Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  OSWALD said he would buy MARINA a light-weight pistol for her to use in the hijack scheme [but she] told him not to buy one because she would not participate in the scheme. OSWALD had said he had wanted her to at least learn how to hold a pistol but she refused . . . .

  She said OSWALD tried to talk her into participating in the hijack scheme on at least four occasions . . . .

  During the time he was planning to hijack the plane, OSWALD began taking physical exercises at home for the purpose of increasing his physical strength.4

  McMillan: Lee kept up his exercises for a couple of weeks, causing much merriment in the household. Afterward he rubbed himself all over with a strong-smelling liniment, took a cold shower, and came out of the bathroom as red as a lobster.

  Meanwhile, he had brought home airline schedules and a large map of the world which he tacked up inside the porch. He started measuring distances on the map with a ruler . . . 5

  To commemorate so apocalyptic an action, and to ensure good reception in Cuba, he told her that the new child—it could only be a boy—ought to be called Fidel. She told him that there was going to be no Fidel in her body.

  He did not argue. He was putting together a résumé of his life. Once again, determined to go to Cuba, he is also contemplating a move of his family to Washington, Baltimore, or New York. Either way, he needs to prepare his papers. In New York, he can show them to officers in the Communist Party or the Socialist Workers Party. If he makes it to Cuba, he can present his dossier.

  All this while, a part of him has to feel as shattered as if a grenade had gone off in his guts. The radio debate had destroyed so much; now, there is the prodigious concern of finding a way to get to Cuba, and the wholly separate option of going east to New York, Washington, or Baltimore and joining the Communist Party.

  It spews over into his writing. If we may speak of dyslexia as a species of spiritual eruption, this is the worst case we see in all the samples of his writing in all the eleven volumes of Warren Commission Exhibits.

  Here is an uncorrected example of what he will either bring to Cuba or use to seek entrance into the Communist Party:

  I first read the communist manifesto and 1st volume of capital in 1954 when I was 15 I have study 18th century plosipers works by Lein after 1959 and attened numerous marxist reading circle and groups at the factory where I worked some of which were compulsory and other which were not. also in Russia through newspapers, radio and T.V. I leared much of Marx Engels and Lenins works. such articles are given very good coverage daliy in the USSR.6

  What a contrast to the Stuckey interview! It is Oswald at his worst. How huge is his anxiety: His ambition is always leading him to worlds where his experience is small—he does not even speak Spanish—and this anxiety wells up in every misspelled syllable as he goes on to describe his abilities as “Street Agitator,” and “Radio Specker.”

  Since his letters to officials are usually far more accurate in spelling, we can presume that he usually takes the time to correct his first draft with a dictionary, yet here, where the dossier might be most important for him, he has made no corrections. It is powerful evidence of what must be close to overwhelming inner panic.

  Yet all of this is gone by the time of a visit from Ruth Paine. She had written to Marina on August 24 that she would be coming back from visiting her relatives in the East and Midwest by September and would stop off in New Orleans for a quick visit.

  On September 20, true to her promise, Ruth arrived in New Orleans and was greeted warmly by Lee. He was in a very good mood, Ruth would say afterward, the best mood she had ever seen him in. If his bouts of anxiety were as deep as immersions in a pit, he could, given the wide spectrum of his swings of mood, pass all the way over to blue sky and high noon. He had made up his mind: He would choose Cuba. A large problem had been resolved. In addition, all the details of Marina’s delivery of their second child, perhaps a month away, would be taken care of by Ruth. She would now make all the arrangements at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, and he would have to pay very little for it since he had worked for six months at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall and so could show a Texas residency. Now, as far as Ruth knew, which is to say as far as he allowed Marina to tell her, he was on his way to Houston to look for work. He would come for his wife and children once he was reestablished.

  Marina took Ruth to see the sights in the French Quarter. They would peek through the swinging doors of the strip-tease bars, one tall woman and one tiny woman holding the hands of three children. Meanwhile, Lee was at home packing. In the course of it, he wrapped and tied his gun in a blanket that he would stow in Ruth’s car before the two women departed on Monday.

  McMillan: No sooner had they said their goodbyes and driven off than Ruth noticed a rumbling in one of her tires. She pulled up at a gas station one block from the apartment to have it changed. Lee, in his sandals, followed them there. Marina took him to one side and they parted all over again. She was tender to him, telling him to be careful and eat properly.

  “Stop,” he said. “I can’t stand it. Do you want me to cry in front of Ruth?”

  For him, too, the hardest thing was to conceal from Ruth that the parting might be forever. And so, while the two of them fought back their tears, Lee held Junie in front of the Coke machines to help them regain their composure. “Come on, Junie,” he said. “Show me with your fingers what you want.” . . . [When] he had a grip on himself, he warned Marina that, above all, she was not to tell Ruth he was going to Cuba.7

  He stayed in the apartment for another night or two. Just when he left New Orleans is in doubt, but he managed to depart without paying the landlady, Mrs. Garner, the last two weeks of rent. She had seen him packing Ruth’s car on Sunday night, but he told her that Marina was going to Texas to have the baby and he would stay on. He didn’t. He decamped.

  PART V

  PROTAGONISTS AND PROVOCATEURS

  1

  Protagonists and Provocateurs

  Oswald is leaving New Orleans, yet we do not know if he has had a secret life or not. If now and again we have had intimations of as much, others did too. A formidable number of books have been written by conspiracy theorists examining many a possibility of intelligence activity by and around Oswald. Yet, after all this time, there is no overruling evidence that he was definitely associated with the FBI, the CIA, Army or Navy Intelligence, or any Cuban groups. It is still possible to believe that Oswald was simply an overambitious yet much henpecked husband, with an unbalanced psyche, a vein of brutality toward his wife, and that was the sad sum of him.

  Such an interpretation has been given by Priscilla Johnson McMillan in Marina and Lee, by Jean Davison in Oswald’s Game, and most recently by Gerald Posner in Case Closed, a work which provided great joy to every element of the media that had been antipathetic to Oliver Stone’s JFK and was generally offended by conspiracy theorists.

  This book, however, was undertaken without a fixed conclusion in either direction; indeed, it began with a prejudice in favor of the conspiracy theorists. All the same, one’s plan for the work was to take Oswald on his own terms as long as that was possible—that is, try to comprehend his deeds as arising from nothing more than himself until such a premise lost all headway. To study his life in this manner produces a hypothesis: Oswald was a protagonist, a prime mover, a man who made things happen—in short, a figure larger than others would credit him for being. Indeed, this point of view has by now taken hold to a point where the writer would not like to relinquish it for too little. There is the danger! Hypotheses commence as our servant—they enable us to keep our facts in order while we attempt to learn more about a partially obscured subject. Once the profits of such a method accumulate, however, one is morally obliged (like a man who has just grown rich) to be scrupulously on guard against one’s own corruption. Otherwise, the hitherto useful hypothesis will insist on prevailing over everything that comes in and so will take over the integrity of the project.

  One can feel such a tende
ncy stirring. It is possible that the working hypothesis has become more important to the author than trying to discover the truth. For if Oswald remains intact as an important if dark protagonist, one has served a purpose: The burden of a prodigious American obsession has been lessened, and the air cleared of an historic scourge—absurdity. So long as Oswald is a petty figure, a lone twisted pathetic killer who happened to be in a position to kill a potentially great President, then, as has been argued earlier in this work, America is cursed with an absurdity. There was no logic to the event and no sense of balance in the universe. Historical absurdity (like the war in Vietnam) breeds social disease.

  We have, of course, an alternative posed by the movie JFK. There, our President was killed by the architects of a vast plot embracing the most powerful officers of our armed forces, our intelligence, and our Mafia, a massive array of establishment evil that is thrilling to our need to live imaginatively with great stakes in great wars, but such a thesis also leaves us with horror: We are small, and the forces of evil are huge.

  Of course, the odds that a huge conspiracy can succeed and remain hidden are also small. And Oswald would have been the last man that a leader of such a vast conspiracy would have selected to be in on the action. While JFK satisfies our growing and gloomy sense that nine tenths of our freedom has been preempted by forces vastly larger than ourselves (and Stone’s hypothesis gives great power to the film), it does not come near to solving the immediate question: Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill JFK, and if he did, was he a lone gunman or a participant in a conspiracy?

  Given the yeast-like propensities of conspiracy to expand and expand as one looks to buttress each explanation, it can hardly be difficult for the reader to understand why it is more agreeable to keep to one’s developing concept of Oswald as a protagonist, a man to whom, grudgingly, we must give a bit of stature when we take into account the modesty of his origins. That, to repeat, can provide us with a sense of the tragic rather than of the absurd. If a figure as large as Kennedy is cheated abruptly of his life, we feel better, inexplicably better, if his killer is also not without size. Then, to some degree, we can also mourn the loss of possibility in the man who did the deed. Tragedy is vastly preferable to absurdity. Such is the vested interest that adheres to perceiving Oswald as a tragic and infuriating hero (or, if you will, anti-hero) rather than as a snarling little wife abuser or a patsy.

  Still, one has to remain aware of the danger of bypassing those interesting leads that do point to a conspiracy. Mysteries are kin to mammoth caves. One can hardly take pride for what has already been reconnoitered without remaining open to the labyrinth that still remains unexplored. Before we quit New Orleans, then, let us take some measure of the events that do not fit the picture we have so far obtained of Oswald through these heat-filled months of May, June, July, August, and the greater part of September down in the Big Easy.

  We can commence with a minor testimony by a young Cuban bartender named Evaristo Rodriguez, who worked in the Habana Bar, at 117 Decatur Street in the French Quarter. His remarks, while of no great importance, have the virtue of reminding us that the prose of Ernest Hemingway, as he was the first to admit, was not foreign to Spanish notions of syntax and sequence:

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. . . . these men came into the bar . . . the one who spoke Spanish ordered the tequila, so I told him the price . . . was 50 cents. I brought him the tequila and a little water. The man protested at the price . . . and he made some statement to the effect that . . . the owner of this bar must be a capitalist, and we had a little debate about the price, but that passed over. Then the man who I later learned was Oswald ordered a lemonade. Now I didn’t know what to give him because we don’t have lemonades in the bar. So I asked Orest Pena how I should fix [one.] Orest told me to take a little of this lemon flavoring, squirt in some water, and charge him 25 cents . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. What time of day did this happen?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. This happened . . . between 2:30 and 3 in the morning. I am not certain of the exact hour but that’s the best of my recollection.

  MR. LIEBELER. Were either of these men drunk?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. The man I later learned to be Oswald had his arm around the Latin-appearing man and Oswald appeared to be somewhat drunk . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. Are you able to say the nationality of the man who was with Oswald?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. . . . He could have been a Mexican; he could have been a Cuban, but at this point, I don’t recall.

  MR. LIEBELER. What did this [other] man look like? . . .

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. . . . about 28 years old, very hairy arms, . . . He was a stocky man with broad shoulders, about 5 feet, 8 inches . . . He probably hit around 155 . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. Now how tall would you estimate Oswald was?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. I didn’t get a good look . . . because Oswald was drunk and he was more or less in a sagging position most of the time . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. Did Oswald become sick?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. He became sick on the table and on the floor.

  MR. LIEBELER. Then did he go in the street and continue being sick?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. The Latin-appearing man helped him to the street where he continued to be sick.

  MR. LIEBELER. What was Oswald wearing?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. Oswald, as I recall, had on a dark pair of pants and a short-sleeved white shirt.

  MR. LIEBELER. Did he have a tie on?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. Oswald had what appeared to be a small bow tie.

  MR. LIEBELER. Are you sure?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. . . . Oswald’s collar was open and this thing was hanging from one side of it.

  MR. LIEBELER. It was a clip-on bow tie?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. It was a clip-on thing . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. When did this happen? What month?

  MR. RODRIGUEZ. I can’t remember exactly, but I know it was just about 1 year ago, and I presume it was in August.1

  Could he have mistaken August for May? New Orleans can be as hot in May as in mid-summer, and the man with Oswald may have been one of the Mexicans who went with Lee to see the lawyer Dean Adams Andrews about rectifying his Marine Corps discharge.

  On the other hand, if it was August or September, then the bartender could be referring to the same Mexican or Cuban who, conceivably, will go to Dallas with Oswald and a man named Leopoldo two mysterious individuals we are going to encounter in the next chapter. Either way, Evaristo Rodriguez has given us the record of a small event that does not fit into our framework. To the best of Marina’s recollection, Lee, but for the exception of the afternoon he was arrested, spent every night in New Orleans at home with her. So, her memory is betraying her or the event took place in early May (or on Monday or Tuesday night, September 23 or 24, after Marina had left with Ruth Paine for Irving, Texas). Or: the man was not Oswald.

  Yet, the story rings true in at least one detail. Oswald, terribly drunk early in the morning and there with his arm around another man, would probably be ready to throw up.

  The episode also introduces us to Orest Pena, the boss of the bar. Pena is macho to a reasonable degree. That is, he is prudently macho, but then, how can you be a Cuban presiding over a Cuban establishment with the proud name of Habana Bar without settling for oxymoronic faculties—prudent and macho?

  MR. PENA. . . . they asked my bartender, Evaristo, why I charge so much for the drinks and I was a capitalist charging too much for the drinks. He went and came to me and told me about it. I said, “Don’t worry about it. They pay you already?” “Yes.” “Don’t worry about it. If you are going to worry about all the customers, you are going to go crazy.”2

  Soon, Orest Pena is talking about the FBI and his relation to them:

  MR. PENA. . . . when I joined the organization against Castro in New Orleans, one of the agents of the FBI, de Brueys, started going to my place very, very often asking me about many different people, Spanish people, what I knew, what I thought. I told him what I knew; that some people was for Castro
and some people was against. I told him what I saw. I never did ask him what he found out about those people.

  MR. LIEBELER. Sometimes you would call the FBI and give them information [which] you picked up from conversations that took place at your bar? . . .

  MR. PENA. Yes . . . Then de Brueys came to the organization . . .

  MR. LIEBELER. He joined it?

  MR. PENA. No, he didn’t join it, but he was sticking with the organization very, very close . . . we knew he was an FBI agent. So from time to time he [came] to my place and was asking me about this guy and that guy, different people here in New Orleans. So I told him . . . about people that I am for sure they are for Castro here in New Orleans. So one way or the other, he was interfering with me somehow, Mr. de Brueys, so—

  MR. LIEBELER. De Brueys was interfering with you?

  MR. PENA. Yes. Somehow. So one day I went to the FBI. They called me to the FBI. I don’t remember exactly for what they called me. So I told . . . de Brueys’ boss . . . that I don’t talk to de Brueys. I don’t trust him as an American.

  MR. LIEBELER. Did you tell them the reasons why you didn’t?

  MR. PENA. Because he was interfering very close with the organization against Castro . . . So 2 days later he went to my place of business. He said to me at the table, “I want to talk to you.” I said, “Okay, let’s go.” He said not to talk about him any more because what he could do is get me in big trouble. He said, “I am an FBI man. I can get you in big trouble.”3

  The House Select Committee on Assassinations gives its assessment of this matter:

  [De Brueys] acknowledged that he did use Pena informally as an occasional source of information because of his position as a bar owner in New Orleans, but he declined to characterize Pena as an informant because of the absence of any systematic reporting relationship.4