Patsy! : The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald

by Douglas Brode

  Suddenly, he felt an uncontrollable instinct to retrieve whatever had been dropped off in the rusty metal box out front.

  Minutes later, as Lee dropped bills, form letters and a Life magazine down on the table, he recognized John’s writing on an envelope. The letter was addressed to Marguerite. John so rarely wrote her. On some occasions, they might receive a note from Lee’s older brother Robert Jr. Not John. Lee's half-brother hated to write, would go to the expense of calling long distance if he wanted or needed to confer with Marguerite.

  Though Lee harbored the greatest respect for a person's privacy, he found himself giving in to temptation. First, Lee tried to ease the envelope open, sliding a knife under the seal, planning to re-seal it so Marguerite wouldn’t know. Lee had bungled that, as he managed to do most everything, by tearing the paper. Frustrated, he ripped the envelope open, figuring that later on he’d lie and claim to have done so by mistake.

  What Lee read devastated the fifteen-year-old:

  Hello mother

  Hope this finds you well. Lee too. I am truly sorry that you had to leave under such awful circumstances. My wife could stand no more. Nor could I. Enough on that. We will talk about it someday when the wounds heal. Perhaps. I need to tell you about a conversation I had with Dr. Hartogs. He called and sounded concerned as he told me about his last meeting with Lee. Dr. Hartogs is much upset for Lee. He believes that Lee needs help and as much as possible. He says that if you do not find a doctor down there he has no idea what might happen. I know how you dote on Lee and spoil him something awful. But even you must grasp that he is a strange boy. That doesn’t mean bad. I don’t mean that. Mother, in all truth I do not know quite what I mean. I don’t have the words, not being educated. But Dr. Hartogs does. He is a wise man and a good one too. Clearly he cares about his patients. Other people, also. Dr. Hartogs says that if Lee is not looked over properly he could be a danger to himself. But beyond that he might prove a danger to others. I don’t know quite what he meant by that. He would not speak any more on the subject. Mother, the man knows something! I can only hope that you realize the seriousness of this situation and take action. Lee needs help!

  Your loving son,

  John

  Suddenly out of control, Lee tore the letter into bits, wildly tossing them in the air like makeshift confetti. His laughter rolled out of control as the shredded pieces fell. Afterwards, and for a long while, Lee stood in the kitchen, barely moving, wailing at the top of his lungs.

  Then, hoarse, Lee grabbed his jacket and ran out onto the street. How dare his brother write such a later?

  Spoiled and sick, that’s how my brother, maybe the world, sees me. You know nothing about me! None of you. No idea who the person is, living under this skin I was cursed with ...

  *

  All at once, there it was: a theatre. Turning a corner, Lee bumped into the booth out front. Lee glanced up at the marquee and noticed the current film starred Sinatra. This must be preordained! He’d watch the guy he’d listened to through the wee small hours of the morning, when the whole wide world was fast asleep.

  Incredibly, when Lee scanned the schedule of showings, he noticed that the Sinatra film would start in five minutes. How was that for timing? This, Lee decided, was meant to be. He would watch this film because it was so written that he would.

  Lee purchased a ticket for one dollar and headed into the musty auditorium. The stale air reeked of yesterday's popcorn, cheap cigarettes, and urine on the floor back in the bathrooms. Lee scanned the area, found himself a soiled seat in the colored section, where he would feel most at home, and plopped down.

  The titles rolled over a black-and-white background that depicted a small town somewhere in the southwest. The film’s title turned out to be at one with this burg: Suddenly. Rugged Sterling Hayden played a local lawman who had little to do but provide directions for passersby whenever they mistakenly pulled off the main road and needed help finding their way out of here.

  Initially, Lee felt vaguely disappointed. The low-budget production values were bad enough. Where was Frank? Lee tried to concentrate as Hayden bird-dogged some middle-aged woman whose husband had been killed in Korea. The sheriff hoped to get her to marry him so he could take care of the lady and her kid.

  Problem was, she couldn’t deal with the thought of Hayden, as a law enforcement professional, carrying a gun. That’s what had stolen her husband’s life.

  Lee did appreciate something Hayden tried to tell her: “Guns aren’t necessarily bad. It depends on who uses them.”

  Amen to that! Lee had discovered the joys of gun-ownership at age eight, after Marguerite without warning up and decided to travel from Louisiana to Texas. Less than a week later, they’d relocated in downtown Fort Worth.

  Lee soon learned that the boys in school all headed out onto the adjacent prairie whenever they had free time. There, they'd shoot at jackrabbits with .22 caliber rifles. Every boy owned one. Always the loner, Lee had not been invited to join in. Marguerite, like the woman in this film, expressed an intense dislike for fire-arms. Eventually Lee talked her into buying him one on his birthday, October 18.

  Later that afternoon he headed out to practice. By himself, other kids having sensed something different—'queer' even—about this new arrival. No matter. He’d grown used to it.

  Lee did not have much luck at first. He was not a natural shot. No matter. He’d fire round after round until he got the knack of it. One thing he did grasp: shooting would from this moment on forever be a part of his life. He enjoyed the kick of the butt against his arm, the jolt he experienced; that sudden, unique smell of powder as a small blue cloud rose in a swirl and passed across his face.

  Maybe the reason he didn’t score so well was that the last thing in the world he wanted to do was kill small animals.

  That, the Normal Boys loved. Lee? He’d have to find something else. Something that deserved, maybe even needed, killing. Well, he was young. There’d be time a-plenty for that.

  *

  In the film, the woman’s eight-year-old, nicknamed ‘Pidge,’ was kind of cocky, perhaps because he’d been raised without a father. Lee could relate to that. Pidge and his mother lived in a small house up on a hill above their town. Not so much a hill, really, as ... how to describe it? ... a grassy knoll.

  Anyway, Pidge wasn’t allowed to watch war movies because his mom felt it best to keep violent stuff from her boy.

  Marguerite had tried that, though her insistence had the opposite effect. Such entertainments became Lee’s forbidden fruit. He’d sneak off to watch war films whenever he could. Not only did Lee enjoy them, like most boys his age. Owing to her attempted censorship, he became obsessed with them. The more violent any movie was reputed to be, the more Mother wanted to keep Lee from catching it, the more desperate he was to see it.

  Hey! I came to see Sinatra. Where the hell is he?

  *

  Everything up there on the big screen changed when a wire reached the sheriff that the president of these United States would arrive that afternoon for an unscheduled train stop. The great man would disembark in their village, where Government Men would be waiting with limousines to rush Mr. President away to a pre-arranged top-level secretive meeting nearby.

  At last, Sinatra arrived on the scene, wearing that Ring-a-Ding hat he clearly adored, perched on his head in a wise-guy manner, precisely as on the cover of one of his record albums.

  Dressed in a dark suit, flanked on each side by colleagues, Sinatra showed up at the house that lady shared with Pidge and her father-in-law. Frank, more correctly his character “Johnny Barrows,” explained he was FBI. He and his men had been assigned to stake out this place to ascertain no suspicious strangers showed up. There had been rumors of a possible assassination attempt, and they were here to prevent it.

  Yet something dark and ugly flickered in this man’s eyes. What’s going on? Lee wondered.

  That became clear when Johnny Barrows shot and killed a Secret Servi
ce Man who stopped by on a routine check. He also wounded the sheriff. Johnny was actually the person that the government men were trying to capture. He’d arrived to kill the sitting-president.

  All at once, Lee found himself drawn deeply into the film. If initially he had associated with Pidge, that changed as Lee instead began to feel at one with Johnny Barrows. This short, angry runt of a man up there on screen reflected the equally short, equally angry runt sitting in this obscure theatre.

  “When I was in the army,” Johnny explained to his captives, “I did a lot of chopping.” Pidge called out that Barrows was a coward. “You’re wrong about me,” Sinatra said. “In the last war, I won a Silver Star. Killed 27 men, all by myself.”

  The smile on Barrow’s face might best be described as a mean-spirited sneer. That hit Lee hard. Hadn’t his psychiatrist back at Brooklyn's Youth House only a year earlier insisted that if Lee were ever to be accepted by society, he must first wipe that “mean-spirited sneer” off his face?

  It’s as if Sinatra is playing ... me!

  Even now, Lee could recall the words his analyst, Renatas Hartogs, had read from the paper scheduled to be circulated as his official report on this ’bad boy’ who’d been truant from P.S. 44 so often that Lee finally had to be removed from his mother’s apartment and relocated in a home for wayward boys.

  “Lee has to be described as personality-pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies.”

  How self-assured Hartogs sounded. Not that the man had dismissed Lee as worthless. Hartogs described Lee as a “13-year-old-boy with superior mental resources.” Hartogs had discovered no evidence of "neurological impairment.” If Lee would only apply himself, he might achieve success at some trade.

  Then Hartogs had removed his large glasses, ran a sweaty hand through his thinning hair, and sighed as he explained his fears to the vulnerable boy before him. Something had gone awry in Lee’s life’s experiences, pretty much from day one.

  Yes, there remained a glimmer of hope that Lee could yet be rehabilitated. Still, Hartogs’s psychology held that the first five years in any person’s life shape him forever. Lee’s own early years were, in a word, horrific.

  You enjoy total power over me, doctor. I realize that. Keep me here, send me home. How it must feel to exert such authority over another human being! Someday I hope to—

  Power, even some small semblance of it, had not been a part of Lee’s life until that day when he held his first gun tight. Aiming at a target, pulling the trigger, experiencing the kick, knowing that if he so chose some life would come to an end ... all of this offered a rush, release, a sense of satisfaction.

  I am nobody. Yet I hold the power of life and death in my hands. Jackrabbits? Small potatoes! Johnny Barrows knew the score. You could see it right there in Sinatra’s gleaming eyes.

  The president? As a hunter might put it, big game!

  *

  Trying to discourage Sinatra, Hayden ran through all the assassination attempts in American history, emphatically pointing out that the shooter always got caught in the end.

  “It’s never been done,” he noted in that sardonic voice that qualified this actor as the era's king of the tough guys.

  “There’s always a first time,” Sinatra hissed in reply.

  That’s true, isn’t it? Whether it’s trying to build a plane that flies, inventing the atomic bomb, or shooting the president ... people try and fail ... so many fail that failure comes to seem inevitable ... until someone succeeds ... someday, I bet, people really will go to the moon ... and someday someone will shoot the president ... and get away with it.

  “I hate crowds,” Sinatra admitted, visibly shivering.

  Me, too! Hate ‘em. It’s like that for Johnny? For Sinatra?

  “You’re an American citizen,” Hayden countered.

  “And at five minutes after five,” Barrows/Sinatra leered, “I’m gonna be a very rich American citizen.”

  Of course! That’s the ticket. Money meant power ... power meant ... everything. If you have money, you have power; you have power, it doesn’t matter what you look like, where you’ve been, what you’ve done. Money bestows power; power brings women ... beautiful women ... and ... everything else we poor slobs sitting out here in run-down theatres across the country hunger for ... watching as someone else enjoys the goods.

  How many people dare to say I’m gonna get me some of that? One in a million, maybe. Could one of those someday be me?

  “Don’t you have any feelings at all?” the housewife demanded of this nasty little man before her.

  “No. They were taken out of me by experts.”

  Oh, I know that feeling. Experts like Dr. Hartogs.

  But how can anyone not experience feelings? she asked.

  “Feelings are a trap,” Sinatra/Barrows explained. “Show me a guy with feelings, I’ll show you a sucker.” She stared at him, unable to comprehend much less speak. “A weakness. Makes you think of something besides yourself. If I had any feelings left, it’d be for me. Just me.”

  That’s it. The key to ... I don’t know ... Survival? Stop worrying about Marguerite and how whatever I do impacts on her ... from now on, I’ve got to be more like Johnny Barrows.

  *

  The parallel proved far from precise. “My mother wasn’t married,” Johnny Barrows confessed. “My old man was a dipso.”

  As for his own old man, Lee had never known him. Robert E. Lee Oswald died two months before Lee's birth. Maybe that was better than growing up with an alcoholic. Likely about the same.

  Yes, Marguerite had been married, then in time remarried. Still, Lee’s experiences and those of this onscreen character still seemed pretty much congruent.

  “They left me in a house,” Johnny wept. That, Lee knew all about. First there had been Bethlehem Children’s House when he was three. Most people couldn’t remember anything about what happened to them at such an early age. Lee did. Almost every night, he still experienced nightmares about being there. Dream of sleeping in that place; dream of dreaming there, too, wanting to be back with Marguerite. Sleeping beside her in one bed, as they would do, when together, until he reached the age of fourteen.

  At the time, Marguerite claimed that she couldn’t afford to support her boys. His older brother Robert and half-brother John were temporarily abandoned too. Lee would wake up in Bethlehem ... what an ironic name for a hellish hovel! ... crying for her. Other kids heard, and tagged him a Momma's boy, then beat Lee whenever Robert or John weren't around to prevent such bullying.

  He was out, now. Mentally, he’d never escaped that place.

  Later, in New Orleans, or Fort Worth, or the Bronx. Youth House, wherever he happened to be, always it was the same thing over and over again ...

  I wake up screaming! Having experienced yet another dream within a dream within a dream. There’s no one there to comfort me; I'm alone in the dark. Always have been. Always will be?

  Lee firmly believed that it couldn’t get any worse than Bethlehem until he landed in the Youth House. Purgatory well described Bethlehem only after he’d experienced the daily horrors of his next home away from home. The beatings by other boys, those who, like him, had been scooped up by authorities and dropped down here; the last, worst place for those who did not, could not fit in. Supposedly for their benefit, to somehow try and make them ‘better.’ Or so everyone in authority claimed.

  Actually, Lee came to believe, to isolate them all from everyone else. The Normals! Sacrifice the few to save the many.

  Even here, in the land of the loners, Lee became the loner. An outsider among outsiders.

  The lowest rung on the totem pole of life ...

  *

  “Who’s behind it?” Sterling Hayden wanted to know.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Sinatra replied without emotion. What most fascinated Lee was that Johnny, all set to whack the president, considered himself a patriot.

  “I won the Silver Star!” />
  That gave Lee an idea, or more correctly brought an earlier one back. He must join the service. The image of Robert in full-dress uniform, home on leave, had inspired Lee. Reading Robert's Marine Corps manual caused the impressionable child to choose that branch of the service as the only one for him.

  If they'd take him. Lee had been shooting for pleasure for several years now. With training, he might become good. A sharpshooter, perhaps. Special. Superior at something. Finally.

  Maybe he too could kill 27 men? There wasn’t a war going on right now. Things quieted down after the Korean conflict came to its unsatisfying conclusion back in 1953. Chances were, another would start up somewhere.

  Hadn’t some senator stated on the news that America might have to make our stand against the Reds in Southeast Asia?

  Why wait for it to begin? Join now. Be prepared, like one of those despicable Boy Scouts who refused to accept me into their troop for reasons best left unremembered.

  “Louisiana white trash,” they’d taunted him in Fort Worth.

  That’s alright. He’d show ‘em, now that he had a sense of direction. That’s what Lee had always needed. Well, here it was.

  As soon as he exited the auditorium Lee would locate a recruiting office and sign up. The thought of doing so had been there for some time, if in a vague form.

  Now, the idea of becoming a marine coalesced, defining him.

  *

  Precisely what had pushed Johnny Barrows over the edge? the sheriff wanted to know. With that, the snotty grin disappeared. Suddenly, he appeared vulnerable. “A man can stand for so much and no more,” the little guy whined to the all-American giant. “Before the war, I drifted ... and drifted.”

  Like me! Seventeen homes, to use that term loosely, in fifteen years. Born on Alva Street, New Orleans. Over to 1242 Compass less than a year later. 1010 Bartholomew in another six months. Ninety or so days after settling in there, 83 Pauline Street, followed shortly by a rush to 111 Sherwood.