Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  In any case, the more relevant facts about the Walker shooting concern Oswald’s intent—no less murderous for the failure to kill his target, or for others to know about it. When he assumed that evening that he had successfully rid the world of Walker, Oswald was proud. The following morning, when the media indirectly informed him he had failed, he was disgusted. With his rebelliousness and withdrawal, Oswald had displayed a predilection for careful planning and organization in the service of his major designs—and never more than now. Experts concluded that a mere ten shots or so from his Mannlicher-Carcano, given his Marine experience, would be enough for him to adjust for the drift of the scope and otherwise make himself at home with that rifle. Oswald almost certainly fired at least that number. When Marina saw him carrying the hidden rifle, he assured her that the place where he practiced—presumably an uninhabited area called the Trinity River Bottom, 35 feet below a levee a short bus ride from his apartment—would not be discovered. He practiced three days in early April before burying his rifle near Walker’s house, in woods near railroad tracks: the place he had picked out and photographed a month earlier.52 This was not a spur-of-the-moment operation. Even the perceptive Volkmar Schmidt would have been surprised by the degree to which Oswald was “totally obsessed with his own political agenda.”

  The killer-but-for-a-window-frame had also carefully reconnoitered the Walker house. He photographed it from the back, including an alley that led to the driveway, drew maps of the area, and compiled a collection of notes.53 After working up his detailed plan, he executed it flawlessly—which might suggest that he would not have undertaken his more difficult shooting in Dealey Plaza, where he would be incomparably more vulnerable, without similar planning, especially for his getaway.

  In this case, the escape into the residential and evening quiet was clever. Oswald told Marina he had run from Walker’s house for all he was worth, hopped a bus to go back to where he had buried the rifle, then taken another bus home. He burst out laughing at a radio report of a neighbor who claimed to have seen two cars when leaving the scene just after the shooting. “Americans are so spoiled, they think you always have to have a car,” he said. “I got away on my own two feet.”54

  But Oswald would lie and conceal crucial information from Marina in the coming months. Perhaps he didn’t take a bus at all. Case Coleman, a 14-year-old Walker neighbor, said he saw two cars leaving immediately after the shot. At the sound of “this loud bang,” young Coleman ran out of his house and, from the seat of his sister’s bicycle, peered over a six-foot fence around a neighboring church. “That’s when I noticed the black Ford that had been backed in [an alley] driving off down the alley. And there was a ‘58 Chevy with a guy [who] threw something in the back seat and then jumped in the car and headed toward Turtle Creek.”55 Coleman is supported by the recollections of Walker himself, who later stated that after the shot, he heard a car door slam followed by a car driving off.

  The most important aspect of the Walker attempt is that it establishes once and for all that Oswald’s “politics” did not exclude the idea of assassination. There is also the possibility, albeit small, that the attempt demonstrated Oswald’s ability to conspire with others. The evening was dark. Case Coleman could not identify Oswald in any of the photographs shown him by the FBI. The cars might have been driven off by men who had attended a small church function that evening—which Oswald might have used as cover. The two cars might not deserve mention at all, except for Case’s vivid memory of their connection to the shot—and the circumstances surrounding most of the critical moments in Oswald’s life, from the Walker episode to shortly before his arrest after the assassination. As Robert Blakey would conclude after exhaustive study, he was “a loner who was never alone.” Was this an early instance of Oswald possibly acting in concert with others?

  More specifically, Oswald, despite keeping himself distant from people who might want to befriend him—perhaps that was why he kept himself distant—would be seen again and again during the coming months with drivers, escorts, and mute companions, many of them Latin. It is now impossible to identify them, and it will probably remain impossible forever. But not to acknowledge their possible existence is to portray the “lone nut” very differently than he was. Owen Dejavovich was one of the fellow Marines at Oswald’s base at E1 Toro to whom Oswald revealed his great desire to help Fidel Castro. He is one of many former acquaintances who caught a glimpse of Oswald’s secret life. Dejanovich recently stated:

  Yes, at one time I recalled Oswald being a loner. But since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, other things stood out in my mind. I recall one incident where Oswald was talking through the chain-link [base] fence to two very dignified Hispanic-looking males who had driven up in a big, black Cadillac. To an enlisted man in the Marine Corps, they looked like quite influential people, and to see them with Oswald made a great impact on me. . . Looking back, I’d guess that Oswald was talking to someone from the Cuban Embassy, or somebody who’d come over from the Cuban hierarchy, about what he could do for them. 56

  This was at the same time when Oswald and Nelson Delgado, who shared radar watches and a Quonset hut, were talking about joining Castro. Oswald had also told Delgado he was visiting the Cuban Consulate in Los Angeles around this time.

  Given the state of Oswald’s private life, the Walker attempt does not seem at all out of context. Lee had just lost his job at the graphic arts shop Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. A combination of reasons has been cited: he couldn’t do the work; he was constantly bickering with co-workers; he didn’t exactly endear himself to the management by bringing to work militant Communist literature. Co-worker Dovid Ofstein remembers, “Lee seemed to be very hell-bent, if you will, on getting through his day, getting through his job, getting on to other things. It rubbed some people the wrong way.” Ofstein also recalls Oswald’s lack of ability:

  Lee Oswald was let go from Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall for an inability to master the techniques and the technical skills necessary to produce a quality product. Lee seemed to be very interested in learning how to do photography, commercial photography. [But] his skills didn’t seem to go along with his eagerness. He was hired initially, as we all were, on a six month trial basis. At the end of that period, it was evident that he was turning out probably as much bad work as he was turning out good work.57

  The Oswalds’ marriage was at a low point, and becoming more violent. Lee was beating Marina regularly, and with his fists. He would at times give her black eyes, and a bloody nose. Most horrifying of all, according to Marina, was the look of pleasure in his eyes when he administered the abuse. Some neighbors were complaining. “I think he’s really hurt her this time,” warned one complainant when speaking to Mahlon Tobias, the Oswalds’ apartment manager. Another neighbor told Tobias, “I think that a man over there is going to kill that girl.”58 Marina would say that February 1963 was the worst month of their marriage: “I’m tired of his brutality. I can’t take it anymore.” Once, when Marina’s dress wasn’t fastened properly, Lee reprimanded her in front of her friend Alex Kleinlerer. Kleinlerer remembers:

  He [Oswald] called to her in a very angry and commanding tone of voice just like an officer commanding a soldier. His exact words were “Come here!” in Russian, and he uttered them the way you would call a dog with which you were displeased in order to inflict punishment. . . He slapped her hard in the face twice. Marina had the baby in her arms.59

  Marina’s friends began to refer to Lee as a “megalomaniac,” “unbalanced,” “a psychopath.” George Bouhe said, “I am scared of this man. He is a lunatic.”60 After reading an April 21 article, “Nixon calls for decision to force Reds out of Cuba,” Oswald packed a pistol and threatened to use it against Nixon. Marina dissuaded him from going after the former vice-president, fearing the worst. (As it turned out, Nixon wasn’t in Texas that particular day, but Lyndon Johnson was.)

  Oswald’s secret life continued. On April 19, 1963, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC)
, a small pro-Castro organization based in New York, mailed him a stack of pamphlets. That was in response to a letter from Oswald in which he reported having recently distributed some 15 earlier leaflets in forty minutes. “I was cursed as well as praised by some,” he wrote.

  Oswald loved to exaggerate his significance, but this was almost certainly not an imagined boast. At about this time, two Dallas policemen reported seeing an unidentified white man of medium build passing out pro-Castro literature on a Main Street corner. He wore a placard with “Viva Fidel” over his white shirt. Local citizens complained. The man fled when the policemen arrived.61

  Also about this time, as Oswald became more of a political activist, he forced Marina to write to the Soviet Embassy in Washington to ask that she be allowed to return to the USSR. However, the Oswalds would decide not to go back to the Soviet Union. Circumstances would bring Lee Harvey Oswald to New Orleans, to Mexico City, and back to Dallas, without ever finding a permanent home. And it all started when Marina Oswald said to her husband, “I’d like to see the city where you grew up,” suggesting that Lee move to New Orleans in the spring of 1963 to look for work. With this innocuous suggestion, Marina was inadvertently placing Lee near one of the strategic pipelines of Bobby Kennedy’s “secret war.”

  NEW ORLEANS

  CHAPTER SIX

  WASHINGTON, NEW ORLEANS, AND CUBA

  “We call New Orleans a city of five hundred people because everybody seems to know each other.”

  —Stephen Tyler, Louisiana filmmaker1

  “New Orleans is full of crazy people. I hate that place.”

  —Sergio Arcacha Smith, Cuban exile activist based in New Orleans in the early 1960s2

  “Unethical behavior is a way of life in New Orleans.”

  —Layton Martens, a volunteer in 1961 with the Cuban exile movement3

  When Lee Oswald moved to New Orleans in the spring of 1963, he inadvertently became enmeshed in a convoluted world of political intrigue that often led straight to John and Robert Kennedy. And this out-of-control world not only mirrored the world inside Lee Oswald’s head, but later colored any study of the Kennedy assassination with a palette of conspiratorial possibilities. As Stephen Tyler says, “Everyone knew each other” in New Orleans. Everyone seemed to know a CIA agent, or a Naval Intelligence officer, or a Cuban exile training to reinvade the island.

  In later years, this would play a role in accusations that many New Orleaneans who “knew” Oswald—in addition to CIA agents and Cuban exiles—had to be involved in the Kennedy assassination. Furthermore, because many of these individuals seemed to be protected from serious investigation after the President’s death, the suggestion of a government-based conspiracy recurs like a leitmotif. Sadly, the one conspiratorial possibility that should have been pursued has been kept from public scrutiny since day one.

  The government indeed protected certain individuals who had, or seemed to have had, access to Lee Oswald. The reason for this protection had nothing. to do with who shot the president, and everything to do with shielding the Kennedys’ “secret war” from public scrutiny. The source of the problem was Bobby Kennedy’s habitual drive to go outside of the official intelligence apparatus in his zeal for quicker results. His enlistment of essentially uncontrollable agents into projects that required the strictest control and security invites the long unspoken possibility: the activities of Robert Kennedy’s New Orleans agents inspired Lee Oswald, perhaps with Cuban instigation, to assassinate John Kennedy. New information reveals that this contention is, in fact, highly probable.

  To make sense out of the confusion that was New Orleans, it is necessary to understand the main players, many of whom have been linked to Lee Oswald, and their agendas during the Kennedy years. But, to understand these players, one must first fathom the city in which such characters flourished. The situation that existed in New Orleans cannot appear believable to anyone not grounded in its peculiar history. Perhaps if Robert Kennedy had understood this history, he would not have depended so much on its residents for help in the Cuba Project.

  “Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler:” Politics as Jazz

  From the days of Jean Laffite to today’s era of the oft-indicted Governor Edwin Edward, New Orleans has nurtured a wicked reputation as floridly stylized as the wrought iron of the French Quarter. Some point to the Voodoo folkways of this humid place. It’s a culture that allows for evil in the scheme of things, evil as a lesser god to be propitiated. When the air hangs like a blanket, impervious to the slack overhead fan, one can understand how sin could relax in a town like this.

  God (or Satan) has given New Orleans much. The wharves teem with grain, cotton, iron and steel to be shipped to Latin countries or to the islands of the Caribbean. Cargo, meanwhile, is unladen from foreign ports to be loaded onto trucks and rail, then to be absorbed by that country called America, to which Louisiana, as if by roulette spin, has been joined.

  The slave trade and cotton were the high points in New Orleans’ early fortunes. The grand architecture of its early period expresses a wealth we associate with the city-states of Europe, or the Gulf states of the Arabian peninsula. The Civil War changed all that, but geography had blessed the town as a natural point of transit, and all the Yankees in New York were never able to change that.

  One only requires a brief sojourn in “The City that Care Forgot” to appreciate one key fact: the Byzantine historic tangle created by a host of quirky characters is a direct result of the city itself—a city so unique that the atmosphere Lee Oswald stumbled onto in the summer of 1963 could only have existed there and then.

  Louisiana had always been different—“outside the mainstream of American life,” as a chronicler of Mafia activities described it4—and with good reason. Before its sale to the United States in 1803, it had been ruled by Spain and France. While all other major American cities had their cultural roots in the British common law/Protestant tradition, New Orleans descended from a French/Italian/Catholic past. Everything about the city reflects that distinction: from its laws, which are based on the Napoleonic Code, to its emphasis on Catholic religious trappings.

  The Napoleonic Code stresses property rights, thus giving the inhabitants an aristocratic feeling. Louisiana law is the only system of “codified” law in the United States.5 (“Codified” refers to the fact that the laws are written by the legislature, rather than being derived by judicial precedence, as in British common law.) The result is that the inhabitants, having a hands-on, unchecked approach to lawmaking, are steeped in all the graft and corruption that can accompany such responsibility. New Orleans is a city of “political animals” second to none. It exemplifies what has become known as the “good ol’ boy” system of government.6

  In New Orleans, more so than any other U.S. city, connections mean everything. This legacy is a holdover from the time when pirates preyed on ships coming and going from the port. Successful businessmen thus fell in league with the rogues. It is illustrative that the “pirate” is revered in Louisiana, where, euphemistically, he is often referred to as “privateer.” Many inhabitants developed a suspicion, disrespect, and distrust of the law and the courts. This attitude was natural considering that many Louisianans were immigrants from Sicily, a country whose population is not exactly known for respect for legal systems. When Louisiana became a state, its way-of-life remained overwhelmingly rural, relishing its reputation as a fun-loving, law-flaunting subculture within U.S. borders. “Laissez les bons temps rouler” (“Let the good times roll”) is less a local slogan than a way of life.

  Mardi Gras itself may best exemplify the roguish personality of the city’s inhabitants. The event consists of a twelve day drunken revelry, ostensibly in celebration of religion. Although “Fat Tuesday” refers to the Catholic tradition that precedes the season of fasting known as Lent, one of the distinguishing features of the New Orleans custom is the parade of floats bearing images of pagan gods! The discrepancy between the huge numbers engaged in bacchanalia on Tu
esday night and the many fewer who actually attend church the next day (Ash Wednesday) makes the point: in this city, religion is just another excuse to have a party.

  Music also says much about a city’s personality, and it is a musical truism that the birth of jazz could only have happened in New Orleans. Jazz was originally considered vulgar, lowdown, and sinful when it emerged in the late 19th century. The rest of the country was listening primarily to religious music, with New Orleans marching to the beat of a different drummer.

  In 1963, New Orleans was a city of three-quarters of a million people, and served as the Gulf Coast’s business center and transportation hub. It boasted America’s second busiest port, and some of its most modern harbor facilities. It was a metropolis, famed for its French Quarter and Mardi Gras celebrations, which gives witness to its international flavor (one visitor referred to the city as a “tower of Babel”). But it remained a small town, especially in the tight overlapping of business and social connections and the near absolute need to know the right people in order to get things done.

  The city’s economy depended on trade with Latin America. Seventy percent of the imports unloaded on its harbor wharves originated from Central and Latin America.7 And Cuba was the number one source of those imports. New Orleans historian Arthur Carpenter offers these supporting statistics: