Dallas 1963

by Bill Minutaglio

  As President Kennedy mingles and the First Lady poses for group photographs, the visitors from Dallas must wonder if their city will ever really live up to what Lincoln wanted, what the Emancipation Proclamation spells out. It seems so promising, so close at hand. Dallas really has been changing—for the good. Surely it won’t take much longer for true equality in the city?

  A thought pops into James’s mind: “How long will it take to make this proclamation a reality? Already it has been 100 years.”13

  It is like crossing from one country to another—Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina have left their humble duplex and are now arriving at an upscale residence in Dallas for a party given by a swashbuckling Russian émigré who seems to have connections to everyone, including various intelligence agencies and Dallas oil millionaires.

  George De Mohrenschildt and his wife have been providing the struggling young couple with gifts of food, clothing, and household items, often over the proud Lee’s objections.

  De Mohrenschildt is not the only one inside the tightly knit Russian expatriate community to coo over the polite, quiet Marina. Many of the others seem to loathe Oswald, suspicious that he has been controlling her in some darker ways. But De Mohrenschildt almost seems to have a clinical fascination with Oswald—maybe as a quiet man he can work to draw out.

  Oswald knows that De Mohrenschildt is one of the handful of people in Dallas who seem to listen seriously to his theories on the fascists and the right wing. Oswald considers De Mohrenschildt his only friend in the city—and maybe some sort of gateway to respectability.

  De Mohrenschildt is from a wealthy Russian family that lost its holdings during the Bolshevik revolution. He speaks several languages, and his range of contacts among America’s elite is extensive—he is friendly with everyone from George Herbert Walker Bush to the parents of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. As a young girl, Jackie had sat on his knee during social gatherings, calling him “Uncle George.”

  He can seem non-specific in his allegiances, willing to mingle and listen to any side: De Mohrenschildt has joined several organizations, from Stanley Marcus’s liberal Dallas Council on World Affairs to Ted Dealey’s conservative Texas Crusade for Freedom.

  But when he is with Oswald, he assures him he is an avowed leftist.

  And as they huddle tonight inside his grand house, apart from the swirl of the other guests laughing and drinking, De Mohrenschildt makes no secret of his dislike for General Edwin Walker:

  “Anyone who ‘knocked off Walker’ would be doing society a favor.”14

  On February 27, Walker boards a specially equipped tour bus owned by his close friend, the anti-communist televangelist Billy James Hargis. The two men are departing on a speaking tour to twenty-nine cities, mostly in the South: “To alert the public to the enemy within and without.” Taking their inspiration from Paul Revere, they are calling their tour Operation Midnight Ride.

  Hargis is a thirty-seven-year-old, three-hundred-pound Texas-born leader of the Christian Crusade, a fervent group of a hundred thousand paid followers based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has an unusually boyish and doughy face, prefers tailored suits, and decorates his office with pictures of Jesus and a large flagpole with the Stars and Stripes. He distributes autographed pictures of himself, often signed: Go With God!

  He possesses an honorary doctorate in divinity from Bob Jones University, a conservative bulwark in South Carolina, and he is armed with an abundant gift for self-promotion. Early in his career, Hargis wrote speeches for Senator Joseph McCarthy. Then he hit upon the idea of getting Bibles into communist countries by attaching them to one million hydrogen-filled balloons that would float over the Iron Curtain. Hargis enjoys traveling in luxurious style, and he personally toured great portions of Europe in order to supervise his Bible balloon launchings into the airspace of the godless nations.

  He publishes a weekly newsletter and a monthly magazine along with numerous tape recordings and albums. His daily broadcasts are carried by 250 television stations and can be heard on over five hundred radio stations across the country. And during his religious revival appearances, he will often call out for a $10,000 donation in the name of God. One of his aides planted in the audience will shout out that he has heard the Lord’s call and will volunteer the money. The idea is to stampede others into pledging their money, too. Anyone who donates $25 or more receives a free copy of his record album: The United Nations Hoax.15

  Hargis and Walker are at ease with each other. Their politics are apparent. Their loathing of Kennedy, of Washington liberals, of Martin Luther King Jr., makes for a perfect match. What only a few might suspect is that Hargis—like Walker—has a secret sexual life.

  Hargis began courting Walker even before the general resigned from the army. Now he’s invited him to join the board of the Christian Crusade, and he shamelessly flatters Walker at every opportunity, telling him: “God knows, we need you for President!”16

  Among Hargis’s most devoted followers is Walker’s mother. In letters to her son, she likes to sign off by writing: “Go with God, as Billy James Hargis always says.”17

  As they board the bus and begin their tour of America, Walker confesses something to Hargis: After the failed gubernatorial race and the snuffing out of my American rebellion in Mississippi, I know that I will never be president. The best I can hope for is to be a lightning rod for patriots until the communist establishment locks me up again.

  As the Operation Midnight Ride tour bus, complete with sleeping bunks, begins to curl down the interstate highways leading out of Texas, Hargis tells aides that he and General Walker are on a mission to “expose the communist clergymen” who support civil rights—clergymen like Rhett James in Dallas and Martin Luther King Jr.

  MARCH

  Staring out the window of the tour bus, as Operation Midnight Ride moves across America, Walker sees crowds of protesters—including whites and blacks from the local NAACP. He stares down at them, his face impassive, as they wave signs: THIS ISN’T OLE MISS, WALKER, and WE DON’T NEED RACISTS HERE, WALKER.1

  Escorted by police guards inside one venue after another, Walker and Hargis wait patiently until an entire row of American flags is carefully arranged on the stage behind them.

  As the caravan rolls on, Walker seems to grow even more fanatical in his opposition to Kennedy, perhaps spurred on by the religious inviolability he thinks that Hargis affords him. Walker condemns the “Kennedy dynasty and dictatorship… There is no law left… We have got to start all over.”2

  He refers to Robert Kennedy as “little stupid brother Bobby, as they call him in Mississippi.” The Kennedy brothers are just like the Castro brothers in Cuba: “Jack has Bobby and Castro has Raul.”

  He describes his arrest in Mississippi as the result of a preconceived Kennedy plot against him.

  “I wouldn’t conform to the ‘National Policy,’ ” he rails to half-puzzled audiences. “They had to get rid of me because I knew too much about Mississippi.”3

  As the barnstorming tour moves across America, Walker also seems to become increasingly fixated on Cuba. He begins calling on President Kennedy to use military might to remove Castro. And really, not to oust him—but to simply kill him. To assassinate him.

  Walker shouts: “I challenge the Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America to… liquidate that scourge that has descended upon the island of Cuba.”4

  Oswald’s beatings of Marina are now more frequent—and even more violent. He’s gone from slapping her around to actually punching her square in the face, leaving her with purple-and-black eyes. She lowers her head in shame, so the neighbors can’t see it—but they do, and they are shocked. His political rhetoric is also growing increasingly strident. She hears him say that she will soon need to take the baby and return to the Soviet Union.

  From the beginning of their relationship, not long after they met at a dance in the Soviet Union, she knew he had a remote side to him. But now he locks himself in his room for hours at a time, reading bo
oks on communism and writing political tracts. At the typesetting and graphic arts firm where he works, he has created a phony ID card for himself, using the name A. J. Hidell. He orders a Smith & Wesson .38 snub-nosed revolver through the mail, using the same alias. She spots him poring over a city map and the Dallas bus schedule, and he is focusing his attention on a particular stretch of Turtle Creek Boulevard.

  Then, three days after Walker’s blistering, unfiltered speech about killing Castro, Oswald leaves their duplex and begins doing reconnaissance at the general’s home. His mission is entering the action-oriented phase. He takes photographs of the back of Walker’s house from the narrow, bush-lined alley.

  Back at his home, he must have realized that a pistol will not be sufficient, because he also orders a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a telescopic sight from a sporting goods store in Chicago. He pays $19.95 plus $1.50 for shipping and handling. Although inexpensive, the Carcano is a reliable, accurate weapon, similar to the U.S. Army’s M14. He achieved “marksman” status in the marine corps, and a few rounds of target practice in Dallas are enough to acquaint himself with his new weapon.

  Marina has gotten used to him closing the door as he steps inside a back room. He is preparing his operations manual for the anti-Walker mission, filling a folder with photographs and a map with various routes. It would be easy to hide a rifle along some railroad tracks near the general’s house.

  He sends a long letter to the Militant, which appears in a March 1963 issue under the headline NEWS AND VIEWS FROM DALLAS. In the letter, he describes Dallas as a city where poor renters live at the mercy of exploitative landlords, and he congratulates the paper as “the most informative radical publication in America.”

  Marina wonders where he goes when he leaves the house for hours at a time. When he returns home he tells her that he was doing target practice, or attending a typing class. There have been so many beatings at his hands that she knows enough not to argue with him.

  On the last Sunday in March, Marina is hanging diapers on a flimsy clothesline stuck in the grass in the small backyard. Oswald steps outside, gives her his camera, and shows her how to operate it. He stands facing her, squinting in the sunlight as a trace of a smile plays across his face. He is outfitted entirely in black. He holds the Carcano rifle proudly, even jauntily, pointing its barrel toward the sky. In his other hand he displays two papers—the Worker and an issue of the Militant that contains his published letter.

  The Militant’s front page also carries a story about a black civil rights worker who has been shot by three white racists in Mississippi. The message must be clear: The extreme right is engaged in violence, even assassinations. Now is the time for the other side to be heard.

  For a second, Marina isn’t sure what to make of her husband’s odd request to be photographed with his two newspapers and new rifle. She laughs nervously, but takes the picture anyway. He tells her he will send the photo to the Militant.5

  Afterward, Oswald develops the photographs at his job, furtively. He knows by now that he has been steadily alienating his boss and co-workers, just as he has in virtually all the jobs he’s ever held. Even back in Russia, one of his supervisors wrote a report on him: “Citizen Lee Harvey Oswald reacts in an over-sensitive manner to remarks from the foremen, and is careless in his work. Citizen L. H. Oswald takes no part in the social life of the shop and keeps very much to himself.”6

  Despite his professed love for the working class, Oswald usually refuses to associate with the other workers in Dallas. He makes a show of reading Russian-language magazines during his lunch breaks. His contempt for his work and his colleagues seems on display at every moment.

  The day after Marina photographs him in the backyard, his boss at the typesetting and graphic arts firm summons Oswald and tells him he is being fired.7

  APRIL

  On the clean-swept streets of Dallas’s downtown, a demonstration involving a lone member of the “lunatic left” is drawing some curious stares. Oswald is there, darting down sidewalks, staging a one-man picket. He has a placard around his chest: HANDS OFF CUBA! VIVA FIDEL!

  As people walk by, he jabs a hand out and offers “Fair Play for Cuba” literature.

  Two patrolmen spot him and have to wonder what there is to picket—the stores are integrated, the protesters are dormant.

  Oswald is alarmed: “Oh hell, here come the cops.”

  He drops the leaflets and makes a quick getaway.

  Later, safe at his duplex, he sends a report to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York: “Since I am unemployed I stood yesterday for the first time in my life, with a placard around my neck.” Oswald notes that he had been “cursed as well as praised.”

  He requests forty to fifty additional pamphlets for future actions.1

  Robert Surrey, Walker’s day-to-day aide, arrives at the general’s grand house on April 8 to welcome him home after Operation Midnight Ride.

  The national revolution, this mixture of Christianity and anti-communism, didn’t seem to soar like Walker and his army thought it would. In Dallas, at least, the Walker team knows the campaign has been well received and that the Dallas Morning News has been faithful.

  As Surrey turns his car into the alley behind the home, he spots a late-model Ford and two strangers, who appear to be looking over the fence at Walker’s house. Surrey waits until the men get in their car and drive away. Then he follows them. The car manages to escape, but Surrey is sure of one detail—it does not have a license plate. He returns to Walker’s home to greet the general.

  As they slip into the quiet of the home, they both wonder if the place has been bugged. Walker and his aides talk, make jokes, about the possibility that the FBI went into his home—maybe while he was away on Operation Midnight Ride—and put listening devices in the walls. Walker is well aware that his high-profile political activities are making him a target. He knows that the FBI is monitoring him. Possibly the CIA and KGB, too. Who knows who his volunteers really are?

  Walker is certain that some of them are undercover officers or double agents. He is convinced that someone is out to get him.

  Two days later, Oswald finally confesses to Marina that he has been fired from his job. He blames it on the FBI, claiming that they made his employer nervous by asking questions about him. Near twilight, he finishes dinner and then leaves without telling her where he is going. Marina hopes he is off to his typing class.

  It’s been unseasonably hot in Dallas. The temperature reached ninety-nine degrees earlier in the day as a wall of hot southwesterly winds stalled over the city. Now it is still warm, close to eighty degrees, as Oswald walks quickly away from the duplex. He moves past the thick-trunked oak and pecan trees, headed for the city bus stop two blocks away. With darkness coming on, he wants to get to that comfortable neighborhood of larger, carefully manicured homes north of downtown.

  He did not tell his wife that he left a note behind for her: a very detailed message, written in his careful, flowing cursive. The note is on the dresser in his small private room where he likes to read and think. If he doesn’t return home this evening, Marina will be sure to find it:

  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 Embassy 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 eithe
r 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 need same.

  9. We have friends here. The Red Cross also will help you.

  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).2

  It is 8:30 p.m. on April 10 and General Walker is settling into the study on the first floor of his sprawling home. His handful of devoted aides have headed for their cars, and he is by himself on this uncomfortably warm Wednesday night. Though he likes to retire early, he decides to stay up a little later. He needs to finish his income tax forms, which are due in five days.

  Fastidious and orderly, he rolls up his shirtsleeves, finds a sharp pencil, and arranges his financial statements on a wooden writing desk at the rear of the house. The wood-framed window in his study faces a very narrow, hidden alley lined with a lattice fence and some thin, tall bushes just beginning to bud. Tonight, he has left the window shades open. Most of the lights in the house are on. He sits at his desk, facing the center of the room.

  Oswald knows the dark, quiet path behind Walker’s home. He arrives close to 9 p.m. He is carrying his rifle, which he has retrieved after hiding it earlier in the week near the railroad tracks. From his vantage point, he can see that the worship service at the chapel on the other side of the general’s house is ending. Car doors are slamming and engines start up as people begin driving away. His timing is perfect.