Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  McMillan: Marina sometimes got up at night and went to the kitchen for something cold to drink. The place would be swarming with cockroaches.

  “Come in and admire your handiwork,” she would call out toward the bedroom—it was “his” handiwork because Lee did not allow her to use the spray.

  He would run in naked from the bedroom, brandishing a can of roach spray and squirting it everywhere. Marina laughed, because he was too stingy to buy decent spray, too stingy to use enough of it, and because he put it in the wrong places.

  “You woke me up and now you’re laughing at me.” He was hurt.2

  During the day, he squirted grease on his machines; at night it was bug-killer on Magazine Street. He stank of oil; he stank of insect poison. He festered in the heat. Nor had he told her he was working in a coffee factory. He had pretended it was a photographic shop, but he couldn’t explain why he smelled of coffee. Finally, he told her. He had to. He not only reeked from his job, but it affected his personal habits. He went around in sandals, old work pants, and a soiled T-shirt he hardly ever changed. Marina could bedevil herself with the thought that she had been ashamed of the way Anatoly dressed in Minsk, and now Lee walked around in outright filthy condition.

  McMillan: “My work isn’t worth getting dressed for,” he told Marina.

  “Do it for yourself, then,” she said. “Or if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”

  “I simply don’t care,” he replied.3

  The grunge at work—the grease from coffee beans and the grease from the machines, the heat, the sense of sliding into new kinds of trouble. His temper is on edge.

  MRS. GARNER . . . . I said, “Lee, why don’t you talk English to your little girl and your wife? That way she could learn to talk English and when the little girl goes to school it wouldn’t be so hard on her.”

  He said, “She has time enough to learn that,” and he never had a nice word to say to me after that . . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. Did you have any other contact with Oswald yourself, personally?

  MRS. GARNER. Yes. One time I went for my rent. It was a few days past due, the rent, and I mean, you know, when you let them go they wait too long and they don’t ever get it . . . . he was starting out the drive to catch a bus on the corner, and when he saw me he turned around and . . . I said, “Oswald, you got the rent?” . . . He said, “Yes, I have it.”

  He was fixing to go to the bus, [but] he turned around . . . and he just pushed me aside and went by me and went and got the money and handed it to me . . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. He actually laid his hands on you?

  MRS. GARNER. Put his hands on me just like that and pushed me . . . . He didn’t say a thing. Came back and gave me the money and that was it.

  MR. LIEBELER. When was the next time you had any—

  MRS. GARNER. Well, I didn’t talk to him any more than that because [he] wouldn’t answer you when you say good morning or good evening . . . The only thing was at night he used to come past behind the house and always wore trunks, yellow trunks with thongs, no top shirt, and he used to stuff all my garbage cans and all the cans on the street, and never would talk to anybody, pass right by the door of the apartment of the other people and never did talk to anybody.4

  Usually, he is just as unresponsive at work:

  MR. LE BLANC . . . . I put him on the fifth floor and told him to take care of everything on the fifth floor and I would be back shortly to check . . . . and about a half hour or 45 minutes or so, I would go back up . . . and I wouldn’t find him., So I asked the fellows that would be working on the floor had they seen him and they said yes, he squirted the oil can a couple of times around different things and they don’t know where he went. So I would start hunting all over the building. There is five stories on one side and four on the other. I would cover from the roof on down and I wouldn’t locate him, and I asked him, I said, “Well, where have you been?” And all he would give me was that he was around. I asked him, “Around where?” He says, “Just around,” and he would turn around and walk off.5

  If he stays in dirty clothes once he gets home, that might be related to sitting in dirty diapers as a child. There had been so many hours when he was two and three years old and Marguerite had been away at work and the young couple she had hired did not take much care of him. Now, the dirt and grease in which he works seem to be turning him on to guns. Is it possible that the dirt and the grease—like the torpor induced by sitting in packed diapers—stimulates him to low dirty impulses?

  MR. ALBA . . . . employees at Reily told [the FBI] after the assassination, of course, that Lee Oswald spent as much time “Over at Alba’s Garage as he did over here at the plant.” . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. You said that he was called from your place to go back to the coffee company from time to time?

  MR. ALBA. There were anywhere from two to four different occasions that I can remember that someone would come in there and tell him, “Now, Lee Oswald, they are looking for you over there. If you keep this up, you are going to get canned.” And Oswald would say, “I’m coming. I’m coming.”6

  But Oswald and Adrian Alba did have interesting conversations in the front office of the garage:

  MR. ALBA. Well, we have a coffee urn and a Coke machine . . . and on the coffee table I would say that I had approximately anywhere from 80 to 120 magazines. [Oswald] requested permission to take one or two off at a time, and kept them anywhere from 3 days to a week, and would make the point of letting me know he was returning them. And then a few days later he would ask that he borrow another magazine or two magazines . . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. Did he strike you as being peculiar in any way?

  MR. ALBA. Yes; he did. He was quiet . . . You could ask Lee Oswald two or three questions, and if Lee Oswald wasn’t apparently interested in the course of the conversation, he would just remain paging through the book and look up and say, “Did you say something to me?” . . . but all you had to do was mention guns and gun magazines and Lee was very free with the conversation . . . 7

  MR. LIEBELER. I am looking at an FBI report. [Did Oswald mention] that a small calibre bullet was more deadly than the larger one, to which point you agreed.

  MR. ALBA . . . . We went into the discussion of basing the thing on the ice pick versus the bread knife—I don’t think I mentioned this part to the FBI—reflecting the whole picture that you would be better off receiving a wound from a 10-inch bread knife than you would be being gigged once with a 2- or 3-inch ice pick, and that reflecting the difference between the large calibre wound and the small calibre wound.

  MR. LIEBELER. What led you and Oswald to agree that you would be better off being hit with a bread knife than with an ice pick?

  MR. ALBA. Internal bleeding.8

  About this time, Marina wrote a letter in Russian to Ruth which the Warren Commission would translate into English.

  25 May 1963

  New Orleans

  Dear Ruth! Hello!

  Here it is already a week since I received your letter. I can’t produce any excuses as there are no valid reasons. I’m ashamed to confess that I am a person of moods. And my mood currently is such that I don’t feel much like anything. As soon as you left all “love” stopped and I am very hurt that Lee’s attitude toward me is such that I feel each minute that I bind him. He insists that I leave America, which I don’t want to do at all. I like America very much and think that even without Lee I would not be lost here. What do you think?

  This is the basic question which doesn’t leave me day or night. And again Lee has said that he doesn’t love me, so you see we came to mistaken conclusions. It is hard for you and me to live without the return of our love—interesting, how will it all end? . . . 9

  MRS. MURRET. Now, what he did at home—how he acted around Marina there, I don’t know, but when he was in my presence he was very attentive to her and very well-mannered. He would, I mean, open the car door for her and so forth—very attentive. He would pull the chair
out for her and things like that. He was very well-mannered. I have to say that for him.

  MR. JENNER. What was her attitude toward him?

  MRS. MURRET. Well, she seemed the same way. They seemed to get along very nicely together, I thought, when they were here in New Orleans. They would take a ride out to the French Market and buy some crabs and some shrimp and come home and boil and cook them. They got a big bang out of doing things like that.10

  5

  Fair Play for Cuba

  As Lee and Marina come together and draw apart, the question of whether she should return to Russia has become one of the recurring elements in their marriage. Whenever he is most vexed, he threatens to dispatch her back. In October of 1962, hardly three months after they have returned to America, the theme is introduced, and on Elsbeth Street, he has her applying to the Soviet Consulate in Washington for permission to return home. It so depressed her that she even flirted with suicide, yet all the same, a correspondence did ensue between Marina and the Soviets in Washington.

  She can read between the bureaucratic lines, however. Soviet officials, Marina can see, are not in a hurry to take her back. Processing her application, they indicate, will require half a year. Even by June 4, after several exchanges of letters over the months between, little has gone forward—here, for example, is a letter of June 4, 1963, from V. Gerasimov of the Consulate Section of the Soviet Embassy:

  June 4, 1963

  Dear Marina Nicolaevna,

  In connection with your request for entrance to the Soviet Union for permanent residence, in our letter of April 18th we requested you if possible to come to Washington and visit the Consulate Section of our Embassy.

  If it is difficult for you to visit us we request you to advise us by letter concerning reasons which made you request this permission . . . 1

  She made no rush to answer. A pot such as this could be kept simmering for years.

  It is no small matter for Lee, however. If she hates his absorption in politics, he hates the mill-stone of his marriage. It is inhibiting to his political career. The attack on General Walker had been a species of shakedown cruise to test his capacities. Was he sufficiently ruthless to kill for political purposes? Since he had missed, the answer could only be a qualified yes. Moreover, he had had to withdraw altogether from Marina in the weeks preceding that attempt. It was as if his murderous impulses could only be gathered if he was without sexual release. To continue his marriage was to condemn himself, therefore, to a life of mediocrity, yet—there is no other explanation for so many of his actions—a sizable part of him adored Marina, and this quite apart from his full affection for June. For that matter, devotion to June was like an open display of his infatuation with himself. But Marina he loved as his woman, his difficult, caustic, contrary, and often wholly attractive wife—even if he could hardly tolerate her for most of the month. Are half of the young husbands in existence all that much unlike him? Or young wives?

  Ruthlessness! He must have whipped himself with the thought that he lacked the cruelty to be a revolutionary, stern and disciplined. Now, in New Orleans, on May 23, the first book he takes out from the public library is Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse Tung. The author, Robert Payne, says of Mao, “He represented even in those days a new kind of man; one of those who single-handedly construct whole civilizations.”2 If that was the noble role Mao had sculpted from history, how could Oswald not have decided—indeed, can we doubt it?—that it is not enough to be a leader; one has to fashion a new kind of existence.

  First, however, is the little matter of playing an active role in history. If he had been a warlock, he would have consulted his runes, but he was, as he saw it, a twenty-three-year-old master of new revolutionary politics on the road to future glory—and the road went straight through Cuba. As Edward Epstein puts it, “Once he got to Havana, he could no doubt find contacts and connections with the Castro government. He even at one point bragged to Marina that he would become a ‘minister’ in the government.”3 No, he would not have found it hard to believe that if he could get there and reach the ear of those who counted, he could become an intimate adviser on what was going on in the USSR. (Indeed, in retrospect, we can ask ourselves—it is a fair question—whether Castro’s advisers knew as much about Soviet reality as Oswald.)

  Epstein: The problem for Oswald was getting there. Since it was illegal at the time for a United States citizen to travel to Cuba, he would have to obtain his visa at a Cuban Embassy outside the country, and to do that, he would need some credentials to prove that he was a supporter of the Cuban government. His game in New Orleans involved creating just such a record for himself.4

  May 26

  Dear Sirs,

  I am requesting formal membership in your organization . . . .

  Now that I live in New Orleans I have been thinking about renting a small office at my own expense for the purpose of forming a F.P.C.C. branch here in New Orleans. Could you give me a charter?

  Also, I would like information on buying pamphlets, etc., in large lots, as well as blank F.P.C.C. applications, etc.

  Also, a picture of Fidel, suitable for framing, would be a welcome touch.

  Offices down here rent for $30 a month and if I had a steady flow of literature I would be glad to take the expense.

  Of course I work and could not supervise the office at all times but I’m sure I could get some volunteers to do it.

  Could you add some advice or recommendations?

  I am not saying this project would be a roaring success but I am willing to try an office, literature, and getting people to know you. [You] are the fundamentals of the F.P.C.C. as far as I can see so here’s hoping to hear from you.

  Yours respectfully,

  Lee H. Oswald5

  Three days later, well before he could receive a reply, he went into the Jones Printing Company on Girod Street with an eight-by-ten sheet of paper on which he had written out the final draft of a handbill:

  HANDS

  OFF

  CUBA!

  Join the Fair Play for

  Cuba Committee

  New Orleans Charter

  Member Branch

  Free Literature, Lectures

  Location:

  Everyone Welcome!6

  Early in June, he would receive a letter from the National Director of FPCC, V. T. Lee, and would probably have seen it as considerably more than coincidence that the man’s last name was the same as his own first name. V. T. Lee was, however, cautionary, and advised Oswald not to take an office. The American public, if polled, would probably have come out 95 percent against Castro in that late spring of 1963, or at least 95 out of 100 people were not going to be caught saying anything positive about Fidel to a pollster. V. T. Lee’s letter gives a small hint of a siege mentality:

  May 29, 1963

  Lee H. Oswald

  1907 Magazine Street

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  Dear Friend:

  . . . Your interest in helping to form an FPCC Chapter in New Orleans is gratefully received. I shall try to give you . . . a better picture of what this entails [since we] know from experience it . . . requires some sacrifice on the part of those involved.

  You must realize that you will come under tremendous pressures . . . and you will not be able to operate in the manner which is conventional here in the north-east. Even most of our big-city Chapters have been forced to abandon the idea of operating an office in public. The national office in New York is the only one in the country today . . . Most Chapters have discovered it is easier to operate semi-privately out of a home and maintain a P.O. Box for all mailings and public notices . . . . We do have a serious and often violent opposition and this [gives rise to] many unnecessary incidents which frighten away prospective supporters. I definitely would not recommend an office, at least not one that will be easily identifiable to the lunatic fringe in your community. Certainly, I would not recommend that you engage one in the very beginning but wait and see ho
w you can operate in the community through several public experiences . . . [We] have learned a great deal over the last three years through some bitter experiences . . .

  We hope to hear from you very soon in this regard and are looking forward to a good working relationship for the future. Please feel free to discuss this matter quite thoroughly with me.

  Fraternally,

  V. T. Lee7

  Oswald would follow none of this advice. His real purpose, after all, was not to create a functioning branch of the FPCC but to build as quickly as possible a record that would impress Castro’s officials. So, Oswald’s first need was to assemble a dossier of official FPCC letters, to which he could add such documents as handbills and, even more important, news clippings. He would have to select actions that would attract media attention. A first step would be to create other officials besides himself in the New Orleans chapter of the FPCC:

  MR. RANKIN. Were the words “A. J. Hidell, Chapter President” . . . in your handwriting?

  MARINA OSWALD. Yes . . . . Lee wrote this down on a piece of paper and told me to sign it on this card, and said that he would beat me if I didn’t . . . I said, “You have selected this name because it sounds like Fidel” and he blushed and said, “Shut up, it is none of your business.”

  MR. RANKIN. Was there any discussion about who Hidell, as signed on the bottom of that card, was?

  MARINA OSWALD. He said . . . there is no Hidell [and] I taunted him about this and . . . said how shameful it is that a person who has his own perfectly good name should take another name, and he said, “ . . . I have to do it this way, people will think I have big organization . . .”8 After he became busy with his pro-Cuban activity, he received a letter from somebody in New York . . . from some Communist leader and he was very happy, he felt that this was a great man that he had received a letter from.