Oswald's Game

by Davison, Jean

  After one of her many quarrels with Lillian, Marguerite took Lee out of the Murret home and found a babysitter for him. She told the Warren Commission at one of its hearings, “War had broken out and the Negroes in New Orleans were going into factories and so on and so forth so there is many a job I had to leave in order to stay home and mind Lee until I could get help.… So, then at age 3 Lee was placed in the home. I waited patiently for age 3 because I wanted naturally for the brothers to be together.”

  Oswald was at the children’s home with his brothers for thirteen months. The Lutheran orphanage had a relaxed atmosphere and its own school, and the two older boys would remember their stay there as a relatively happy time. Robert, who thought of Lee as his “kid brother” and “stayed pretty close to him,” said Lee seemed happy there, too. Marguerite visited often and brought them home on weekends. One day she came by to introduce her sons to an older man she had been dating—Edwin A. Ekdahl from Boston, who was working in New Orleans as an electrical engineer. John Pic recalled, “He was described to us as Yankee, of course. Rather tall, I think he was over 6 feet. He had white hair, wore glasses, very nice man.”

  Not long after this, Marguerite took Lee out of the home and moved to Dallas, where Ekdahl had been transferred, leaving his brothers to finish the school year. After she and Ekdahl were married in May 1945, he tried to be a father to the boys, and Lee in particular became quite attached to him. That September John and Robert went off for the first of three school years at a military academy in Mississippi. Lee stayed behind, and frequently accompanied Marguerite and Ekdahl on his business trips to places like Boston and Arizona. Ekdahl was making $1000 a month, and they had moved to a comfortable house on a large plot of land in Benbrook, a Fort Worth suburb. But the Ekdahl marriage was shaky from the start. Marguerite complained that her husband was stingy and expected her to account for every penny. There were noisy arguments and several separations. Every time they got back together, Lee seemed elated. Then in the summer of 1947 Marguerite found out that her husband was seeing another woman.

  Her reaction was pure Marguerite.

  Ekdahl had sent her a telegram saying he’d be late getting back from a business trip. Marguerite told the Warren Commission, “So, I called his office, I … knew his secretary, and I was going to tell her that Mr. Ekdahl would be delayed 3 or 4 days. But immediately she said, ‘Mrs. Ekdahl, Mr. Ekdahl is not in, he has gone out to lunch.’ So, I said …‘When will he be back’ and so on.”

  Not having let on to the secretary, Marguerite drove her car that evening to the building where her husband worked, watched him come out, and followed him to an apartment building. She went home and told her son John and a friend of his what had happened. Then she called John McClain, an attorney who lived next door, told him what she had seen, and asked his advice. Marguerite reported:

  “He said, ‘Mrs. Oswald, just ring the phone. Do you know the woman?’

  “And I said, ‘Yes.’

  “‘Just ring the phone and let him know that you know he is there.…’”

  She thought about it, but decided against it because “he could leave and say he was just there on business and I wanted to catch him.”

  “So the kids and I planned that we would say she had a telegram … we went up the stairs, I believe it was the second or third floor, and [John’s friend] knocked on the door and said, ‘Telegram for Mrs. C——.…’

  “She said, ‘Please push it under the door’ and I told him no; he said, ‘No, you have to sign for it.’

  “So with that she opened the door …[and] I, my son, and … the other young man walked into the room … Mrs. C——had on a negligee, and my husband had his sleeves rolled up and his tie off sitting on a sofa … he said, ‘Marguerite, Marguerite, you have everything wrong, you have everything wrong.’

  “He says, ‘Listen to me.’

  “I said, ‘I don’t want to hear one thing. I have seen everything I want to see, this is it.”

  It might have been a scene from a bedroom farce, but Marguerite’s devious and vindictive personality was behind it, manipulating her oldest son and another teenager into taking part in the subterfuge. According to Robert, “Lee’s imagination and love of intrigue was a lot like Mother’s. She always had a wild imagination and I think it influenced Lee’s view of the world.”

  In 1948 Ekdahl filed suit for divorce and, Marguerite said, “I thought I was sitting pretty. He didn’t have anything on me. I had him for adultery with witnesses and everything and I didn’t have an idea that he could sue me for a divorce, but [he] did.…” John Pic had to testify for Marguerite and, as he remembers it, Lee was called to the stand but excused by the judge as being too young—he was eight—to know “right from wrong and truth from falsehood.” In his complaint, Ekdahl charged that his wife argued incessantly about money, flew into “uncontrollable rages,” and threw cookie jars, glasses, and bottles at him. The jury found Marguerite guilty of these “outrages” and granted the divorce, awarding her a mere $1500 settlement.

  Although Marguerite attributed their breakup to disagreements over money, a friend of hers, Myrtle Evans, thought her attachment to Lee had something to do with it. She thought Marguerite “spoiled him to death.” According to Evans, Marguerite wouldn’t discipline Lee or let Ekdahl do it, and Lee demanded so much of her attention that she and Ekdahl never had a chance to be alone. But this mother-son relationship was oddly detached. Lee would go his own way, as she did, and she would observe from a distance. After telling Jean Stafford she had taught her sons to fight back, Marguerite said,

  Let me give you one little instance with Lee and the next-door neighbor boy. They were approximately the same age, and if not, they were the same height, and Lee had a dog. He loved his shepherd collie dog. It was named Sunshine. He used to romp in the back yard with his dog and took him every place he went, and this little boy was throwing rocks over the fence at Lee’s dog. Well, my kitchen window had a view to the back yard. And I watched my son Lee for approximately three days telling the little boy over the fence he better stop throwing rocks at his dog. Well, I was amused, and I was just waiting to find out what happened. Finally, one day when I came home from work the father called me on the phone. It seemed his son was very badly beaten up—in a child’s way. My son Lee had finally taken upon himself, after much patience, I thought, to confront the little boy enough to fight him, and the father didn’t approve. I told the father what happened, and since the boys were approximately the same age and height, let them fight their own battles.

  While she was at work, Marguerite encouraged Lee to come straight home after school instead of playing with other children. Marguerite insisted he had always been solitary by nature, as she was, and preferred to play alone. “I am not lonely,” she said. “But I live to myself.” The picture she gives of Oswald at this age—and of her attitude toward him—is vivid and worth closer inspection:

  Lee had a normal life as far as I, his mother, is concerned. He had a bicycle, he had everything that other children had.

  Lee had wisdom without education. From a very small child—I have said this before, sir, and I have publicly stated this in 1959 [when she was interviewed after his defection]—Lee seemed to know the answers to things without schooling. That type child, in a way, is bored with schooling, because he is a little advanced.

  Lee used to climb on top of the roof with binoculars, looking at the stars. He was reading [astronomy]. Lee knew about any and every animal there was. He studied animals. All of their feeding habits, sleeping habits.… And Lee read history books, books too deep for a child his age. At age 9—he was always instructed not to contact me at work unless it was an emergency, because my work came first—he called me at work and said, “Mother, Queen Elizabeth’s baby has been born.”

  He broke the rule to let me know that Queen Elizabeth’s baby had been born. Nine years old. That was important to him. He liked things of that sort.

  He loved comics, read comic b
ooks. He loved television programs. But most of all he loved the news on radio and television. If he was in the midst of a story, a film—he would turn it off for news. That was important.… Lee read very, very important things.…

  Yet he played Monopoly, played baseball.

  He belonged to the Y. He used to go swimming. He would come by work with his head wet, and I would say, “Hurry home, honey, you are going to catch cold.”

  And I considered that, sir, a very normal life.

  While the divorce was pending, Marguerite moved to a small house next to the railroad tracks. For John, it meant they “were back down in the lower class again.” Soon they relocated, first to a one-bedroom house where John and Robert slept in a screened-in porch while their mother and Lee shared the bedroom, and then to another house in Fort Worth, so that Marguerite could be nearer her job at a department store. Later she began selling insurance.

  Marguerite had taken the older boys out of the military academy. They could have stayed on with the aid of scholarships, and wanted to, but their mother reminded them that they were orphans and she could no longer afford it. Robert later wrote, “We learned, very early, that we were a burden. By the time we were teenagers, she felt that we should take over some of her burden.” John was 16 when she told him to quit school and get a job. Eventually, she talked him into joining the Marine Corps Reserve to bring in a little more income. He was still under age, but she signed an affidavit giving him an earlier date of birth. As John saw it, “Money was her God,” and “Every time she met anyone she would remind them she was a widow with three children. I didn’t feel she had it any tougher than a lot of people walking around.”

  According to Robert, John Pic was “so resentful of Mother that he simply ignored her as much as he could.” He went back to high school on his own, signing his report cards himself and working at a shoe store part-time. Three days before he was to graduate in 1950, he enlisted in the Coast Guard. During the following year Marguerite wrote him several letters containing a repetitive theme: “Try and help as much as possible. After all, my struggle to keep what we have will also help you boys,” and “I have four more payments on the car and then that struggle will be over.”

  With John gone, it was Robert’s turn to quit school and go to work. He, too, went back to school and completed his junior year, working after school and Saturdays at the A&P. In July 1952 he joined the Marines. Soon after he left, Lee bought a copy of the Marine Corps handbook and began studying it. He was only 12, but he planned to join the service too, as soon as he was old enough.

  The month after Robert left home, Marguerite and Lee Oswald loaded their belongings into her 1948 Dodge and moved to New York City. John was stationed on Ellis Island and was living with his wife, a woman from New York, and their infant son in her mother’s apartment on East 92nd Street. Marguerite said she wanted to meet her new daughter-in-law and first grandchild. John recalled that the day they arrived, Lee was waiting for him at the subway exit about ten blocks from the apartment and seemed glad to see him. He took a few days’ leave to show him around the city, and during that time he noticed a change in his younger brother: Lee had definitely become “the boss.” If he decided to do something, he did it. Pic thought he had no respect for his mother at all.

  As time went by, tension developed at the Pics’ apartment when Marguerite made no move to help pay the grocery bills or find a place of her own. When Pic’s wife was interviewed by the FBI after the assassination, she still remembered how Lee kept damaging their bookcase by putting beverage glasses down on it. She also remembered that one day she asked Lee not to turn on a TV set Marguerite had brought with them and Lee pulled out “a small pocketknife with a blade opened.” He moved toward her, she said, and she backed off. When Pic got home that night, she told him about it. Marguerite claimed it wasn’t anything serious, simply a misunderstanding. John asked Lee what had happened and immediately “he became real hostile toward me.” After that, whenever John tried to talk to him “he ignored me, and I was never able to get to the kid again.” Warren Commission lawyer Lee J. Rankin questioned Marguerite about the incident:

  “Was there any time that you recall … a threat of Lee Oswald against Mrs. Pic with a knife or anything like that? Do you remember that?”

  “Yes, I do,” she replied. “I am glad you said that. My daughter-in-law was very upset. The very first time we went there … we were not welcome. And immediately it was asked what did we plan to do as soon as we put our foot in the house.… I had made it plain to John Edward that I was going to have a place of my own, that we were just coming there to get located.

  “My daughter-in-law resented the fact that her mother—this went on before I got there—that her mother had to leave the house and go visit a sister so I could come…. I had never met my daughter-in-law. She didn’t like me and she didn’t like Lee.

  “So she—what is the word to say—not picked on the child, but she showed her displeasure.…

  “So there was, I think now—it was not a kitchen knife—it was a little pocketknife, a child’s knife that Lee had. So she hit Lee … I remember this distinctly, because I remember how awful I thought Marjory was about this. Lee had the knife in his hand. He was whittling, because John Edward whittled ships and taught Lee to whittle ships. He puts them in the glass, you know. And he was whittling when this incident occurred. And that is what it occurred about, because there was scraps of wood on the floor.

  “So when she attacked the child.… she made the statement to my son that we had to leave, that Lee tried to use a knife on her.

  “Now, I say that is not true, gentlemen. You can be provoked into something. And because of the fact that he was whittling, and had the knife in his hand, they struggled.

  “He did not use the knife—he had an opportunity to use the knife.

  “But it wasn’t a kitchen knife or a big knife. It was a little knife. So I will explain it that way, sir. So immediately then I started to look for a place.”

  She found a job as assistant manager of a Lerner dress shop and took a basement apartment, one big room, in the Bronx. As soon as she could find a larger place they moved again, to East 179th Street. Originally, Lee Oswald was enrolled in a Lutheran private school and then switched, after several weeks of irregular attendance, to a seventh-grade class in Junior High School No. 117. By the following January he had been absent 47 out of the 64 school days, and he finally stopped going entirely. He later explained that he preferred being by himself and had “many more important things to do.”

  At first he would get dressed as though he were going to school, but after his mother left for work he would stay home all day reading or watching television. Sometimes he would go to the public library or ride the subways. Once he was picked up by a truant officer at the Bronx Zoo—he was reportedly surly and called the officer a “damn Yankee.” When a teacher came to the Oswald apartment to ask him to return to class, he said he would think about it.

  Eventually, truancy charges were brought against him, and in March 1953 he was ordered to appear before a juvenile judge. On the appointed day, Marguerite showed up at court alone and told Judge Delany her son had refused to come with her. As a result, a warrant was issued, and at a hearing in April, at which he did appear, Lee Harvey Oswald was remanded to Youth House, a juvenile detention center, for three weeks of evaluation so the court could determine whether or not he needed psychiatric help.

  The old Youth House was on Manhattan’s Lower East Side between First and Second avenues on Twelfth Street, among tenement buildings. Oswald was examined by a physician and then a psychologist. The latter, Irving Sokolow, reported:

  He achieved an I.Q. of 118 on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (abb.) indicating present intellectual functioning in the upper range of bright normal intelligence. All his scores were above the average for his age group, appreciably so in the verbalization of abstract concepts and in the assembly of commonly recognizable objects. His method
of approach was generally an easy, facile and highly perceptive one. Although presumably disinterested in school subjects he operates on a much higher than average level.…

  The Human Figure Drawings are empty, poor characterizations of [a] person approximately the same age as the subject. They reflect a considerable amount of impoverishment in the social and emotional areas.… He exhibits some difficulty in relationship to the maternal figure suggesting more anxiety in this area than in any other.

  Under conditions of emotional stress and strain he appears increasingly defensive … and in general incapable of constructing an effective ego-defense.

  Afterward, a social worker named Evelyn Strickman talked to him at length and wrote an insightful report in which we are able to see Oswald’s own assessment of his situation, and hers. She began by describing him as “a seriously detached, withdrawn youngster of thirteen” who answered questions, “but volunteered almost nothing about himself spontaneously.”

  By persistent questioning, the information received from Lee was as follows: his father died before he was born and he doesn’t know a thing about him. He has no curiosity about his father, says he never missed having one, and never thought to ask about him. His mother was left with three children.… Lee said his mother supported them by working as an insurance broker and she was on the go all day long. He doesn’t remember anyone else taking care of him and he thinks she either left him in the care of his older brothers or … that he shifted for himself. She would leave early in the morning and come home around seven or eight at night after a hard day’s work. Occasionally she took Lee with her on these trips, but he wrinkled his nose and said it was very boring because she was always making stops, going into houses and trying to sell people things, while he waited for her in the car.