Oswald's Game

by Davison, Jean

  He was more in [a] peaceful mood … and was willing to listen.

  Well, like, for example, if maybe before I would say I would like for us to be together, and he would tell me to, oh, just stop dreaming, or just cut me off, or not listen at all, but now at least he was listening at what I had to say.…

  [W]e were looking forward and talking about him renting [an] apartment for us … it was a very big imposition to live with Mrs. Paine, and I thought we … should live as a family.…

  In the earlier version Oswald had begged her to live with him and she had refused to listen; now, it was Marina who was repeating her request that they be together, and Oswald for the first time seemed willing to hear her out. No wonder, then, that she was bewildered and hurt when he was arrested for the president’s assassination the following day. Oswald had led her on about their future together—because, I believe, he wanted to ensure that she wouldn’t guess what he planned to do and tell Ruth, who would have instantly called the police. “You and your long tongue,” Oswald had once chided Marina, “they always get us into trouble.” It would not have been the only instance that Oswald had manipulated her shamelessly to get what he wanted.

  And yet, Marina’s initial story was not entirely a fiction. McMillan believes that Oswald did in fact ask her to move into an apartment, not once but three times, and that each time Marina said no, saying that she preferred to wait until they had saved some money. But as McMillan wrote:

  He knew how to get his wife back—indeed, he had done so one year before when she ran away from him and he wanted her back in time for Thanksgiving at Robert’s on November 22, 1962. Had Lee, on November 21, 1963, genuinely wanted Marina back, he knew how to arrange it—the telephone call in advance, a little cajoling, believable tenderness. It seems a fair guess that, unhinged as he must have been, Lee still, on November 21, knew how to obtain the answer “Yes.”

  The story that Oswald was rejected by his wife on the eve of the assassination has been so widely accepted that it seems almost perverse to challenge it. But I believe Marina’s account was part of an understandable impulse to distance herself as much as she could from the president’s assassin. Consider the situation. On November 21 she knew that her husband had attacked Walker, that he continued to keep a rifle, and that he was using an alias. If she told the Commission she was still warm and friendly, how would it look? How did you treat him that night, Mrs. Oswald? I was angry, of course; I wouldn’t have anything to do with him. And this was probably not even a calculated lie—it just came out that way. It was not only a facesaving answer, it was probably also what she fervently wished she had done, instead of falling for another one of Oswald’s deceptions.

  Furthermore, it was a story that was readily accepted and never questioned. It was exactly the kind of thing everyone wanted to believe—that the assassin was such an obvious miscreant, even his own wife spurned him. It was Ruth Paine who warned the Commission that if people thought that Oswald was someone who would be instantly recognized as a potential assassin, someone who would stand out in a crowd as being unusual, then they didn’t know this man and had no way of recognizing such a person in the future.

  Marina may have reasoned that her marital relationship was not important and not the Commission’s business—as indeed it wasn’t, except insofar as it related to the cause of the assassination. But by maintaining that she had coldly rejected Oswald, she inadvertently distorted the perception of his motive.

  George de Mohrenschildt’s testimony to the Commission reflected his own difficult situation. By the time he appeared, Marina had revealed that he had guessed, after the fact, that Oswald might have been the unknown sniper who shot at Walker. (When de Mohrenschildt and his wife had stopped by the Oswalds’ apartment a few days after the incident, George had said jokingly, “How did it happen you missed?” Both Marina and the de Mohrenschildts reported that Oswald had turned pale and quickly changed the subject.) In his manuscript on Oswald, de Mohrenschildt confessed that because he had felt intimidated and wanted to clear his name, he said untrue things about Oswald in his testimony that he later regretted, such as that he was “a poor loser” who was envious of other peoples’ success and money. He wrote that he believed Oswald had been framed: “Lee, an ex-Marine trained for organized murder, was capable of killing but [only] for a very strong ideological motive or in self-defense.”

  By coincidence, de Mohrenschildt had known Janet Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother, and Jackie herself as a child. De Mohrenschildt claimed that after he gave his testimony in Washington, he was invited to the Auchincloss house in Georgetown. He said that he suggested to Jackie’s mother that the family should finance a real investigation of Kennedy’s murder, because he doubted Oswald’s guilt, and that Mrs. Auchincloss said, “He’s dead, nothing can change that.” De Mohrenschildt then speculated that Kennedy’s relatives may have suspected anti-Castro Cubans were involved and didn’t want his death associated with the Bay of Pigs, “his biggest mistake.”

  Despite that story there is reason to believe that de Mohrenschildt actually felt guilty, perhaps believing that he might have somehow prevented Kennedy’s death. According to Edward Jay Epstein, de Mohrenschildt told a friend in Houston in 1964 that he had inadvertently given Marina the money Oswald used to buy his rifle. Marina supposedly said to him, “Remember the twenty-five dollars you gave me? Well, that fool husband of mine used it to buy a rifle.”

  In 1967 de Mohrenschildt revealed that he owned one of the backyard photographs showing Oswald with his rifle. His copy had a signed inscription on the back in Oswald’s hand, “To my dear friend George, from Lee,” with a date written Russian-style: “5/IV/63”—that is, April 5, 1963, or five days before the Walker shooting.1 There was a second inscription in Russian that McMillan believes Marina wrote: “Hunter of fascists ha-ha-ha!!!” De Mohrenschildt explained that he had discovered this photograph among his stored belongings when he returned to Dallas in 1967 from Haiti, where he and his wife had lived since May 1963. He said that it was inside an unopened package of records Marina had returned to him by mail shortly before the de Mohrenschildts left Texas that April. But when Marina was shown this photograph during her Assassinations Committee testimony, she indicated that she had seen her husband show the picture to George, presumably in April 1963. At that point in the transcript she seemed flustered, and the Committee didn’t pursue the question further. In his manuscript de Mohrenschildt wrote that this photograph demonstrated that Oswald “might have been considering hunting fascists—and in his mind General Walker was one—but certainly not our President Kennedy.”

  De Mohrenschildt also wrote that the Warren Commission investigation had virtually ruined his life. He claimed that he had lost work because of the FBI’s interest in him and that the subsequent conspiracy theories produced “strange idiocies”—that he was Oswald’s “CIA handler,” for example—that made him seem “controversial and even gruesomely threatening.” He began getting strange phone calls, apparently from assassination buffs who believed he was part of a CIA conspiracy. (The Assassinations Committee investigation found no evidence that he had ever worked for the CIA.)

  In later years, de Mohrenschildt became depressed and voluntarily underwent treatment in a sanitarium. In 1977, shortly before he was to be questioned by the Assassinations Committee, he fatally shot himself.

  Our perception of what happened in Dallas was distorted, for several reasons. Since Oswald was highly secretive, his motivation had to be pieced together as one would reassemble a shredded document. In 1963 his political motive was invisible, largely because the public lacked knowledge of the context in which he had operated—it didn’t know about the attempts to kill Castro. If Oswald were alive and on trial today, he might be seen as a revolutionary terrorist.

  Another circumstance blocked our view of this event. The president’s murder had aroused Washington’s fears of a dangerous international crisis. As a result, the overriding concern of the official
investigation was to prevent the situation from getting out of control. As the Church committee amply demonstrated, the CIA and FBI downplayed the possibility of a Cuban connection from the beginning.

  At 5:00 P.M. on November 23, 1963, CIA headquarters learned that the Mexican police were about to arrest Silvia Duran, the Cuban Embassy employee who had dealt with Oswald. Agency personnel telephoned the Mexico station and asked them to stop the arrest. After discovering that this couldn’t be done, Richard Helms’s deputy, Thomas Karamessines, cabled the station that her arrest “could jeopardize U.S. freedom of action on the whole question of Cuban responsibility.” When the Church committee asked him about this statement in 1976, Karamessines

  speculated that the CIA feared the Cubans were responsible, and that Duran might reveal this during an interrogation. He further speculated that if Duran did possess such information, the CIA and the U.S. Government would need time to react before it came to the attention of the public.

  On November 24 the FBI legal attaché in Mexico cabled headquarters that the American ambassador there believed that the Cubans were unsophisticated and militant enough to have directed Oswald’s action, and he suggested that the bureau might want to poll its Cuban informants in the U.S. “to confirm or refute this theory.” But in Washington an FBI supervisor wrote a note on the cablegram: “Not desirable. Would serve to promote rumors.” This view was shared by the CIA and the State Department. On November 28 Helms notified the CIA in Mexico:

  For your private information, there [is a] distinct feeling here in all three agencies that Ambassador is pushing this case too hard … and that we could well create flap with Cubans which could have serious repercussions.

  In the months ahead, the CIA repeatedly failed to follow up leads that seemed to point toward direct Cuban involvement. Its investigation of this area became “passive in nature,” as did that of the FBI. The CIA and FBI had both laudable and self-serving reasons for wrapping this case up quickly, like spoiled fish. Each was aware that a flap with the Cubans might lead to a nuclear confrontation like the 1962 missle crisis. But at each agency, there were private considerations as well.

  J. Edgar Hoover pushed for a quick solution. He was convinced that Oswald acted alone. But he was eager to avoid public criticism that the bureau neglected its job by not keeping Oswald under closer surveillance after he returned from the Soviet Union. If a foreign conspiracy were found, the FBI would look even worse. Although he publicly defended the agents handling Oswald’s case, Hoover secretly disciplined seventeen employees, including James Hosty, for not pursuing Oswald more aggressively.

  A full investigation of a possible Cuban involvement might have proved even more embarrassing to the CIA. Warren Commission member Allen Dulles, who resigned as the agency’s director in 1961, knew about the Mafia plots and withheld this information from the other members. Perhaps he reasoned that it wasn’t relevant, since these plans ended well before the assassination. But the few CIA officials who were aware of the AM/LASH operation took steps to make sure that the Commission never got wind of it.

  Although the Commission was kept in the dark, it seemed reluctant to raise the Cuban issue on its own: Castro’s warning and Oswald’s alleged threat at the Mexico Embassy were omitted from its report. Even fourteen years later the House Assassinations Committee found this subject hot to the touch. With remarkable frankness, its chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, has written that one reason the Committee formally concluded that Cuba was not involved in Dallas was that “the Committee, as a responsible body of government, had an obligation to determine that the Cuban government was not involved in the assassination, if it could not find convincing proof that it was.” In other words, if it couldn’t prove Cuba was involved, it had to say Cuba was not involved.

  Blakey was referring to the question of direct Cuban responsibility, but the same rule seemed to apply to the question of indirect involvement, that is, Castro’s influence on Oswald, a possibility that was never discussed in the Committee’s report. When members of the Committee interviewed Castro and showed him the passage in Daniel Schorr’s book dealing with the Comer Clark interview, Castro denied that Oswald had threatened Kennedy at the Cuban Embassy. Counsel Blakey didn’t believe him—he suspected that Oswald probably did make the threat and that Castro felt it was in Cuba’s interest to deny it. But the Committee not only decided to accept Castro’s denial, it went further. Although its report discussed Castro’s warning and Oswald’s alleged threat a few weeks later, it said nothing about Schorr’s theory that the one event inspired the other. The report didn’t mention that Castro’s warning appeared in Oswald’s local newspapers. Moreover, the report dealt with the warning and the threat in separate sections, thus stripping away the connective tissue that would have been provided by a simple chronology.

  Finally, there may be one other reason that our perception of Dallas was flawed. After a traumatic event, people naturally seek a reassuring explanation, not one that is disturbing or painful. To believe that Lee Oswald was a drifter with no motive or the victim of a high-level conspiracy is easier to bear than the idea that American-backed murder plots helped bring about the assassination of President Kennedy.

  17 … Conspiracy Thinking

  It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of the evidence rather than the other way around.… It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.

  The very process of transforming a collection of personalities, dates, gun calibers, letters, and speeches into a narrative eventually forces the “why” to the surface. It will emerge of itself one fine day from the story of what happened. It will suddenly appear and tap one on the shoulder, but not if one chases after it first, before one knows what happened. Then it will elude one forever.

  —Barbara W. Tuchman, Practicing History

  BUILDING a conspiracy theory is easy. One might say, it’s what the mind does best. Consider this hypothetical example. According to a 1982 ABC television documentary, J. Edgar Hoover once ruined an important investigation of Soviet espionage by publicizing the case too soon. And for years Hoover put his faith in a Soviet defector who later turned out to be a phony, a KGB plant. After a pattern such as this has been noticed, additional information tends to be filtered through the screen of that pattern. Thus, if one examined Hoover’s career in detail, one would undoubtedly find other instances in which decisions he made turned out badly and helped the Soviet cause. Upon such documented evidence one might build a theory that Hoover was a high-level mole working for the KGB. But to make the theory stick, one would have to ignore two things: alternative explanations for those “pro-Soviet” actions (publicity seeking, bad judgment), and the entire context, that is, everything else we know about J. Edgar Hoover. Still, the notion that Hoover might have been a KGB agent is titillating—and who can prove that he wasn’t? All the conspiracy books about Dallas are constructed in this way.

  The paperback edition of David S. Lifton’s Best Evidence cites reviews that called the book “a meticulously detailed detective story,” “rigorously documented.” The author’s theory began, he tells us, when he saw the Zapruder film of the assassination for the first time and saw Kennedy’s body fall violently backward and to the left after the fatal head shot. Having been a physics major, Lifton understood Newton’s laws. He concluded that the backward movement of Kennedy’s body could only be explained by a bullet striking him from the opposite direction—the direction of a grassy knoll west of the Depository. (Even his later discovery that Kennedy’s head moved forward two inches before he fell back didn’t change his mind.) Many witnesses thought shots came from the knoll, and some of the doctors who examined Kennedy in Dallas described wounds consistent with a shot from the front. Yet the autopsy X rays and report clearly indicated that Kennedy was struck only from the rear. How could this be?

  Unabl
e to accept that the grassy knoll theory might be wrong, Lifton reconciled the conflicting versions in an original manner. He decided both versions were true: the Dallas witnesses were right and so were the autopsy surgeons—they saw different things because someone altered the president’s body before the autopsy.

  Stated baldly, Lifton’s theory is preposterous. He contends that all the bullets that struck Kennedy were fired from the front, and that to conceal this fact a large group of unnamed conspirators managed to steal Kennedy’s body from its casket aboard Air Force One, slip it aboard a helicopter after the president’s plane reached Washington, alter the body so that it appeared that Kennedy was shot from the rear by Oswald, and then sneak the altered body into Bethesda Naval Hospital for the official autopsy. That much is complex enough, but after Lifton began interviewing people who had been at Bethesda Hospital that night he found new conflicts in the testimony. Most of the witnesses said the body arrived in an expensive casket, and was wrapped in a sheet with a plastic mattress cover laid underneath. This was how the body left Dallas. But three hospital employees thought they remembered seeing Kennedy’s body arrive wrapped in a body bag inside a plainer casket. Most witnesses put the time of arrival at about 7:15, but one written report said 8 o’clock. As he had before, Lifton now attempted to reconcile these differences. As he put it, “Had this been an ordinary case, the choice of which witnesses to believe would have been left to the jury. But this was no ordinary case.” He decided that the body must have entered the hospital twice—once in the plain coffin/body bag, and later in the bronze coffin/sheet. This is comparable to saying that if some witnesses say the robber wore a black hat and others say he wore a red hat, there must have been two robberies.