Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  People with a good opinion of themselves tend to enjoy a double life. While living on Exchange Alley, he started to read Karl Marx as well as the Marine Corps manual. Life at school, however, was another matter. A schoolmate speaks:

  MR. VOEBEL. . . . I don’t exactly remember when I first saw him . . . but I really became acquainted with him when he had this fight . . . with a couple of boys . . . the Neumeyer boys, John and Mike [which] started on the school ground, and it sort of wandered down the street in the direction naturally in which I was going [and] it kept going on, across lawns and sidewalks, and people would run them off, and they would only run to the next place, and it continued that way from block to block, and as people would run them off one block, they would go on to the next.

  MR. JENNER. That was fisticuffs; is that right?

  MR. VOEBEL. Right.

  MR. JENNER. Were they about the same age? . . .

  MR. VOEBEL. I don’t know; I guess so . . .

  MR. JENNER. How about size?

  MR. VOEBEL. I think John was a little smaller, a little shorter than Lee . . .

  MR. JENNER. All right, what happened as this fight progressed down the street?

  MR. VOEBEL. Well, I think Oswald was getting the best of John, and the little brother sticking by his big brother stepped in too, and then it was two against one, so with that Oswald just seemed to give one good punch to the little brother’s jaw and his mouth started bleeding . . .

  MR. JENNER. The little boy?

  MR. VOEBEL. Yes, sir. Mike’s mouth started bleeding, and when that happened the whole sympathy of the crowd turned against Oswald for some reason, which I didn’t understand, because it was two against one, and Oswald had a right to defend himself. In a way, I felt that this boy got what he deserved, and in fact, later on I found out that this boy that got his mouth cut had been in the habit of biting his lip. Oswald might have hit him on the shoulder or something, and the boy might have bit his lip, and it might have looked like Oswald hit him in the mouth, but anyway, somebody else came out and ran everybody off then, and the whole sympathy of the crowd was against Lee at that time because he had punched little Mike in the mouth and made his mouth bleed . . . [then] a couple of days later we were coming out of school in the evening and Oswald, I think, was a little in front of me and I was a couple of paces behind him, and . . . some big guy, probably from a high school—he looked like a tremendous football player—punched Lee right square in the mouth, and . . . ran off.

  MR. JENNER. He just swung one lick and ran?

  MR. VOEBEL. Yes; that’s what they call passing the post . . . That’s when somebody walks up to you and punches you . . . I think this was sort of a revenge thing on the part of the Neumeyer boys, so that’s when I felt sympathy toward Lee for something like this happening, and a couple of other boys and I . . . brought him back to the restroom and tried to fix him up, and that’s when our friendship, or semi-friendship, you might say, began . . . I think he even lost a tooth from that . . .

  MR. JENNER. Well, you had a mild friendship with him from that point on, would you say?

  MR. VOEBEL. Right.

  MR. JENNER. Tell me about that.

  MR. VOEBEL. . . . sometimes I would stop off at Lee’s and we would play darts and pool. Lee’s the one who taught me . . . He lived over the top of the pool hall . . . on Exchange Alley . . .

  MR. JENNER. Did you find him adept at playing pool?

  MR. VOEBEL. You see, I had never played before and he showed me the fundamentals of the game, and after a couple of games I started beating him, and he would say, “Beginner’s luck,” so I don’t think he was that good . . .

  MR. JENNER. . . . was he a drinker?

  MR. VOEBEL. Well, you see, we were only at the age of about fourteen or fifteen, and smoking and drinking just wasn’t of interest to a lot of people of our age at that time . . .

  MR. JENNER. All right, those are the things I am interested in . . . I’m trying to get a picture of this boy as he became a man . . .

  MR. VOEBEL. Right. Now I want to make one thing clear. I liked Lee. I felt that we had a lot in common at that time. Now, if I met Lee Oswald, say, a year ago, I am not saying that I would still like him, but the things I remember about Lee when we were going to school together caused me to have this sort of friendship for him, and I think in a way I understood him better than most of the other kids . . . and if he had not changed at all, I probably would still have the same feeling for Lee Oswald, at least more so than for the Neumeyer brothers . . .

  MR. JENNER. . . . Would you say there were other boys of the type of the Neumeyer brothers at Beauregard School? . . .

  MR. VOEBEL. Oh, yes . . . it was almost impossible [not to get] involved in a fight sooner or later. You take me, I am not a fighter but I had to fight at that school.

  MR. JENNER. You did?

  MR. VOEBEL. Well, no; I will say this: I would back down from a fight a lot quicker than Lee would. Now, he wouldn’t start any fights, but if you wanted to start one with him, he was going to make sure that he ended it, or you were really going to have one, because he wasn’t going to take anything from anybody. I mean, people could call me names and I might just brush that off, but not Lee . . . You couldn’t do that with Lee . . . he didn’t take anything from anybody . . . 7

  MR. JENNER. And you also . . . had an interest in guns; is that right?

  MR. VOEBEL. . . . we had guns around the house all the time . . .

  MR. JENNER. Did Lee share your enthusiasm for collecting weapons? . . .

  MR. VOEBEL. . . . I don’t think Lee was interested in the history of any weapons. For example, he wanted a pistol . . . just to have one, not for any purposes of collecting them or anything . . .

  MR. JENNER. Did Lee ever own a weapon?

  MR. VOEBEL. . . . Not that I know of . . . he did own a plastic model of a .45 . . . and he showed that to me. I guess you want to know now about his plan for a robbery. Actually, I wasn’t too impressed with the whole idea at first, [and] it really didn’t bother me until he did shock me one day when he came up with a whole plan and everything that he needed for . . . stealing this pistol [from] a show window, on Rampart Street . . . It might have been a Smith & Wesson. I think it was an automatic, but I really didn’t pay too much attention to it . . . The following week I was up at his house and he came out with a glasscutter and a box with this plastic pistol in it, and . . . he had a plan as to how he was going to try to get in and get this pistol.

  MR. JENNER. You mean in the Rampart Street store?

  MR. VOEBEL. Yes. Now, I don’t remember if he was planning to use this plastic pistol in the robbery or not, or just . . . cut the glass and break it out . . . I don’t think he was really sure even then how he wanted to do it [but] we walked over there to this store and we looked at this pistol in the window . . .

  He said, “Well, what do you think?” and I . . . happened to notice this band around the window, a metal tape that they use for burglar alarms, and I got working on that idea in the hope that I could talk him out of trying it, . . . I said, “Well, I don’t think that’s a good idea, because if you cut that window, it might crack that tape, and the burglar alarm will go off,” . . . and so [he] finally gave up the idea . . . I don’t think he really wanted to go through with it, to tell you the truth . . . I think maybe he was just thinking along the lines that if he went through with it, that he would look big among the guys, you know . . . 8

  It was in this period that Oswald began to read Marxist literature. Just which books is somewhat in question. He would tell several people in Moscow and Minsk that his radical politics were first stirred by a pamphlet about the execution of the Rosenbergs handed to him in 1952 by an old lady outside a subway stop in New York, and he would also remark that he took out Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto from his local library in New Orleans. On the other hand, he is reading Das Kapital seriously in Minsk, and his remarks suggest it is for the first time. In New Orleans, it is probably The Comm
unist Manifesto that is giving him all the fire he needs for striking radical opinions at the age of sixteen.

  William E. Wulf, a studious young man, contributes to such a picture. Oswald worked for a time at Pfisterer Dental Laboratory in New Orleans as a delivery boy and had made friends with another runner there named Palmer McBride, who was a member of the New Orleans Amateur Astronomy Association (a group of high school students), of which Wulf was president. Oswald was interested in astronomy, he informed McBride. After a preliminary phone call, Oswald and McBride dropped in one night around ten or eleven at Wulf’s house.

  MR. WULF. [I told him that] we were not very much interested in teaching some fledgling all this data we had already gone through over the years, and he would actually be hampered in belonging to the group, and I actually discouraged him from joining for that reason. This is all I can remember of the first contact, because it was kind of late . . . 9

  However, Oswald came over again with Palmer McBride, and this time began to expound on politics.

  MR. WULF. . . . McBride had always told me that he wanted to get into the military service as a career, especially rocket engineering and rocketry—like we were all nuts on rocketry at the time—and I told him, I said, “This boy Oswald, if you are associated with him, could be construed as a security risk . . .”

  MR. LIEBELER. What led you to make that statement to McBride?

  MR. WULF. [Oswald] was reading some of my books in my library, and he started expounding the Communist doctrine and saying that he was highly interested in communism, that communism was the only way of life for the worker, et cetera, and then came out with the statement that he was looking for a Communist cell in town to join but he couldn’t find any [and then] my father came in the room, heard what we were arguing on communism, and that this boy was loud-mouthed, boisterous, and my father asked him to leave the house and politely put him out of the house, and that is the last time I have seen or spoken with Oswald . . . 10

  On his sixteenth birthday, with a birth certificate forged with Marguerite’s connivance, he tries to enlist in the Marine Corps and is rejected as too young. So, he has to undergo another year of memorizing that Marine Corps manual. How much he must have absorbed about the erection of pup tents and squad tents, care of one’s weapon, close-order march, proper salute, disassembly of the .30 caliber machine gun, dress uniform, guerrilla tactics, traversing a three-rope bridge, aims and standards of the Marine Corps obstacle course and, of course, the procedure for firing the M-1 rifle from prone, standing, and sitting positions.

  Marguerite moved from New Orleans back to Fort Worth in July of 1956, three months before Lee would be seventeen and so eligible to enlist. On October 3, 1956, just twenty-one days before he would sign up for the Marines on October 24, he put his X on a coupon from an advertisement found in a magazine: “I want more information about the Socialist Party.” Then, he added a personal letter to the coupon:

  Dear Sirs,

  . . . would like to know if there is a branch in my area, how to join, etc. I am a Marxist and have been studying my Socialist principles for well over fifteen months. I am very interested in your YPSL.11

  John Pic had a short comment on why Lee had gone into the Marines:

  MR. PIC. He did it for the same reasons that I did it and Robert did it, I assume, to get from out and under.

  MR. JENNER. Out and under what?

  MR. PIC. The yoke of oppression from my mother.12

  In April 1960, during Oswald’s first spring in Minsk, an FBI agent named John W. Fain was making inquiries about Lee in Fort Worth and here refers to an interview with a neighbor of Marguerite Oswald:

  Mrs. TAYLOR stated that the subject was a student in Arlington Heights High School and was only about 16 or 17 years of age when the OSWALDS moved to this address [and] that the subject was a peculiar boy inasmuch as he read a great deal and kept very much to himself . . . Mrs. TAYLOR stated that she actually felt sorry for the subject inasmuch as it appeared to her that he had few if any friends and no social life. She stated she pitied the boy because . . . she has never seen anyone stay at home more closely than did the subject. She stated that Mrs. OSWALD . . . on occasion urged him to go out and seek employment but that he preferred to sit at home and read . . . 13

  MARGUERITE OSWALD. Yes, sir. [This] is a picture of Lee in Atsugi, Japan, in 1958, showing his strength.

  MR. RANKIN. That shows him in [his] Marine uniform also, does it?

  MARGUERITE OSWALD. In his Marine uniform showing his muscles to his mother.14

  6

  The Loose End

  There can be little doubt that the Warren Commission came to the unvoiced conclusion that it might be all for the best if Oswald turned out to be homosexual. That would have the advantage of explaining much even if it explained nothing at all. The Warren Commission did have, after all, a lone killer as their desired objective, but there was no evidence of particular animus by Oswald toward Kennedy, and more than a few key witnesses testified to Oswald’s positive utterances concerning JFK. So, a history of homosexuality located in Oswald’s closet would prove helpful to them. In 1964, homosexuality was still seen as one of those omnibus infections of the spirit that could lead to God knows what further aberration.

  Nonetheless, there is a real chance that Oswald had considerably more of a sexual career as a homosexual than as a heterosexual through his Marine Corps days and through his first year in Minsk. Paradoxically, it would help to explain the patience with which he wooed Ella and the haste with which he married Marina. Indeed, his young life is a study in one recurring theme—I am not yet a man and I must become one—which in the late Fifties and early Sixties became a compelling motif for many young men terrified by homosexual inclinations and ready to go to great lengths to combat and/or conceal them.

  One must always read accounts of Oswald’s behavior with double vision: Yes, he was serious—no, he was jesting; yes, he was gay—no, he was merely shy with women; yes, he was obsessed with violence—no, he had only a small and intermittent interest in such matters. Any attempt to put a thematic stamp on him will run into contradictions—his actions are not often predictable—but given the oppressive psychological climate of the Fifties, we have to entertain the possibility that one of the major obsessions in Oswald’s life was manhood, attaining his manhood. If he was in part homosexual, then the force of such a preoccupation would have doubled and trebled.

  From the affidavit of David Christie Murray, Jr.:

  . . . Oswald did not often associate with his fellow Marines. Although I know of no general explanation for this, I personally stayed away from Oswald because I had heard a rumor to the effect that he was homosexual . . . 1

  Much is said to this effect by another Marine, Daniel Patrick Powers, a high school football and wrestling coach at the time of his Warren Commission testimony. He must have seemed an ideal soldier to the Commissioners. Powers was a big man physically, and his testimony gives off an air of sincerity which powerful men often possess when they know they can depend on their bodies more than most.

  MR. POWERS. . . . he had a large homosexual tendency, as far as I was concerned, and . . . a lot of feminine characteristics as far as the other individuals of the group were concerned, and I think possibly he was an individual that would come to a point in his life that he would have to decide one way or the other.

  MR. JENNER. On what?

  MR. POWERS. On a homosexual or leading a normal life, and again, now, this is a personal opinion.

  And I think this, more than any other factor, was the reason that he was on the outside of the group in Mississippi.

  He was always an individual that was regarded as a meek person, one that you wouldn’t have to worry about as far as the leadership was concerned, a challenge for leadership or anything . . .

  He had the name of Ozzie Rabbit, as I recall . . . 2

  This question of whether he was or was not homosexual may hinder our understanding of Oswald more than
it helps. Why not suppose instead that he had the kind of double nature which would leave him miserable after gay activities and more certain than ever that he was really heterosexual, whereas, conversely, when with a woman a year or two later, he might feel more powerful homosexual inclinations than when he was with men. It may have mattered less what he did than what he was tempted to do. In any event, we can be reasonably certain of one matter: By the age of seventeen and a half, he had not yet had a woman.

  We are advancing too quickly, however. Powers did not meet Oswald until Lee had been in the Marines for almost half a year, and so Powers’ account skips over one of the most telling periods in any soldier’s life—his basic training—but then, the Warren Commission was not about to delve too deeply into Oswald’s military career. After all, what if Oswald turned out to be some spawn of military intelligence? Better not to open that door more than a crack.

  Assassination by conspiracy was, however, not a likely topic for the Warren Commission—their emphasis was on family values. A bang-up job they did, and we can take the benefit of that, but no one could ever say that keen inquiry was the Warren Commission’s prevailing passion. Their treatment of Oswald’s Marine Corps days can only be termed slack. In Legend, his landmark work on CIA involvement with Oswald, Edward Jay Epstein gives us a richer portrait of Oswald’s military service than do all the volumes of the Warren Commission, for he managed to uncover a dozen Marines who had known Oswald and not been interviewed.

  All the same, there is not much anywhere about his boot camp in San Diego, just enough to let us know that Oswald had a hard time. The Marine Corps manual could hardly have prepared him for the reality. A trainee in Oswald’s platoon named Sherman Cooley described it as “holy hell.”3 Of course, all basic training can be so described—it was just that the Marine Corps liked to pack two basic trainings into one. Oswald, according to Cooley, was soon being called shit-bird. He had trouble managing to qualify with his rifle, and that was horrific. The Marine Corps laid it out for you: Your ability with an M-1 was equal to your virility—there was no reason to be in the Marine Corps if virility was not the center of your focus.