Oswald’s Game
Jean Davison
Contents
Introduction
1:
A Most Unusual Defector
2:
Marguerite’s Son
3:
Dropping Out, Joining Up
4:
The Marxist Marine
5:
The Defection
6:
Getting Out
7:
Homecoming
8:
Taking Action
9:
The Activist
10:
“Street Agitation … Radio Speaker and Lecturer”
11:
The Troubling Testimony of Sylvia Odio—“A Matter of Some Importance to the Commission”
12:
Castro’s Revelations
13:
October 1963—Reading between the Lines
14:
November—The Decision
15:
The Arrest
16:
Reactions
17:
Conspiracy Thinking
18:
Oswald’s Game
Index
Illustrations
Many thanks to my editor, Kathy Anderson, for her invaluable assistance and advice.
Vladimir Ilyich and I recalled a simile L. Trotsky used somewhere. Once when walking, he spotted in the distance the figure of a man squatting on his haunches and moving his hands about in an absurd way. A madman! he thought. But on drawing nearer, he saw that it was a man sharpening his knife on the paving-stone.
—Lenin’s wife, quoted in Bertram D. Wolfe’s
Three Who Made a Revolution
Introduction
PRACTICALLY everybody who can remember November 22, 1963, remembers the exact moment when he or she heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. I was sitting in a staff office at the University of Georgia, getting ready to teach a class of freshmen, when I saw a knot of students in the hall huddled around a transistor radio. One glanced up at me with the fiercely introspective look survivors of a natural disaster often have and said, “Somebody shot President Kennedy.”
I didn’t believe it. An hour or so later, after news came that he had died, I walked outside the building and noticed the intense green of the lawn and trees and the sudden weight of the air. Down the hill, a long line of cars was backed up leaving the campus—all classes had been canceled. The cars moved foot by foot, but very quietly and patiently, like a funeral procession.
People too young to remember may find it hard to credit the degree of shock and disbelief that was the almost universal reaction. No American leader had been assassinated since McKinley in 1901, and Kennedy was no ordinary leader, as even his adversaries agreed. More than a popular president, he was fortune’s child, having wit, elegance, wealth, and a style that made his admirers talk, even while he lived, of the Kennedy myth and the legend of Camelot. He had been destroyed in an instant by a bullet to the brain, and for no apparent reason.
At first, because Dallas was a notorious center of right-wing extremism, many people assumed Kennedy had been attacked by a right-wing fanatic—someone who opposed his civil rights program or his efforts to relax tensions with the Soviet Union. The news that the suspect who had been arrested—a 24-year-old named Lee Harvey Oswald—was a Marxist and a former defector to the Soviet Union struck many as a grotesque twist of fate. When Robert Kennedy told his brother’s widow, Jacqueline, that Oswald was a Communist, her reaction was, “Oh my God, but that’s absurd.… It even robs his death of any meaning.” A Marxist killing a liberal president made no sense.
Under arrest, Oswald maintained he hadn’t shot anybody. Two days later, when the police attempted to transfer him from one jail to another, he was gunned down by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, before a national television audience.
Over the next few weeks the public’s impression of Oswald solidified around the bits of information that came out through the news media. Oswald never held a steady job and he had marital problems. He seemed erratic and aimless. Having defected to Russia, he returned to the United States and later tried to go to Cuba. In April of 1963 he had reportedly taken a shot at retired Major General Edwin A. Walker, a prominent right-winger—Walker was one of Kennedy’s bitterest political enemies. Many editorials blamed the vicious anti-Kennedy atmosphere in Dallas for inciting a confused misfit to violence.
In 1964 the Warren Commission published the results of the official investigation—a summary that came to be known as the Warren Report, followed by twenty-six volumes of testimony and exhibits that sold mainly to libraries. The report presented strong circumstantial evidence that Oswald had fired three shots at the motorcade from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, striking Kennedy twice and Governor John Connally once, and that during his attempt to escape he had shot and killed Patrolman J.D. Tippit. Among other things, the rifle found in the School Depository had been mailed to Oswald’s post office box, and the order blank and money order bore his handwriting. When he was arrested at a movie theater, he held in his hand a pistol that matched the bullet casings found near Patrolman Tippit’s body—and Oswald reportedly exclaimed, “It’s all over now.” But perhaps the most telling was a small symbolic gesture. Before Oswald went to work at the Depository on the morning of the assassination, he took off his wedding ring and left it on his wife’s dresser, something he had never done before.
And yet, although the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald shot Kennedy, it was unable to say why:
Many factors were undoubtedly involved in Oswald’s motivation for the assassination, and the Commission does not believe that it can ascribe to him any one motive or group of motives.
The Warren Report spoke of his troubled personal life, his hostility to American society, his interest in Marxism, and his alleged propensity for violence. None of this seemed adequate to explain what had been called the crime of the century. It seemed to many Americans that the reason Kennedy was murdered would never be known.
Some felt, in fact, that there was no reason. If Oswald was a lone gunman with no motive, then the assassination was an event without meaning. It was as though Kennedy had been struck by a bolt of lightning, or by a brick that happened to fall from a construction site as the motorcade passed by. In their view, it amounted to the same thing: the course of history had been changed by a freak accident.
Others suspected a conspiracy from the very beginning. They pointed out that the murder of any head of state is a political crime. If the assassin wasn’t a raving lunatic—and Oswald certainly wasn’t that—then there must have been a political motive. The Warren Commission’s critics began asking the old legal question, Cui bono? Who stood to gain by Kennedy’s death? If Oswald had no obvious motive, there were others who did—CIA operatives and Cuban exiles who felt Kennedy had double-crossed them at the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and Mafia dons who were feeling heat from Kennedy’s Justice Department, to name a few. As many of the critics saw it, one had only to discover the links between these groups and their patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald, to determine a motive. The result would be a multitude of assassination books attacking the Warren Report and offering new theories about how and who and why. The prospect of a widespread, high-level conspiracy entered America’s consciousness, as did a new suspicion about the way our world worked. In these books, Oswald is merely a pawn, and the real assassins are the unidentified men who successfully plotted to control and change American history.
It has been said that there are only two theories of history: blunder and conspiracy. Broadly speaking, these were the only theories about Dallas, as well. It was an act of
random violence or a plot. Choose the first, and you run head on into the conclusion that history—life itself—is chaotic and meaningless. Choose the second, and history is a racket run by unseen, all-powerful conspirators.
In the mid-1960s I didn’t take an interest in this controversy. Like a lot of people I had formed an immediate impression of the alleged assassin: he was “some kind of nut” who probably didn’t know himself why he did what he did. As far as I was concerned, the case was closed. In 1965 I left my teaching job and got married, moved north, and began working as a free-lance writer.
Then in 1968 I happened to read an article about Oswald in The Westwood Village Square, a conservative, youth-oriented magazine that has since folded. The article was written by an anti-Communist propagandist named Ed Butler, who said he had faced Oswald in a New Orleans radio debate on Cuba in August 1963. That surprised me, since I found it hard to imagine Oswald, who apparently couldn’t even hold a menial job, holding his own in a public debate. But according to Butler, he was a well-informed and articulate debater who was dedicated to the cause of Castro’s Cuba. Butler produced testimony and documents from the Warren Commission records to bolster his belief that Oswald had been “conditioned to kill” by the Communist propaganda he’d been reading since he was a teenager. That didn’t seem likely, to put it mildly, but even taking Butler’s political bias into account, I couldn’t reconcile this picture of Oswald as a skilled public debater with the one I had previously been given of him as a hapless drifter. Although I didn’t realize it, I was getting bitten by one of the central mysteries of the Kennedy assassination—the question of who Oswald really was.
On a later trip to the library I checked out Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, one of the first attacks on the Warren Report. Lane had been retained by Oswald’s mother to represent her son’s interests before the Commission. His argument was that Oswald had been framed. Almost nothing was said about Oswald’s personal background, his political commitment or lack of one. Like the defense attorney he was, Lane tore into virtually every piece of evidence in the case against his client—the shell casings found near Patrolman Tippit’s body, the famous snapshots showing Oswald holding the rifle found in the Depository, and much more. Lane portrayed the Warren Report as a farce, a calculated attempt to conceal a conspiracy. By the time I had finished this angry book, I wondered if Oswald was involved in the assassination at all.
I now had three pictures of Oswald to choose from: those of the Warren Commission, Butler, and Lane. All had relied on evidence contained in the Commission’s twenty-six volumes. Everybody had read the same material and arrived at wildly different conclusions. How was that possible? More to the point, who was telling the truth? At the time, it seemed simple enough to find out. I would read the twenty-six volumes myself.
I found the blue-bound Hearings in a local university library. Volumes I-XV contained the testimony of witnesses who appeared at the Commission’s hearings or gave depositions before a Commission lawyer. The question-and-answer format made the transcripts read like the text of a play. The remaining volumes contained exhibits entered as evidence—FBI reports, photographs, and similar documents. The first thing that struck me was how disorganized this material was. An FBI report on ballistics might be followed by a psychiatric report on Jack Ruby’s mother or a description of the preparations for the motorcade. And there was no index. I began taking notes, wondering if I could ever find an underlying order in this jumble of information.
During the reading I checked some of Mark Lane’s footnotes. The testimony he had cited as evidence that the Warren Report was a cover-up had often been quoted out of context, so that what he quoted changed the meaning of what had actually been said. For example, the way Lane wrote about Jack Ruby’s testimony led readers to believe that Ruby was denied the opportunity to reveal the existence of a conspiracy.
After Ruby had been convicted of Oswald’s murder and sentenced to death, Warren Commission members Earl Warren and Gerald R. Ford questioned him at the Dallas jail. For many months, there had been rumors that Ruby was a hit man whose job had been to silence Oswald. To hear Lane tell it, Ruby seemed eager to disclose his part in this conspiracy:
Ruby made it plain that if the Commission took him from the Dallas County Jail and permitted him to testify in Washington, he could tell more there; it was impossible for him to tell the whole truth so long as he was in the jail in Dallas.…“I would like to request that I go to Washington and … take all the tests that I have to take. It is very important.… Gentlemen, unless you get me to Washington, you can’t get a fair shake out of me.”
After quoting similar statements by Ruby, Lane continued:
Representative Ford asked, not a little redundantly, “Is there anything more you can tell us if you went back to Washington?” Ruby told him that there was, and just before the hearing ended Ruby made one last plea to the Chief Justice of the United States.
RUBY: But you are the only one that can save me. I think you can.
WARREN: Yes?
RUBY: But by delaying minutes, you lose the chance. And all I want to do is tell the truth, and that is all.
But Warren didn’t take him to Washington. Reading Lane’s account, one is horrified. His implication is clear: Ruby was begging to be allowed to expose the conspiracy, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court wouldn’t listen.
Everything Lane quoted was in the record. What he didn’t say, however, was that the “tests” Ruby wanted to take were simply a lie detector test—and the reason Ruby wanted to take one was to prove that he was not part of a conspiracy.
After his arrest, Ruby had been diagnosed as a “psychotic depressive.” His testimony to the Commission indicates that he believed he was the victim of a political conspiracy by right-wing forces in Dallas. He suggested that the John Birch Society was spreading the falsehood that he, a Jew, was implicated in the president’s death in order to create anti-Jewish hysteria. “The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment,” Ruby insisted. “Consequently, a whole new form of government is going to take over our country.” To foil this supposed plot, Ruby repeatedly asked to be given a lie detector test. At various points in their conversation Ruby told Warren:
No subversive organization gave me any idea. No underworld person made any effort to contact me. It all happened that Sunday morning.… If you don’t take me back to Washington tonight to give me a chance to prove to the President that I am not guilty, then you will see the most tragic thing that will ever happen.… All I want is a lie detector test.… All I want to do is tell the truth, and that is all. There was no conspiracy.
The following month Ruby was allowed to take a polygraph test in his jail cell as he had requested, and he again denied being part of a conspiracy. Because of the doubts about his sanity, however, the test results were considered inconclusive.
The only part of this background that appears in Lane’s book is Ruby’s statement, “All I want to do is tell the truth, and that is all.” Had he presented the accompanying material, Lane might have argued that Ruby was faking. Instead, Lane cheated. He transformed a man who seemed pathetically anxious to prove his innocence into an honest conspirator desperate to reveal everything he knew. And this was only one of many similar distortions in Rush to Judgment.
I remember feeling outraged when I realized what Lane had done. Evidently, the Warren records were like a vast lumberyard. By picking up a few pieces here and there, and doing some cutting and fitting, any theory could be built for which someone had a blueprint.
Meanwhile my impression of Lee Harvey Oswald was changing. I was surprised by the sheer amount of material the Commission had collected on his background. Much of this information was new in the sense that it had never been published anywhere except in the Hearings. There was testimony from dozens of witnesses who had known Oswald at each stage of his life from birth to death—they described him and his activities and recounted numerous conversations they had had with him. And
there was a good deal more: Oswald’s personal papers and letters; detailed evaluations by social workers and a psychiatrist who had interviewed him when he was a junior high school truant; a diary and manuscript he had written that purported to show his experiences in the Soviet Union; his school, Marine, and work records—even lists of the books he checked out of libraries, the magazines and newspapers he subscribed to, and the reading material found among his effects.
A transcript of the radio debate Ed Butler had written about was included, and Oswald did indeed appear to be an able debater. The moderator, a reporter named William Stuckey, testified that he thought Oswald was impressive, almost like a young lawyer. And Stuckey’s judgment was not unusual. Virtually everyone who knew Lee Oswald thought he was intelligent, rational, and dedicated to his brand of left-wing politics. The people who knew him best described him as a revolutionary. (This was in 1964, when most Americans thought revolutionaries existed only in banana republics or in Russia before 1917.) On the other hand, people also felt that he was bitter, secretive, and—the most frequent description of all—” arrogant.” Testimony about his troubled personal life, beginning when he was a child, was presented in great detail as well.
And yet, if the impression Oswald gave his relatives and acquaintances was clear, some of his political activities were not. He went to the Soviet Union as a 19-year-old defector and lived there for almost three years. The particulars of his life during that period are, and probably always will be, sketchy. He had given political reasons for his defection, but were they the only reasons? After he returned to the United States, he supported Castro both publicly and privately, but he also made contact with anti-Castro groups. These clouded areas of activity raise questions about which side he was really on. After the assassination, there had been heavy speculation that he may have actually been working for the CIA or the FBI. (Although I didn’t like Mark Lane’s methods, I could see that he and the other more responsible critics did have a point.)
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