Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  The court-appointed professionals added that both son and mother belonged on a psychiatrist’s couch, but Mrs. Oswald wouldn’t hear of it. Lee’s older brother, Robert, rightly concludes, “If she had faced it, if she had seen to it that Lee received the help he needed, I don’t think the world would ever have heard of Lee Harvey Oswald.”29

  Oswald also began to exhibit a tendency for violence when his very nasty temper erupted. Once, he chased his half-brother with a butcher knife, then hurled it at him. A Fort Worth neighbor, where the Oswald’s would soon move, thought him not only quick to anger but also “a bad kid. . . vicious almost.”30 Baby-sitters hired by the mother would also refer to Lee as a bad child and quickly refuse another baby-sitting job.

  In his wanderings, Oswald encountered something that would quickly channel him towards a radical turning. If fate is the cards one is dealt and destiny is how one plays them, this was a classic illustration of both: a chance happening that would have hardly affected a better nourished ego; an accident that assumed critical importance because it seemed to light a path from emotional emptiness toward explanation and fulfillment.

  The Emergence of Oswald’s “Politics”

  ‘‘Oswald turned to politics because of a lack of happiness, of achievement, of knowing what to fill his life with. A man who knows he can do something but has nothing to do.. At creates a terrible tension if he realizes this dilemma: this tremendous energy he has, this will power—and no achievement”

  —Volkmar Schmidt, an acquaintance of Oswald in Fort Worth

  “[Oswald’s] interest in Communism may have grown out of the desire to be knowledgeable about something about which a lot of other people weren’t knowledgeable.”

  —Dr. Dale Cameron, psychiatrist, testifying before the Warren Commission, June 23, 196431

  From his earliest years, Lee Harvey Oswald had been fond of dissembling. A compulsive liar, he lied about little things, even when it served no discernible purpose except, perhaps, to treat himself to the satisfaction of asserting his will and merit by fooling others. His elder brother Robert would conclude that Lee used intrigue as a way of escaping the drabness of his young life—which would have seemed all the more unfortunate to those who saw how “beautiful” and “adorable” the pristine child had been. In any case, Lee grew up wanting to “be something different, something unique,”32 as Robert Oswald would put it. He also developed a passion for secrets, mystery, and role-playing. As a boy, he loved a radio program called “Let’s Pretend.” While his brother and half-brother were off doing more physically active things, Lee immersed himself in what Robert would call his “fantasy life.” “I think he just liked the atmosphere where you could do anything you wanted to, or could imagine you could do anything. . . . He seemed to really get involved with it and hang on to it after the programs were over.”33

  In the late 1940’s, when Lee was ten or eleven years old, television, in the form of a small black-and-white set, made its debut in the Oswald home. His favorite program was “I Led Three Lives,” based on the exploits of an FBI informant who posed as a communist spy. Robert Oswald remembers Lee watching it intensely when he, Robert, left the home to join the Marine Corps in 1952. “My opinion of what he got out of ‘I Led Three Lives’ and other programs with a similar nature was the fact that he could put on a facade and pretend to be somebody he wasn’t.” Robert would later consider the meaning for Lee:

  It probably opened up a new world for him. . .[where] you could appear to be something, then appear to be somebody else. . . To me, that was a training ground. . . If you’re playing “Cowboys and Indians,” you stop being the cowboys and the Indians when you stop playing. But with Lee, with the “I Led Three Lives” type show, he was still being somebody even though the show was over, the game was over. He still played another role.

  As an adult, his favorite show became “The Fugitive,” a television series about a man always on the run because he was wrongly accused of murdering his wife. Also as an adult, he was fascinated with the “James Bond” spy novels, and when he would return from his Soviet stay, his reading would include How to Be a Spy. In the Marines, he studied the Russian language. When playing chess, he used red pieces to represent the Red Army. For those reasons, some fellow Marines would call him a Russian spy—which he liked.34

  But now, in New York, he took his first steps in this new direction. A pamphlet was handed to him as he wandered through the city. It described the Rosenberg case, still very fresh in the memory of many Americans. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were two American citizens executed in June 1953, for passing atomic secrets to Soviet agents.35 In this—the protest against what seemed a hideous injustice perpetrated by an ungenerous authority—Oswald found a cause. It was the far left wing, specifically, that organized and led the protests against the Rosenberg convictions. Oswald’s brother Robert reasons that “the appeal to Lee of something like Marxism, communism, socialism would be something different, something unique.”

  But it was more. It was a way for Lee to ameliorate his sense of hurt with acceptance, praise, recognition, admiration. “I think Lee Harvey Oswald. . . was looking for acceptance in some way, shape or form, and never could achieve it in what he called a capitalist system,” a fellow Marine would remember.36 “Being himself, he’s not going to have acceptance in what he calls a capitalist world, and so he has to turn to something else.” Oswald himself said that he was like “a very religious man opening the Bible for the first time” when he made his first acquaintance with Marxist literature, soon after leaving New York. This was a new, much more promising kind of fantasy. It was fantasy mixed with what seemed to Lee the reality of the socialist world—which, by definition, was supposedly the opposite of the capitalist world. By attaching himself to that other, better world, Oswald could unify his wants with universal problems. He could imagine a much finer life and much more comfortable mental state than he could from watching his favorite television programs about pretense.

  Rather than receive the help both she and her son desperately needed, Marguerite Oswald took Lee from New York and fled for New Orleans, where Lee attended a junior high school—his tenth school. By this point, he professed himself a communist. The appeal of Marxism varies considerably with each individual attracted to it. Lee would later explain he had been looking for “a key to my environment.”37 But if a single reason can explain his attachment to that alien belief—alien in the context of the overwhelming American fear and loathing of communism—it probably lay in his need to join a cause that would rescue him from his loneliness and hurt, and provide him what he sensed he had been deprived of in childhood. This profoundly lonely teenager craved recognition and appreciation; he needed to belong to something.

  Among the American adherents of Marxism-Leninism, he was hardly alone in those needs. It’s just that in the context of his personal problems, his attraction to the cause seems clearer than that of more intellectual believers. One of his young classmates, William Wulf, sensed Oswald had “a real identity problem” and “needed something to identify with”—which is why he “looked for something to belong to.” In his case, that something was a communist cell “to participate with and push the communist ideal.”38

  Wulf’s father had been an active social democrat in Hamburg, Germany following World War I, where he developed a strong dislike for communism. In the service of the Soviet Union’s nationalist interests, it had perverted socialism, he thought. Overhearing Lee’s praise of Soviet socialism, the father tried to explain its defects, but Lee would hear none of it. The teenager told the old man he didn’t know what he was talking about, and was ordered to leave his house.

  Young Wulf was struck by Oswald’s radicalism, and Oswald’s fascination with guns—which Wulf linked to “the whole idea of being an active communist if he could find some way to exhibit that activity.”39 At that time, in his New Orleans junior high school, Lee was indeed trying to acquire his own weapon—by stealing it. He made a careful plan to
snatch a revolver from a store window. He even produced a glasscutter, and persuaded another school friend to help him reconnoiter the premises. He dropped the plan only when the friend noticed the metal strip around the window that would trigger an alarm if the glass were broken.40

  Meanwhile, 15-year-old Oswald remained an outsider, “living in his own world,” as Edward Voebel, the co-conspirator in the plot to steal the revolver, noticed. Oswald also struck neighbors and acquaintances of his mother as difficult, arrogant, and sometimes unbearable. Voebel noticed his dislike for authority. He seemed “bitter” and believed life had given him a raw deal.41

  Lee’s commitment to what was generally practiced as communism endured from that point on. Some writers challenge this, but incorrectly. Like many who believed in Marxism-Leninism, Oswald, despite his reading from pamphlets and library books, understood little about the precepts of Lenin, let alone Marx. For instance, when he arrived in Moscow, the American Consul discovered, after some questions about fundamental Marxist tenets, that Oswald’s knowledge was rudimentary. Oswald also possessed a large dose of naiveté in these matters. He would later discuss with fellow marine Nelson Delgado the books he was reading, including George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and 1984. Oswald spoke of them as if they were pro-communist tracts, completely missing the point of the anti-communist satires.42

  But all that didn’t matter because Oswald’s commitment was far more emotional than intellectual. He became convinced that a better social system existed in which he would find a happier place—and be appreciated. His disillusionment with Soviet socialism would not change his basic vision of Marxism as a cure for his personal problems as well as for social injustice.

  In July 1956, Lee was relocated, for the twenty-first time in his sixteen years, when his mother trundled him off to Fort Worth, Texas. Soon, he would drop out of still another school, and appear interested in only two pursuits: communism, and escape from his mother. In October of that year, Oswald wrote a letter to the Socialist Party of America, stating, “I am sixteen years of age and would like more information about your youth League. . . I am a Marxist and have been studying Socialist principles for well over fifteen months”43 (pictured on following page).

  Simultaneously, Oswald joined the Marines. His decision to enlist in October of 1956 can be understood as an escape from what we know of Oswald’s desperately twisted home life. Virtually all the people who knew him as a child agree that his sole motive in signing up was to escape his dysfunctional situation. His enlistment had nothing to do with patriotism, and almost everything to do with his mother. The remarks of his brother and half-brother are typical. As noted by author Gerald Posner, Oswald’s half-brother John Pic stated: “He did it for the same reason that I did it and Robert did it. . . to get from out and under the yoke of oppression from my mother.” Even Robert admitted that Lee “had seen us escape from mother that way. To him, military life meant freedom.”44

  Oswald in the Marines: A Different Kind of Cuban Obsessive

  Oswald’s early Marine period, while stationed in various Pacific outposts, was noteworthy for only two reasons. His constant brushes with authority often resulted in disciplinary action against him, including a stint in the “brig.” (Dan Powers, a fellow Marine, characterized Oswald in this way: “I think just as. . . in any part of society that we live in today, there’s a certain amount of screwups in there—and he was one of the all-time screwups.”)45 Oswald also stood out in the Marines for his unabashed proselytizing of communism, especially the Cuban version,

  Following basic training and his time in the Pacific, Oswald was assigned to the Marine Corps Air Station at E1 Toro, California. There, he was a member of a radar crew of less than a dozen officers and men, one of whom was Owen Dejanovich. Dejanovich remembers Oswald as being entranced with Cuba:

  He used to talk quite a bit about Fidel Castro being a great leader and how the United States wasn’t treating him right. He talked about how Castro really needed Americans to go down there and help him, and how he wanted to go down and do that. He wanted to do anything he could to help Cuba. He went to the point of even dealing with one of the guys who lived in our barracks, Nelson Delgado, to have him teach him Spanish.46

  Corporal Nelson Delgado of Brooklyn, characterized by his commander as “very dependable,” did try to teach Oswald some Spanish. He and Oswald shared a Quonset hut cubicle and stood the same watches in a radar bubble—their job was aircraft surveillance. They had hours and hours to talk and they became good friends. They shared a mutual interest in Fidel Castro, who had won his first revolutionary battle at the beginning of 1957. Buoyed by his friend’s sympathy for Fidel, Oswald confided that he desperately wanted to go to Cuba and help train Castro’s army.47

  Oswald’s conversations and plans with Delgado deserve examination as evidence not only of his ardor for a revolutionary mission, but also of his ability to take at least some action in that direction. He kept talking about his desire to go to Cuba and fight for the noble cause there. Encouraging Delgado to join him, Oswald cited the example of a former American army sergeant named William Morgan, whom Castro personally commissioned a Major in his army after Morgan had arrived in Cuba and renounced his American citizenship. Morgan, as a Castro agent, lured anti-Castro rebels to Cuba and into various traps.48

  This was certainly in keeping with Oswald’s longstanding fascination with men who assumed double or triple identities and lived a life of seeming fantasy, lying and deceiving for a noble cause. There is every reason to believe that the thought of becoming a double agent for Castro—carrying out a mission of penetrating anti-Castro groups in order to serve Fidel—allured him, and would motivate some otherwise puzzling activities of his in New Orleans (where White House-sponsored anti-Castro activities had a base) during the summer before he shot President Kennedy.

  Oswald went so far as to press Delgado for ideas about how to make contact with revolutionary Cuba. Delgado suggested writing the Cuban Embassy in Washington, and soon noticed that Oswald, who until then had received very little mail, began getting letters several times a week. Some of them, he discovered while looking in his friend’s locker for a tie to borrow, bore the “unmistakable” seal of the Cuban Consulate.

  The two men began taking the bus to Los Angeles, a trip of about 90 minutes. In the city, Oswald would visit the Cuban Consulate, he revealed in time. Delgado “started getting scared” when he saw that Oswald was “actually making plans.”49 By this time, Castro, whose revolution originally appeared to be liberal-democratic, had begun declaring adherence to Marxism. He was derided in the American press. Oswald argued that the American media was highly propagandistic and distorted Castro’s position. It seems reasonable to question whether the 20-year-old Oswald, with his drive to make himself more important than he was, actually did make contact with the Cuban Consulate.

  There is evidence that he did. An American mercenary, Gerry Hemming, remembered (together with others) seeing an American in civilian clothes at the home of the Cuban Consul, which Hemming was guarding. He gave his name as Oswald and said he was living in Santa Ana, where the E1 Toro base was located. He said he wanted to get on a flight to Cuba that would deliver arms hidden in the Consul’s house—and join the revolution. Hemming was suspicious: how did the stranger know about the top-secret flight or its purpose? Suspecting a threat rather than an asset, Hemming brushed Oswald off, then followed him seconds later to try to copy down his license plate number. But Oswald disappeared before then. Hemming concluded that Oswald drove off or was picked up.50 He could not have left on foot, Hemming reasoned, for he would have seen him somewhere on the long, straight street.

  The young Marine’s behavior with Nelson Delgado was also suspicious. Near the end of his service at the El Toro base, Delgado saw that Oswald had a stack of “spotter” photographs of a fighter plane—the kind used for aircraft identification in training classes—among his papers. Together with other possessions, Oswald put them in a duffel bag, whic
h he asked Delgado to take to a bus station locker and bring him back the key—in return for which, Delgado remembers, Oswald gave him two dollars.51 What was the purpose of that maneuver? Did Oswald plan to offer the photographs to representatives of Cuba to ingratiate himself with them? In New Orleans during the summer before the assassination, he would give a Marine handbook to ingratiate himself with anti-Castro Cubans so as to “penetrate” them. In any case, he was evolving a method of operation. And later, when Delgado asked Oswald whether he still planned to go to Cuba after his discharge, Oswald pretended not to hear him.52

  Soon, Oswald began suiting up in a coat and tie during his off hours, telling Delgado he was visiting the Cuban Consulate (corroborated by Hemming’s sighting). Delgado recalled what happened next, while on guard duty late one night with Oswald. “I got a call from the MP guard shack. . . that Oswald had a visitor at the front gate. This man had to be a civilian; otherwise, they would have let him in. . . I had to find somebody to relieve Oswald.”

  Delgado passed by the same front gate an hour later and witnessed Oswald in a heated discussion with a man attired in a topcoat—odd to Delgado, this being a hot night in California. Although Oswald never told Delgado who the man was, Delgado (for reasons he can’t now recall) formed the impression that the rendezvous had something to do with “the Cuba business.”53

  When Oswald returned home after his discharge, he told an elder brother that he was thinking of going to Cuba—to acquire experience, he said, and write about it, “like Hemingway.”54 (Although wide reading allowed Oswald to express himself with imagination, his prose was tortured. Handicapped by slight dyslexia as well as by a weak formal education, he made constant errors in spelling, and his grammar was poor.) Oswald felt it unnecessary to divulge his true plans to his family. When he spoke about Cuba to his brother in September 1959, he made no mention of planning to leave for Russia, which he did several days later—a stunning move in those Cold War days for any American, let alone a young man from a disadvantaged background, just discharged from the Marines.55 Nor did Oswald feel compelled to reveal his political thoughts or obsessions to his family. But his “Hemingway” reason for wanting to go to Cuba, as stated to Robert Oswald, may have derived from his ultimate motives: a search for acceptance and recognition, a need for fame and glory.