But his behavior was inconsistent. Sometimes he went a whole day without speaking, then spent the next day making up to her. He would take her and Junie to the park, do the laundry, mop the floor. He would even hang up the wash, while Marina leaned out the window and shouted directions, and Junie waved at her “Papa.” He often told Marina how much he had missed her. And he was proud of her when he took her to the Murrets. They thought that Marina and Lee were a “cute,” “family-conscious” and “devoted” couple.8 But Marina was anxious. She was afraid that Lee was nice to her only because he would soon be getting rid of her.
She was not entirely helpless, however—she did have a friend. Two weeks after her arrival in New Orleans, Marina wrote to Ruth Paine: “As soon as you left, all ‘love’ stopped. I feel very hurt because Lee’s attitude toward me is such that every minute I feel as if I am tying him down. He insists that I leave America, and this I don’t want at all. I like America very much and I think that even without Lee I would not be lost here. What do you think?”9
Ruth had invited Marina to stay with her in October, when the new baby came. So far she had said nothing about a more permanent haven. But Marina was intuitive. Ruth was her hope of salvation.
The strain on her began to take its toll. On Saturday morning, June 1, Lee took Marina and June to the Napoleon Branch of the public library, the branch nearest their apartment, to look for books in Russian for Marina. All they found were some novels in English translation. But Lee took out two books for himself: The Berlin Wall by Dean and David Heller, and The Huey Long Murder Case by Hermann Bacher Deutsch. They walked along for a bit, with June in her stroller; then Marina and the baby waited outside while Lee ducked into a store and had his photograph taken—evidently for a passport.10 The three walked along farther and crossed the street.
“Don’t go so fast,” Marina said. “I don’t feel well.” Lee kept on walking, thinking it was only a joke. She leaned against a storefront. “Wait a minute, Lee,” she called out. Next thing she knew she was lying on the sidewalk and Lee had his arms around her. He carried her inside the store, and some strangers brought her to with ammonia.
“You’ll be okay, you’ll be okay,” Lee encouraged her. “Can you walk?”
Marina nodded, and they went home. He put her to bed, brought her some juice, and tiptoed around the rest of the day, taking care of June. “Shhh, Junie, Mama’s sleeping,” Marina heard him say.
Later that same week, on June 4, Marina received a letter from the consular section of the Soviet Embassy in Washington. It asked that she come to Washington if possible and, otherwise, that she write the embassy her reasons for wishing to return to the USSR.11
Marina turned the letter over and stared at it a long time. What puzzled her was the address. It had been mailed directly to her at 4907 Magazine Street, New Orleans. When Lee came home that night, she asked how the embassy knew her new address. He told her that he had sent it. Marina thought she heard her death knell toll again.
Later that same night, she at last discovered what Lee was up to.
“Come here. I want you to sign something,” he said.
“What is it?”
“My card for this organization about Cuba.”
“What organization? The one with only one member?”
“It’ll help me to have this card. People will believe in me more. They’ll think I have a real organization.”
He wanted Marina to sign a membership card in the New Orleans “chapter” of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, not in her own name but with the alias he had been using for several months.
“I won’t do it,” she said.
“You’ve got to.” He grabbed her and held her hard by both hands.
“Sign it yourself. I won’t,” she answered. “I’m not going to get mixed up in your affairs.”
He pleaded with her. “There have got to be two handwritings. You’re my wife. You never help. You never support me. And I ask so little of you. You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”
Marina remembered the letter that had arrived from the Soviet Embassy that day. “What will you do to me if I don’t sign? Will you beat me?” she asked.
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
His eyes had begun to glitter, and Marina thought she had better sign. She told herself that it was nothing but child’s play anyway, and it was better for him to be playing with bits of paper than with a gun. But she had no idea what she was signing. “It could have been my own death sentence,” she said later.
As long as she was going to sign, however, she wanted her writing to look pretty.12 Several times, on a piece of scratch paper, she practiced writing the name Lee wanted her to sign. He thrust the card in front of her, and with some care she wrote “A. J. Hidell.” He was “president” of the New Orleans “chapter” of the FPCC.
“What’s that?” she asked, commenting on the name. “An altered Fidel?”
“Shut up.” He was blushing. “Don’t meddle in what you don’t understand.”
“So America has its Fidel,” she said sarcastically. “Don’t you think you’re taking a bit too much on yourself?”
He was ashamed at being caught and admitted there was no such person as “Hidell.” But he wanted people to think he had a big organization.
“Do you mean that you have two names?” she asked in wonder.
“Yes,” he said.
Two days later he put his alias to another use. He took a standard yellow international vaccination certificate, wrote his name at the top, stamped it “Dr. A. J. Hideel” (sic) and, in his own handwriting this time, forged the name “A. J. Hidell” above the stamp. In addition to being president of the New Orleans “chapter” of the FPCC, “Hidell” was also his doctor.13 Three days after that, Lee listed “A. J. Hidell” and Marina Oswald as persons entitled to receive mail at the post office box he had opened on June 3.14
All of these things together—the handbills, his remarks to Marina about going to Cuba or China, the passport photos, the vaccination certificate, his intention to send Marina back to Russia—suggest that a multiple scenario was beginning to take shape in Lee’s head.
A third important letter arrived during the first week in June, this one from Ruth Paine. Much of the letter was written in English for Lee. Ruth repeated her offer for Marina to come to Texas to have her baby at clinic in Grand Prairie. She explained how much it would cost, said that Marina would have to bring her medical records from New Orleans, and expressed hope that she would go to a doctor soon to anticipate any complications in her pregnancy.
Coming so soon after Marina’s fainting spell of June 1, the letter seems to have had an effect on Lee. On Saturday, June 8, he took Marina for a medical examination at the New Orleans Charity Hospital, a large institution near their home. Unfortunately, it was a state hospital, permitted to treat only Louisiana residents or emergency cases. Marina had not lived long enough in Louisiana to qualify as a resident, nor was hers an emergency. Although Lee spent a full hour pleading to have a doctor examine her, the Oswalds were turned away.15
The impact could hardly have been more dramatic. “Everything is money in this country,” Lee said, his face contorted with anger, awash with apology and shame. “Even the doctors are businessmen. You can’t even have a baby without money.” The tears were rolling down his cheeks.
“It’s okay. I understand. Everything will be all right,” Marina said to comfort him. Lee always had an extra $10 in his pocket, and Marina later realized that he could have taken her to a doctor. But she was too sorry for him to think of it at the time. She wanted to see a doctor, but she put the idea aside and was not examined until she was in her ninth month.
The week that began two days later, on Monday, June 10, was a memorable one in the presidency of John F. Kennedy and a memorable, as well as tragic, one for the civil rights movement. On June 10 President Kennedy gave the famous “American University” speech in which he hailed the Russian people for their achievements and asked for a
world “safe for diversity.” On the evening of the speech, Lee sat down and wrote a letter to the Worker, the newspaper of the US Communist Party in New York City. He announced that he had formed a Fair Play for Cuba “chapter” in New Orleans, asked for Communist Party literature for his “office,” and sent honorary membership cards in his “chapter” to Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis, leaders of the party in the United States.
The following day, June 11, was a landmark in the civil rights struggle that had been raging that spring with its focus in Birmingham, Alabama. In January a governor named George Wallace had been inaugurated in Alabama with a speech promising that he “would stand in the schoolhouse door, if necessary,” to resist court-ordered desegregation. On June 11 Wallace fulfilled his promise by standing in the doorway of the registration building of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Twice Wallace held out his hand in a “stop” signal, and twice James Hood and Vivian Malone, two black students who were accompanied by the deputy attorney general of the United States, Nicholas Katzenbach, had to retreat. As the day wore on, President Kennedy, in Washington, signed an order federalizing part of the National Guard in Alabama. As guardsmen walked onto the campus, Governor Wallace walked off, and the two students were allowed to register.
That evening President Kennedy went on the air from the White House to call for a new civil rights law. But it was a night that ended in tragedy. Only a few hours after Kennedy finished speaking, Medgar Evers, field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi, was shot and killed by a sniper who had been lying in wait outside his home in Jackson, only two hundred miles from New Orleans.16
Lee had often spoken of the necessity for greater understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union. He claimed that racial discrimination in America was the chief reason he had become a Marxist. But if he recognized that President Kennedy had that week taken major steps toward better relations with Russia abroad, and toward better relations between the races at home, he did not give the slightest sign of it. His mind appeared to be fixed on Cuba.
On the afternoon of Sunday, June 16, the day Evers’s tumultuous funeral was reported in every newspaper in the land, Lee went, without a word to anyone, to the Dumaine Street Wharf, where the USS Wasp was berthed. There he passed out his white “Hands Off Cuba” leaflets, FPCC literature that he had received from New York, and yellow application forms for his Fair Play for Cuba “chapter” to such sailors and civilians as happened to come off the boat. Approached by Harbor Patrolman Girod Ray and asked whether he had a permit, Lee replied that he did not and he had no need of one. He was within his rights distributing leaflets anywhere he liked. Patrolman Ray informed him that he was on property of the New Orleans Port Authority and that a permit was, indeed, required. Either he must show a permit or be arrested.
Lee Harvey Oswald left.17
— 28 —
Castro and Kennedy
Lee Oswald’s interest in Castro was not new. As early as the fall of 1958, when he was barely nineteen and was stationed in the Marine Corps at El Toro, California, after his tour of duty in the Far East, he was already cheering Castro on. Castro was not yet in power at the time. He was leading a guerrilla band in the Sierra Maestre, fighting to overthrow the Cuban dictatorship.
Oswald had a friend in the Marine Corps named Nelson Delgado, a New Yorker of Hispanic extraction. Over Christmas of 1958 Delgado went on leave. When he returned, just after January 1, 1959, Castro was the ruler of Cuba. “Well,” Oswald greeted him, “you took a leave and went there and helped them, and they all took over.”1
Castro was hailed when he visited America four months after he came to power. He was received by the secretary of state and acclaimed as a hero in a huge rally at Harvard University. Castro had not yet embraced Communism. As for Oswald, he told Delgado that he mistrusted both the Communist and the American forms of government. He thought that Castro was the pioneer who would show the way. He was what a revolutionary hero ought to be.
That spring Oswald and Delgado talked about going to Cuba. They and the other men in the barracks had heard of an army enlisted man named Morgan who became a legend because he quit the US Army with a dishonorable discharge, fought under Castro in the Escambres, and came out a Cuban Army major. Oswald and Delgado thought they would have a head start. They would have honorable discharges, and between Delgado’s knowledge of Spanish and Oswald’s ideas about government, which seemed to fit with those of Castro, things might go well for them in Cuba. The idea of becoming an officer had great appeal for them both.
“We could go over there and become officers and lead an expedition to some of these other islands and free them, too,” Delgado explained long afterward.2 One of the ideas they had was to “do away with Trujillo” and free the Dominican people.
But Delgado was only talking—Oswald meant what he said. Very soon he was “making plans.” He peppered Delgado with questions about how they could get to Cuba and become part of the revolutionary movement. On Delgado’s advice Oswald bought a Spanish-English dictionary and started studying Spanish. Delgado also suggested that Oswald contact the Cuban Embassy, he assured him there was nothing subversive about it because the United States was on friendly terms with Cuba. And there is evidence that Oswald actually did contact the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles in hopes of getting into Cuba.3 But when the men in the barracks discussed where they would seek refuge if ever they were in trouble at home, Oswald never hesitated: Russia would be his place of refuge.4
As the months went by and Castro started arresting political opponents, Delgado cooled off on Cuba. Not Oswald. He held stubbornly to his faith, claiming that Castro was getting a bad press and that “in all new governments, some errors have to occur.” Delgado had the impression that the rumors of arrests and executions were, if anything, making Oswald “more reverent” toward Castro.5
Oswald did not go to Cuba, but to the Soviet Union instead. Once he was disappointed there, Cuba seemed all the more like a truly revolutionary country, like Russia before it went wrong, before bureaucratic ossification set in. In his eyes Castro was still what a revolutionary hero ought to be. Besides, Cuba was small, beleaguered, an underdog. With all these things Oswald was in sympathy.
Once again he had come full circle. Four years earlier he had thought about gaining Castro’s trust and joining his revolution. Now, in the summer of 1963, he was thinking about the same thing. His effort to establish a chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans appears to have been two-pronged, both an attempt to change American policy toward Cuba by peaceful political action at the grassroots level and an attempt to win the trust of the Castro government.
Lee Oswald needed a social system to idealize, and that for the moment was Cuba. He also needed a hero with whom he could identify; that hero was Fidel Castro.
The pseudonym a man uses, his alias, tells a good deal about him and whom he would like to be. Lee Oswald’s alias, the only one he ever used consistently, was Alik James Hidell. “Alik” was, of course, the name Oswald’s fellow workers had given him in Minsk. “Alik” was Oswald himself at a period in his life when he liked himself better than usual.
There is no “James” who is known to have meant anything to Oswald in real life. But the name may have been taken from James Bond, the fictional hero created by Ian Fleming, whose novels Oswald read with enjoyment. Bond is a spy, as Oswald often said he would like to be, and he had the altogether miraculous quality of extricating himself from every danger. James Bond was, indeed, at the center of a magic circle of invulnerability, just as Lee supposed himself to be, especially after his attempt on General Walker and his own miraculous escape.
“Hidell” is, however, the most suggestive part of the alias. As often happens, the idea for the name probably came to Oswald from several sources. In Atsugi, Japan, he had known a fellow Marine who hailed, as he did, from New Orleans, and whose name was John Rene Heindell, nicknamed “Hidell.”6 But his reasons for choosing the name lie much deeper. S
ince the purpose of an alias is to hide one’s identity, the name “Hidell,” pronounced with a long “i,” has an exquisite economy, defining its use, “hide,” to perfection. But if the “i” is pronounced as a long “e,” the name becomes “Heedell,” a simple rhyme of Fidel. It was Marina who first spotted the similarity, for in Russian the letter “i” is pronounced as a long “e,” and in the Russian alphabet the consonant “kh” or “h,” as in “Hidell” comes immediately after “ph” or “f,” as in “Fidel.”
The beauty of “Alik James Hidell,” then, is that it held within it Oswald’s Russian name, “Alik,” linked it with the magical properties of James Bond, and made Oswald one with his hero, Fidel.
Lee used both his own name and his alias on his leaflets and handbills. He bought two boxes of metal letters and put them together to form stamps. When Marina first saw him making the stamps, she scornfully called it his “jewelry work.” On some of the leaflets he stamped: “L. H. Oswald, 4907 Magazine Street,” and on others: “A. J. Hidell, P. O. Box 30016.”7 At first he was reluctant to let Marina see what he was doing, but one day, the second or third week in June, he proposed a trip to the zoo, then backed out of it, and Marina went alone with the baby. Returning sooner than he expected, they found him in the living room with handbills—Marina calls them “papers”—spread out all over the coffee table. Taken by surprise, Lee hesitated guiltily, then started to put his “papers” away. Marina asked why he was hiding them.
Lee put on a special, wheedling voice, a mixture of pleading and baby talk. “Do you like Cuba?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you like Uncle Fidel?”
“Yes.”
“Well, these papers will help make people be on the side of Cuba. Do you want them attacking little Cuba?”
“No,” Marina said, “and you don’t have to hide them from me, either. Sit there and play your childish games.”
Marina and Lee Page 51
