At her urging, Lee at last read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, a great favorite in Russia. He was not impressed. He closed the book with a disgusted air, went to the public library, and took out a biography of Leon Trotsky. That was more to his liking.
One evening, in a romantic mood, he asked her to put on the red brocade dress she had worn on the evening they met. Marina was amused, reflecting that she was not a Cinderella at a ball any more, but a wife who was pregnant with her second child.
He even remembered that she was pregnant. Whenever Marina saw Lee on the bed, his arms folded under his head, gazing up at the ceiling, she knew he was thinking about the new baby. Once or twice he asked her to lie down beside him. Which side ached most, he wanted to know, and what were her other symptoms? He was heartened to hear that her symptoms were different from those while she was carrying June.
“This times it’s sure to be a boy. Our David is going to be president!”
Marina, too, wanted a boy, but to please Lee, not because she wanted any son of hers to be president. She thought politics was sick, and that anyone engaged in politics had to be sick as well. “Don’t make me laugh,” she said. “You can hardly support a family, much less give our son the education he needs to be president. A president has to go to college.”
“Not all presidents have been to college,” Lee said.
Marina’s feelings about having the child were still mixed. She was reluctant and ashamed, anxious to conceal from the other Russians that Bouhe’s prophecy had been fulfilled. Since it had happened, however, she told herself that there was merit in having two children close together. They would both be in school that much sooner. Then she would go back to work and support Lee so he could go to college.
Lee was not thinking about college. Sitting in the kitchen that first week of March, he asked Marina to fetch him his Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Marina was overjoyed. He was going to buy a present for her and June. She brought him the catalogue, then crept behind his chair to see what he was going to buy. Abruptly, he snapped the catalogue shut. Next time she got a better look. It was not dresses or toys he was looking at. He was reading the section on rifles.
Lee’s life appears to have been fairly normal that first week of March. He signed in and out of work at regular hours and seems to have attended typing class as usual. Mrs. Gladys A. Yoakum, his teacher, has described him as a young man who liked to “slip in, unobserved,” while her “back was turned.” Instead of sitting up front by the keyboard chart with the other beginners, where she could help him, Lee “gravitated” from the outset to the back-row seat beside the window. Thus Mrs. Yoakum never had occasion to give him individual attention. Nor did she see what he was typing. She noticed, however, that each night he brought his textbook wrapped in brown paper or a brown paper bag, unwrapped it, propped it up in front of him, and typed from it, or from something he placed inside it, throughout class. Mrs. Yoakum says that he could easily have been typing something of his own without her noticing it. She recalls that she “never once saw him talk to anyone else, or come in or leave with anyone else.” She also noticed that he sometimes left a little early. She assumed that Lee, like some of her other students, was taking the course to escape an unhappy marriage.2
It is not known what he was typing in class, but it may have been drafts of a letter to the Militant that Lee almost certainly wrote, and that appeared in the March 11 issue under the heading: “News and Views from Dallas,” signed with the initials “L.H.”3 The author of the letter praised the paper as “the most informative radical publication in America” but criticized it for failing to publish more about reform movements inside the Democratic Party, especially in California and New York, and about an Independent campaign for the US Senate in Massachusetts. The writer then described the case of a Mrs. Marie Ortiz, of Dallas, who had been left ill and unable to work with six children, and who had also suffered a fire. “Would it not be better to fundamentally reform the social conditions which are presently the cause of unemployment … than to rely on the sympathy of a few of the rich at Christmas …?”
The letter has several features that help trace it to Lee. Among the most telling are the caustic reference to Christmas and the sarcastic remark that “some kind person” had suggested to Mrs. Ortiz that “she turn her children over to an orphanage,” but “she replied that she did not wish to live without her children.” The remark appears to reflect Lee’s own bitterness over having been sent to an orphanage and his desire that his mother, like Mrs. Ortaz, had refused “to live without her children.”4
Sunday, March 10, marked the first known deviation from Lee’s routine that month. He rode a bus to the vicinity of No. 4011 Turtle Creek Boulevard, the home of General Walker, and took photographs.5 Five survive: one shows the alley behind Walker’s house; two show the rear of the house itself; and two a set of railway tracks running through woods about half a mile from the house.6 Lee probably took more than five photographs, for Marina recalls that he later told her that “he wanted to leave a complete record so that all the details would be in it. He told me that the entries [in a notebook he kept] consisted of the description of the house of General Walker, the distances, the location, and the distribution of windows in it.”7 These entries were almost certainly accompanied by photographs.
Lee probably developed the photographs at work the following evening, March 11, and something—his study of Walker’s house or the photographs—convinced him that a different crime was possible from the close-up, virtually suicidal act he had had in mind in January when he ordered his revolver. This crime could be committed at a distance. From it he had a chance of escape.
Thus, on March 12, using not the Sears catalogue but a coupon clipped from the February issue of American Rifleman magazine, Lee went to the main post office and ordered a high-powered Italian carbine, called a Mannlicher-Carcano, from Klein’s Sporting Goods Company, a mail-order house in Chicago. He sent the coupon air mail with a postal money order for $21.45 ($12.78 for the rifle, $7.17 for the scope, to be mounted by a gunsmith employed by Klein’s, and $1.50 for postage and handling). The rifle was to be delivered to “A. Hidell, Post Office Box 2915, Dallas, Texas.”8
About the same day Lee ordered the rifle, he received a letter from his brother Robert, whom he had last seen four months before. Robert wrote that his company had promoted him and transferred him to Malvern, Arkansas. He asked Lee and Marina to visit, adding that occasionally he came to Dallas and would like Lee’s home address so he could stop in and see the family or, if Lee was not at home, at least visit June and Marina.9
Lee’s reply is revealing.10 It hints at the affection he felt for his brother, and yet he refused to give Robert his home address. Instead, he sent only his post office box number, on the grounds that “I shall always have it.” Lee had rented the Neely Street apartment for a purpose, and he did not think he would be there long.
The intensity with which Lee was thinking about his plan is underlined by the extraordinary hours he put in on the day he mailed his answer to Robert. It was Saturday, March 16, a day for which he would receive overtime pay, and he contrived to work for ten hours. He was eager for every penny he could earn.
Marina, meanwhile, had received an answer to her letter of February 17 to the Soviet Embassy. With utmost politeness the embassy explained that in order to return to the USSR she would have to furnish a long list of documents and photographs, all in triplicate, plus letters from her relatives in Russia. The embassy said that the process would take five or six months.11 Marina was elated. Faced by the mountain of red tape that she had lived with all her life, she knew it would take the bureaucracy of her country not five or six months to clasp her to its bosom once again, but more like five or six years. So on Sunday, March 17, when Lee forced her to sit down a second time and fill out the embassy’s forms, she was not as catastrophically affected as she had been the month before.12
During the week of March 18, Lee resume
d his vigil at the post office. His time sheets at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall reveal that he signed out early enough nearly every day that week to pick up a package if it arrived.13 But a real coincidence was in the making. The revolver that Lee had ordered in January from Los Angeles and the rifle he had ordered from Chicago in March were both shipped on the same day, March 20. Lee probably received notice of their arrival early in the morning on Monday, March 25, and he signed out early enough that day, and only on that day of the week, to pick up his rifle at the post office.14 The revolver, meanwhile had arrived by REA Express, and to pick it up Lee had to ride a bus two miles from downtown Dallas to an office close to Love Field. No one remembers today what hours REA kept in Dallas in 1963, but Lee probably picked it up on Monday or Friday evening of that week.15 Marina recalls, however, that she first saw the rifle toward the end of the week. It was propped up in Lee’s office, and he had camouflaged it, more or less, by draping his raincoat over it.
Thursday of that week was the last time Lee attended typing class. Mrs. Yoakum later described his arrival that evening:
The last time I clearly recall seeing him, he walked past my desk and stood momentarily scanning the crowded room for a seat, and as usual he took the back row.… He seemed to be as straight and thin as a figure “1” in profile. Later, on TV I hardly recognized him because … he appeared filled out.… I’ve asked myself why he usually “seemed” to try to slip in when my back was turned; yet the last time I recall seeing him he seemed to “want” me to observe him before he located his seat.16
But that night Lee wanted Mrs. Yoakum to notice him. And he had, in fact, lost weight. During February he had been so upset that he nearly stopped eating, and Marina was afraid he was “starving himself.” In March he was too busy to eat. There were evenings when he came home from work and slipped into the apartment so quietly that Marina did not hear him. The first she knew he was racing down the stairs, going out again. “Back soon,” he would shout up to her. She would run to the balcony and trace his silhouette as it disappeared down the street. She does not know where he went or what he was doing.
He would return for supper and then retire to his “little closet,” as Marina calls it. There he worked out his plan of attack. Months before, George Bouhe had given him a blue looseleaf folder, and Lee now filled it with a description and photographs of Walker’s house, a description of the route he planned to use to escape after he shot Walker, and more photographs and a description of the place where he was going to bury his rifle. He may also have included a brief autobiography with photographs of himself in Russia and the Pacific. It was all part of the record he intended to leave for history.
In addition, Lee wrote on lined paper a fairly long historical rationale, which was both a justification for what he was about to do and a political program for the future. The first document, the historical rationale, is apocalyptic in tone and is hand-printed, not written, as if he had attempted several drafts, then printed it carefully.17 Even so, he made mistakes and had to cross out a good many words, a sign that he was excited, hurried, or disturbed when he wrote it. Lee predicted that a “total crisis” of some kind would soon destroy the capitalist system and the government of the United States. “We have no interest in violently opposing the U.S. government,” he said, or “in directly assuming the head of government.” But in order to prevent foreign intervention and set up a “separate, democratic, pure communist society,” he proposed the formation of a small party made up of disenchanted radicals, socialists, even remnants of the Republican Party, to defend “the right of private personal property, religious tolerance and freedom of travel (which have all been violated under Russian ‘Communist’ rule).” Lee concluded:
No rational man can take the attitude of “a curse on both your house’s.” There are two world systems, one twisted beyond recognition … the other decadent and dying.
A truly democratic system would combine the better qualities of the two upon an American foundation, opposed to both … as they are now.
The other document was handwritten, not printed, and set out Lee’s political program in detail.18 For example, no individual would be allowed to own the means of production; free speech, racial and religious freedom would be guaranteed; there would be heavy taxes against surplus profits but none on individuals; medical care would be free; and there would be general disarmament and “abolition of all armies except civil police force armed with small arms.” Under the category “sale of arms,” Lee wrote: “Pistols should not be sold in any case, rifes [rifles] only with police permission, shotguns free.” Lee Oswald was for gun control.
Lee drafted and redrafted these documents until midnight or 1:00 a.m. many nights during March, reported to his job regularly, and, for the sake of the time-and-a-half pay, worked long hours every Saturday that month except March 2. Still he made time for family life on Sundays. Each week he took June and Marina to a nearby lake to have a picnic. He loved to swing Junie on the swings. Then he would treat “his two girls” to ice cream. He did some fishing, which, next to hunting, was his favorite sport, and he had luck catching goldfish. One night they lugged his catch home, and Marina made fish soup for dinner. Lee could not bear to go into the kitchen while the cooking was going on, for the fish were swimming and thrashing in the pail right up to the moment Marina thrust them into the pot of boiling water.
He did not hit Marina now, a blessing she attributes to his “little closet” and the fact that he had “nobody beating on his nerves.” But he was often cold to her, sometimes snappish and cross, and frequently the very sight of her seemed to annoy him. The baby was his only real joy. Often he came home at night, sat on the balcony with June on his knee, sipped a bottle of Dr. Pepper, and gazed down at the street below. But if Marina joined them, he would stare at her in displeasure. “What did you come out here for?” he would say, or, “Haven’t you any housework to do?” Sometimes he stood up and left.
Marina was upset when she discovered the rifle. She hated guns and was annoyed that Lee was spending money on what she called “this dangerous toy” at a time when they were scrimping and saving even on food.
“Why did you buy a gun?” she asked. “Why don’t you think of your family first?”
Lee shrugged. “Maybe I’ll go hunting sometime.”
Marina reflected that it was his money; he earned it, and he had a right to spend it as he liked. She liked dresses, he liked guns.
Sunday afternoon, March 31, Marina got a huge surprise when Lee came up to her in the backyard and asked her to take his picture. The sun was out, their ground-floor neighbors were away, and the Oswalds had the fenced-in yard to themselves. Marina was hanging up diapers.
“Why me?” She was startled. “I’ve never taken a picture in my life.”
He promised to show her how.
Her surprise was transformed into astonishment when she glanced up from the clothesline a few minutes later to see her husband descending slowly, triumphantly, down the outdoor staircase dressed, as she had never seen him before, all in black—a black shirt and slacks. At his waist he was wearing his revolver. In one hand he carried his rifle, in the other he had a camera and a couple of newspapers. On his face was an expression of sublime contentment. Marina’s eyes grew large and round. The diapers fell from her hand. She broke into peals of laughter.
“Why are you rigged out like that? And where on earth did you get those guns? From Intourist?” One of the chief aims of Intourist, the Soviet travel agency, is to impress foreigners. Marina thought that her husband was trying to impress her.
“Take my picture,” Lee said. He was serious.
Marina stopped laughing. “Are you crazy? I’ve never taken a picture in my life. I’m busy, and I don’t know how. Take it yourself.”
Lee had two cameras, one a Soviet Smena-2, the other a duo-lens American Imperial Reflex. The Smena-2 could be set automatically, so you could be in the picture and take it, too. But Marina remembers that Lee could not bu
y film for it in the United States. So he had to recruit her to snap the shutter of his Imperial Reflex.19
He showed her how to do it. Marina thinks it was about 4:00 P.M., for she recalls that Lee was worried about the shadows. She also thinks that she held the camera incorrectly, at eye rather than waist level. She snapped the shutter, he reset it, and she snapped it again. It was over in a minute. Not until months afterward did she realize, on being shown a pair of photographs, that she had snapped the shutter not once, as she first remembered, but twice.
Marina was puzzled by Lee’s performance. “If that’s his idea of a good time,” she said to herself, “then I hope he enjoys it. Just so he leaves me alone.” But before going back inside, she asked him why he had to have his picture taken with guns, of all stupid things? He explained that he was going to send the pictures to the Militant to show that he was “ready for anything.”
Marina did not know it, of course, but Lee had a special reason for sending his picture to the Militant. In the photograph he was holding two newspapers, the Worker of March 24, the one that had most recently arrived, and, thrust forward a little more prominently, the Militant of March 11, the issue containing a letter from Dallas that was signed “L.H.” Hoping to go down in history, Lee wanted the Militant to know exactly whom it had had the honor of publishing, and that the author had meant every word when he said that he “questioned” the system. He was, indeed, “ready for anything.”
“What a weird one you are!” Marina exclaimed. “Who on earth needs a photograph like that?”
Lee probably developed the photographs at work the following day, April 1. He handed one of them to Marina and told her to keep it for the baby. On it he had written: “For Junie from Papa.”
“Good God!” Marina was appalled. “Why would Junie want a picture with guns?”
Marina and Lee Page 43
