Detective J.R. Leavelle was also present that morning. Oswald gave him the impression “of being a man with a lot better education than his formal education indicated.… for instance the long elaboration that he went into on the Cuba deal would tell—indicate that he had a fairly better than high school education that he was reported to have had.” Leavelle told the Commission the prisoner seemed very much in control of himself at all times and added, “In fact, he struck me as a man who enjoyed the situation immensely and was enjoying the publicity and everything [that] was coming his way.”
Inspector Holmes later reported:
Oswald at no time appeared confused or in doubt as to whether or not to answer a question. On the contrary, he was quite alert and showed no hesitancy in answering those questions he wanted to answer, and was quite skillful in parrying those questions which he did not want to answer. I got the impression he had disciplined his mind and reflexes to a state where I personally doubted if he would ever have confessed. He denied, emphatically, having taken part in or having had any knowledge of the shooting of the policeman Tippit or of the President, stating that so far as he is concerned the reason he was in custody was because he “popped a policeman in the nose in a theater on Jefferson Avenue.”
Priscilla Johnson also believed he would never have confessed. Soon after the assassination she wrote that if there was one thing that stood out in the conversation she had had with him in Moscow, “it was his truly compelling need … to think of himself as extraordinary. A refusal to confess, expressed in stoic and triumphant silence, would have fitted this need. In some twisted way, it might also have enabled him to identify with other ‘unjustly’ persecuted victims, such as Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs.”
Oswald was scheduled to be transferred to the county jail at ten o’clock. The questioning ran longer than expected, past eleven, but yielded nothing further. Oswald chose a black sweater from among those offered to him from his clothes and put it on over his T-shirt. He was now dressed entirely in black, as he had been in the rifleman photographs Marina had taken. To the end, he was playing out the role he had created for himself and had been rehearsing, in one way or another, for most of his life. Then he was handcuffed to Leavelle’s left wrist and walked to the elevator. Outside the building a large crowd waited, and the basement was packed with police and reporters. At 11:17 Jack Ruby was at the Western Union office across the street sending a money order to one of his strippers. He walked out and went to the police station. Less than four minutes later, as television cameras followed Oswald being brought out toward a waiting car, Ruby rushed forward and shot him once in the abdomen. Ruby was immediately wrestled to the floor by several policemen, to whom he said, “You all know me. I’m Jack Ruby.” When the crowd outside heard what had happened, it let out a cheer.
Police detective Billy Combest had the presence of mind to try to get a statement from Oswald before he died. The author of Conspiracy, Anthony Summers, interviewed Combest in 1978. Combest told him, “I got right down on the floor with him, just literally on my hands and knees. And I asked him if he would like to make any confession, any statement in connection with the assassination of the President.… Several times he responded to me by shaking his head in a definite manner.… It wasn’t from the pain or anything—he had just decided he wasn’t going to correspond with me, he wasn’t going to say anything.”
In a footnote Summers added something he had left out of the text. Combest had told him that Oswald accompanied his headshaking with “a definite clenched-fist salute.” Summers then argued, “This cannot be taken as good evidence of a political gesture, given Oswald’s condition at that moment. It may indeed have been an expression of pain.” He added that Combest had said nothing about the clenched-fist salute in his statements to the Warren Commission. Two comments can be made on Summers’ argument. When Combest testified in 1964 he probably didn’t know what a clenched-fist salute was. Although the gesture had been a socialist salute in Spain in the 1930s, it didn’t become a widely recognized symbol of political militancy in this country until the late 1960s. It was probably then that Combest reinterpreted Oswald’s gesture as a political statement. Second, a news photograph taken of Oswald after his arrest shows him raising one manacled arm in what appears to be a clenched-fist salute.
In any event, a raised fist was Oswald’s last comment.
16 … Reactions
I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.
—Harry Truman
ASTUNNED nation groped for a meaning. Trying to assimilate the president’s death into the only context they knew, many saw it as a continuation of the violent opposition to the civil rights movement in the South—the murder of Medgar Evans, the bombing of the Birmingham church. Editorial writers and television commentators immediately blamed the anti-Kennedy environment in Dallas or American violence in general.
As more information came out, the possibility that Oswald had a political motive became ever more remote. When reporters learned that Oswald had once tried to join Carlos Bringuier’s organization in New Orleans, this was taken as an indication that he was politically erratic. In December the discovery that Oswald had tried to murder Walker—whose political philosophy was radically different from Kennedy’s—produced a similar impression.
An accepted picture of Oswald gradually emerged. He was seen as a confused drifter who acted out of personal frustration—he couldn’t hold a job and his wife didn’t want to live with him. The assassination had no political significance, except as a timely lesson about right-wing extremism and its consequences.
Fidel Castro’s first reaction was given in a New York Times headline: “Castro Mourns ‘Hostile’ Leader: Deplores Slaying But Says Kennedy Courted War.” Later, however, after details of Oswald’s background were revealed, Castro began to suspect “a Machiavellian plan against Cuba.” In a speech in late November he declared:
Oswald never had contacts with us—we have never heard of him.… We have searched through all our files and this man is not listed as president of any committee. Nowhere is there any mention of any Fair Play for Cuba Committee in Dallas or New Orleans.… Oswald is an individual expressly fabricated to begin an anti-Communist campaign to liquidate the President because of his policy. This plan to call Oswald a Castro Communist is designed to pressure the new Administration. All people, including the U.S. people, should demand that what is behind the assassination be clarified. Those who love peace and the United States intellectuals should understand the gravity of this campaign.
Apparently Castro sincerely believed this. He was afraid a public clamor about Oswald’s politics might lead to war. American government officials were also aware of this danger, and they too were worried. There was a general fear among cabinet members that the American people might demand retribution from Russia or Cuba or both. When the new president, Lyndon Johnson, asked Chief Justice Earl Warren to head up the investigation, he stressed that rumors about Oswald’s foreign connections had created a grave international situation. He made Warren understand that it was his duty to head up a responsible investigation to dispel these rumors, and Warren reluctantly accepted the assignment.
When the Warren Commission began taking testimony a few months later, some of the witnesses who knew Oswald were asked what they thought his motive might have been. None of these witnesses thought Oswald acted because he was irrational or because he had personal problems. Several said they believed his motive was somehow political. Their opinions are remarkable in that they ran counter to the contemporary news media interpretation and popular belief.
Michael Paine had initially doubted that Oswald was guilty because he “didn’t see how this could fit, how this could help his cause, and I didn’t think he was irrational.” Paine came to believe that the president was a target of opportunity: “I th
ought it was a spur of the moment idea that came into his head when he realized that he would have the opportunity with sort of a duck blind there, an opportunity to change the course of history, even though he couldn’t predict from that action what course history would take, that in my opinon would not have deterred him from doing it.”
John Hall, Elena Hall’s husband, said he wasn’t surprised when he heard that Oswald had been arrested because he thought Oswald was the “kind of guy that would do something like that.” Not that he believed Oswald was insane—“He was pretty sharp. If he had the right training in the right direction, he could have done something with his life.” Hall thought the assassination was a violent expression of Oswald’s resentment not only of the American government but of “our whole way of life.” Max Clark, the Fort Worth attorney, also said he didn’t think Oswald was mentally unstable. But he thought Oswald was capable of assassinating Kennedy in order “to go down in history, because he seemed to think he was destined to go down in history some way or another.”
Lee’s cousin Marilyn disagreed with the news media explanations, as well. She didn’t think he acted because he was “jealous of Kennedy and all that Kennedy stood for,” or because he wanted to “be somebody.” In her view, Lee Oswald already thought he was somebody and always seemed perfectly satisfied with the way he was. She thought his motive might have been “to discredit America in the eyes of the world”—or “perhaps because he was turned down by Russia and then turned down by Fidel, that perhaps he wanted to show them that he could commit such a great act without the help of any others.”
Marina gave several contradictory opinions about her husband’s motive, but at one point she testified that her first impression had been that he wanted “by any means—good or bad, to get into history.” Then she added, “But now that I have heard a part of the translation of some of the documents, I think that there was some political foundation to it, a foundation of which I am unaware.”
Police Captain Fritz seems to have come closer to the truth than anyone else. He testified: “I got the impression he was doing it because of his feeling about the Castro revolution, and I think that… he had a lot of feeling about that revolution. I think that was the reason. I noticed another thing. I noticed a little before when Walker was shot [sic], he had come out with some statements about Castro and about Cuba and a lot of things and if you will remember the President had some stories a few weeks before his death about Cuba and about Castro … and I wondered if that didn’t have some bearing. I have no way of knowing that other than just watching him and talking to him.” Asked if Oswald acted afraid, Fritz said, “No, sir; I don’t believe he was afraid at all. I think he was a person who had his mind made up what to do and I think he was like a person just dedicated to a cause. And I think he was above average for intelligence. I know a lot of people call him a nut all the time but he didn’t talk like a nut. He knew exactly when to quit talking.”
Oswald’s death left Marina in a predicament. The FBI and Secret Service now turned to her for the answers to their questions, and although Marina had no foreknowledge of the assassination, she did have knowledge of some of Oswald’s past activities that she was afraid to admit. On November 27, when FBI and Secret Service agents confronted her with the backyard photographs showing Oswald with his rifle, she admitted taking them, but said nothing about his attack on Walker. Instead, she said that before the assassination “she had never had any inkling that he would be so violent to anybody”—she must have realized that she would be blamed for not going to the police after the Walker shooting. At the end of the interview she volunteered the information that when Oswald came to Irving on Thursday he told her he wouldn’t be coming back that weekend because “he had something very important to do.” Asked about this statement a few weeks later, Marina said she couldn’t remember, and the matter was dropped.
A Secret Service report of November 28 quotes her as saying that at “one time she became so exasperated with Lee Oswald she asked him ‘What are you trying to do, start another revolution?’” Interviewed again the next day, Marina said that when she left New Orleans with Ruth no arrangement had been made for Oswald to go to Mexico City. The interviewer noted, “Inasmuch as Mexico City had not been mentioned, she was asked why she had said no arrangements had been made.… She replied she had been looking at television the past few days and had seen or heard that Oswald had been in Mexico City.” Later she admitted she had known about his visits to the Cuban and Russian embassies.
And yet, despite her evasions, it does appear that Marina was trying to convey the truth, but in such a way that she could avoid getting into any trouble. On November 30, when Oswald’s attack on Walker still hadn’t been discovered, she told the FBI that Oswald had once told her “Hitler needed killing,” since by killing Hitler many lives could have been saved. But Marina didn’t mention the shooting incident that had inspired that remark until she had to—after the note Oswald had left her was discovered by the Secret Service on December 2, tucked inside her Russian “Book of Useful Advice.” She then admitted that he had told her Walker was the leader of the fascist organization in Dallas “and it was best to remove him.” She explained that she had saved the note so that she could threaten to take it to the police if Oswald ever spoke of doing such a thing again.
After she appeared before the Warren Commission in February, the Commission lawyers weren’t satisfied with her testimony. Wesley J. Liebeler thought she might have been approximating the truth in order to tell the Commission what she believed it wanted to hear. In 1978 Marina explained the inconsistencies in her testimony when she appeared before the House Assassinations Committee:
At the beginning, if it is possible to understand … I am just a human being and I did try to protect Lee—that was my natural instinct that I followed. Some things I did not want to talk about because I tried to protect Lee. So they can hold this against me, there is nothing I can do about it.
I had to protect myself, too. I didn’t have any home to turn back to. I was not eligible or qualified to live right here so I really was trying to save my skin, to put it bluntly, but it was not for the reasons that I was protecting somebody, that I was part of any crime, that is not so. That was just a very human mistake that you make but it was not—maybe legally you call this perjury, I don’t know. But it was not because I was afraid that I might betray some secrets that I knew in order to be punished for … I was not aware of the crime that he was planning and I am sorry that all this happened like the rest of us suffer. So I don’t think I can add any more.
It was within this context that Marina told the Commission a story that led to one of the earliest and most often repeated theories about Dallas—that on the night before the assassination Oswald begged his wife to live with him and she refused.
Q. Did your husband give any reason for coming home on Thursday?
A. He said that he was lonely because he hadn’t come the preceding weekend, and he wanted to make his peace with me.
Q. Did you say anything to him then?
A. He tried to talk to me but I would not answer him, and he was very upset.
Q. Were you upset with him?
A. I was angry, of course. He was not angry—he was upset. I was angry. He tried very hard to please me. He spent quite a bit of time putting away diapers and played with the children on the street.
Q. How did you indicate to him that you were angry with him?
A. By not talking to him.
Q. And how did he show that he was upset?
A. He was upset over the fact that I would not answer him. He tried to start a conversation with me several times, but I would not answer. And he said that he didn’t want me to be angry at him because this upsets him.
On that day, he suggested that we rent an apartment in Dallas. He said that he was tired of living alone and perhaps the reason for my being so angry was the fact that we were not living together. That if I want to he would rent an apartment in
Dallas tomorrow—that he didn’t want me to remain with Ruth any longer, but wanted me to live with him in Dallas.
He repeated this not once but several times, but I refused. And he said that once again I was preferring my friends to him, and that I didn’t need him.… And I told him to buy me a washing machine, because two children it became too difficult to wash by hand.
Q. What did he say to that?
A. He said he would buy me a washing machine.
Q. What did you say to that?
A. Thank you. That it would be better if he bought something for himself—that I would manage.
Ruth Paine, who saw them together that night, saw nothing of this. She thought they seemed “cordial,” “friendly,” and “warm”—“like a couple making up after a small spat.” Ruth also testified that shortly after Oswald’s arrest, Marina let her know she was bewildered and hurt that he should do such a thing when just the night before he had talked of their getting an apartment soon.
Marina later admitted to McMillan that she had never asked her husband to buy her a washing machine, and that it was Lee who had brought that subject up on November 21. McMillan concluded, “Lee and Marina did not fight that evening about a washing machine.” Nor, apparently, did they fight about anything else. When Marina appeared before the Assassinations Committee and was questioned for perhaps the twentieth time about the events of November 21, she showed her impatience. She was asked what her husband said to her when he arrived. “Did he say hello?” someone asked, and she replied, “Isn’t is usually people say hello when they see each other? Probably.” But the way she eventually described that evening was quite different from the story she had told in 1964:
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