16. Letters from Gladys A. Yoakum to the author, April 6 and May 6, 1973; May 24, 1975.
17. Exhibit No. 97, Vol. 16, pp. 422–430. This is probably the most significant document Oswald ever wrote, revealing both his emotions and his political ideas. It is striking for its apocalyptic, megalomaniacal tone, and the reader almost has to conclude that the author was possessor of the “narcissistic” personality described in Ernest Jones’s famous essay “The God Complex” (Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis by Ernest Jones [London], pp. 204–226). Politically, the author denounces both the US and Soviet systems and the US Communist Party; but his primary concern appears to be destruction of the capitalist system in the United States and its future replacement. Although written before the Walker attempt, the document looks forward to Oswald’s own future. It gives a better idea than anything else he wrote of what appears to have been his conscious purpose in killing President Kennedy, and of the resigned, stoical, and yet exalted spirit in which he went about it.
18. Exhibit No. 98, Vol. 16, pp. 431–434.
19. It has been stated that Sunday, March 31, 1963, was overcast and that conditions were not bright enough for Marina to have taken the photographs of Oswald with his guns. According to weather charts supplied by the National Climatic Center, Asheville, North Carolina, that described conditions at Love Field Observatory, 5½ miles northwest of downtown Dallas, there were high thin clouds during much of that day, but there would have been no difficulty taking pictures at any time that afternoon.
Chapter 24. Walker
1. Testimony of John G. Graef, Vol. 10, p. 189.
2. Ibid., pp. 189–190.
3. Ibid., pp. 190–191.
4. Oswald’s time sheets, Exhibit 1856, Vol. 23, p. 621.
5. There is another reason Oswald may have wanted to be fired, although there is no evidence that he thought of it. On the day after shooting General Walker, he would be the most hunted man in Dallas and it might have been dangerous for him to show up for work. On the other hand, he had never missed a day at work, and failure to show up might have been dangerous, too.
6. Testimony of Dennis Hyman Ofstein, Vol. 10, p. 203.
7. Testimony of Everett D. Glover, Vol. 10, pp. 15–30.
8. Conversation with Michael R. Paine, August 1973.
9. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 393 ff.
10. Ibid., p. 403.
11. Once again Oswald’s timing was remarkable. He had been fired from his job and knew that he would be making his attempt on Walker within a few days. Marina and June might soon need help, and once he had been at the Paines’, he saw that they were in a position to help and might be disposed to do so. Marina has said that “from the moment he met Ruth, Lee think only how to use her,” and indeed, in his “Walker note” only a few days later, Oswald told Marina that they had “friends” who would help. After the Kennedy assassination, he used the same words and made plain to his brother Robert that the friends he was referring to were the Paines (Robert Oswald, op. cit., pp. 144–145).
It is also noteworthy that from the moment he returned to the United States, Oswald always had help from outsiders when he needed it: from his mother and the Robert Oswalds, the Russian émigrés, the Paines, the Murrets. The one time he was completely on his own was, interestingly, the one time he did not need help, while he was working at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, October 12 to April 6. It is uncanny that the Paines should have entered his life, together, on April 2, one day after he was fired.
12. The Warren Commission investigated data about bus routes, practice sites, and places where ammunition could be bought but did not put forward a definite theory about where or when Oswald practiced.
13. Exhibit No. 2694, Vol. 26, pp. 58–62.
14. Warren Commission Report, p. 192; Testimony of Sergeant James A. Zahm, Vol. 11, p. 308. Robert Oswald, who taught his brother how to shoot and had a similar Marine Corps record, noted that his marksmanship was only “average” when the two went small-game hunting in the summer of 1962, after Oswald’s return from Russia, because he was unfamiliar with the .22 he was using. But providing his brother had enough practice, Robert believes that he was capable of the feats attributed to him. While Oswald may have practiced only on April 3 and 5, he could also have practiced all or part of April 7 to 10.
15. Conversations with Marina Oswald Porter plus Exhibit No. 2694, Vol. 26, pp. 59, 60, and No. 1156, Vol. 22, p. 197.
16. Both de Mohrenschildts remembered that this episode occurred during their visit to the Oswalds’ apartment on Saturday night, April 13. (For George’s recollection, see Vol. 9, p. 249; for Jeanne’s, see ibid., pp. 314–317.) However, the rifle was not in the apartment on April 13– Oswald dug it up only on April 14. Moreover, Jeanne remembered under cross-examination (Vol. 9, p. 315) that April 13 was not her first visit to the Oswalds’ apartment. She had been there once without George. It is also extremely unlikely that Marina would have shown the rifle to anyone after her husband’s attempt on Walker’s life. She was afraid of him and, certainly after April 10, would not have referred to him as “my crazy husband” in his presence or his hearing, as would have been the case had the episode occurred as late as April 13.
17. Exhibit No. 1953, Vol. 23, p. 768.
18. Telephone conversation with Major General Edwin A. Walker, August 19, 1975.
19. It is possible, and even likely, that Oswald made up the story about the church announcement. E. Owen Hansen, counselor of the church, confirmed that his church had services every Wednesday from 7:30 to 9:00 P.M. and was generally empty fifteen or twenty minutes later (Exhibit No. 1953, Vol. 23, p. 763). Oswald, who had been stalking the neighborhood, may have known this already. Moreover, no announcement of the sort Oswald described has been found in either of the major Dallas dailies for that week.
20. Exhibit No. 1401, Vol. 22, p. 757.
21. Oswald could have been looking for their new apartment that night, and he could have been watching General Walker, who left Dallas on February 28.
22. Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 16, pp. 1–2.
23. All through the time that Marina was growing up in Russia, there was a law on the statute books—an infamous law of 1934—that provided that a close relative of anyone suspected of a serious crime against the state is as liable for the crime as the suspect, whether or not the relative knew of the crime either before or after it was committed. The atmosphere created by this and other laws appears to have affected Marina from the moment she learned of her husband’s attempt on General Walker. Although she had neither known of his attempt in advance nor approved of it later, Marina appears to have felt that she was as guilty as he was. Her special feeling of guilt in the Walker affair lingered for months, even years, and it probably cannot be understood without knowledge of the Soviet laws of complicity that existed throughout almost the whole of her life in the USSR.
Chapter 25. Legacies
Sources
Conversations with Marina Oswald Porter and her testimony in the Warren Commission Hearings, Vols. 1, 5, and 11; and conversations with Katherine Ford, Declan P. Ford, and Samuel B. Ballen.
1. Exhibits No. 1401, Vol. 22, pp. 756–757, and No. 2521, Vol. 25, p. 730.
2. Marina reports him as saying much the same (ibid.).
3. The Walker bullet was never traced definitely to Oswald’s rifle, not even after the Kennedy assassination. (See Warren Commission Report, p. 562, and Exhibit No. 2001, Vol. 24, p. 39.)
4. Walker later denied the police theory that he moved his head at the last minute and accidentally saved his own life. Contrary to his own early testimony, he believes that Oswald fired a near-perfect shot. He was standing 120 feet away behind a stockade fence, but with a four-power sight, Walker appeared to be only 30 feet away, an easy target. Walker was not, however, sitting profiled in the window. Rather, he was well inside the room, facing out, “a side shot with a frontal angle,” he explains. Firing under nighttime conditions, Oswald was at the mercy of the lighting, and the
angles of light and shadow, distorted by the lenses of his sight, could have thrown off his aim. He appears, however, to have had a perfect bead on his target; but with light flooding the room outside as well as in, he was unable to see the window frame. Thus the bullet was flying straight at Walker when it hit strips of window casing and was deflected. Walker at first thought that a firecracker had exploded directly above his head. Then he saw the hole in the window frame, felt bits of wood and glass in his hair, and saw bits of copper casing in his arm. (Testimony of Major General Edwin A. Walker, Vol. 11, pp. 405–410; letter from General Walker to the author, undated but postmarked May 15, 1974; and telephone conversation of General Walker and the author, August 19, 1975.)
5. Although Marina was in no way culpable for keeping silent after her husband’s attempt to kill Walker, advising him to destroy evidence might, under the Texas penal code of 1974, render her culpable on two counts: accessory to attempted murder; and accomplice to the crime of destroying evidence. The present code was not in effect in 1963, however, and, indeed, the code then in effect gave a spouse immunity from being convicted for a crime committed by his or her partner.
6. Testimony of George S. de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 249.
7. Ibid., p. 250.
8. Testimony of Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, pp. 317–318.
9. A description of the bundle, the way the photograph was placed in it, and the inscription was given to the author by Pat S. Russell, Jr., de Mohrenschildt’s attorney, in a telephone conversation on April 21, 1977, after de Mohrenschildt’s death, and a copy of the photograph, with inscriptions, was subsequently sent to the author by Mr. Russell. Some persons have questioned the authenticity of de Mohrenschildt’s “find,” suggesting that he placed the inscriptions there himself. There appears to be no truth to this. De Mohrenschildt immediately told friends about his discovery. In a letter of April 17, 1967, George de Mohrenschildt wrote to George McMillan, husband of the author, that he had come into possession of some “very interesting information” about Oswald since his return to the United States, and on June 22, 1968, he invited George McMillan and the author to visit him in Dallas to discuss “some interesting material on Oswald plus a message [de Mohrenschildt’s italics] from him we discovered in our luggage.”
10. On May 4, 1963, Oswald was in New Orleans and Marina was staying with Ruth Paine in Irving, Texas. Marina does not drive a car and has no recollection of returning a bundle to the de Mohrenschildts with or without Ruth. Indeed, the de Mohrenschildts were out of town. Oswald, however, had taken all the family’s belongings with him to New Orleans, except for Marina’s clothes and the baby’s things. The package thus appears to have been mailed by Oswald from New Orleans.
11. Conversation with Samuel B. Ballen, November 28, 1964.
12. In a paper presented at the Midwestern meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Chicago, November 15–17, 1968, Dr. James W. Hamilton, a psychiatrist at the Yale University Medical School, notes the parricidal overtones of the Walker attempt and points out that Walker’s first name and initial, “Edwin A.,” were the same as those of Oswald’s stepfather, Edwin A. Ekdahl, whom Hamilton described as the “paternal surrogate who disappointed him.”
13. It is possible that Oswald handed out pro-Castro leaflets before the Walker attempt, on April 8, 9, or 10, not after, hoping perhaps to be picked up by the Dallas police before he could take Walker’s life. Given his intense preoccupation with his plan, however, it is more likely that he demonstrated after the attempt. Oswald’s letter to the F.P.C.C. is undated, and the only reference to time is the statement that “I stood yesterday …” A notation at the bottom of the letter, which was later found in the F.P.C.C.’s files, indicates that the pamphlets Oswald requested were sent on April 19. Thus it seems unlikely that he could have demonstrated any later than Monday or Tuesday, April 15 or 16 (V. T. Lee Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 20, p. 511).
14. Testimony of John R. Hall, Vol. 8, p. 409.
15. Marina later remembered that she had seen Nixon in newsreels while she was living in Leningrad and that in 1959, in Minsk, she had watched the famous Khrushchev-Nixon “kitchen debate” in newsreels or on television.
Interlude and Part Four: New Orleans, Mexico City, Dallas, 1963
1. Testimony of Edward Voebel, Vol. 8, pp. 5, 7, and 13. Curiously, Lee’s aunt, Lillian Murret, uses identical words to explain Lee’s fights in Vol. 8, p. 119.
2. Testimony of Edward Voebel, Vol. 8, pp. 9–10.
3. Exhibit No. 1386, Vol. 22, pp. 710–711.
4. Ibid., p. 711.
5. Testimony of William Wulf, Vol. 8, p. 18.
6. Ibid., p. 21.
Chapter 26. Brief Separation
1. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 457–463.
2. Ibid., p. 448.
3. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 9, p. 460. Although Ruth apparently had already raised with Michael the idea of offering Marina a haven, I believe that Michael’s idea, as spelled out here, actually developed during the summer, after Marina’s stay at the Paines’ from April 24 to May 10, 1963.
4. Exhibit No. 422, Vol. 17, pp. 140–144.
5. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, pp. 348–349.
6. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, pp. 133–135.
7. Ibid., p. 128.
8. Testimony of Charles F. Murret, Vol. 8, p. 184.
9. Testimony of John Murret, Vol. 8, pp. 193–194.
10. Testimony of Marilyn Murret, Vol. 8, pp. 159, 160, 177, 178. Marilyn adds that even as a boy, Oswald always knew “he was somebody” and knew that “he was exceptionally intelligent” (Ibid., p. 177).
11. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 135.
12. Testimony of Marilyn Murret, Vol. 8, pp. 165–166.
13. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 136.
14. Exhibit No. 1919, Vol. 23, pp. 717–718, and No. 3119, Vol. 26, p. 765.
15. Exhibit No. 1927, Vol. 23, p. 722.
16. Exhibit No. 1919, Vol. 23, pp. 717–718.
17. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 136.
18. Exhibit No. 1945, Vol. 23, p. 745.
19. Exhibit No. 1144, Vol. 22, p. 162.
20. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 136.
21. Testimony of Myrtle Evans, Vol. 8, p. 58.
22. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 446, 447.
23. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, p. 370.
24. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, p. 509.
25. Ibid.
26. Exhibit No. 68A, Vol. 16, p. 228.
27. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, p. 396.
28. Pay later Marina did. According to a letter she wrote to Ruth in July, when she and Lee were living together in New Orleans, he had reproached her bitterly for even considering driving northeast with Ruth on vacation and gave it as still another example of Marina’s disloyalty to him. Marina added that it was one of the main bones of contention between them that summer.
29. In fact, Lee borrowed $30 or $40 from his uncle to make a first rental payment on his apartment. He repaid it promptly, after he had been at work a short time.
Chapter 27. Magazine Street
1. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 470–471.
2. In a speech on April 19, 1963, President Kennedy, in what was actually an effort to soften demands for a new invasion of Cuba, predicted that “in five years’ time” it was very likely Castro would no longer be the ruler of Cuba and, in the long run, the United States would be seen to have contributed to the result. In the Militant of April 29, 1963, a writer named William Bundy reported a statement by Robert Kennedy on April 22: “We can’t just snap our fingers and make Castro go away. But we can fight for this. We can dedicate all our energy and best possible brains to that effort.” Read from hindsight, with knowledge that the Kennedy administration was engaged in assassination plots against Castro, the two speeches, so closely timed together, suggest that not only Robert Kennedy and
others high in the administration but also the president himself were aware of these plots. At the time, however, no one read these speeches in that light, the public question being whether there would be a second US invasion. As nearly as can be ascertained, Oswald knew nothing about any US assassination plots against Castro but was worried about an invasion.
3. A list of books borrowed by Oswald from the New Orleans Public Library, the main library and the Napoleon Branch, appears in Vol. 25, Warren Commission Report, pp. 929–931. A reason Oswald borrowed the Payne biography may be another article in the Militant, this one by William F. Warde on p. 5 of the April 29, 1963, issue. Warde discussed the possibility that Castro had become disillusioned with the Russians, suggested that he might soon visit China, and concluded that whatever Castro’s feelings about the Russians, “he has not become a Maoist either.” The possibility of Castro’s going to China may have kindled Oswald’s desire to read about Mao. Further, he probably identified himself with Mao, another revolutionary hero whom Payne describes as “a new kind of man: one of those who singlehandedly construct whole civilizations”—Robert Payne, Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung (New York: Abelard, 1961). Either Oswald saw himself as that kind of man, or else he wished to become so.
4. V. T. Lee Exhibit No. 2, Vol. 20, pp. 512–513.
5. Exhibits No. 1410, Vol. 22, pp. 796–797, 798–799, and No. 2543, Vol. 25, p. 770.
6. Exhibits No. 1411, Vol. 22, pp. 800–802 (including photographs of the application forms and membership cards), and No. 2548, Vol. 25, p. 773.
7. V. T. Lee Exhibit No. 3, Vol. 20, pp. 514–516.
Marina and Lee Page 76
