1

“Which One Are You?”

President John F. Kennedy had been dead less than an hour. J. D. Tippit, only the third Dallas policeman in a decade to die in the line of duty, was killed shortly after the President. Rumors swept the city. Dealey Plaza, the site of the presidential assassination, was in pandemonium. Dozens of witnesses sent the police scurrying in different directions in futile search of an assassin. While most police mobilized to hunt the President’s killer, more than a dozen sped to Dallas’s Oak Cliff, a quiet middle-class neighborhood, to search for Tippit’s murderer.

At 1:46 P.M., after an abortive raid on a public library, a police dispatcher announced: “Have information a suspect just went in the Texas Theater on West Jefferson.” Within minutes, more than six squad cars sealed the theater’s front and rear exits. Police armed with shotguns spread into the balcony and the main floor as the lights were turned up. Only a dozen moviegoers were scattered inside the small theater. Officer M. N. McDonald began walking up the left aisle from the rear of the building, searching patrons along the way. Soon, he was near a young man in the third row from the back of the theater. McDonald stopped and ordered him to stand. The man slowly stood up, raised both hands, and then yelled, “Well, it is all over now.”1 In the next instant, he punched McDonald in the face, sending the policeman’s cap flying backward. McDonald instinctively lurched forward just as his assailant pulled a pistol from his waist. They tumbled over the seats as other police rushed to subdue the gunman. The gun’s hammer clicked as the man pulled the trigger, but it did not fire.2

After the suspect was handcuffed, he shouted, “I am not resisting arrest. Don’t hit me anymore.”³ The police pulled him to his feet and marched him out the theater as he yelled, “I know my rights. I want a lawyer.”⁴ A crowd of nearly two hundred had gathered in front of the building, the rumor circulating that the President’s assassin might have been caught. As the police exited, the crowd surged forward, screaming obscenities and crying, “Let us have him. We’ll kill him! We want him!” The young man smirked and hollered back, “I protest this police brutality!”⁵ Several police formed a wedge and cut through the mob to an unmarked car. The suspect was pushed into the rear seat between two policemen while three officers packed into the front. Its red lights flashing, the car screeched away and headed downtown.

The suspect was calm. Again he declared, “I know my rights,” and then asked, “What is this all about?”⁶ He was told he was under arrest for killing J. D. Tippit. He didn’t look surprised. “Police officer been killed?” he asked. He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I hear they burn for murder.” Officer C. T. Walker, sitting on his right side, tried to control his temper: “You may find out.” Again, the suspect smirked. “Well, they say it just takes a second to die,” he said.⁷

One of the police asked him his name. He refused to answer. They asked where he lived. Again just silence. Detective Paul Bentley reached over and pulled a wallet from the suspect’s left hip pocket. “I don’t know why you are treating me like this,” he said. “The only thing I have done is carry a pistol into a movie.”⁸

Bentley looked inside the wallet. He called out the name: “Lee Oswald.” There was no reaction. Then he found another identification with the name Alek Hidell. Again no acknowledgment. Bentley said, “I guess we are going to have to wait until we get to the station to find out who he actually is.”⁹

Shortly after 2:00 P.M., the squad car pulled into the basement of the city hall. The police told the suspect he could hide his face from the press as they entered the building. He shrugged his shoulders. “Why should I hide my face? I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.”10

The police ran him into an elevator and took him to a third-floor office. He was put into a small interrogation room, with several men standing guard, as they waited for the chief of homicide, Captain Will Fritz. Suddenly, another homicide detective, Gus Rose, entered the room. He had the suspect’s billfold in his hand, and he pushed two plastic cards forward. “One says Lee Harvey Oswald and one says Alek Hidell. Which one are you?”

A smirk again crossed his face. “You figure it out,” he said.

For the past thirty years historians, researchers, and government investigators have tried to deal with Oswald’s simple challenge. Although the identity of the suspect remained in doubt for only a few more minutes at that Dallas police station, the search has continued for the answer to the broader question of who Lee Harvey Oswald was. Understanding him is the key to finding out what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Oswald was born on October 18, 1939, into a lower-middle-class family in a downtrodden New Orleans neighborhood. His father, Robert Edward Lee Oswald, died two months before his birth. His mother, Marguerite, was a domineering woman, consumed with self-pity both over the death of her husband and because she had to return to work to support Lee, his brother, Robert, and a halfbrother, John Pic, from the first of her three marriages.¹¹ Marguerite played an important role in Oswald’s development, and conspiracy critics cast her in a positive light. Jim Marrs, author of Crossfire, one of two books upon which the movie JFK was based, downplays Oswald’s formative years: “Despite much conjecture, there is little evidence that Lee’s childhood was any better or any worse than others.”¹² Anthony Summers, in his best-selling Conspiracy, quotes a relative describing Marguerite as “a woman with a lot of character and good morals, and I’m sure that what she was doing for her boys she thought was the best at the time.”¹³

The truth is quite different. Robert described his mother as “rather quarrelsome” and “not easy to get along with when she didn’t get her own way.”14 According to Robert, Marguerite tried to “dominate” and “control” the entire family, and the boys found it “difficult … to put up with her.”¹⁵ John Pic developed a “hostility” toward her and felt “no motherly love.”¹⁶ Although she wanted to rule her sons’ lives, she was unable to cope with them following the death of her husband. High-strung, and failing to keep any job very long,* she committed Robert and John Pic to an orphanage.¹⁷ She wanted also to send Lee, but he was too young to be accepted. Instead, she shuttled him between her sister and an assortment of housekeepers and baby-sitters.¹⁸ The temporary arrangement did not work. Marguerite had let a couple move into her home to help care for Lee, but had to fire them when she discovered they had been whipping him to control his “unmanageable” disposition.¹⁹ She admitted it “was difficult with Lee,” juggling different jobs and homes (they moved five times before Lee was three). The instability had its effect on Oswald. Years later, in an introductory note to a manuscript, he wrote: “Lee Harvey Oswald was born in Oct 1939 in New Orleans, La. the son of a Insuraen [sic] Salesman whose early death left a far mean streak of indepence [sic] brought on by negleck [sic].”²⁰

The day after Christmas 1942, Marguerite finally placed three-year-old Lee into the orphanage, where he joined his two brothers.²¹ Nearly one hundred youngsters lived at the Bethlehem Children’s Home. The atmosphere was relaxed, and Lee’s older brothers watched out for him during his stay there, which was quite uneventful. In early 1944, Marguerite unexpectedly checked her sons out of the Bethlehem Home and moved to Dallas. She relocated there because of her personal interest in a local businessman, Edwin Ekdahl, whom she had met six months earlier in New Orleans.²² They married in May of the following year. Lee’s new stepfather worked for a utility company and extensive travel was part of his job. Robert and John Pic were placed in a military boarding school and Marguerite and Lee traveled with Ekdahl.²³ The business trips and short relocations were so extensive that Lee missed most of his first year of school, but by late October, they settled in Benbrook, Texas, a suburb of Fort Worth. Just after his sixth birthday, Lee was admitted to Benbrook Common Elementary.24

But young Oswald was no longer concerned about the frequent moves or his absence from school because he had found a friend in his stepfather. Lee’s halfbrother, John Pic, recalled, “I think Lee found in him the father he never had. He had treated him real good and I am sure that Lee felt the same way. I know he did.”²⁵ Soon after the marriage, however, Marguerite and Ekdahl began arguing. “She wanted more money out of him,” recalls Pic. “That was the basis of all arguments.”* The fights increased steadily in vituperation and intensity. Ekdahl often walked out, staying at a hotel, and in the summer of 1946, Marguerite moved with Lee to Covington, Louisiana.²⁶ But Ekdahl and Marguerite soon reunited. Lee was ecstatic when his stepfather moved back in, but he hated the fighting and separations.²⁷ “I think Lee was a lot more sensitive than any of us realized at the time,” recalled his brother, Robert.²⁸

The uncertainty in the marriage prevented Lee from ever settling into a single neighborhood and school. In September 1946, he enrolled in a new school, Covington Elementary, but was again in the first grade, because he had not completed the required work at Benbrook. After five months, Marguerite withdrew him from Covington and they moved back to Fort Worth, where Lee enrolled in his third school, the Clayton Public Elementary. He finally finished the first grade, but soon after he was registered for the second grade in the fall, they moved again.²⁹ A schoolmate at Clayton, Philip Vinson, recalled that while Oswald was not a bully, he was a leader of one of three or four schoolyard gangs.³⁰ Since he was a year older than his classmates, “they seemed to look up to him because he was so well built and husky … he was considered sort of a tough-guy type.”³¹ Vinson also noted, however, that none of the boys in Oswald’s gang ever played with him after school or went to his home. “I never went to his house, and I never knew anybody who did,” said Vinson.32

In January 1948, Ekdahl moved out permanently, and he started divorce proceedings in March. Soon after, Marguerite moved to a run-down house in a poor Fort Worth neighborhood, adjoining railroad tracks.³³ Lee was enrolled in another school, the Clark Elementary, his fourth. Unable to afford the tuition at military boarding school for her other two sons, Marguerite moved them in with her and Lee. Robert Oswald and John Pic described the new home as “lower-class” and “prisonlike,” and they found Lee even less communicative than when they had previously left the household, often “brooding for hours” at a time.³⁴ Lee had always been a quiet child. But with the constant moving, he did not easily fit in with his schoolmates and seldom made friends.

In June 1948, the bitter divorce proceedings came to trial. Lee was brought to court to testify, but refused, saying he would not know the truth from a lie. While the divorce dragged along, he stayed home alone with a pet dog, a gift from a neighbor.³⁵ His brother noticed that he seemed to withdraw further into himself.

That summer, Marguerite and her sons moved once again to Benbrook, Texas. By the autumn they returned to Fort Worth, the thirteenth move since Lee’s birth. He was enrolled in the third grade at Arlington Heights Elementary. With her marriage over, Marguerite now gave Lee all her attention, spoiling and protecting him. “She always wanted to let Lee have his way about everything,” recalled her sister, Lillian Murret.³⁶ Afraid he could be hurt in physical activities like sports, she instead encouraged gentler pursuits like tap dancing, but he preferred to stay home by himself or with her.³⁷ Until he was almost eleven years of age, Lee often slept in the same bed with his mother.³⁸

According to Pic, who admittedly resented his mother more than Robert did, Marguerite’s attitudes made the home atmosphere depressing.³⁹ She was jealous of others, resented what they had, and constantly complained about how unfairly life treated her. “She didn’t have many friends and usually the new friends she made she didn’t keep very long,” recalled Pic. “I remember every time we moved she always had fights with the neighbors or something or another.”40 Pic felt so strongly about her that after the assassination he said that if Lee was guilty, then he “was aided with a little extra push from his mother in the living conditions that she presented to him.” Even Lee’s wife, Marina, later said that “part of the guilt” was with Marguerite, because she did not provide him the correct education, leadership, or guidance.

She did not encourage him to attend school when Lee whined that he did not like it. Instead, his mother told him he was brighter and better than other children, and reinforced his feeling that he learned more at home by reading books than from listening to his teachers. “She told me that she had trained Lee to stay in the house,” Marguerite’s sister, Lillian, recalled, “to stay close to home when she wasn’t there; and even to run home from school and remain in the house or near the house.… He just got in the habit of staying alone like that.”⁴¹ Oswald’s cousin Marilyn Murret said that Marguerite thought it was better for him to stay at home alone than to “get in with other boys and do things they shouldn’t do.”⁴²

When Lee visited the Murrets during this period, Lillian found “he wouldn’t go out and play. He would rather just stay in the house and read or something.” She did not think it was healthy for him to be inside all the time, so the Murrets took him out, but immediately noticed “he didn’t seem to enjoy himself.” “He was obviously very unhappy,” his aunt concluded.

Neighbors noticed the odd relationship between the overbearing mother and the introverted youngster. Mrs. W. H. Bell, a neighbor in Benbrook, remembered Lee as a loner who did not like to be disciplined.⁴³ Myrtle Evans, a good friend of Marguerite, said she “was too close to Lee all the time.”⁴⁴ Evans said Lee was “a bookworm” even at seven years of age, and that his mother “spoiled him to death.”⁴⁵ “The way he kept to himself just wasn’t normal,” Evans recalled.⁴⁶

Another neighbor, Hiram Conway, lived two doors away from Lee in Fort Worth. He noticed something else about him: “He was quick to anger.” Conway noticed that on the way home from school, Oswald looked for other children to throw stones at. They got out of his way. “He was vicious almost.… He was a bad kid,” recalled Conway.⁴⁷ Conway’s impressions were formed from watching Lee from the age of nine to almost thirteen. He believed the young Oswald was smarter than most his age, but also “very strange.”48

Otis Carlton, a neighbor in Benbrook, was in the Oswalds’ living room one evening when Lee, gripping a butcher knife, ran through chasing John Pic. Lee hurled the knife at Pic, in front of a startled Carlton, but it missed and struck the wall. According to Carlton, Marguerite calmly said, “They have these little scuffles all the time and don’t worry about it.”⁴⁹

In September 1949, Lee transferred to his sixth school, Ridglea West Elementary, just in time to start the fourth grade. As in his other schools, his grades were mediocre. On an IQ test he recorded an unexceptional 103.* He remained there for the next three years, his longest stay at a single school. One of his teachers, Mrs. Clyde Livingston, never saw him make friends or come out of his shell.⁵⁰

In January 1950, John Pic left the house to join the Coast Guard. Robert joined the Marines in July 1952. Lee, who had grown closer to Robert than anyone else in the family, bought a copy of the Marine Corps handbook. Although only twelve, “he was going to keep up with me, to learn everything I was learning,” recalled Robert.⁵¹

With both her older sons gone, in August 1952 Marguerite moved with Lee to New York City, where John Pic was stationed. They temporarily moved in with Pic, his wife of one year, Marge, and their newborn son, who were staying at Pic’s mother-in-law’s small apartment, at 325 East 92nd Street in Manhattan. Pic, who took a week’s leave from the Coast Guard to tour New York with his younger brother, recalled that Lee “was real glad to see me.” But he soon realized Marguerite had no intention of moving and finding her own apartment. Tension in the household grew as Pic’s wife and Marguerite often argued. Lee added to the strained atmosphere by fighting loudly with his mother and often striking her.⁵² One day, Marge asked Lee to lower the volume on the television, and instead he pulled out a knife and threatened her. When Marguerite rushed into the room and told him to put it away, he punched her in the face.53 The Pics immediately asked Marguerite and Lee to move. “After I approached Lee about this incident,” recalled Pic, “his feelings toward me became hostile and thereafter [he] remained indifferent to me and never again was I able to communicate to him in any way.”⁵⁴* Pic stayed in contact with his mother but felt helpless as he witnessed her gradual loss of control over Lee.⁵⁵

While he was at the Pics’, Lee enrolled in Trinity Evangelical Lutheran School, but was only there several weeks before moving with Marguerite to a one-room basement apartment in the Bronx. There, he entered Public School 117, a junior high. He hated the New York schools, where he was teased by other students for his Southern drawl and shabby clothes, primarily jeans and T-shirts. At P.S. 117, he missed forty-seven of sixty-four school days and was failing most of his courses when his mother pulled him out.⁵⁶ In January 1953, they moved again in the Bronx, their third time in five months. Lee was enrolled in a new school, P.S. 44, but refused to attend. Two hearings regarding Oswald’s truancy were set, but Marguerite and Lee did not show up. In April, a judge declared him a truant and remanded him to Youth House for three weeks of psychiatric evaluation.⁵⁷ Social workers noted he made no effort to mix with the other children while there. The probation officer assigned to the case, John Carro, remembered it because it was unique. “This was not the usual hooky playing type … the type of boy who does not go to school, to truant with his other friends, to go to the park, fish, play, or whatever it is,” recalled Carro. “This [Oswald] was a boy who would not go to school just to remain home, not do anything.”58 Carro found that Oswald “did not want to play with anybody, he did not care to go to school.”⁵⁹ In the few classes Oswald attended at P.S. 117, Carro discovered he had been disruptive.

At Youth House, Oswald told Evelyn Strickman, his caseworker, that he felt his mother “never gave a damn” about him. In her report, Strickman wrote that Lee “feels almost as if there’s a veil between him and other people through which they cannot reach him, but he prefers this veil to remain intact.”⁶⁰ After the social workers interviewed Lee, he was sent to the staff psychiatrist, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and an M.D. He vividly remembered Oswald eleven years later when he testified before the Warren Commission. Hartogs gave seminars for other professionals in which he discussed interesting and unusual cases discovered at Youth House. One week, he chose Oswald as the seminar subject. The reason Hartogs considered him so interesting was “because he came to us on a charge of truancy from school, and yet when I examined him, I found him to have definite traits of dangerousness. In other words, this child had a potential for explosive, aggressive, assaultive acting out which was rather unusual to find in a child who was sent to the Youth House on such a mild charge as truancy from school.” Hartogs thought Oswald “in full contact with reality” but “intensely self-centered.”⁶¹ He also said the thirteen-year-old “showed a cold, detached outer attitude” and “talked about his situation” in a “nonparticipating fashion.”⁶² Hartogs found it “difficult to penetrate the emotional wall behind which this boy hides.”⁶³ He perceived that Oswald had “intense anxiety, shyness, feelings of awkwardness and insecurity” as the main reasons for his withdrawal tendencies (emphasis in original). Oswald told him his main goal was to join the Army, although Hartogs noticed he had developed a “vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power.”⁶⁴

Oswald admitted that he became very angry with his mother whenever she returned home without having brought food for supper, and confessed he occasionally hit her. He also told the psychiatrist, “I don’t want a friend and I don’t like to talk to people.” When asked if he preferred the company of boys or girls, he responded, “I dislike everybody.”

Hartogs’s diagnosis was “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies. Lee has to be seen as an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a selfinvolved and conflicted mother.”65 Although Hartogs thought he “was quite clear” in emphasizing Oswald’s potential for violence by “the diagnosis of passive-aggressive,” he did not explicitly state it since that would have mandated institutionalization. Instead, he recommended that Oswald be placed on probation so long as he was under guidance, preferably from a psychiatrist.*

The New York Domestic Relations Court considered Hartogs’s diagnosis serious enough that it assigned a probation officer to Oswald and tried for the next nine months to find appropriate treatment for the disturbed youngster. Meanwhile, Lee was at his ninth school, P.S. 44. On several occasions, Marguerite refused to bring him to court, claiming he had returned and adapted well to school. Instead, his grades were low, sometimes failing, and comments from his teachers noted he was “quicktempered,” “constantly losing control,” and “getting into battles with others.”66 Oswald refused to do his homework or salute the American flag during the class’s normal recital of the Pledge of Allegiance.⁶⁷ One of his teachers, H. Rosen, said, “When we spoke to him about his behavior, his attitude was belligerent. I offered to help him, he brushed out with, ‘I don’t need anybody’s help!’”⁶⁸ John Carro, his probation officer, believed that Marguerite was part of the reason Lee was not getting better: “[S]he may have been as disturbed as the boy.… [S]he seemed so preoccupied with her own problems at the time that I do not think she really had an awareness as to the boy’s own problems and fears.”⁶⁹ “If she had faced it,” said Robert, “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.”⁷⁰

By November 1953, Judge Sicher ordered Oswald be placed in a home for disturbed boys and that he be given mandatory psychiatric care. Placing him was difficult since most of the residence homes for which he qualified were overcrowded. Marguerite was now convinced that New York and the court system were the sources of her son’s problems. “In New York, if you are out of school one day you go to children’s court,” she told the Warren Commission. “In Texas the children stay out of school for months at a time.” At the start of 1954, to avoid Lee’s placement in an institution, she fled the jurisdiction and returned with him to New Orleans. Carro recalled, “I wrote to her … and the letter was returned ‘Moved, address unknown.’ … There is very little one can really do. We don’t have extra-state jurisdiction, and we didn’t even know where she had gone.”⁷¹

Marguerite briefly moved in with her sister, Lillian, who saw that Lee was still a “lonely boy” and that no matter what he did, Marguerite “didn’t think her child could do anything wrong …”⁷² But the Oswalds left the Murrets’ after several weeks and rented an apartment owned by Marguerite’s friend Myrtle Evans. Evans had not seen the Oswalds in several years. She immediately noticed changes in Lee, who was fourteen. Although still withdrawn, he had become abusive toward his mother. “He was more spoiled,” Evans said. “He wanted his way … he was very difficult.”⁷³ Lee returned from school each day, stood at the head of the stairs, and screamed for his mother to fix him something to eat. Marguerite dropped whatever else she was doing to take food to his room, where he locked himself away to listen to records and read books. “[H]e was a lot more difficult this time to understand or control than he was when he was younger.… He was a hard one to figure out,” Evans recalled. Lee had developed a “loud and quite disturbing voice” and used it to order Marguerite around the house; although Lee “was getting a little unbearable,” his mother obligingly acquiesced to his dictates.74

Evans’s husband, Julian, also noticed that Lee had changed, “was arrogant.… Real demanding, and loud.… Nobody liked him.… He didn’t associate with anybody. Stayed mostly in the apartment.”⁷⁵ Julian was surprised by the “insolent” manner with which Lee spoke to his mother. Once Julian took Lee, with some other children, to fish at a small pond. Oswald did not talk to the others, insisting on fishing by himself. The other children either threw small fish back into the pond or kept the larger ones to eat later. Lee just laid everything he caught in a row at his feet and then, when he tired of fishing, walked away, leaving them dying on the bank. “We couldn’t understand that at all,” says Julian. “It just showed how totally inconsiderate he was of everything. It was a good example of how he acted, and his general attitude.”⁷⁶ Julian tried to get Lee to socialize, but could not get through to him. “I don’t think anybody did. I don’t think anybody even came close to it, because the way he was, nobody could figure him out. It was hard to get to him or to understand him. He didn’t want you to get too close to him …” Frustrated by Lee’s coldness, Julian abandoned his efforts. “I thought he was a psycho,” said Julian. “I really did.”⁷⁷

Lee was now enrolled at Beauregard Junior High, his tenth school. Bennierita Sparacio, a classmate, said, “I could remember him so much because he was always getting in fights …”⁷⁸ Soon after enrolling, Oswald had a bloody fight with two brothers, which attracted a crowd from the school. A couple of days later, a football player surprised Lee and smashed him in the mouth, knocking out a tooth. Edward Voebel and several other classmates tried to “fix him up” in the bathroom. “That’s when our friendship” began, Voebel said.⁷⁹ But he soon learned that Lee “didn’t make friends. It was just that people and things just didn’t interest him generally. He was just living in his own world …” According to Voebel, Lee was “bitter” and thought he had a raw deal out of life. “He didn’t like authority,” he recalled.80

Voebel discovered Oswald was an avid reader, and they shared a mutual interest in guns. Lee owned a plastic model of a .45 caliber pistol, but he wanted a real revolver. Voebel was startled when Oswald hatched a plan to steal a Smith & Wesson automatic from a local store. “He [Oswald] came out with a glasscutter … [and] finally told me his complete plans …”⁸¹ Oswald convinced him to help case the downtown store, but Voebel noticed a strip around the window and warned Lee that if he cut the window, it would set off an alarm. Oswald abandoned his plan.

Another Beauregard student who spent time with Lee was William Wulf, the astronomy club president. Wulf soon discovered that Oswald shared his interest in history, and one day at Wulfs house, they had a conversation that eventually “got around to communism.”⁸² “I think Oswald brought it up,” Wulf recalled, “because he 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, etc., 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.”⁸³ Wulf was surprised by Oswald’s radicalism and argued with him. As their voices raised, Wulf’s father, having heard Oswald’s philosophy, “politely put him out of the house.”

Wulf was convinced that Oswald was a “self-made communist.… He just learned it on his own.” The extent of his commitment startled Wulf. It struck him odd that he was so adamant at such a young age. “His beliefs seemed to be warped but strong … he seemed to me a boy that was looking for something to belong to.… He had very little self-identification … he just happened … to latch on to this particular area to become identified with.… He impressed me as a boy who could get violent over communism .…”⁸⁴

By the end of the 1955 school year, the ninth grade, which was marked again by mediocre grades, Oswald filled in a personal-history form. As for plans after high school, he checked off both “Military Service” and “Undecided.”85 Although he was briefly a member of the Civil Air Patrol and thought of joining the astronomy club, when asked if he had any close friends, Oswald answered “none.”⁸⁶

In the fall of 1955, Oswald enrolled in his eleventh school, Warren Easton High. But after a month he forged his mother’s name and wrote school authorities a note saying they were moving to San Diego and that he “must quit school now.”⁸⁷ Oswald’s aunt, Lillian Murret, later explained: “Lee didn’t think he had to go to school. He said that he was smart enough and that he couldn’t learn anything at school, that nobody could teach him anything.” Having dropped out days before his sixteenth birthday, Oswald then asked his mother to lie about his age so he could enlist in the Marines.* She agreed in the hope it might provide some direction for what had become an increasingly rebellious and aimless life-style. But though his mother gave her help, the Marines realized he was underage and rejected him. Oswald was furious. He further isolated himself, assiduously avoiding his few acquaintances, and thought only of enlisting as soon as he turned seventeen.⁸⁸ He studied the Marine Corps handbook so much that eventually “he knew it by heart.”⁸⁹

After leaving school, Oswald kept himself busy with clerical and messenger jobs at several companies. Palmer McBride, who worked as a messenger for Pfisterer Dental Laboratory, met Oswald, who was working there in the same capacity. Because both enjoyed classical music, on several occasions Oswald went to his home and they listened to records in McBride’s bedroom. During their first get-together, the discussion turned to politics. After McBride commented that he thought Eisenhower “was doing a pretty good job,” Oswald bristled that Ike “was exploiting the working people” and that if he had the opportunity, he would like to kill Eisenhower.⁹⁰ McBride did not report the threat because he did not think Oswald would act on it. But he had no doubt Lee was a committed Communist. On other occasions, Oswald lectured McBride about the “virtues of Communism,” how “the workers in the world would one day rise up and throw off their chains,” and he often praised Khrushchev.91 At times, he encouraged McBride to join the Communist party with him. McBride once accompanied Oswald to his apartment, and there Lee “seemed quite proud” to have library copies of Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto.⁹² Years later, Lee’s Dallas friend George de Mohrenschildt asked him, “Who told you to read the Marxist books?” Oswald bragged, “Nobody, I went by myself. I started studying it all by myself.”⁹³* Oswald also later confirmed to a correspondent, Aline Mosby, that he had studied Marxism from the age of fifteen, when an elderly woman in New York handed him a pamphlet about the Rosenberg case.⁹⁴ But he said it was not until he arrived in New Orleans that he discovered Das Kapital on a library bookshelf. “It was like a very religious man opening the Bible for the first time,” he recalled. “I continued to indoctrinate myself for five years.”†

In July 1956, Marguerite and Lee moved for the twenty-first time since his birth. Expecting that Lee would join the Marines on his seventeenth birthday, she decided to return to Fort Worth. In September, Oswald enrolled at Arlington Heights, his twelfth school. For a few weeks, he sporadically attended classes before dropping out.⁹⁵ He bought his first real gun, a Marlin bolt-action .22 caliber rifle, which he later sold to his brother, Robert.⁹⁶ He also continued devouring library books about Communism. Within days of leaving school, he wrote a letter to the Socialist Party of America and announced, “I am sixteen years of age and would like more information about your youth League, I would like to know if there is a branch in my area, how to join, ect. [sic], I am a Marxist and have been studying Socialist principles for well over fifteen months.”97

Why did Oswald, a dedicated leftist, want to join the Marines? Ideology did not control him at that young age, and his desire to enlist preceded his interest in Communism. Oswald had talked of joining the Marines since grammar school.⁹⁸ And those who knew him best, his mother and brothers, never had any doubts about his reasons. Robert acknowledged that Lee idolized him, and said, “I feel very surely that the reason that Lee joined the United States Marine Corps was because of my service …”⁹⁹ Even when he was a truant in New York and virtually uncontrollable, Lee wore his brother’s Marine ring as a sign of honor.¹⁰⁰ Oswald later told a reporter: “I joined the Marine Corps because I had a brother in the Marines.”¹⁰¹

But Oswald’s halfbrother, John Pic, perceived an additional motive beyond emulation of Robert. “He did it for the same reasons that I did it and Robert did it … to get from out and under … [t]he yoke of oppression from my mother.”¹⁰² Even Robert admitted that Lee “had seen us escape from Mother that way. To him, military service meant freedom.”¹⁰³

At sixteen, Oswald had a strong interest in Communism, but he was not prepared to stand on principle and refuse to join the Marines, which would have meant staying in Fort Worth, friendless and still under his mother’s control* The Marine Corps offered a new start, and if it had worked for Robert, who returned very satisfied with the service, Oswald was convinced it could work the same magic for him. Lee turned seventeen on October 18, 1956, and joined the Marines one week later.

*She admitted in her Warren Commission testimony to holding more than a dozen jobs and being fired from half of them.

*Marguerite was always concerned about money. After the assassination, she almost always refused to give an interview or sit for photographs unless paid. Marina, Lee’s wife, said, “She has a mania—only money, money, money.” Her son John Pic said in 1964 that money was “her god.”

*When committed to Youth House in New York several years later, Oswald scored 118 on an IQ test.

*Testifying before the Warren Commission, Marguerite could still find no fault with her son despite the knife incident. She said, “He did not use the knife—he had an opportunity to use the knife. But it wasn’t a kitchen knife, or a big knife. It was a little knife.”

People who present Lee as fairly stable overlook the incident when he punched his mother and threatened Pic’s wife with a knife. Harold Weisberg, in the first of his six self-published books attacking the Warren Commission, does not even inform the reader that Marguerite and Lee lived with the Pics. He covers the entire period by writing: “In August 1952, Oswald and his mother moved to New York City, where an older, married son by her first marriage also lived” (Whitewash I, p. 9). Henry Hurt, in his best-seller Reasonable Doubt, not only omits the knife incident but covers all of Oswald’s life from birth to New York in one innocuous sentence: “Born in New Orleans in 1939, Oswald and his domineering, eccentric mother lived in various places, including New York City and Fort Worth” (Reasonable Doubt, p. 195). Best-selling authors like Anthony Summers, Jim Garrison, Mark Lane, Josiah Thompson, and Robert J. Groden and Harrison Livingstone do not mention the New York City period.

*A few critics have denigrated Hartog because in some of his Warren Commission testimony, and in a subsequent book, he went beyond the conclusions of his original 1953 report by describing Oswald as an even more disturbed youngster with a far greater disposition for violence. But he is not even listed in books written by Mark Lane, Josiah Thompson, Jim Garrison, John Davis, Robert J. Groden and Harrison Livingstone, Robert Blakey, Henry Hurt, David Scheim, or David Lifton. Among those who mention the tests, Jim Marrs disingenuously says: “The results were essentially inconclusive. They showed him to be a bright and inquisitive young man who was somewhat tense, withdrawn, and hesitant to talk about himself or his feelings.”

Harold Weisberg tells of the tests but does not quote any of Hartogs’s conclusions. Sylvia Meagher, in her acclaimed book Accessories After the Fact, writes, “There is, then, no basis in any of the available medical or psychiatric histories for allegations that Oswald was psychotic, aberrant, or mentally unsound in any degree.” Meagher’s conclusion is contradicted not only by Hartogs but also by two Soviet psychiatrists who evaluated Oswald after his failed suicide attempt in Moscow in 1959 (see page 51).

*Several years earlier, Oswald’s halfbrother, sixteen-year-old John Pic, had joined the Marine Corps Reserve by using his mother’s false affidavit that he was seventeen (WC Vol. XI, p. 32). (Note to reader: An explanation of abbreviations used in footnotes appears on page 507.)

*Marguerite later admitted to the Warren Commission that Lee had books about Communism at their house. But she still defended her deceased son: “I knew he was reading it. But if we have this material in the public libraries, then certainly it is all right for us to read.”

† Oswald’s early fascination with Communism is a difficult issue for the conspiracy critics, and many ignore his early attraction to Marxism/Leninism. Despite the fact that Oswald was fifteen years old and living with his mother, Harold Weisberg writes that his attraction to Communism only makes sense when “the possibility of Oswald’s being somebody’s agent is considered.”

*If nothing else, being in the Marines provided Oswald the opportunity to break away from his mother. After enlisting, he wrote her infrequently, and saw her only sporadically during the remaining seven years of his life. When she arrived at the police headquarters on the night of November 22, 1963, Marguerite did not even know Lee and his wife, Marina, had a second child.