Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  4. If ever confirmed, points 1, 2, and 3 would be small but containable disasters in public relations. Harder to measure was the potential for damage in those missing contact reports. If those papers were ever to be exposed, their routing symbols would reveal which CIA desks had become privy to the knowledge that Oswald was a putative assassin. If the CIA had any suspicions that a few of its people might have been involved in the assassination of JFK—and, indeed, how could they not, given the boiling disaffection at JM/WAVE in Miami over Kennedy’s withdrawal of support from Operation Mongoose?—then the routing of De Mohrenschildt’s contact reports could show that inside knowledge on Oswald and Walker had reached some of the most unaccountable and hair-trigger of the Agency’s enclaves.

  Given such fears, how could the contact reports not be removed from the file? If there is real ground to point 4, then the CIA had a great deal more to be concerned about than a spell of bad public relations.

  We must leave it here. If there is any connection between these speculative matters and Oswald’s adventures in New Orleans, it may well be located in some undefined species of Bermuda Triangle then forming among right-wing money, CIA malcontents, and ex-FBI men. The question, for which there will not be one answer but two, is whether Oswald’s activities in New Orleans must then be comprehended on these two different levels: 1) Was everything he did done simply because he was Oswald? Or, 2) to the contrary, was he functioning as a provocateur? Of course, as he would have seen it, he was using the people who were using him.

  PART IV

  THE BIG EASY

  1

  “A Terrifically Sad Life”

  From an unpublished interview with Marguerite Oswald in 1976:

  INTERVIEWER: They said you were very pretty.

  MARGUERITE: I was. Very pretty . . . . My hair was absolutely gorgeous. And my teeth . . . Oh, I had pearl teeth. They were just beautiful. They really were. I was very nice looking, like, uh, I have to say it because I really was . . . . My complexion was good and my eyes changed with the color of my clothes, you know, blue, they got blue, green, they got green. And my hair was nice and curly and wavy. I was a very popular young lady.

  INTERVIEWER: How much education did you have?

  MARGUERITE: None. I only went to high school one year.

  INTERVIEWER: Was your husband, Robert E. Lee Oswald, interested in General Robert E. Lee?

  MARGUERITE: His mother was.

  INTERVIEWER: His mother?

  MARGUERITE: [She] was very much in love with him.1

  An old acquaintance of Lillian Murret and Marguerite Oswald named Myrtle Evans was paid a visit mid-morning on Thursday, May 9, 1963, at her real estate office in New Orleans. It was one day less than a month following the attempt on General Walker’s life.

  MRS. EVANS . . . .this young man was at the door and . . . did I have an apartment to rent? . . . I told him I might be able to find something for him, and he told me he had a wife and child over in Texas, and that he was going to bring them over here as soon as he could find something . . .

  When we were walking down the steps I looked at him real hardlike, and I didn’t recognize him, but something made me ask, “I know you, don’t I?” and he said, “Sure; I am Lee Oswald; I was just waiting to see when you were going to recognize me.” I said, “Lee Oswald, what are you doing in this country? I thought you were in Russia. I thought you had given up your American citizenship . . .” and he said, “No,” he said, “I went over there, but I didn’t give up any citizenship.” He said he had been back in the States for quite a while, and that he had brought his Russian wife back with him . . . and so I said, “Well, come on, Lee, I don’t know anybody that will take children,” I said, “but we will just ride up and down the streets and see what we can find.” So we rode in and out and all around Baronne and Napoleon and Louisiana Avenue, and Carondelet, you know, just weaving in and out the streets, and looking for any signs of apartments for rent, so we finally rode down Magazine Street . . . and all of a sudden he said, “Oh, there’s a sign,” and . . . we went up and rang the doorbell, and . . . one apartment was very good for the money . . .

  I said, “Lee . . . this is the best you can do” . . . it had a living room that was a tremendous room . . . .and it had a front screened porch, and a yard, and . . . an iron fence, like they use around New Orleans . . . I told Lee to give her the deposit, so she could get the electricity turned on, because he wanted his wife to come for Saturday [two days later. Then we] got in the car and rode on home, and I think I . . . ran to the grocery store too and got a pound of ham and some stuff, and we sat and ate lunch, and he drank a Coke, I think, and we talked, and I asked him, I said, “Well, how does it feel to be back in New Orleans?” and he said, “I have wanted to move back to New Orleans.”

  He said, “New Orleans is my home.”2

  That conversation brought back quite a bit of the past, and Myrtle Evans thought of how she had not even heard of Lee Oswald’s being in Russia until she learned about it by running into Lillian Murret:

  MRS. EVANS . . . . I hadn’t seen her in years. I am Catholic and she is Catholic, [and] they had this card party . . . over at the Fontainebleau Motel, and a number of ladies was present, and it was for charity, and we played bingo and canasta . . . and so she said, “Oh, Myrtle, did you hear about Lee, he gave up his American citizenship and went to Russia, behind the Iron Curtain,” and I said, “My God, no,” and she said, “Yes.” . . .

  MR. JENNER. Was this the first you knew or had become aware of the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was living in Russia?

  MRS. EVANS. Yes; now, it was undoubtedly in the newspapers and on TV but I sometimes get to doing a million things and I don’t get a chance to read a newspaper . . . . So a lot of times I don’t know what’s going on, but she said . . . “Lee has done gone and given up his United States citizenship,” and I said, “Poor Marguerite, that’s terrible; I feel so sorry for her.”3

  Myrtle did. She spoke to Mr. Jenner about Marguerite Oswald for as long as he wished to hear.

  MRS. EVANS. Yes; Marguerite has a terrifically sad life, and she was just a wonderful, gorgeous wife. She married this John Pic and had his boy, and he didn’t want any children at all, so she left him and went to live with her sister and [her next husband] Oswald . . . was a Virginia Life Insurance salesman [who] started taking her out . . . and then she married him, and . . . had the two boys, and they were very happy, and then one day he was out mowing the lawn, and he had this terrific pain, and she was several months pregnant with Lee . . .

  Now, he left her with $10,000, I think, in insurance, so she sold her home, and by that time her two boys were old enough, so she put them in this home . . . and went to work [and] she had got this couple to come and stay with Lee . . . some young couple. I don’t know their names. She said people told her that when Lee was in the high chair, that he used to cry a lot and they thought they were whipping little Lee, so she came home unexpectedly one night, and the child had welts on his legs, and she told them to get out and get out now . . . all her love, I think, she dumped on Lee after her husband died . . . . she always sort of felt sorry for Lee for that reason, I think, and sort of leaned toward Lee.4

  Well, Mr. Jenner was patient. He listened. Now he wanted to know how mother and son had comported themselves years later, when they came back from New York because at that time Myrtle Evans had rented an apartment to them in a building she lived in and managed:

  MR. JENNER. What kind of housekeeper was Margie?

  MRS. EVANS. A very good housekeeper; very tasty; she . . . had a lot of natural talent that way and she was not lazy . . . . she kept a very neat house, and she was always so lovely herself. That’s why, when I saw her on TV, after all this happened, she looked so old and haggard, and I said, “That couldn’t be Margie,” but of course it was, but if you had known Margie before all this happened, you would see what I mean. She was beautiful. She had beautiful wavy hair.

  MR. JENNER. What about Lee?


  MRS. EVANS. Well . . . when he wanted supper, or something to eat, he would scream like a bull. He would holler, “Maw, where’s my supper?” Some of the time Margie would be downstairs talking to me or something, and when he would holler at her, she would jump up right away and go and get him something to eat. Her whole life was wrapped up in that boy and she spoiled him to death. [If you go back earlier] it’s my opinion that Lee . . . demanded so much of his mother’s attention that they didn’t get along—I mean her and Ekdahl, because of Lee . . .

  MR. JENNER. That’s just your surmise?

  MRS. EVANS. Yes, sir; I can’t help feeling that if she had put Lee in a boarding school, she might have hung onto her meal ticket, and considering Mr. Ekdahl’s condition and everything, if all that hadn’t happened, she would have been sitting on top of the world. She wouldn’t have had another worry in her life, as far as money goes, but instead her children came first, I mean, Lee. She just poured out all her love on him, it seemed like.5

  2

  “He Walks and Talks Like a Man”

  The Big Easy—a.k.a. New Orleans—may be the only American city where the middle levels of the Mafia are all but indistinguishable from the middle class, but then New Orleans may be more tolerant than other places. Perhaps it is the permissiveness offered by sub-tropical heat; to own a strip-joint and also be a dedicated churchgoer offers little inner contradiction. It is as if people in the Big Easy take it for granted that humankind is a spiritual house of cards built on flimsy, and therefore is full of contradiction and ready to collapse. Opposites in oneself, consequently, are given equal welcome.

  It could also be said that Lee had unfinished business in New Orleans, having spent part of his adolescence (once Marguerite could no longer afford the rent at Myrtle Evans’ apartment) living in an apartment over a pool hall on a street on the edge of the French Quarter, Exchange Alley, which had its share of whores, small-time hoods, and petty gamblers. Rare is the adolescent who listens to such nocturnal action from a second-story window without expectations building up in him of a dramatic street life to come.

  One cannot say, however, that he was drawn back to New Orleans entirely by old memories. Marina, as we know, wanted to get him out of Dallas as quickly as possible. So, she encouraged him to go and promised she would follow as soon as he found a job. In the meantime, she would live with a new friend, Ruth Paine. On April 24, therefore, Lee had gotten on a bus to New Orleans, where, on arrival, he telephoned his aunt, Lillian Murret, and asked if he could be put up for a few days. Actually, it turned out to be a couple of weeks before he and Myrtle Evans found the apartment on Magazine Street.

  McMillan: [The Murrets] were extremely conservative, they disapproved of his going to Russia, and he was afraid they might not welcome him to New Orleans. Anticipating this, Lee had confided to Marina that he suspected the Murrets lived beyond what his uncle’s earnings would support. Lillian’s husband, Charles Ferdinand, or “Dutz,” Murret, as he had been known since his prizefight days, was a steamship clerk, and Lee thought that his uncle might be engaged in some other activity on the side, like bookmaking. There is no evidence that this was so . . . 1

  On the contrary, there is some. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) probed Dutz Murret’s activities and decided he was well connected to

  significant organized crime figures associated with the Marcello organization . . . . an associate of Dutz Murret reportedly served as a personal aide or driver to Marcello at one time. In another instance, the committee found that an individual connected to Dutz Murret, the person who arranged bail for Oswald following his arrest in August 1963 for a street disturbance, was an associate of two of Marcello’s syndicate deputies.2

  MR. JENNER. What kind of boy was Lee Harvey Oswald?

  MR. MURRET. Well, I’ll tell you, I didn’t take that much interest in him. I couldn’t tell you anything about that, because I didn’t pay attention to all that. I do think he was a loud kid, you know what I mean; he was always raising his voice when he wanted something from his mother, I know that, but I think a lot of times he was just the opposite. He liked to read, and he stuck by himself pretty much in the apartment.

  MR. JENNER. Did you and Marguerite get along all right?

  MR. MURRET. Not too well . . .

  MR. JENNER. What was your impression of Lee then, after he appeared at your house after all those years?

  MR. MURRET . . . . I just couldn’t warm up to him, but he said he wanted to find a job and get an apartment and then send for his wife in Texas, so I wasn’t going to stand in his way.3

  Murret would have spoken in much the same manner if he had had a good deal to do with Oswald in New Orleans in 1963, but we do have Lillian Murret’s testimony for corroboration, and it gives a clue: Murret may have had his Mob relations, but he and his wife cherished their hard-won respectability and the college education they had been able to provide for their children. Oswald, given his stint in Russia, would not have been Murret’s first choice for a houseguest. Like just about every other semi-respectable figure on the periphery of the Mafia, Dutz was an ardent patriot.

  Because of Murret, much has been made of Oswald’s possible connections to the Mob, but no evidence has arisen that uncle and nephew did anything but keep their relations at a good arm’s length. Lee’s blood tie was with Lillian; indeed, it may have been Lee’s good fortune that it was his aunt, not his uncle, who picked up the phone when he called from the bus station. She told him to come right over.

  MRS. MURRET . . . .he was trying to find a job, he told me, and then he said he would send for Marina, his wife, and the child, and I asked him . . . to describe her, and he said, “Well, she’s just like any other American housewife.” He said, “She wears shorts.”

  . . . He said he would have to have a newspaper to scan the want ads and try to find himself a job and [then] he would go out every morning with his newspaper . . . and he wouldn’t come back until the afternoon, till supper time. I had supper anywhere from 5:30 to 6:00 o’clock, and he was there on time every day for supper, and after supper he didn’t leave the house. He would sit down about 6:30 o’clock or 7:00 o’clock and look at some television programs and then he would go right to bed, and he did that every day while he was at the house, and so then on the first Sunday he was there, he was talking—we were talking about relatives and he said to me, “Do you know anything about the Oswalds?” and I [told him] “I don’t know any of them other than your father,” . . . Now what he didn’t tell me was that on Sunday he must have gone to the cemetery where his father was buried . . . I guess he went to ask the person in charge about the grave.4

  One morning, his older cousin John Murret gave him the white short-sleeved shirt and tie that he would be wearing ten weeks later, when he would distribute pamphlets on Canal Street for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee:

  MRS. MURRET. Yes, Lee was getting ready . . . and John was in the back getting dressed to go to work, I think, and he didn’t think Lee looked presentable. John . . . said it in such a nice way—he can do it, you know, but he asked Lee, he said, “Lee, here’s a shirt; take it; it doesn’t fit me. You put it on and here’s a nice tie to go with it.” He said, “Come on, kid, you want to look good when you go for that job, you know,” and so he gave the white shirt and the tie to Lee to go after the job, and Lee took them.5

  On May 9, the same day in which he will later find his apartment, he manages to get hired by the Reily Coffee Company.

  MRS. MURRET . . . .he came home waving the newspaper, and he grabbed me around the neck and he even kissed me and he said, “I got it; I got it!” . . . I said, “Well, Lee, how much does it pay?” and he said . . . “It don’t pay very much, but I will get along on it.”

  I said, “Well, you know, Lee, you are really not qualified to do anything too much. If you don’t like this job, why don’t you try to go back to school at night time and see if you can’t learn a trade . . .” And he said, “No, I don’t have to
go back to school. I don’t have to learn anything. I know everything.” So that’s the way it was. I couldn’t tell him any more . . .

  MR. JENNER. Did you get the impression when you were talking along those lines that he really believed he was that smart?

  MRS. MURRET. He believed he was smart; yes, sir.6

  The William B. Reily Company distributed a product called Luzianne Coffee, and Oswald was taken on as a greaser for the large grinding machines.

  McMillan: On his brief application there, he may have set his own record for lies. He said that he had been living at 757 French Street (the Murrets’) for three years; that he had graduated from a high school that he had attended for only a few weeks; and he gave as references his cousin John Murret, whose permission he did not ask; Sergeant Robert Hidell (a composite of his brother Robert and his own alias “Hidell”), “on active duty with the U.S. Marine Corps” (a fiction from beginning to end); and “Lieutenant J. Evans, active duty U.S. Marine Corps” (the surname and first initial of [Myrtle Evans’ husband], combined with a fictitious Marine Corps rank and identification).7

  He understands how to give job references. At low levels of employment, who will spend the time to check? Yet what a creative liar is Oswald! Every name he offers is taken from a different sector of his experience. Past, present, and future, family, Marines, and Myrtle Evans’ husband, whom he has not even met, are drawn upon to shape his lies. He is comfortable with a wealth of sources. If only he had been a poet instead of a liar.

  With it all, the false facts have a purpose. He never knows when he will be on the lam, and so he likes to leave a trail with a plethora of offshoots to befuddle future pursuers.