Having completed his speaking tour, General Walker came home. Oswald may have been following his progress in the Dallas newspapers. On March 6 the Times Herald had reported on a speech Walker gave in Savannah in which he challenged President Kennedy to take “one U.S. Army division … and liquidate the scourge that has descended upon the island of Cuba.” This was only a few days before Oswald reconnoitered the Walker house and grounds and ordered his rifle.
On the evening of April 10 Oswald went to Walker’s home with the Mannlicher-Carcano, which he had concealed under a raincoat. He took a position in a dark alley behind a stockade fence, 120 feet from the back of the house. Inside he could see Edwin A. Walker through a lighted window sitting at his desk. The light obscured a strip of the window casing and the bullet missed, striking the wall just above Walker’s head and leaving bits of wood and glass in his hair. Oswald ran without waiting to see the result. He hid the rifle and escaped on a city bus (exactly as he would do after the assassination of President Kennedy).
Around 10 o’clock that evening Marina grew restless wondering where he was. She went into his study and found a key and a note of instructions written in Russian:
1. This is the key to the mailbox which is located in the main post office in the city on Ervay Street. This is the same street where the drugstore, in which you always waited is located. You will find the mailbox in the post office which is located 4 blocks from the drugstore on that street. I paid for the box last month so don’t worry about it.
2. Send the information as to what has happened to me to the Em bassy and include newspaper clippings (should there be anything about me in the newspapers). I believe that the Embassy will come quickly to your assistance on learning everything.
3. I paid the house rent on the 2d so don’t worry about it.
4. Recently I also paid for water and gas.
5. The money from work will possibly be coming. The money will be sent to our post office box. Go to the bank and cash the check.
6. You can either throw out or give my clothing, etc. away. Do not keep these. However, I prefer that you hold on to my personal papers (military, civil, etc.).
7. Certain of my documents are in the small blue valise.
8. The address book can be found on my table in the study should you need same.
9. We have friends here. The Red Cross also will help you (Red Cross in English) [sic].
10. I left you as much money as I could, $60 on the second of the month. You and the baby can live for another 2 months using $10 per week.
11. If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of the bridge through which we always passed on going to the city (right in the beginning of the city after crossing the bridge).
Marina testified that when her husband got home that night he was pale. He told her what he had done, and defended his action by describing General Walker as “the leader of a fascist organization.” She responded by saying even though that might be true, he had no right to take his life. She made him promise never to do such a thing again, and tucked the note of instructions he had left her into one of her books. She told the Assassinations Committee that Oswald “felt quite strongly that he was doing a justice to the people” and considered her a fool for not understanding him. She quoted Oswald: “Well, what would you say if somebody got rid of Hitler at the right time? So if you don’t know about General Walker, how can you speak up on his behalf?” She reported that after reading the news accounts the next day Oswald was “kind of angry” that he missed him, but at the same time “kind of pleased with himself, with the clever fellow he was” in getting away with it.
Oswald destroyed the notebook he’d used for the planning, but kept the photographs of Walker’s house and its surroundings and the photographs of himself holding the rifle. He evidently wanted a record of the attempt for some future use. It’s possible he was even considering another attempt to kill Walker, at some later date after the police attention subsided.
One may ask why Marina didn’t immediately go to the Dallas police. In retrospect it is easy to condemn her. But Marina evidently didn’t leave her husband or go to the police for much the same reasons other battered wives often choose to stay with their husbands—at times, she was afraid of him. Someone on the Assassinations Committee asked her, “What do you think he would have done if you had gotten rid of the rifle?” And she answered, “Well, he probably would have got rid of me.” She had no one else, no way of supporting herself and June; and she was three months into a second pregnancy. But despite everything she still loved him and hoped he would change.
Marina did not realize that Oswald could not change without giving up the image he had of himself as an idealist who acted on his principles. His feelings of self-worth derived not from his work or personal relationships, but from his ideology. The assassination attempt against Walker, like his defection, revealed Oswald’s extreme dedication to his political beliefs. All else was secondary to him—his family, even the question of whether he lived or died. At the same time, Oswald expected and craved recognition as a revolutionary hero. Both these events were clearly designed to attract worldwide attention to himself as well as to his cause. Giving up these ideas, as Marina wanted, would have meant scrapping his identity and constructing a new one—or becoming a hypocrite in his own eyes, someone who sat around and talked but did nothing.
The attack on Walker resembled his defection in another respect: it was carefully planned. Part of the excitement must have been in the detailed anticipation. The note he left Marina indicates that he had considered every eventuality—that he might be killed or arrested, or that he might escape, possibly to another country. Albert Newman believes that had Oswald assassinated Walker he intended to go to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, tell the officials there what he had done—proving it with his notebook and photographs—and ask for asylum in Cuba, an “extradition-free” country. McMillan suggests that in the event of an arrest he might have used his trial as a forum to denounce American fascism, before asking for asylum in Russia. At any rate, as Marina later said of the backyard photographs, “He must have had something in his mind—some grandiose plans.”
On April 21 Oswald staged another dramatic scene. After reading the morning newspaper he got dressed and put his Smith & Wesson pistol into his belt. He informed Marina that former Vice-President Richard Nixon was coming to town and that he wanted “to go and have a look.” Marina has testified that she replied, “I know how you look”—and physically restrained him from leaving the apartment. (In fact, Nixon was not coming to Dallas, but that day’s Morning News reported a speech he had made in Washington. The banner headline read, “Nixon Calls for Decision to Force Reds Out of Cuba/Open U.S. Support of Rebels Urged.”)
When skeptical Commission members questioned her about this incident, Marina admitted that she could not have kept her husband from leaving their apartment if he had really wanted to go. She said that at first he was angry and told her, “You are always getting in my way,” but then rather quickly gave in. “It might have been,” she continued, “that he was just trying to test me.” (Thinking back on it, Marina saw the incident as a “kind of nasty joke,” an example of a sadistic streak he had. She also told the Commission that when he made her write letters to the Russian Embassy asking to be allowed to return to the Soviet Union, “He liked to tease me and torment me in this way … especially if I interfered in any of his political affairs, in any of his political discussions.”)
It isn’t clear why Oswald now decided to move to New Orleans. Marina has said it was her suggestion that he go to his hometown to find work, because she wanted to get him away from the temptation of trying to kill Walker again. But it also appears that Oswald had, as usual, some political goal in mind. When Ruth Paine visited the Oswalds on April 24, she found them waiting with their bags packed ready to be driven to the bus station. Rather than see the pregnant Marina make the long bus trip with a small child, she offered to let them stay with
her while Lee went ahead to look for a job. This was evidently exactly what Oswald had intended all along. She drove him to the terminal to check his baggage, and the next day Oswald took a bus to New Orleans.
9 … The Activist
FROM our perspective twenty years later, America’s undeclared war on Cuba looks like a hysterical overreaction. It did not seem so to most Americans at the time. The Kennedy administration was under intense public pressure to do something about Cuba. Thousands of refugees had fled to the United States bringing horror stories about life under communism, and many of them were prepared to fight to liberate their country. (Other refugees, according to the New York Times, were Castro agents who were sent to create disunity and promote agitation against the U.S. government among the exiles.) Castro had proclaimed himself an ally of the Soviet Union and was boasting that his revolution would spread throughout Latin America. Occasionally it looked as though his dream might come true. Shortly after the missile crisis, for example, pro-Castro guerrillas knocked out one-sixth of Venezuela’s oil-production capacity.
The White House was still uncertain what to do about Cuba. After the October crisis, the MONGOOSE operation was disbanded, and the Special Group committee, chaired by presidential assistant McGeorge Bundy, took control of covert actions in Cuba. On January 4, 1963, and again in April and June, Bundy proposed to the president the idea of opening communications with Castro with an eye to taking Castro “out of the Soviet fold.” This option was to be explored on a “separate track,” however, while other proposed actions, such as sabotage, were going on. In February 1963 Time carried an article called “The Hardening Soviet Base in Cuba,” which quoted a top administration official as saying that present U.S. policy toward Cuba was “not containment; it’s getting rid of Castro”—through economic and political pressures. It stated that the administration was hoping for an uprising against Castro and quoted President Kennedy on what his reaction might be: “Probably the first U.S. response would be diplomatic.… But a real uprising in Cuba would not be like a Bay of Pigs invasion financed from abroad. It would be a cry for help which the U.S. could not afford to ignore.” Another report on a Kennedy news conference that month quoted him as conceding “that Soviet troops in Cuba are surely being used to train Cubans to export revolution and sabotage throughout Latin America.” One White House estimate reported that at least 13,000 Latin American students were being trained.
Early spring brought the first public talk about the possibility that Fidel Castro might be assassinated by someone dissatisfied with his rule inside Cuba. On March 15 the Wall Street Journal quoted unnamed Washington officials as declaring that Castro’s assassination had become “the major U.S. hope for de-communizing Cuba”—explaining that “rising public discontent in Cuba” was “bound to bring a successful assassination attempt sooner or later.” This item was picked up for brief mention by both The Worker and The Militant. Both papers omitted the reference to rising discontent in Cuba. At approximately the same time an exile group called Alpha 66 raided a Cuban port and shelled a Russian ship, eliciting a strong protest from the Soviet government. The FBI and Coast Guard responded with an official crackdown nationwide on exile raiders starting the first week of April. This new policy, in turn, brought protests from the exiles and Republican leaders.
In an April 19 speech President Kennedy attempted to counter demands for a second invasion of Cuba by predicting that “in five years” Castro would likely no longer be in power and that ultimately the United States would be seen to have contributed to his downfall. In recent years this speech has sometimes been interpreted as a sign that Kennedy was aware of a CIA effort to kill Castro. But he was clearly referring to the long-term effect of administration pressures on Cuba in general, which he hoped would eventually result in Castro’s overthrow. It would have been illogical for him to suggest that an American contribution to Castro’s murder would someday be applauded—none of the plotters wanted the U.S. role ever to be revealed. Moreover, according to the Church committee investigation, there were no ongoing assassination plots during this period. The plots involving members of the Mafia had been terminated in February after producing no results whatsoever. (It appears that the Mafia participants weren’t seriously interested in eliminating Castro but were stringing the CIA officials along for their own purposes.)
But at the time, Fidel Castro apparently saw the president’s statements as a threat. His response came two days later in an April 21 New York Times headline that today seems startling:
CASTRO SAYS U.S. PLANS SLAYINGS
Declares Assassination Plot Replaced Second Invasion
The story began, “Premier Fidel Castro said today that the United States had abandoned plans for a second invasion of Cuba in favor of a plot to assassinate Cuban leaders.” Castro then gave his version of recent Cuban-American history, asserting that after the Bay of Pigs the Soviets had introduced missiles into Cuba to prevent a second invasion attempt, and had withdrawn them in return for Kennedy’s promise that Cuba would not be invaded. The American government, said Castro, understood that new military attacks on Cuba would provoke a world war. But, Castro added, “We cannot rest on our laurels.… They are now making plans to assassinate the leaders of the revolution.”
(This story was picked up by the Dallas Times-Herald the same afternoon, but Lee Oswald almost certainly didn’t see it. This was the day of Oswald’s “nasty joke” about shooting Nixon, and therefore the events of April 21 were vividly impressed on Marina’s memory. She testified that Oswald didn’t leave their apartment after going out for the morning newspaper, and if she is right, Oswald couldn’t have bought a Times-Herald that afternoon.)
In May 1963, the National Security Council’s Standing Group discussed several contingencies, and found that the prospect of Castro’s death resulting in favorable developments inside Cuba was “singularly unpromising.” The CIA’s Office of National Estimates agreed. The memorandum it prepared concluded that Castro would be replaced by his brother Raul or someone else who had Soviet backing, and warned, “If Castro were to die by other than natural causes the U.S. would be widely charged with complicity.…”
The president’s speech on April 19 and the negative conclusions of the Standing Group and the CIA may be taken as further evidence of the administration’s continuing sense of frustration concerning Cuba. The tension of those times was reflected in an April 29 issue of The Militant which quoted a statement Robert Kennedy had made on April 22: “We can’t just snap our fingers and make Castro go away. But we can fight for this. We can dedicate all our energy and best possible brains to that effort.”
Lee Oswald hadn’t been in New Orleans since 1959 when he had passed through on his way to the Soviet Union. The city was much the same. In late April it was already getting hot and humid. During the months ahead there would be frequent afternoon thunderstorms, and swarms of mosquitos blown in from nearby salt marshes would attack pedestrians on downtown streets. One could still get off a streetcar in the middle of Canal Street and walk into the French Quarter, with its carnival atmosphere of jazz and strip shows, tawdry souvenir shops, sidewalk artists, and occasional young black boys offering a quick softshoe routine in exchange for money. But there had been a considerable influx of Cuban exiles, some of whom were active in anti-Castro organizations.
Oswald called his Aunt Lillian from the Greyhound Bus station. She was surprised to hear from him, since she didn’t know he had returned from the Soviet Union, nor did she know he had married and was a father. She agreed to put him up while he looked for a job. He stayed with her family for a couple of weeks.
Oswald applied for and received unemployment benefits from Texas, and then found a job as a maintenance mechanic at the William B. Reily Company, a distributor of Luzianne coffee. Lillian remembered him coming home excited.
… and he grabbed me around the neck and he even kissed me and he said “I got it; I got it!”… I said, “Lee, how much does it pay” and he said, �
�Well, it don’t pay very much but I will get along on it.”… I said, “Well, you know, Lee, you are not really qualified to do anything too much. If you don’t like this job why don’t you try to go back to school again at night time and see if you can’t learn a trade or whatever you think you can prepare yourself to do.” And he said, “No, I don’t have to go back to school. I don’t have to learn anything. I know everything.”…
Q. Did you get the impression … that he really believed he was that smart?
A. He believed he was that smart, yes, sir.
Q. You don’t think he was spoofing you?
A. No; I think he really thought he was smart, and I don’t think he envied anybody else, because he thought he knew it all, I guess.
That same morning Oswald began looking for a place to live. He went to see his mother’s old friend Myrtle Evans, who was still managing apartments. She had nothing available, but they drove around in search of “For Rent” signs. They found a vacant apartment at 4907 Magazine Street for $65 a month, and Oswald took it. That evening he called Marina at Ruth’s house in Irving, Texas, to tell her the news. Marina had been spending a lot of time discussing with Ruth the question of whether Lee loved her or not, and now, after hanging up the phone, she kept repeating to her daughter, June, “Papa nas lubet… Daddy loves us, he got work and he wants us to come.” The next day Ruth, Marina, and their children left Irving to drive to New Orleans.
Seeing the Magazine Street apartment with its dark rooms and roaches was a bitter letdown for Marina, and Ruth noticed that Oswald seemed disappointed by her reaction. Although their meeting had been cordial, the Oswalds began quarreling almost immediately, and Ruth decided to leave earlier than she had planned. The fighting stemmed from the problem they had always had: their priorities were not the same. For after his family was settled, Oswald turned to political activities.
On May 14 he mailed a change-of-address card to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and eight days later the National Director, Vincent T. Lee, wrote a routine reply: “We received your notice of change of address.… We hope to hear from you soon so that we may again have your name amongst those who continue to support the efforts of our Committee.” Much to Vincent Lee’s subsequent regret, Oswald needed no encouragement. He responded quickly:
Oswald's Game Page 13
