Oswald's Game

by Davison, Jean

  I have been told that I will not have to leave the Soviet Union if I do not care to. This then is my decision. I will not leave this country, the Soviet Union, under any conditions, I will never return to the United States which is a country I hate.

  Reading these cold words, one wonders what there was in Oswald’s past that led him to reject not only his country but his brother as well. Others—especially people who have followed the controversy about the Kennedy assassination—may suspect that Oswald was insincere and ask: Who sent him? What was the real purpose behind his coming to the Soviet Union? Certainly there was more to Oswald’s defection than appeared on the surface.

  Two weeks after his confrontation with Snyder, Oswald changed his mind about’talking to the American press corps. He gave two interviews in which he elaborated on his reasons for defecting. On November 13 he called Aline Mosby, a UPI correspondent, who came to his room on the second floor of the Metropole Hotel. It was a large room overlooking the Bolshoi Theater, with ornate furniture and blue walls and she thought he looked totally out of place there, “like some Okie from the boondocks.” Mosby asked questions and took notes in shorthand, and Oswald talked “non-stop” for two hours. He seemed a little stiff at first, but the longer he talked, the more confident, even smug, he became.

  Aline Mosby was a veteran reporter, originally from Montana. (It was she who revealed, in 1952, that Marilyn Monroe had once posed for a nude calendar photo.) She had questioned other American defectors during her assignment in Moscow, but as the interview progressed she could see that Oswald was an anomaly. The others, as she perceived them, fell into one of two categories—either a “high-level official who had played an important role in his country and decided to transfer his knowledge to the Soviet side” or someone “of the romantic variety who flees behind the Iron Curtain in the hopes of escaping personal problems.” Oswald claimed that his reasons were ideological. When Mosby heard him using phrases like “capitalist lackeys,” she thought it sounded “as if it were all being given by rote, as if he had memorized Pravda.” She got very few glimpses of the person behind the political talk.

  Mosby asked him how he had become a Marxist, and he told her, “I became interested about the age of 15. From an ideological viewpoint. An old lady handed me a pamphlet about saving the Rosenbergs.… I looked at that paper and I still remember it for some reason, I don’t know why.”2 He was living with his mother in New York City at the time. The Rosenberg pamphlet introduced him to socialist literature. He began observing the “class struggle” in New York, “the luxury of Park Avenue and the workers’ lives on the [Lower] East Side.” Nobody had influenced him, he said and insisted that it was only through his reading and personal observation of American society that he had become a Marxist. “I guess you could say I was influenced by what I read, and by observing that the material was correct in its theses.”

  Serving in the Marines had strengthened his beliefs, particularly his view of American imperialism: “Like Formosa. The conduct of American technicians there, helping drag up guns for the Chinese. Watching American technicians show the Chinese how to use them—it’s one thing to talk about communism and another thing to drag a gun up a mountainside.” On guard duty at night, he said, he would dream about getting out of the Marines and going to Russia—it would be, he thought, “like being out of prison.”

  About his decision to leave America he said, “I would not care to live in the United States where being a worker means you are exploited by the capitalists. If I would remain in the United States, feeling as I do, under the capitalist system, I could never get ahead.… I would have a choice of becoming a worker under the system I hate, or becoming unemployed.… One way or another I’d lose in the United States. In my own mind, even if I’d be exploiting other workers.” Evidently, it was fairly important to him to get ahead and not lose.

  He presented himself as a struggling idealist: “I’m sincere in my ideal. This is not something intangible. I’m going through pain and difficulty to do this.” But even an idealist can be aggressive, and he seemed to believe he had chosen the winning side. At one point he said, “Communism is an aggressive ideal as well as an economic system.… The forces of communism are growing. I believe capitalism will disappear as feudalism disappeared.” He also talked about armchair socialists. “You don’t just sit around and talk about it,” he said. “You go out and do it.”

  The next day Aline Mosby’s UPI story was picked up by a Fort Worth newspaper and run under the headline “Fort Worth Defector Confirms Red Beliefs.” After reading her account in another paper available in Moscow, Oswald telephoned Mosby to complain about what he considered to be distortions, saying that his family had not been poverty-stricken, as she had said. True, he told her how he had seen the “impoverishment of the masses” in his own mother, but he felt that Mosby had put her emphasis in the wrong place. He reiterated that his defection wasn’t prompted by personal hardship, but was “a matter only of ideology.”

  On November 16, 1959, Priscilla Johnson stopped by the American Embassy to pick up her mail. She had just returned from the United States, where she was covering the Camp David summit meeting between President Eisenhower and Premier Khruschev. Her first job, ironically enough, had been in Washington as a researcher for the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. In the winter of 1954–1955 she had gotten to know him well. She had left Washington and was working in New York as a Russian-language translator when he was hospitalized there for two operations on his spine. She visited him occasionally during his recovery, posing as one of his sisters. In 1958 she went to Moscow as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance and The Progressive magazine. (In 1977, as Priscilla Johnson McMillan, she would publish a book with Oswald’s widow called Marina and Lee.)

  At the embassy that day she had run into John McVickar, who told her, “Oh, by the way, there’s a young American in your hotel trying to defect. He won’t talk to any of us, but maybe he’ll talk to you because you’re a woman.” When she knocked on the door of Oswald’s room later that day, he came out into the hall to speak with her instead of inviting her in, but readily agreed to come up to her room on the floor above for an interview that evening.

  Oswald arrived dressed in a dark flannel suit. With his “pale, rather pleasant features,” he resembled “any of a dozen college boys I had known back home.” They talked for about five hours, from nine until two in the morning. Like Aline Mosby, she had also seen other defectors, and she too found Oswald hard to figure. Oswald had just turned 20, and she had never known anyone “of that age …, or that generation, taking an ideological interest to the point where he would defect.” He reminded her of the leftists who had emigrated to Russia for political reasons in the 1930s. The reasons Oswald gave—unemployment in the United States, racial inequalities—sounded “nineteen-thirtyish.”

  He began by complaining about the runaround he had gotten at the embassy, insisting that the American officials were “acting in an illegal way.” He told her he had decided to grant the interview because, now that Soviet officials had assured him he would not be forced to return to the United States, he felt “it was safe to tell his side of the story.” He wanted to counter the American Embassy’s statements about his defection because, he said, “I would like to give people in the United States something to think about.”

  After that, he seemed mainly interested in discussing economic theory. Like Richard Snyder, Priscilla Johnson got the impression that Oswald didn’t fully understand Marxist economics. When she pointed out that the Soviets made a large profit from their workers in order to accumulate capital for the state, Oswald agreed. What was important, he said, was that the profit was used to benefit all the people, emphasizing this concept with a sweep of his arm. Asked about the difference in the living standards of the two countries, he replied, “They don’t have as many hot water heaters and meat pies here but they will in 20 years, through an economic system that
is leaving the United States far behind.” At another point he told her, “I believe sooner or later communism will replace capitalism. Capitalism is a defensive ideology, whereas communism is aggressive.” A recent meeting of the Supreme Soviet had taken no action on Oswald’s request for citizenship, and Johnson thought he seemed disappointed and worried by that. But he told her he hoped that his experience as a radar operator would make him more desirable to them.

  Oswald’s account of how he became a Marxist was virtually the same as the one he had given Mosby. He reiterated his belief, from his observations in New York, that the workers were exploited and explained once more how he had discovered socialist literature and saw that the description it gave of capitalist society “was quite correct.” He told her, “I had been brought up like any Southern boy to hate Negroes. Socialist literature opened my eyes to the economic reasons for hating Negroes: so the wages could be kept low.”

  Listening to him, Johnson felt “it was as though Oswald wanted to convince us both that he had never had a childhood, that he had been all his life a machine, calibrating social justice.”

  He repeatedly said that his decision to defect was “unemotional.” But she noticed that his voice seemed to tighten when he talked about his mother, whom he described as a victim of the capitalist system. In contrast, his voice sounded cold and considerably more distant when he answered a question about his father’s line of work: “I believe he was an insurance salesman.” (In fact, his father had died before Oswald was born.) Oswald told her he had joined the Marines “because we were poor and I didn’t want to be a burden on my family.” By his account, he’d been making plans to defect for two years, finding out how to go about it mostly by reading. “I have had practical experience in the world,” he said. “I am not an idealist completely. I have had a chance to watch American imperialism in action.”

  Shortly after the assassination, Priscilla Johnson would write, “If there was one thing that stood out in all our conversation, it was his truly compelling need … to think of himself as extraordinary.” When she asked him if he recommended defection to others, he said he did not. The course he had chosen was not for everyone. Defection meant “coming into a new country, always being the outsider, always adjusting, but I know now that I will never have to return to the United States. I believe what I am doing is right.”

  And later, in Marina and Lee, she wrote, “Our evening was like a seesaw, with me trying to get Lee to talk about himself and Lee trying to talk about his‘ideology.’ I would say that Lee won.” Before he left, he told her he had never talked about himself so long to anyone before, and she felt a twinge of pity, “for if this was his idea of openness, then I thought he must never have talked about himself to anyone at all.”

  Ten days after his interview with Priscilla Johnson, Oswald wrote a second, remarkable letter to Robert, who had responded to his first one by telling Lee he hadn’t renounced him. Robert was still puzzled about why his brother wanted to live in the Soviet Union. Oswald’s lengthy reply began like a political tract and ended with a threat—the tone was much more hostile than the one he had used with the women reporters.

  He began by explaining “Why I and my fellow workers and communists would like to see the capitalist government of the U.S. overthrown.” He instructed Robert that the American government “supports an economic system which exploits all the workers, a system based upon credit which gives rise to the never-ending cycle of depression, inflation, unlimited speculation (which is the phase America is in now) and war.… Look around you, and look at yourself. See the segregation, see the unemployment and what automation is. Remember how you were laid off at Convair?”

  He continued:

  Ask me and I will tell you I fight for communism.… I will not say your grandchildren will live under communism, look for yourself at history, look at a world map! America is a dying country, I do not wish to be a part of it, nor do I ever again wish to be used as a tool in its military aggressions.

  This should answer your question, and also give you a glimpse of my way of thinking.

  So you speak of advantages. Do you think that is why I am here? For personal, material advantages? Happiness is not based on oneself, it does not consist of a small home, of taking and getting. Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world, and the world in general.…

  I have been a pro-communist for years and yet I have never met a communist, instead I kept silent and observed, and what I observed plus my Marxist learning brought me here to the Soviet Union.

  I want you to understand [that] what I say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly.…

  He advised his brother of the following.

  1. In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American government—any American.

  2. That in my own mind I have no attachments of any kind in the U.S.

  3. That I want to, and I shall, live a normal, happy and peaceful life here in the Soviet Union for the rest of my life.

  4. That my mother and you are (in spite of what the newspaper said) not objects of affection, but only examples of workers in the U.S.

  On December 17 Robert received a third letter in which Oswald said he wouldn’t write again and didn’t want Robert to continue writing to him. The letter concluded: “I am starting a new life and I do not wish to have anything to do with the old life. I hope you and your family will always be in good health.” It would be hard to imagine a more extreme rejection of his past.

  On January 4, 1960, Oswald was informed that his request for Soviet citizenship had been denied. He was issued an “identity document for stateless persons” and sent to Minsk to start work in a radio factory. If Oswald’s statements are to be believed, he never intended to see the United States or his family again.

  Although the reasons Oswald gave for his defection were political, his letters to Robert—as well as the undercurrent of his interviews with Aline Mosby and Priscilla Johnson—suggest that there was something highly personal behind his ideology. One of the most curious things about Oswald’s sketchy account of his past was his statement concerning the Save the Rosenbergs pamphlet. During the early 1950s American soldiers were fighting a bloody stalemate in Korea and anti-Communists like Senator Joseph McCarthy were riding high. This was the political atmosphere of Oswald’s childhood. When the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, Lee Oswald was not about 15 years old, as he had said, but 13. He had been born into an apolitical family in the conservative South. How could a pamphlet about saving the Rosenbergs have gotten this 13-year-old interested in Marxism “from an ideological viewpoint”?

  2 … Marguerite’s Son

  EARLY one hot August morning in 1939, Robert Edward Lee Oswald was mowing his lawn in New Orleans when he felt a sharp pain in one of his arms. His wife Marguerite gave him an aspirin and called a doctor, but he was dead of a heart attack before the doctor could get there. Marguerite arranged to have him buried the same afternoon—she was seven months pregnant and wanted to avoid any undue strain. Some of her in-laws were appalled by her “coldness” and never spoke to her again.

  Lee Harvey Oswald was born on October 18, two months later. Marguerite was 32 years old.

  Oswald never spoke much about his childhood. What he did say bore more than a trace of resentment and self-pity. In an autobiographical paragraph he wrote in 1962 he described himself simply as “the son of an Insurance Salesman whose early death left a fair mean streak of independence brought on by neglect.” As in many statements people make about themselves to explain who they are, this one may reflect more than he realized. What Richard Snyder and others saw as his insufferable arrogance, Oswald evidently regarded as a “mean streak of independence,” a more admirable quality, a proud, deliberate separation from other people. And ultimately he felt he was the person he was because his father died before he was born. If his mother neglected him, this was secondary: she too was a vic
tim of circumstance. And this was precisely the way Marguerite saw herself.

  The most significant and revealing thing about Oswald’s childhood is how much his personality resembled his mother’s. Robert Oswald saw some of Marguerite’s worst traits repeated in Lee. Their mother had, as Robert once put it, “an extraordinary idea of her ability and her importance.” If she didn’t get everything she thought she deserved, it was because circumstances or individuals were against her. Throughout his youth Robert had heard her talk about the hidden motives and malicious actions of other people. She was the type, her older sister Lillian Murret testified, who in any disagreement would always insist she was right. Whenever they quarreled, Lillian wouldn’t hear from her again until Marguerite needed “assistance or a place to stay.” Lillian explained, “You see, I am forgiving, but she is not.” People would say much the same things about Lee Oswald.

  Marguerite had also once observed that Robert was like his easygoing father: “He is not opinionated like I am. My older son and Lee are my disposition.” And to writer Jean Stafford she admitted, “I should say I’m very outspoken, I’m aggressive, I’m no dope. Let’s face it, if you step on my toes I’m gonna fight back, and I don’t apologize for that.” This was, she added, the way she wanted her boys to be.

  When Lee was born, Marguerite already had two sons—John Pic, from her first marriage, who was 8 and Robert who was 5. Her late husband, a collector of insurance premiums, had left her a $10,000 policy, and she began thinking about how she was going to get by once that was gone. In early 1941 she sold her house and bought a smaller one, where she opened Oswald’s Notions Shop in the front room, selling sewing supplies and grocery items. This venture failed, and the following year she placed John and Robert in the Bethlehem Children’s Home so that she could find work. Lee was too young to be accepted, so she boarded him with Lillian, who was married and had five kids of her own. Lillian liked her nephew, but he was unusual in one respect. Sometimes he would sneak out of her house at night in his pajamas, to be found later in a neighbor’s kitchen. “He could slip out of the house like nobody’s business,” she said. “You could have everything locked up and he would still get out.”