Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  Former Kennedy aide (later a senator) Harris Wofford observed, “As the President turned more and more to his brother, and together John and Robert Kennedy committed themselves to counter-insurgency, covert action, and increased military effort as a way to counteract the Cuban defeat. . . I wondered what whirlwind they would reap.”161

  That whirlwind, in fact, would include a decades-long coverup of the Kennedys’ provocative foreign policies. It also included among its debris a young, emotionally vacant Castro admirer who sought a place in history. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

  OSWALD

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE CHILD IS THE FATHER TO THE MAN

  “Lee Harvey Oswald was born in October, 1939 in New Orleans, La. the son of a Insurance Salesmen whose early death left a far mean streak of independence brought on by neglect.”

  —Lee Harvey Oswald about himself, from his manuscript “The Collective” (misspellings in original)

  “Lee Harvey Oswald is. . . not. . . an easy man to explain.”

  —G. Robert Blakey, former Chief Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations1

  Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who would kill John Kennedy and help produce, unknowingly, the most massive coverup in U.S. history, was nothing less than an enigma. George DeMohrenschildt, one of Oswald’s only friends in the later years of his life, once characterized Lee Oswald as “the most honest man I knew.” At other times, he severely disparaged Oswald as a “mixed-up. . . unstable. . . semi-educated hillbilly.”

  It was a dichotomy that well-characterizes the man. Others, too, have spoken highly of the infamous assassin. Nelson Delgado, a Marine corporal who once shared a cubicle in a Quonset hut with Oswald, was impressed by Oswald’s intelligence and how he used it to cut officers down to size. Delgado, a Puerto Rican, also liked Oswald for treating him as an equal. In 1959, an airline stewardess met Oswald and was charmed by his intellectual curiosity and ability to admit areas where he had no knowledge or experience. To that woman, who had a long talk with the 20-year-old Marine, he seemed to be “totally guileless.”2 Another Marine, James Botelho, with whom Oswald roomed for six months, called him “the best roommate I ever had. . . an honest, scrupulously loyal gentleman.” “You couldn’t find a better friend,” says James Botelho. “If you dropped a five-dollar bill, he would return it, even though he was always broke. . .[He was] the most patriotic American in history.”3

  Ed Butler, the host of a New Orleans radio show on which Oswald appeared in 1963, was impressed with Oswald’s ability to think on his feet and to hold his own “against great odds” in a debate with much older, more skillful opponents. The self-educated Oswald, Butler remembers, tended to use words like “superfluous” without knowing the correct pronunciation. Still, he was “nobody’s fool and certainly not the image that most Americans still have of a patsy. He was a formidable character [with] a lot more ability than most people give him credit for.”4

  Every observer agrees that Oswald genuinely loved his children—and other children too, with whom he sometimes played peacefully and generously.5 Speaking of the time before his second daughter was born, Priscilla McMillan, author of Marina and Lee, called his first daughter June the “happiest and best” thing in his life. McMillan, Marina’s biographer, would write, “June was the one person he lived for and whom he loved, and he played with her every night when he put her to bed. He also played with her during the day. When he was doing exercises to practice going to Cuba, she ran after him and laughed. . .”6

  A neighbor, whose son played together with Lee and his daughter June, observed how pleased Lee was by his second baby. “I didn’t feel he was pleased to have the children just as an extension of himself. He paid real attention to them.”7

  On the morning of the assassination, Lee left a note for Marina before going to work. It said that he had left some money on the bureau, and that she should be sure to buy shoes for the children.

  All this suggests that the initial depiction of Oswald as a simple-minded murderer—a characterization that generally persists in America’s mainstream press8—is itself simple-minded. But if Oswald’s “positive” qualities impressed some, his negative ones struck a much larger number. The history of his young life provides fertile ground for developing those negative qualities. While it goes without saying that not every difficult childhood engenders a capacity to kill, it does provide a framework in which to understand the adult Oswald.

  Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?

  “I dislike everybody.”

  —Lee Oswald at age 13 (1953), to his court-appointed psychiatrist9

  Oswald was born in October 1939. His mother, Marguerite, was a pretty, popular girl from a poor but apparently stable New Orleans family. Like her son, she was a one-parent child. Her mother died when she was two years old.10

  Lee’s father, an insurance premium collector named Robert Lee Oswald, died suddenly two months before his birth. Marguerite was viewed by his horrified family as cold and selfish because she decided against having a funeral for him. A funeral, she told them, would take time away from her and the baby she was carrying. That baby would be named Lee Harvey Oswald. The father’s family never spoke to Marguerite again.11

  Instability followed. Lee’s elder brother Robert recalls that family members thought of Lee as a “beautiful, adorable child.” An aunt who helped raise him would agree. But Lee’s childhood was a succession of wrenchings from one shaky home to another in New York, Louisiana, and Texas. The fragile youngster grew up in a relentless series of household moves, no less than thirteen of them before he was ten years old. Virtually everyone who knew Marguerite Oswald blames Lee’s mental state on her dysfunctional parenting.

  Marguerite had two other sons, Robert and John Pic, Lee’s half-brother from an earlier marriage that ended in divorce. Those two other boys may have turned out with a healthier mental profile because, during their formative years, they benefited from having a father figure. Lee wasn’t so fortunate. Often plunged into poverty, sometimes on the edge of panic, Marguerite transferred her family from one house or apartment to another, often “prison-like,” as characterized by one of the brothers. As their living conditions spiraled downward, gloom took over, and rootless young Lee spent hours in lonely brooding. The uncertainty, as Gerald Posner recently wrote with admirable understatement, “prevented Lee from ever settling into a single neighborhood and school.”

  Another mother might have provided more stability, but Marguerite had little emotional reservoir from which to draw to cope with her family problems on her own—and too much disagreeableness to sustain another marriage. She gave her boys mixed signals, alternating between wild abandonment (leaving them with relatives or in orphanages), coddling-and-spoiling, and dominating them. Self-absorbed, and groping for security, she had the emotional development of a spoiled child. Jealous and resentful of people who had better luck and easier lives, the self-pitying woman quarreled with friends and neighbors, blaming others for her troubles and nursing a sense of abject persecution.

  After the Kennedy assassination, John Pic ventured that Lee, if guilty, had received “a little extra push from his mother in the living conditions that she presented to him.”12 Lee’s brothers would remember their mother as lacking maternal love, but possessing an inclination to try to control them: a woman with whom it was difficult to live. The “little extra push” she may have given him was a tendency to lie and dissemble. A Secret Service agent who was on the team that held her in protective custody just after the assassination learned that she would help herself get nursemaid jobs by dressing in a uniform with a small Red Cross—and bragging about her training. This made Robert Oswald, Lee’s full brother, laugh, since this “nurse” never had a day of training in her life.

  Robert Oswald has volunteered considerable information about his mother’s tendency to fancy herself someone other than who she was. Marguerite, he would recall, “had the same type of imagination [as Lee]. She could become someb
ody from New York real easy when she’s [actually] from Texas, putting on airs.” According to Robert, his mother also bred another tendency in Lee. She nurtured in him a feeling of abiding grievance—a grudge at having been dealt a bad deal by the world, which withheld from her what she thought was properly due. Robert poignantly recalled to a Secret Serviceman that when Lee was a toddler, Marguerite would rock him in her lap in a rocking chair—and carp about the dishonesty of government. She was convinced the government was cheating her out of a veteran’s pension for Lee’s father. “If the government had paid me as they should have, we wouldn’t have all these problems now,” she would say.13

  John Pic, Lee’s half-brother, remembers how Lee was nonetheless special in his mother’s eyes. While the two older brothers slept in a screened-in porch, Lee slept in his mother’s bed. Pic says, “Lee slept with my mother until [he was] almost eleven years old.”14 Evelyn Strickman Siegel, the social worker who once was called on to analyze Lee, couldn’t help but analyze Marguerite, writing, “I honestly don’t think that she sees him as a person at all but simply an extension of herself.” Her interview with Marguerite led her to conclude: “She was defensive, rigid, selfish and very much a snob.”15 Reviewers of Marguerite’s biography (A Mother in History by Jean Stafford) drew conclusions like, “Mrs. Oswald is as grotesque a character as one can find,”16 and “a woman sick with a spiritual and emotional malignancy.”17 They could have been describing the adult Lee Oswald.

  If an even more twisted home life were needed to explain Oswald’s convoluted development, it is found in an orphanage where Marguerite placed Lee when he was three years old. One writer recently called the atmosphere of the Bethlehem Children’s Home “relaxed” and Lee’s two-year stay there “uneventful.” But Allen Campbell, who was in the institution at the same time, described its conditions as “deplorable. . . We were fed water and four-day-old bread for breakfast.”18

  Campbell also described the Bethlehem Home as “a house of horrors” that “severely affected not only me but also Lee and the other children who were there at the time.” The chief horror arrived when the girl residents, upon turning 16, were sexually molested by the priest who headed the orphanage. Terrified of being killed, the girls asked some boys to watch, which they did from a hiding place in a crawl space. It was, Campbell says, “the only defense mechanism the girls had. . . . We would watch to make sure that this individual didn’t kill those girls after he raped them.” Incredibly, four-and a-half-year-old Lee Oswald was among the group of boys who saw the atrocities first-hand. Witnessing the rapes “shattered” Lee. Campbell continues:

  He was up in the crawl space with two other people and it was demoralizing, it was depressing, it was scary. We cried at the end of it but it was something we had to do because of the girls. They were our friends and we were the only defense they had. I know it affected all of us tremendously. We would go into a state of depression for days and days after. . . It affected me, it affected Lee, it affected the other two boys. Its indescribable. You’d have to be mere to know how bad it was.19

  Ruth Paine, a woman who would later befriend Oswald’s future wife, had an opportunity to observe Oswald during the months just prior to the assassination because he occasionally visited her at her home in suburban Dallas.20 Though she lacked formal training in analysis, as well as the details of his childhood, she arrived at the conclusion that Lee’s childhood had badly scarred him. She felt this way about Marina too, whom she knew better because they would live together for months at a time. (Lee’s visits were shorter.) Interviewed in later years, Paine opined:

  From what I know now, as somebody who’s studied psychology since then, I really feel that both Lee and Marina were abused children. I think that Lee was very injured emotionally early on. He didn’t really understand—or know or feel—love in a normal way. . . And Marina was very abused as a child. Some of the ways she reacted to him—her tolerance of the way he behaved and her thinking it was something she’d done wrong or that she wasn’t good enough—was also the behavior of a grown-up who’d been abused as a child.21

  Oswald’s thirteen childhood moves were in Louisiana and Texas, most of them in and around New Orleans, Dallas, and Fort Worth. The fourteenth was to New York City. In August 1952, Marguerite took herself and thirteen-year-old Lee from Fort Worth to Manhattan, depositing themselves with Lee’s elder stepbrother John Pic, who had joined the Coast Guard and was stationed in New York. The cramped little apartment quickly filled with tension. Soon after the Oswalds’ arrival, Pic’s wife of one year asked Lee to lower the volume of the television set. The teenager responded by threatening her with a knife. His mother rushed into the room and told him to put the knife away. He punched her in the face. The Pics asked them both to leave.22 Marguerite moved again with her troubled boy, this time to a one-room apartment in a Bronx basement.

  Lee’s year and a half in New York was disastrous for his emotional development. Some evidence suggests that before that profoundly alienating experience, he had at least a hope of overcoming his severely disadvantaged childhood, despite the effects of the orphanage. Lee had attended the Ridglea West Elementary School for three years, longer than any other school in his life—before moving to New York. One of his Ridglea teachers would remember him as deeply introverted and friendless.23 But at least one Fort Worth friend, Pat O’Connor, would remember Lee as a “normal kid [who] liked to do the normal-type things”—movies, ball-playing, swimming at swimming holes, spending the night at a friend’s house. O’Connor described Lee and himself as “very good friends.” He considered Lee to have “a good personality” and was of the opinion that “everybody liked him.” “He was a regular kid. You’d have never known he didn’t have the same aspirations as everyone else had.” O’Connor also observed a “very smart young man. . .[who] seemed to stand out above the rest of us.”

  If Lee’s aspirations did differ, it was because they were wider and higher. He loved to read. When a book-mobile visited the school, Lee was the first in line to use it and make his choice of books. O’Connor perceived Lee to be a leader, whom “everyone” enjoyed and looked up to. But he saw a noticeably different boy when Lee returned from New York24—as did others: now he was more withdrawn, more bruised, more arrogant.

  No wonder. Even for a single-parented adolescent partially inured to the trauma of being plucked from one neighborhood and dropped into another one, the New York months were an emotional nightmare. A Bronx probation officer came to the conclusion, which tests appeared to confirm, that Lee had no deep-seated psychiatric problems, although he often had become angry and disruptive in school. He was having “an adjustment problem.” In a recent interview, the officer stated, “Oswald didn’t like school. He didn’t like the boys there. He felt it was a waste of time. He wasn’t doing well. He said he had more important things he could do.”25

  A social worker at a New York Youth House prepared a diagnostic report on Oswald. She remembers him as “a skinny kid dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket. No kids in New York wore that in those days.”26 She too found no deep-seated mental problem:

  He was not a mentally disturbed kid. As a matter of fact, his IQ was better than average. He was just emotionally frozen. He was a kid who had never developed a really trusting relationship with anybody. . . Our feeling was that unless he got therapy. . . he would have to be placed in a home, a school for juvenile delinquents. He needed therapy very badly.

  Both the probation officer and social worker had involved themselves with young Oswald because of his chronic truancy in the New York junior high school. Absent 47 of 64 school days, he was failing most of his courses. Instead of going to school, where his southern accent and Texas clothes were targets for mockery, he stayed home and read, or prowled the city by subway and on foot.

  The probation officer and social worker agreed that Lee’s anti-social behavior grew from a sense of detachment that deprived him of the ability to express normal emotions. The social wo
rker blamed the boy’s mother. She saw little of her, but little was enough to convince her that the “very self-absorbed” Marguerite was a substantial part of Lee’s problem. The “very smartly dressed, gray-haired woman” struck the social worker as “detached herself. . . not a warm person. . . She seemed to me to have very little emotional feeling for any of her kids”—and was “clearly annoyed” by the city’s attempts to help Lee, which she took as interference in her life. The probation officer put it more directly. He felt Marguerite “may have been as disturbed as the boy,” so preoccupied with herself that the officer doubted that “she really had an awareness as to the boy’s own problems and fears.”27

  Still another professional assigned to Lee, psychiatrist Dr. Renatus Hartogs, made the conclusions unanimous, writing, “Lee has to be diagnosed as personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies. . . . an emotionally quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life, and rejection by a self-involved and conflicted mother. . . .[He is] a seriously detached, withdrawn youngster. . .”28

  Marguerite left the basement apartment every day around seven o’clock in the morning and returned at seven in the evening, leaving Lee to fend for himself during the entire day. Instead of receiving “very badly” needed therapy, “you got the feeling of a kid nobody gave a darn about. He was just floating along in the world with no emotional resources at all,” says Lee’s brother Robert, commenting on this period. “Mother was working all the time. Lee had no brothers around, no father figure around, no adult he was acquainted with that he could talk to and rely on. He was on his own,” Robert says. “To me, mother and Lee did not belong in New York. They belonged in Fort Worth or New Orleans.”