Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  First draft: Yes, basically. Although I hate the USSR and (the) socialist system, I still think Marxism can work under different circumstances.9

  Second draft: No, of course not. I have never even known a Communist outside the ones in the USSR, but you can’t help that.10

  Besides the two sets of questions and answers, which were really scripts for the anticipated press conference, Oswald wrote two long pages, again on Holland-America Line stationery, explaining why he had taken money from a source he believed to be the Soviet secret police. It was the question he dreaded most:

  … I accepted the money because I was hungry and there were several inches of snow on the ground.… But what it really was was payment for my denunciation of the US in Moscow.… I didn’t realize all this, of course, for almost two years … I have never mentioned the fact of these monthly payments to anyone. I do so in order to state that I shall never sell myself intentionally or unintentionally to anyone again.11

  There is no way of knowing how many sheets of Holland-America Line paper Oswald covered with handwriting, only to toss them into a wastebasket on the Maasdam. But it is clear from what has survived that he spent part of the voyage working up this imaginary colloquy with the press, and an even longer time drafting a statement of his political beliefs.12 Again, he apparently thought that he would be questioned on these matters.

  I have often wondered why it is that the communist, capitalist, and even the fascist and anarchist elements in America always profess patriotism toward the land and the people, if not the government, although their movements must surely lead to the bitter destruction of all and everything.

  I am quite sure these people must hate not only the government but the culture, heritage and very people itself.…

  I wonder what would happen if somebody was to stand up and say he was utterly opposed not only to the governments, but to the people, to the entire land and complete foundations of his society?…

  Where can I turn? To factional mutants of both systems [communism and capitalism], to oddball Hegelian revisionists out of touch with reality, [to] religious groups, to revisionists or to absurd anarchism? No!

  To a person knowing both systems … there can be no mediation.…

  He must be opposed to their basic foundations.…

  And yet it is immature to take the sort of attitude which says “a curse on both your houses.”

  There are two great representatives of power in the world … the left and right.…

  Any practical attempt at one alternative must have as its nucleus the traditional ideological best of both systems, and yet be utterly opposed to both.…

  For no system can be entirely new. That is where most revolutions … go astray. And yet the new system must be opposed unequivocally to the old. That is also where revolutions go astray.

  Oswald then launched into criticisms of capitalism: “runaway robot” automation, “a general decay of classes into shapeless societies without real cultural foundations,” the “regimentation” of “ideals,” and, finally, war.

  The biggest and key fault … of our era is of course the fight for markets between the imperialist powers … which lead to the wars, crises and oppressive friction which you have all come to regard as part of your lives. And it is this prominent factor of the capitalist system which will undoubtedly eventually lead to the common destruction of all the imperialistic powers.…

  Oswald next considered what he called the “mistakes” of Engels and Marx,13 chiefly the notion that the abolition of classes would lead to a withering away of the state. He cited with bitterness his own visa experience to illustrate that even with Khrushchev’s decentralization, the state did not wither away. To counter the argument that the state had to become strong and highly centralized before it could wither away, he called for “social democracy at a local or community level.” Oswald believed that “true democracy can be practiced only at the local level.”

  Four other long sheets of Holland-America Line stationery have survived, covered with Oswald’s scrawl, mutilated and nearly illegible because of scratched-out phrases and words. They are a vaguely programmatic document,14 apocalyptic in that Oswald apparently expected an armed confrontation between two camps at any moment and suggested that afterward he hoped to set up a peace organization that would break with the traditions of both Communist and capitalist systems, which “have now at this moment led the world into unsurpassed danger … into a dark generation of tension and fear.”

  How many of you have tried to find out the truth behind the cold war clichés?

  I have lived under both systems. I have sought the answers and, although it would be very easy to dupe myself into believing one system is better than the other, I know they are not.

  For an American who was only twenty-three, Oswald’s experience was unique. He had, as he had written, lived in each of the opposing world camps, more or less as an ordinary citizen. Now, suspended between the two on the voyage home, he was looking at both, weighing both, trying to puzzle out a system that would combine the merits of each. And as he had done so often in his life before, he was doing it, once again, alone. He had not been to college, nor had he been part of any political or intellectual milieu in the United States. In Russia he had been cut off completely from such currents as might be stirring young people back home. Yet the political solution he reached, from his own experience, from reading, and from talking to his friends in Minsk, was similar to the solution proposed by a generation of American activists in the later 1960s: participatory democracy at a community level. Oswald was a pioneer, if you will, or a lonely American antihero a few years ahead of his time.

  The trouble lay not with his ideas but with the emotions underneath. Oswald had been disappointed by Russia, which he had thought to be a Marxist society where each person’s needs were met. It was not the thing Oswald expected and found, a system of authority, that drove him from the USSR. It was what he came seeking and failed to find.

  His disappointment, and above all the anxiety he felt on returning to the country of his birth, are evident in the confused style and erratic spelling of his shipboard writings. But his was not a new wound. It had been inflicted long before he went to Russia, and it stemmed from his relationship with his mother. For somehow Marguerite had failed her son. His need for his mother’s love had not been met when he was young. Not only was his need unmet, he had been unable to extricate himself from it. He remained enmeshed with his mother, needing her, yet resenting her and hating himself for his dependence. For his need was an enormous threat to him, and once in a while, in order to convince himself that he was free and a man, he had to pull himself together and act. And the action he took very often was one of rejection.

  He had rejected Marguerite first when he joined the Marines. But his dependence remained so great that he was able to transform even that institution into a kind of mother. The Marine Corps—the “mother of men”—failed him, too: and in rejecting the Marines, he was, symbolically, rejecting his mother again. Then he defected to Russia, contriving in a single exquisite gesture to reject his real mother, the Marine Corps, and his mother country all at once. So doing, he transformed an unresolved personal conflict into a political act.

  Now he had rejected Russia, once more reenacting the central drama of his life. Mother Russia had failed him not because it was authoritarian or because it lacked Marxian “equality.” It failed him because it did not meet all his needs. No country, no mother, could—his needs were bottomless. But this rejection was the most portentous one so far, for while rejecting his mother symbolically yet again, he was returning to her physically for the first time. He was returning to the real mother who was the cause of it all.

  Marina had no idea of the danger her husband was running in going home. She was hurt and depressed by his shipboard behavior to her. But she had no way back. She was committed to Alik and June, and to the decision she had made in leaving Russia. And she was looking forward with the eagerness
of a child to a great adventure that lay ahead. Besides, she was young and forgiving, fully capable of laying aside Alik’s cruelty and the warning signals he had given her. She saw in Alik’s suddenly altered behavior only his fear of being punished in America. She was right. But she failed to perceive the depths of his turmoil. As he approached the emotional orbit of his mother, he started to behave like a compass approaching its magnetic pole. The needle of his emotions began to swing, wildly and more wildly still, until eventually he was to forfeit his control.

  — Interlude —

  During the summer of 1964, I was in the Irving, Texas, home of Ruth Paine, a woman who befriended Lee and Marina Oswald in 1963 and with whom Marina was staying at the time President Kennedy was shot. Ruth and I were talking about Lee Oswald and about the last evening he spent with Marina at the Paines’ house, the evening before the assassination.

  Suddenly, Ruth broke into our conversation with a warning that an uninvited visitor was walking up the drive. The visitor entered—a small, plump woman, immaculately groomed, with her hair upswept in a bun and a white blouse neatly tucked inside her skirt. I recognized her right away. She was Marguerite Oswald.

  She and Ruth started talking, and I was surprised at how sensible Mrs. Oswald seemed to be. I had read that she was a mixed-up, contentious woman, who believed the world was against her and was very much concerned with money. Now I thought that what I had read must be wrong. Mrs. Oswald’s conversation appeared to be just as well put together as her costume.

  She was wearing a flash camera around her neck, and she announced that she had come to take photographs: one of the bedroom in Ruth’s house “where they slept”; one of the living room sofa, “where I slept that sorrowful night” (Mrs. Oswald spent the night of November 22, 1963, at the Paines’ house); and one of what she called the “famous” garage where Lee kept his rifle. Mrs. Oswald explained that she wanted the photographs to add to a scrapbook for Lee’s children. “Who would keep it if I didn’t?” she asked. Apparently, she was compiling a photographic record of Lee’s life, for she mentioned that she wanted Marina to give Lee’s baby book back to her. “Marina didn’t know him that long,” she said.

  Mrs. Oswald did all the talking, oblivious to Ruth and me, and she was obviously preoccupied with two topics—money and Lee’s innocence. She was suing one national magazine, she said, for a false statement about the amount of money she had received “for one lousy speech” about her son. She had allowed another to publish Lee’s letters to her because they showed “what a good boy he was” but added mysteriously that she had so far refrained from publishing another twenty-five letters “for security reasons.” Proudly, she told us that she frequently went to her son’s grave to tidy up, and that ninety thousand visitors had been to see it already. “Who would get down on their knees and sweep up the mess and plant plastic flowers if I didn’t?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said to myself. “This lady is claiming that her son is innocent, and at the same time she is making money off the deed he is supposed to have committed.” Mrs. Oswald was falling apart in front of my eyes, just as surely as if her blouse had come untucked and her tidy bun come tumbling to her waist. “Who am I?” I thought. “Where can I turn to touch something real?” I looked at my watch and saw that Marguerite Oswald had been in the house seven and a half minutes.

  She was born Marguerite Claverie in 1907 in New Orleans, the fifth of six children of a streetcar conductor. Her mother died when she was four years old, and Marguerite was raised by her father, her older brothers and sisters and, she says, by housekeepers. She was a pretty child, and she grew up an attractive young woman. She quit school after the ninth grade, falsified her school documents, and got a job.

  At the age of twenty-two, she married Edward John Pic Jr., a shipping company clerk. They separated a year or so later, when Marguerite was three months pregnant. She claimed that Pic did not want the child and refused to support her. The child was a boy, John Edward Pic, and his father contributed to his support until he reached the age of eighteen. But Marguerite told the boy that his father contributed nothing to his support and that his birth had been the cause of her divorce.1

  Marguerite met Robert Edward Lee Oswald during her separation from Pic. Like her he came from a Catholic family of French and German descent. And like her he was married and separated. In 1933 both obtained divorces and were married. Marguerite objected when Oswald wanted to adopt John; it might mean the end of support payments from John’s father. Their first son, Robert Jr., was born in 1934. The second, Lee Harvey, was born on October 18, 1939, two months after his father’s sudden death of a heart attack. The accounts of his death vary. Marguerite’s sister, Lillian Murret, who also lived in New Orleans, says that he was mowing the lawn when he felt a pain in his arm. He told his wife to rub his arm and give him aspirin, which she did, but while she was telephoning the doctor, he keeled over dead.2 Years later, however, Marguerite told a social worker in New York that her husband died at 6:00 A.M. and, in order to spare herself and the child she was carrying, she had him buried the same day, an act that so horrified his relatives by its “coldness” that they had avoided her ever since.3

  But Marguerite’s feelings for her husband had not been cold. According to one member of her family, Oswald gave her what she wanted—a car, a house, financial security. To this day when she speaks of him, she says, “There goes the only happy part of my life.”4 At the time of his death, the couple had been hoping for a baby girl.

  Now Marguerite was on her own, with three small sons to provide for. She was not destitute. She had her support payments from John’s father and, according to a friend, a $10,000 insurance policy from Oswald. In addition, the house she lived in was at least partly paid for. But money was on Marguerite’s mind. She rented the house and moved to a cheaper place. And so that she could go to work, she put the older boys, first in a strict Catholic boarding school, and then in the Bethlehem Children’s Home, a New Orleans orphanage, despite the fact that neither was an orphan and John had two parents living.

  She kept Lee. He had a shifting babyhood, both in terms of where he lived and who took care of him. He stayed part of the time with Marguerite’s easygoing sister Lillian, who was married to Charles Murret and had five children of her own. Mrs. Murret remembers Lee as beautiful, friendly, and affectionate, and she kept him on and off for two years. But the arrangement was occasionally interrupted either by one of Marguerite’s squabbles with her sister or by little Lee himself. For as soon as he was big enough, Lee acquired the habit of running away in his nightclothes and slipping through the Murrets’ iron gates, only to surface a while later, clad in pajamas, sitting cheerfully in some neighbor’s kitchen.

  And so Marguerite took him back and had a succession of babysitters—neighbors and even the milkman, Bud, and his wife. Once she hired a live-in couple for $15 a month, but after two months she noticed that two-year-old Lee had big red welts on his legs. The couple said he was a “bad, unmanageable child.” He had thrown a toy gun at the wife, and they were whipping him to keep him in line.5 At that, Marguerite quit her job briefly to take care of him.

  Marguerite tried to put Lee in the Bethlehem Home with his brothers when he was two, but she was turned down because, as she knew very well, the minimum age was three. Marguerite says, “I waited patiently for age three.”6 She returned to work and moved close to the Murrets, leaving Lee with Lillian by day and taking him home with her at night. Finally, on December 26, 1942, the day after Christmas, Lee, aged three years and two months, joined his brothers at the orphanage.

  Lee seemed happy there, but he still did not have a steady environment because his mother would take him out for two or three weeks at a time and either keep him herself or farm him out to the Murrets. He had been at the orphanage just over a year when Marguerite moved to Dallas, taking Lee, but not his brothers, with her. She was engaged in an on-again, off-again courtship with an older man, a “Yankee” named Edwin A. Ekdahl, an
d was planning, on balance, to marry him. She hesitated, however, and married Ekdahl only a year later, in May of 1945. Meanwhile, five-year-old Lee saw a good deal of Ekdahl and became attached to him. Tall, white-haired, and “very nice,” with a history of heart trouble, Ekdahl was an electrical engineer earning $1,000 a month. Relatives thought that money was a motive on Marguerite’s side.

  After the marriage, the older boys were sent to the Chamberlain-Hunt Military Academy in Port Gibson, Mississippi, while Lee went by car with his mother and stepfather to such exotic places as Boston and the Arizona desert. They settled in Benbrook, Texas, outside Fort Worth, in a big stone house with plenty of trees around it. Ekdahl treated the boys “real swell … like his own children,” John says.7 One Christmas he showered them with candies and Cokes while their mother voiced loud opposition. Robert says, “We was on Mr. Ekdahl’s side,”8 adding that, “All of us liked Mr. Ekdahl, but I think Lee loved him most of all.”9 John thinks, “Lee found in him the father he never had.”10

  But the marriage was as rocky as it could be, and Lee, the only child at home, got the worst of it. His spirits rose and fell with the ups and downs of his mother’s marriage, and his life was unsteady, too. He entered the first grade in Benbrook, but Marguerite left Ekdahl for a few months; settled in Covington, Louisiana; then returned with Ekdahl to Fort Worth. As a result, Lee touched down in three schools and took two years to finish first grade, although his grades were all A’s and B’s. Robert remembers “loud arguments” between his mother and stepfather, and it seemed to John that they had “a fight about every other day.” One summer evening John brought home the good news that they had made up after one of their fights. He recalls that the news “seemed to really elate Lee.”11 Like the older boys Lee wanted nothing better than for the marriage to work out.