After his unit returned in the spring of 1958, Oswald was court-martialed for possessing an unauthorized weapon. He was fined $50 and sentenced to twenty days at hard labor, but the confinement was suspended for six months. Two months later, however, he was court-martialed again. This time he was charged with attempting to provoke a fight with Sergeant Miguel Rodriguez at the Bluebird Cafe in Yamato, and for assaulting Rodriguez by pouring a drink on him. (Oswald evidently bore a grudge because the sergeant had kept him on mess duty.) After electing to serve as his own defense counsel, Oswald cross-examined Rodriguez and persuaded the court he was drunk that night and had spilled the drink by accident. (Years later, Rodriguez would still insist Oswald had been sober and knew exactly what he was doing.) But despite this minor victory, Oswald was found guilty of using “provoking words” and sentenced to the brig. He served eighteen days in a tough military prison.
His fellow Marines noticed a change in Oswald when he got out. He seemed bitter and more withdrawn than he had been before. One man remembered Oswald telling him, “I’ve seen enough of a democratic society here.… When I get out I’m going to try something else.” Oswald would later claim that he met a few Communists in Japan who got him interested in going to the Soviet Union to see what a socialist country was like. There may be some truth in this—it would have been in character for him to try to make contact with a Communist group, as he had in New Orleans. The court-martial may have helped make up his mind. In any case, it was during this period that Oswald began studying the Russian language.
In September 1958, a month later, the Chinese began shelling the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, which were controlled by the Nationalist government on Formosa (now Taiwan), and Oswald’s unit was sent to Formosa to set up a radar base. Shortly after they arrived, Oswald was on guard duty one night when the officer in charge heard four or five shots at Oswald’s position. Running over, he found Oswald “shaking and crying.” Oswald told him he was seeing things and that he couldn’t stand being on guard duty. After Rhodes reported what had happened, Oswald was sent back to Japan on a military plane. Rhodes believed Oswald was faking. He told Edward Jay Epstein, “Oswald liked Japan and wanted to stay.… I know he didn’t want to go to Formosa, and I think he fired off his gun to get out of there.… There was nothing dumb about Oswald.”
At the end of his overseas duty in November 1958 Oswald was transferred to the El Toro base in Santa Ana, California. He became part of a radar crew with about seven other enlisted men and three officers. One of the officers, Lieutenant John E. Donovan, was a recent graduate of the Foreign Service School. He found Oswald to be “very competent,” “brighter than most people,” and surprisingly well-informed about foreign affairs. He recalled that Oswald
would take great pride in his ability to mention not only the leader of a country, but five or six subordinates…. He took great pride in talking to a passing officer coming in or out of the radar center, and in a most interested manner, ask him what he thought of a given situation, listen to that officer’s explanation, and say, “Thank you very much.” As soon as we were alone again, he would say, “Do you agree with that?” In many cases it was obvious that the officer had no more idea about [what he was saying] than he did about the polo … matches in Australia. And Oswald would then say, “Now, if men like that are leading us, there is something wrong—when I obviously have more intelligence and more knowledge than that man.”
If the officers weren’t too high in rank, Oswald would point out their mistakes. One of the enlisted men, Nelson Delgado, enjoyed the way Oswald baited them: “Oswald had them stumped … four out of five times. They just ran out of words.… And every time this happened, it made him feel twice as good.… He used to cut up anybody that was high ranking … and make himself come out top dog.”
Donovan also recalled that Oswald thought the poverty he saw in Asia was unjust and that he took a special interest in Latin America. At a Warren Commission hearing, Donovan was asked, “Did he ever have any specific suggestions as to what should be done about problems in Asia or Latin America?” Donovan answered, “No. His only solution that I could see was that authority, particularly the Marine Corps, ought to be able to recognize talent such as his own, without a given magic college degree, and put them in positions of prominence.” As Donovan recalled, this attitude carried over to the squadron football team, on which Lee played end:
[H]e often tried to make calls in the huddle—for better or worse … a quarterback is in charge of the team and should make the calls.… And I don’t know if he quit or I kicked him off.… at any rate, he stopped playing.
He felt that Oswald’s only common bond with the other enlisted men was a desire to get out, but that the others respected his intelligence and admired his ability to “pursue Russian on his own and learn it.”
At the El Toro base Oswald flaunted his admiration for all things Russian, playing Russian music in the barracks and putting his name in Russian on one of his jackets. He subscribed to a Russian-language newspaper and to the Daily Worker. Some of his barracks-mates kidded him, calling him “comrade,” or accused him jokingly of being a Russian spy. Oswald seemed to enjoy these comments immensely.
Some critics of the Warren Report have argued that Oswald couldn’t have gotten away with this ostentatious pro-Russian behavior without official sanction. They contend that Oswald was merely pretending to be pro-Russian, while he was, in fact, working for American intelligence. As it often happens, a more reasonable explanation is less exciting, but more suited to his character. Oswald was apparently not as open about his political beliefs with the officers as he was with the enlisted men. Lieutenant Donovan, for instance, never heard Oswald “in any way, shape or form confess that he was a Communist, or that he ever thought about being a Communist.” He thought Oswald subscribed to the Russian newspaper to learn the language and to get another view of international affairs. Oswald’s behavior evidently attracted official interest just once, when a mail-room clerk reported that he had been receiving leftist literature. When Captain Robert E. Block questioned Oswald about this literature, Oswald replied, in a typically disingenuous fashion, that he was indoctrinating himself in Russian theory in conformance with the Marine Corps policy (of getting to know the enemy). Although Block wasn’t satisfied with that explanation, he let the matter drop. According to Thornley, Oswald believed he was being watched because of his politics and felt “unjustly put upon.”
In December 1958, when Fidel Castro was on the verge of defeating Batista in Cuba, Oswald began spending more time with Nelson Delgado, a Puerto Rican who agreed with him in supporting Castro. While Delgado was on leave in January Castro took power, and when he returned Oswald joked that he must have been down in Cuba helping Castro win. The Cuban revolution fired Oswald’s imagination, especially when it appeared that other Latin American countries might follow suit. In June, Dominican exiles based in Cuba launched an invasion of the Dominican Republic in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Trujillo. Later that summer there were similar exile raids against Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Haiti. Oswald’s hero during this time was William Morgan, a former sergeant in the U.S. Army who had become a major in Castro’s army. That August Morgan received considerable press coverage when he lured some anti-Castro rebels into a trap by pretending to be a counter-revolutionary.
Delgado recalled that Oswald wanted to emulate Morgan. They began talking about going to Cuba to join the revolutionary forces as officers and “lead an expedition to some of these other islands and free them too.” They talked about how they would “do away with Trujillo.” With Delgado’s help, Oswald learned some elementary Spanish.
After the Cuban government started sending hundreds of Batista supporters before the firing squad, Delgado lost his enthusiasm for Castro, but Oswald defended him. He argued that in all new governments some errors were bound to occur, but he was certain that these people had been investigated prior to their executions and that the American press w
asn’t publicizing those investigations. For Delgado, leaving for Cuba had been barracks talk, mostly, but Oswald still wanted to go. He asked Delgado for ideas about how an Anglo-American like himself could, in Delgado’s phrasing, “get with a Cuban, you know, people, be part of that revolutionary movement,” and Delgado suggested he get in touch with a Cuban embassy. He believed that Oswald later made contact with the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles and received mail—perhaps pro-Cuban literature—from there. But for some reason Oswald abandoned the idea of going to Cuba, at least for the moment.
Delgado also remembered that Oswald had no use for religion—“He used to laugh at Sunday school… mimic the guys that fell out to go to church.… Oswald told him that “God was a myth or a legend, that basically our whole life is built around this one falsehood.” The Bible was simply “a novel.” Oswald preferred Das Kapital and other political books like George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Through Delgado, we are able to see that Oswald had little sense of irony. As he described Animal Farm to Delgado, the farmer represented the imperialistic world, and the animals were the workers or socialist people, and “eventually it will come about that the socialists will have the imperialists working for them.” When he was asked if Oswald had explained that after the pigs took over the farm they became like the farmers, Delgado replied, “No; just that the pigs and animals had revolted and made the farmer work for them.” Oswald had read the book literally and obviously missed Orwell’s point.
Nelson Delgado’s name appears in many conspiracy books, but mainly because he testified that Oswald was a poor rifle shot when he was in the Marines:
Q. Did you fire with Oswald?
A. Right; I was in the same line.… It was a pretty big joke, because he got a lot of “Maggie’s drawers” [a red flag indicating the shot had missed the target], you know, a lot of misses, but he didn’t give a darn.
Q. Missed the target completely?
A. He just qualified, that’s it. He wasn’t as enthusiastic as the rest of us. We all loved—liked, you know, going to the range.
The key element in this account is that Oswald wasn’t enthusiastic—he didn’t give a darn. He scored just one point above the score necessary to qualify. As a raw recruit he had done better. And according to a report in Time, his Marine rifle-score book showed him “making 48 and 49 points out of a possible 50 in rapid fire at 200 yards from a sitting position, without a scope.”
In the spring of 1959 Oswald struck up an acquaintance with Kerry Thornley, another young radar operator, who would be so impressed by Oswald that he would write a novel about him after his defection. As in the case of Delgado, Oswald became interested in Thornley after Thornley seemed to agree with some of his ideas—beginning with an admiration for the new Cuban leader. They met at a bull session during which Oswald learned that Thornley, too, was an atheist. “What do you think of communism?” Oswald asked him. When Thornley replied he didn’t think much of it, Oswald told him, “Well, I think the best religion is communism.” At first Thornley felt that Oswald was merely playing to the crowd, but he later decided that Oswald sincerely believed “communism was the best system in the world.” Although he noticed some gaps in Lee’s knowledge, Thornley considered him to be “extremely intelligent,” and was surprised on learning after the assassination that Oswald had never finished high school. He thought the news media underestimated Oswald’s understanding of Marxism:
I certainly think he understood much more than many people in the press have seemed to feel. I don’t think he was a man who was grasping onto his particular beliefs … trying to know something over his head, by any means.
He also thought Oswald “could analyze what he read very well, but it was a very subjective impression.”
Thornley said, “I think in his mind it was almost a certainty that the world would end up under a totalitarian government or under totalitarian governments.” With that future in mind, Oswald seemed to be “concerned with his image in history”:
He looked upon history as God. He looked upon the eyes of future people as a kind of tribunal, and he wanted to be on the winning side so that 10,000 years from now people would look in the history books and say, “Well, this man was ahead of his time.…” He wanted to be looked back upon with honor by future generations. It was, I think, a substitute in his case for traditional religion.
The eyes of the future became what to another man would be the eyes of God, or perhaps to yet another man the eyes of his own conscience.…
I don’t think he expected things to develop within his lifetime. I am sure that he didn’t. He just wanted to be on the winning side for all eternity.
Oswald’s view of history wasn’t as unusual as it might appear. In a book on the ideological battles of the McCarthy period, Victor S. Navasky wrote, “Ernest Becker has argued that what man really fears is not so much extinction but extinction with insignificance. Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning.” In wanting his name to live on, young Oswald was not very different from a philanthropist who endows a library in his name or a politician who hopes to be remembered. But Oswald was staking his hopes in what has been called “revolutionary immortality.” And in that particular system of belief, there is a catch. In order to be remembered, his side has to win. If the revolution he supported prevailed, he would live on. If it didn’t, he would end up in the dustbin of history. Fighting for the revolution thus meant fighting for his own immortality.
For someone who defines himself and his hope of immortality through his politics, as Oswald did (thus making politics his religion), ideological disputes are quite literally a matter of life and death. As Navasky wrote, “No wonder men go into a rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible.”
One day Oswald was complaining to his buddy Thornley about the stupidity of a ceremonial parade they were preparing for, and Thornley happened to joke, “Well, come the revolution you will change all that,” at which point Oswald looked at him “like a betrayed Caesar,” in Thornley’s words, “and screamed …‘Not you too, Thornley.’…” They never spoke to each other again.
5 … The Defection
EVEN before he met Kerry Thornley, and while he was daydreaming with Delgado about Cuba, Oswald was making concrete plans for his defection. He had been thinking about it long enough to anticipate a problem he would have to face. After his discharge he was required to serve three more years in the inactive Marine Reserves. How was a member of the Reserves going to explain applying for a passport for a trip to Europe and the Soviet Union, without arousing suspicion?
To get around this difficulty, Oswald worked out an elaborate cover story. He was due to be discharged from active duty in December 1959. In March he passed a high school equivalency exam and applied for admission to the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland for the spring 1960 semester. On his application he indicated that he planned to attend a summer course at the University of Turku, Finland, before returning to America to pursue his “chosen vocation.” Turku is 100 miles west of Helsinki, the city through which he would enter the Soviet Union. After his application to Schweitzer College was accepted, he had an alibi. If anyone questioned him before he entered the Soviet Union, he could say that he was traveling to Finland to enroll at Turku and would be visiting Russia as a sidetrip. (Soon after the defection, Robert Oswald realized this was his cover story and mentioned it to a reporter.)
Oswald must have spent a good deal of time working out this scheme. The trips that Delgado noticed he took alone into Los Angeles may have involved visits to libraries or consulates there to find out about European colleges and routes to the Soviet Union. The plan suggests that he feared someone in authority might spot him as a potential defector and pick him up. He talked with Delgado about extradition treaties and the
countries that were “extradition-free,” like Cuba, Russia, and Argentina. Oswald told him about a route to get to the Soviet Union, in Delgado’s words, “bypassing all U.S. censorship.… And he definitely said Mexico to Cuba to Russia.… I remember him at the time mentioning two men that had defected, and we were wondering how they got there.” Later on, Delgado asked Oswald if he still intended to go to Cuba. Oswald grimaced and acted as if he didn’t know what he was talking about. “When I get out,” he said, “I’m going to school in Switzerland.”
In June 1959 he wrote Robert, “Pretty soon I’ll be getting out of the Corps and I know what I want to be and how I’m going to be it, which I guess is the most important thing in life.”
Later that summer—five months before he was due to be discharged—he saw an opportunity to expedite his departure. In December 1958 Marguerite had been hit on the nose by a jar that fell off a shelf at the store where she worked. She went from doctor to doctor trying to obtain evidence with which to sue her employer and wrote Oswald about her troubles. On August 17 he wrote back saying that he had applied for a hardship discharge
in order to help you. Such a discharge is only rarely given, but if they know you are unable to support yourself then they will release me from the U.S.M.C. and I will be able to come home and help you [his emphases].
He cautioned her to make the “right” impression when the Red Cross representative arrived to ask questions about her capacity to support herself. Marguerite came through. She somehow got letters from an attorney, a doctor, and two friends—plus one from herself—all saying she had been injured at work and was unable to support herself. Because of this documentation, Oswald’s petition for discharge was approved fairly quickly.
Oswald's Game Page 7
