a pistol and came back down and went out the back door, taking a look to see what might have happened.

  MR. LIEBELER. Did you find anything outside that you could relate to this attack on you?

  GENERAL WALKER. No, sir; I couldn’t. As I crossed a window coming downstairs in front, I saw a car at the bottom of the church alley just making a turn onto Turtle Creek. The car was unidentifiable. I could see the two back lights, and you have to look through trees there, and I could see it moving out. This car would have been about at the right time for anybody that was making a getaway.2

  When Walker had discussed it with the police, one of them said, “He couldn’t have missed you.”

  GENERAL WALKER. . . . But as I later was analyzing the thing, [that rifleman] couldn’t see from his position any of the lattice work either in the window or in the screens because of the light. It would have looked [to him] like one big lighted area, and he could have been a very good shot and just by chance he hit the woodwork.

  MR. LIEBELER. Which he did in fact?

  GENERAL WALKER. Which he did, and there was enough deflection in it to miss me, except for slivers of the bullet, the casing of the bullet, that went into my arm laying on the desk—slivers of the shell jacket.3

  Walker had seen a car go down the alley, and a fourteen-year-old neighbor, Kirk Coleman, was reported to have seen two cars. Having heard the shot, he went out to a fence in the back of his house, looked down the alley, and “saw one man putting something in the tru
nk of a Ford sedan and a few feet away, a second man getting into another car. Both cars then raced away.”4

  From a Secret Service interview with Marina: . . . Lee Oswald told her, after reading in the papers that some young man saw an automobile containing three men pulling away from the scene of the shooting, that the Americans always think they [need] a car to get away from the scene of a crime and that he would rather use his feet to do so than to have a car. He also told her that he took buses to go to the Walker residence and that he took a different bus to return home after the shooting.5

  On the following night, Lee had anxiety attacks. He never did wake up, but two times, even three times an hour, he would begin to shake and to tremble beside her.

  McMillan: . . . She was afraid, terrified, that he would take another shot . . .

  Marina immediately began to beg Lee . . . [never to] do such a thing again. She told him that . . . it had been a sign from fate. “If God saved him this time, He will save him again. It is not fated for this man to die. Promise me you’ll never, ever do it again.”

  “I promise.”6

  With her good Russian soul, how could she not believe that Providence showed itself most clearly in those awesome moments when no one had any idea how things would turn out? “Promise me,” she had asked, and if Marina’s memory is correct, he did reply, “I promise.” Perhaps it was his belief as well.

  Providence is Providence, but we have not accounted for the cars. Gerald Posner in Case Closed comes close to disposing of the issue:

  Contrary to press reports that [the fourteen-year-old] saw two men get into separate cars and race away, he told the FBI that he only saw one car leave, and it moved at a normal rate of speed. At least six other cars were in the parking lot at the same time. Other neighbors contradicted Coleman’s story, saying no cars left after the noise.7

  It is the fundamental principle of evidence. If one witness says “A,” you can always find another to say “Z.”

  Still, the odds are that Oswald made his attempt on Walker with no confederates. Indeed, the essay into his motive for shooting at Walker would be seriously flawed if Oswald did not do it alone. Yet, it is just as well to recognize that this narrative is an exploration into the possibilities of his character rather than a conviction that one holds the solution.

  There is, after all, a possibility that other people besides Oswald had a motive to kill Walker. There are puzzling aspects to Oswald’s attempt. Unless someone inside Walker’s house was ready to steer the General at a given moment to a chair in front of a lighted window with no shades, how long would Oswald have had to wait until by chance Walker came into view? If it had taken hours, how could Oswald have remained unnoticed for so long? (Of course, hiding in a parked car while waiting does serve such a purpose.) The police did find a nick in the freshly painted fence that separated the alley from Walker’s backyard, and concluded that the gunman had rested his rifle there—the position conformed to the trajectory of the shot—but, of course, firing from one side of a fence, back exposed to passing onlookers in the alley, hardly sounds like a concealed blind.8

  It can be argued that in the course of his preparations, Oswald had scouted the house and knew Walker’s habits, but that is not likely. Walker was away on his tour until Monday, April 8, two days before the attempt. The only conclusion, if Oswald managed it by himself, running entirely on his own schedule, is that he went to Walker’s house on Wednesday night to shoot him, and there was the General in full collaboration. As stated earlier: Luck! Of course, luck may be the product of extra-sensory perception in crucial areas, and Oswald may be an unhappy example of a man with extraordinary luck.

  Let us not banish, however, the possibility that certain extreme right-wingers had come to the conclusion that General Edwin A. Walker was not only eminently expendable but would be of much more use to his movement as a dead martyr than as a live embarrassment whose secret homosexual life was bound sooner or later to be exposed. Life, however, moves on a more dilatory schedule than paranoia, and it was only in the eighties that Walker, by then close to eighty himself, solicited a vice-squad cop in a men’s room, was arrested, and his lifelong homosexuality became common knowledge. Yet, his closet life was no secret in the circles close to Walker. The John Birch Society obviously had a problem.

  Add one more observation: If the dedicated spirit of the Cold War encouraged the CIA to enter serious relations with the Mafia in order to assassinate Fidel Castro, why not assume that fantastical operations, if on a smaller scale, were being developed all over the Sun Belt? In the mountains, caves, and swamps of America, and in big cities like Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas, the warriors-for-liberty were gathering. A decision to assassinate Walker might have been one step in a serious set of moves to take over the John Birch Society.

  MR. JENNER. Now, Mr. Surrey, was there an occasion preceding April 10, 1963, that you noticed an automobile and some people in the automobile in and about General Walker’s premises?

  MR. SURREY. . . . April 8; yes, sir . . . the gist of the matter is that two nights before the assassination attempt, I saw two men around the house peeking in windows and so forth, and reported this to the General the following morning, and he, in turn, reported it to the police on Tuesday, and it was Wednesday night that he was shot at. So that is really the gist of the whole thing.9

  It is, of course, a huge jump in our comprehension of Oswald to believe he is now part of a right-wing conspiracy; we have no trace of connections to such people in that period of his life. On the other hand, from October 1962 to April 1963, there have to be a hundred, if not two hundred, hours that no one (certainly not Marina) can account for. Who knows what he did and whom he met in that time? We have, for example, no idea whether Lee and Yaeko Okui were having a romance or were cooperating in one or another intelligence function; or, for all we know, Yaeko saw him but once, at the Christmas party, and that was all there was to it. Still, one would add a footnote from Edward Epstein:

  When interviewed in Tokyo in 1976, Okui said that she did not remember the subject of her conversation with Oswald, but that the one brief contact with him “ruined her life.” She would not elaborate further.10

  We have constructed a portrait of Oswald as a solitary man, but he has his sides—as we shall see in New Orleans. In any event, a man who can have congress with Stalinist and Trotskyite organizations at the same time when they have been implacable enemies for close to three decades, may be ready to deal with any political contradiction if it will advance his purpose. Moreover, some ultraright-wingers do not sound like reactionaries but libertarians; that, on the evidence of the Atheian credo, appealed to Oswald. It is certainly safe to believe he did wish to kill Walker, but it does not follow automatically that he thought he could do it without help.

  There is a famous photograph Lee took of Walker’s backyard that shows a parked car with a hole in the print large enough to obliterate the license plate. Posner points out:

  A photo of evidence taken from Oswald’s flat after the assassination shows the hole was in the print at that time. Also, the photo was taken from such a distance that the license plate of the car would not have been legible in any case, and it was later determined that the car belonged to a Walker aide . . . 11

  It is a large assumption that the “license plate would not have been legible in any case.” Oswald worked at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, where high-quality lenses that maintained image detail in extreme enlargements were used every day. It is not impossible that he recognized the car in the photograph as one he had been riding in with a confederate: In a moment of anxiety, he could have cut out the license plate. It is also possible that he did it for no reason at all—just, in case he was caught, to confound the authorities, wear them out, send them off on false leads. He was a veteran in wars against bureaucracy and knew that the way to win was to exhaust the foe. Bureaucracies, after all, exercised power by wearing their adversaries out, and Oswald understood that rare is the sadist who is ready t
o receive the kind of punishment he is ready to mete out—a spiritual fact!—so, fatigue the authorities. It is worth remembering that in life, as in other mysteries, there are no answers, only questions, but part of the pleasure of intellection is to refine the question, or discover a new one. It is analogous to the fact that there are no facts—only the mode of our approach to what we call facts.

  The only conclusion we can come to here is that Oswald almost certainly did shoot at Walker, and was probably alone, but there are bits of puzzling and conflicting evidence which make it impossible to decide definitively that he made the attempt without confederates.

  11

  Telescopic Sight

  From an FBI report: MARINA said she had asked OSWALD . . . what he had done with the rifle because she was worried lest he had left it somewhere where it would be found. OSWALD said he had buried the rifle in the ground far from the actual spot of the shooting. He then mentioned a field and the fact that the field was near a railroad track.

  She . . . recalls OSWALD returned to the NEELY Street home with the rifle wrapped in a raincoat on the Sunday following the [Wednesday] night of the assassination attempt.1

  Having hidden his farewell letter in her Russian cookbook, she was now in a position to warn him that if he ever wanted to play games again with his rifle, she would go to the police. Until such a terrible time, the letter, she assumed, would be safe.

  She did not feel as secure about his notes on General Walker’s house and the accompanying bus schedules.