He had been planning the assassination even before he bought the rifle. He had chosen his victim, scouted the location, written detailed notes in his journal, drawn maps and diagrams, even photographed the building. By the time he was ready to do it, his notebook bulged with all the information needed to carry out a successful political murder—black-and-white surveillance photos, ideas on where to hide the rifle before the attack, the best spot for his sniper’s nest, estimates of the range to the target, the distance between the building and some railroad tracks nearby.
He had also planned his escape. After the shooting, he would conceal his rifle in a hiding place near the tracks and then flee on foot. He had little choice about the method of escape. He did not own a car. He did not even know how to drive. But the notebook contained all the vital information necessary to make a clean getaway on public transportation—the location of bus stops in the vicinity and, most important, the exact times that the buses would make those stops. Yes, he planned to coordinate an assassination with a bus schedule. He would have to kill his victim, run away, hide the rifle, and arrive at the stop just before the bus approached. Timing was everything. It would be too risky to stand at a corner for several minutes, waiting for the next bus. He would be the first assassin in American history to try to escape the scene of the crime on a city bus. It was crazy. But it was crazy enough—and so unexpected—that it might work. He figured the police would never suspect or even look for an unarmed passenger riding a bus.
His target was famous but vulnerable. Aides or bodyguards could not protect the man from a clean shot with a rifle. The murder was sure to cause a national sensation and create headline news not only in Dallas, Texas, but throughout the country. The shooter had always wanted to make big news. If he could just get the target in his telescopic sight, it should work.
At first, he had thought he might use a pistol, the assassin’s traditional weapon of choice for slaying an American politician. He had already bought one by mail order more than two months ago. Back on January 28, 1963, he sent an order form and a $10 down payment to Seaport Traders in Los Angeles for a $39.95 Smith & Wesson .38 special, a double-action, six-shot revolver with a five-inch barrel cut down to a stubby two and a quarter inches. The shortened barrel made the weapon easier to conceal in a pocket or a shoulder holster. He had signed the form with the false name A. J. Hidell, and he would owe the balance of the purchase price upon delivery.
But a handgun was a dangerous and even suicidal choice. You had to get close to the victim to use it, and his target was a combat veteran who had served in the military. He might fight back. He thought better of it. No, using a handgun was out of the question. Six weeks later, on March 12, 1963, he mailed a postal money order to Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago and, under a false name, ordered an Italian, World War II military surplus 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle mounted with a 4-power telescopic sight.
By coincidence, the revolver and the rifle both arrived in Dallas on March 25, 1963. He picked up the rifle at his post-office box, which he had also obtained under a false name. When his wife saw the weapon, she was afraid. “What do you need a rifle for?” she asked. “What do we need that for?” Her husband told her a woman like her was incapable of understanding why a man like him needed to own a rifle.
A few days later, on the last weekend in March, he had her take photographs of him in their backyard brandishing his new rifle and wearing the pistol on his belt. “I was hanging up the diapers, and he came up to me with the rifle, and I was even a little scared, and he gave me the camera and asked me to press a certain button.” She had never taken a photograph, and he had to show her how to operate his cheap Imperial Reflex camera. “I asked him then,” she said, “why he dressed himself up that like, with the rifle and the pistol.” He was wearing all black—black shirt, pants, and boots. He had never dressed like that before. He assumed a few different, jaunty poses. “I thought he had gone crazy,” she recalled.
Lee Harvey Oswald poses with his rifle, pistol, and left-wing newspapers.
(courtesy of the National Archives)
He told her he wanted to send the photographs to a newspaper. He held two newspapers in his hand while she took the photographs—copies of the left-wing journals the Worker and the Militant. She could not understand why he would call attention to himself that way. He said that he wanted to show that he was “ready for anything.” Then he told her it was not her concern—that it was “man’s business.” After he had developed photographic prints—for privacy he did the work himself at the printing company where he worked—he gave one to his wife and said that she should keep it for their infant daughter, June. “Of course,” she thought, “June does not need photographs like that.”
She hoped that he was just “playing around” and that this was just another example of her husband’s immaturity. “If I had known these were such dangerous toys, . . . ” she mused, after it was too late.
She had an intuitive sense of foreboding. After her husband acquired the rifle, she “knew that [he] was preparing for something.” He ordered her to keep out of his private room, a little home office he had set up in their new apartment. He did not want her to find his secret notebook. He threatened to beat her if he ever caught her in there. “This is my own little nook. I’ve never had my own room before,” he lamented. It wasn’t much of a room, measuring less than four by five feet.
For a man who had shared a bed with his mother until he was ten or eleven years old, the nook, no matter how modest, represented the privacy and independence he craved. “I’ll do all my work here,” he boasted to his wife, “make a lab and do my photography. I’ll keep my things in here. But you’re not to come in here and clean. If I ever come in and find that one single thing has been touched, I’ll beat you.”
She knew he meant it—he was an unpredictable and violent man who had beaten her up before. He was twenty-three years old, she was twenty-one, and they had been husband and wife for only two years. But he was not the same man she had met and married in her native Russia. Now he felt free to insult, humiliate, or hit her at will. Not long before, he struck her so hard her nose bled. When he left the house, she bolted the locks. When he returned and found that he could not get in, he smashed a glass panel, reached in, and unlocked the door from inside.
“You know I am a terrible character,” he had admitted to her recently. “When you see I’m in a bad mood, try not to make me mad. You know I can’t hold myself in very long now.”
She was furious and wanted him to know he had not beaten the pride out of her. “You weak, cowardly American. What a fool I was. I was afraid to marry a Russian because Russian men beat their wives. You! You’re not worth the soles of their feet. How I wish I had woken up sooner!”
He threatened her. “I’ll make you shut up.”
She was not cowed. “Of course you can shut me up by force. But you’ll never change my mind. It’s better to be a drunkard than what you are.”
His rage had climaxed the previous month, on February 23, 1963. In the morning, he made a special request for dinner that night. He told his wife to make him a meal of Southern beans and rice. She had never cooked that dish before and could not find a recipe. After he got home from work, he blew his top when he discovered that she had prepared the beans and rice together in the same pot. Didn’t she know, he demanded, that she was supposed to cook the two ingredients in separate pots and then pour the beans on top of the rice? What difference, she asked, did it make? He was going to mix the beans and rice together on his plate anyway. He ordered her to start over and make the dinner a second time.
“I won’t.”
“You will.”
“I won’t.” Then she threw the dinner she had made into the trash can.
“I’ll force you to.” He raised a hand to strike her.
“You have no right.”
He hit her anyway. Then he turned his back and began to walk away. She retaliated by throwing a small wooden box at him. It grazed his shoulder.
He turned, charged, and threw her onto the bed. His hands encircled her throat. His eyes and face froze into a cold, murderous expression. “I won’t let you out of this alive.” She was sure he was going to strangle her. Then their baby began to cry.
“Go get her,” he told her, as he released his grip from her neck.
“Go get her yourself.”
This attack had broken her spirit. Now she felt ashamed and worthless. She went into the bathroom. She took the clothesline she used to dry her daughter’s diapers. She tied the rope around her neck. He wouldn’t have to kill her. She would do it for him.
He caught her in the act before she could finish. He carried her back to the bedroom. “Forgive me,” he pleaded. “I didn’t mean to do what I did.” Then he mouthed the classic wife beater’s defense. “It’s your fault. You saw what a mood I was in. Why did you make me so mad?”
She said she had only tried to do what he had just tried to do to her. “I’m sick of it, Alka.” That name, along with Alek, was one of the names she called him when they had lived in Russia. His American first name sounded very odd—Asian—to Russian ears.
“Every day we fight, and for no reason,” she complained. “We fight over things so tiny, normal people wouldn’t speak of them at all.”
“I never thought you’d take it so hard,” he replied. “Pay no attention to me now. You know I can’t hold myself back.” It was not his fault, he was suggesting, that he could not control his temper. “Try to understand, you’re wrong sometimes, too”—as if blaming her justified the slaps and punches and choking. “Try to be quiet when you can. For God’s sake, forgive me. I’ll never, ever do it again. I’ll try and change if you’ll only help me.”
“But why, Alka, why do you do it?”
“Because I love you. I can’t stand it when you make me mad.”
And their neighbors could not stand him when he got mad. One of them once reported him to the building manager, Mahlon Tobias, complaining, “I think he’s really hurt her this time.” On another occasion a neighbor predicted, “I think that man over there is going to kill that girl.” The building’s owners showed up to confront him with an ultimatum. Cut it out, or get out, they told him. He did not tell his wife about the warning. Instead, a few days later, he told her they were moving. He claimed he had found them a better apartment at 214 West Neely Street. They moved there on March 2, 1963.
Now, in their new apartment, not long after he had promised to never hit her again, he threatened to beat her if she ever intruded into his tiny private room.
SHE KNEW he had been practicing with the rifle. She had never seen him fire it, but when he went out by himself, he would sometimes say, “Well, today I will take the rifle along for practice.” He had bought at least one small cardboard box of 6.5mm bullets manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company. He knew his way around a rifle. His training in the United States Marine Corps had taught him all he needed to know about that.
On one occasion, she had discovered in their apartment photographs of a strange house. What could it mean? “I asked him what kind of photographs are these?” He refused to answer.
He could never hold a job for long. On April 1, he was fired from his current one at the Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall printing company. He had hurried through his assignments, made careless mistakes, and had to redo too many jobs. He was brusque with coworkers, refusing to sit with them at lunch and often shouldering them aside in the darkroom. When his supervisor gave him his notice, all he did was stare at the floor, listen without protest, and reply, “Well, thanks.” Then he just walked away.
He needed the money, but he did not beg to keep his job. He did not even seem to care. He had already gotten what he wanted—he had used the office equipment to make himself fake identification cards and had developed prints of the photographs of him posing with his rifle. It was as though his mind was distracted by something more important than holding a job. Saturday, April 6, was his last day at work. Within the next four days, he would cross the line from malcontent to madman.
On the morning of Wednesday, April 10, he put on a gray suit and white shirt, the kind of outfit a man looking for a job might wear. After waiting a week and a half to tell her, he admitted to his wife that he had been fired. “I don’t know why,” he whined. “I tried. I liked that work so much.” He did not reveal that he had been let go for poor performance and a bad attitude. He offered a grander excuse that shifted the blame from himself to others. “But probably the FBI came and asked about me, and the boss just didn’t want to keep someone the FBI was interested in. When will they leave me alone?” She accepted his explanation. She knew the government had had an ongoing interest in them since they had moved from Russia to the United States.
When he left the house that morning, his wife assumed he would spend all day looking for work. Whenever he needed a job, it was his habit to buy a newspaper, scour the want ads for leads, and walk the streets from employer to employer.
But he did not look for jobs that day. He had only one appointment to keep, and he was not due there for another ten or twelve hours. How he spent the day remains a mystery. He was in no hurry to reach his destination, the house at 4011 Turtle Creek Boulevard, in one of the better neighborhoods in town. Long ago he had decided against a daytime attack. It was too risky: Too many people, too many potential witnesses, too great a chance that the police might hunt him down. No, he would strike under the cover of darkness.
He arrived at his destination a little before nine P.M. CST. He went to the spot where he had secreted his rifle a few days earlier. It was still there—he had hidden it well. He took his position. Everything had gone as he had planned. No one saw him tote the weapon to the house. Once again, he placed the residence under surveillance, just as he had done several times before on his practice missions. He walked around to the back of the house. No one saw him crouch down. He knew that the man was in Dallas. And he was sure that at this moment his victim was somewhere inside that house on Turtle Creek Boulevard. The man he had marked for death had been in command of thousands of American soldiers, but tonight they could not protect him. He was alone.
AT THIS moment, President John F. Kennedy was in the White House, 1,200 miles away. The day before, in a 3:00 P.M. televised ceremony in the flower garden, he had conferred honorary American citizenship upon Winston Churchill. It was the first time such an honor had been given to a foreign statesman. Ancient Sir Winston, too frail to travel to the United States, watched the event on television at his home in London, via a live satellite broadcast.
After the ceremony, John and Jacqueline Kennedy hosted a reception for 250 guests in the East Room. Earlier this day, April 10, Kennedy had addressed a gathering of economics students from abroad, sent a memo to place veterans of the Peace Corps in other government jobs, and proposed the creation of a National Service Corps. Soon he would retire to bed on the second floor in the mansion’s residence.
But on this night, Lee Harvey Oswald did not care where the president of the United States was. He did not want to kill John F. Kennedy.
The man Oswald wanted to kill—Major General Edwin A. Walker, United States Army—was less than forty yards away.
Oswald’s fixation with Walker probably began when the October 7, 1962, issue of the Communist Party newspaper, the Worker, published not one but three inflammatory articles demanding that President Kennedy “arrest and prosecute General Edwin Walker . . . for murder and rebellion against the democratic authority of the Constitution of the United States.”
After a distinguished military career—West Point graduate, decorated World War II and Korean War combat officer—Walker received orders from President Eisenhower in 1957 to quell civil disturbances during the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Although he did a superb job of protecting the black students, Walker thought it was wrong to use the United States Army to flout states’ rights and desegregate the South against its will. He became obsessed with the idea that Communists had infiltrated the U.S. government, and he later accused Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt of being “pink”—the hot-button word for communist sympathizers. President Kennedy relieved him from command, and Walker resigned his commission. He became a political activist, giving provocative speeches throughout the nation.
On September 30, 1962, the day after Walker made virulent televised remarks opposing the admission of a black student—James Meredith—to the University of Mississippi, a campus riot left two dead and seventy-five wounded. After Walker was charged with insurrection and the violation of several federal laws, Attorney General Robert Kennedy overreached and tried to commit the general to a mental institution. The Worker reported that Walker “led the brick-throwing students” and warned that the racial violence at Ole Miss was the “first attempt by a conspiracy of racists and ultra-Right generals to renounce the federal constitution, to open the path to tyranny over the negro people . . . and the subjection of the entire nation to a fascist type rule.”
In February 1963, Edwin Walker was in the news again when he gave a speech that seemed to advocate that the United States invade Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro. It was too much for Lee Oswald. As soon as his guns arrived in the mail, he would show that he was “ready for anything.” His justifications for the assassination came straight out of the pages of the Worker. Edwin Walker despised President Kennedy. In trying to kill Walker, Oswald was attempting to assassinate one of JFK’s bitterest political enemies. Subsequent developments would expose the irony in that.
MOST OF the lights in the house were on. The shades were up.
Oswald looked through the windowpanes, searching for General Walker.
Then Lee spotted him, clear as day in a brightly lit room, sitting at a desk while he worked on his federal income-tax return. The deadline was in five days. Oswald raised his rifle. He leveled the barrel to the horizontal and took aim. He acquired the general in his telescopic sight. He superimposed the crosshairs over his head. He was so close. Walker was no more than 120 feet away.
Oswald steadied his shooting stance, verified the target in his scope, and squeezed the trigger. He was certain he could not miss. The man’s head was dead center in the crosshairs.
The rifle fired. The supersonic bullet cracked the air.
BY AROUND nine P.M., Marina Oswald began to worry. Her husband should have returned home by now. She knew he must be up to no good. She decided to search their apartment for some clue about where might have gone. Despite his past threats, she decided to search his private office. “Then I went into his room. Somehow, I was drawn into it. . . . I was pacing around. Then I saw the note.” It was in his handwriting, and it was in Russian, her native language. That meant it was for only her to understand. She still could not speak or write English well. To keep her dependent on him, Oswald had discouraged her from learning the language. They always spoke to each other in Russian.
A single key sat on top of the note. She moved the key, picked up the sheet of paper, and began reading. The note contained eleven numbered paragraphs. At first the words confused her. The first point mentioned his post office box. “This is the key,” Lee disclosed, “to the mailbox which is located in the main post office . . . on Ervay Street.” Yes, the key was there. He had left it for her just as he had written. But why? And why was he telling her how to locate his post office box?
The second paragraph was more mysterious: “Send the information as to what has happened to me to the Embassy and include the newspaper clippings.” Marina didn’t know what her husband was talking about. What was he doing tonight that a newspaper might write about? The paragraph continued. “I believe that the Embassy will come to your assistance on learning everything.” Marina had no idea what those words meant.
The third through fifth points dealt with petty financial concerns: “I paid the house rent on the 2d so don’t worry about it . . . recently I also paid for water and gas . . . the money from work will possibly be coming . . . to our post office box . . . go to the bank and cash the check.”
The sixth through eighth points covered Lee’s personal property: “You can either throw out or give my clothing . . . away. Do not keep these. However I prefer that you hold on to my personal papers . . . certain of my documents are in the small blue valise . . . the address book can be found on my table in the study.”
The ninth point reminded Marina that “we have friends here,” implying that a small circle of Russian-born émigrés living in Dallas would help take care of her. Then he added that “the Red Cross also will help you.”
The penultimate point was about money. Lee Oswald had provided a meager sum to care for his family: “I left you as much money as I could, $60 . . . you and the baby . . . can live for another two months using $10 per week.”
Yes, there was no doubt now. Lee Harvey Oswald had abandoned his wife and infant daughter.
Then Marina got to the eleventh point and her husband’s final, bizarre instruction.
She could not believe it.
This was not a farewell note from an estranged husband. This was a note from a man who must have done something terrible.
“If I am alive and taken prisoner . . . the city jail is located at the end of the bridge through which we always passed on going to the city (right in the beginning of the city after crossing the bridge).”
These handwritten instructions advising Marina what to do in case Lee vanished or was killed or arrested gave no hint about the awful things he had planned to do that night—what he might be doing right now while she was reading the note. She had no clue and did not know what to do.
So she just waited for him to come home.
THE BULLET was in midflight, rocketing toward General Walker’s head. He had survived two wars. He had commanded an infantry regiment in battle. Now he was about to be murdered in the tranquility of his own home. “It was right at 9 o’clock,” Walker noted, “and most of the lights were on . . . and the shades were up. I was sitting down behind a desk . . . with my head over a pencil and paper working on my income tax when I heard a blast and a crack right over my head.”
The bullet, traveling at 1,700 or 1,800 feet per second, had punched through the window glass and missed Walker’s head by less than an inch.
Oswald had missed! But he had not fired an inaccurate shot. He did have his target in his sights. The general should be dead. But on its way into the house, the bullet nicked part of the wood window frame, which altered its flight path just enough to save the general’s life.
At first, Walker did not suspect gunfire. “I thought that possibly somebody had thrown a firecracker, that it exploded right over my head through the window right behind me. Since there is a church back there, often there are children playing back there.” Walker assumed that kids had tossed the fireworks through an open window missing its screen, but he was wrong. “Then I looked around and saw that the screen was not out, but was in the window, and this couldn’t possibly happen, so I got up and walked around the desk and looked back where I was sitting and I saw a hole in the wall.”
It did not take the general long to figure out that somebody had shot at him.
Lee Harvey Oswald could not tell if his first shot had killed Walker. The Mannlicher-Carcano had a six-round clip. Oswald could have operated the bolt, ejected the empty brass cartridge, chambered a fresh round, and fired again. But he did not attempt a second shot. Either he convinced himself he had killed the general—how could he miss at that range?—or he was too skittish to stand his ground and fire a second round. He decided to run away.
It was a wise choice. When Walker realized he had been fired upon, he did not duck for cover, cower on the floor, and hide. Instead he made a snap decision to hunt for the sniper.
“I noticed there was a hole in the wall, so I went upstairs and got a pistol and came back down and went out the back door, taking a look to see what might have happened.”
Walker barged outside and headed in Oswald’s direction. But Lee was already running away. Walker searched the area—“I went about halfway out to the alley”—but he found no one. If Oswald had lingered in the vicinity, hoping to fire multiple shots, Walker might have caught him in the open and shot him to death.
Instead, Lee’s legs increased the distance between him and the pursuing general. Oswald fled into the night and hid his rifle in the same spot where he had concealed it prior to the assassination attempt. He didn’t want to get caught with the weapon in his possession on the way home.
In a few days, when it was safe, he planned to go back and retrieve the rifle from its hiding place. For now, Oswald made his way to a bus stop and rode home. At this moment, after months of careful planning, he did not know whether he had succeeded or failed in killing Edwin Walker.
MARINA OSWALD waited for Lee to come home—ten thirty, eleven, eleven thirty. Where was he? What was he doing?
Before midnight, Lee burst into the house. He was in an excited and agitated state. His face was pale. He was sweating.
Marina spoke first. “What happened?”
“I shot Walker!”
“Did you kill him?” Marina asked.
“I don’t know.”
“My God,” Marina said. “The police will be here any minute.”
She noticed that Lee was unarmed. “What did you do with the rifle?”
He told her he had buried it.
Marina waved the note he had left her and demanded, “What is the meaning of this?” Lee did not want to talk anymore. After his confession, “He told me not to ask him any questions. He only told me that he had shot at General Walker.”
Lee said that he did not know whether or not he had killed Walker. Then he revealed how he had fled the crime scene. He told Marina he had run “several kilometers” and then caught a bus home. To avoid being spotted by eyewitnesses, he decided not to stand at a bus stop too close to Walker’s house.
Within a minute or two of returning to his apartment, Lee Oswald switched on the radio. He listened, hoping to hear a news flash about the attack and confirmation that the general was dead. Marina listened with him, “But there were no reports.” Not one radio station broadcast a bulletin about the Walker shooting. That was odd. The assassination of an army general as well-known as Edwin A. Walker was sure to make the news.
Oswald gave up on the radio and collapsed in bed. He fell into such a deep sleep, Marina thought he looked dead.
On the morning after the shooting, Oswald bought a newspaper. The Dallas Morning News headlined its article, CLOSE CALL: RIFLEMAN TAKES SHOT AT WALKER. It was then that Lee learned the bad news. He had missed. He had failed to murder General Walker. The paper reported that the general had survived and that chance had saved his life: “A gunman with a high-powered rifle tried to kill former Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker at his home Wednesday night,” police said, and “missed the controversial crusader by less than an inch.”
Oswald had not missed by much. “Walker dug out fragments of the shell’s jacket from his right sleeve,” the story went on, “and was still shaking glass and slivers of the bullet out of his hair when reporters arrived.”
The newspaper suggested that Walker’s would-be assassin had fled by automobile. “It was on Monday night [April 8] that one of his assistants noticed a late-model unlicensed car parked without lights in the alley behind the Walker house . . . the car remained there for about 30 minutes while several occupants once walked up to the back door to look in, and then left.” Perhaps the men had the general under surveillance.
And on the night of the assassination attempt, a fourteen-year-old neighbor boy said he saw two suspicious cars—one with a driver only and the second with several occupants—race away from the scene. But the witnesses were wrong—Oswald was alone.
When reporters asked Walker if he had any idea who shot at him, he replied, “There are plenty of people on the other side. You don’t have to go overseas to earn a Purple Heart. . . . I’ve been saying the front was right here at home.” This anticommunist crusader would have been humiliated to have been slain by a malcontent ex–U.S. Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union and was a disciple of Karl Marx. And how ironic it would have been for this arch foe of overreaching government authority to be murdered while in the act of calculating his federal income tax.
Oswald complained aloud to Marina as he read the newspaper coverage: “Americans are so spoiled! It never occurs to them that you might use your own two legs. They always think you have a car. They chased a car. And here I am sitting here,” he boasted. “My legs had carried me a long way.” “They got the bullet,” Lee informed his wife. “They said I had .30 caliber bullet when I didn’t at all.” He enjoyed mocking the police. “They’ve got the bullet and the rifle all wrong. Can’t even figure that out. What fools!”
He replayed the shooting in his head. “It was such an easy shot. How on earth did I miss? A single second saved him. I fired and he moved. A perfect shot if only he hadn’t moved!” But the newspaper story got that detail wrong. The police had asked Walker if he had made any sudden movement. “None that I was aware of,” he said. “No. Just moving with a pencil and thoroughly engrossed in my income tax.” It was the wood frames of both the mesh screen and glass window that had saved Walker.
“I had it so well figured out,” Oswald repeated to Marina. “I couldn’t make a mistake. It was only accident that I missed.”
Marina pressed her husband for more details of what he had done. “I told him that I was worried, and that we can have a lot of trouble, and I asked him, ‘Where is the rifle? What did you do with it?’ ” Lee confirmed that he had hidden it a safe distance from Walker’s home, so that gunpowder-sniffing police dogs could not locate it by its scent. Lee justified the attack, saying that Walker was “a very bad man . . . a fascist [and] . . . the leader of a fascist organization.” He added that if someone had killed Hitler, it would have saved many lives.
Oswald admitted that he had been stalking Walker and planning his assassination for two months, even before he ordered the rifle. Yes, Marina thought to herself, it all made sense now. She knew he had been planning something. He would lock himself in his room and write in a notebook. Now Lee showed her his blueprint for killing Walker. Tucked inside it was a photograph of Walker’s house. “And what,” Marina asked, “do you mean to do with this book?”
“Save it as a keepsake. I’ll hide it somewhere.” Like many compulsive criminals, Lee Oswald desired to possess a souvenir of his crime. In the future, whenever he fondled the cherished notebook, he could relive the thrilling assassination attempt.
“Some keepsake,” Marina warned. “It’s evidence! For God’s sake, Alka, destroy it.”
For once, Lee did as she asked.
Marina watched him tear out each page one by one, crumple it, and light it on fire with a match. Then he dropped each crumpled, burning page into the toilet and flushed away his murder plans.Marina continued to chastise her husband. “A rifle—that’s no way to prove your ideas,” she insisted. “If someone doesn’t like what you think, does that mean he has a right to shoot you? Once people start doing that, no one will dare go out of doors.” She reminded Lee that when they lived in Russia, he boasted that in America there was freedom of speech, where “everyone can say as he pleases.”
Lee was disappointed by his failure. “He said,” Marina recalled, “only that he had taken very good aim, and that it was just chance that caused him to miss.” Oswald emphasized that he was “very sorry” that he had missed. Marina was terrified. What if her obsessive husband decided to pay another call on General Walker? She begged Lee to promise that he would not make another attempt on Walker’s life. Fate, she claimed, had spared him, and “he should not be shot at again.” Marina threatened to save Lee’s note and turn it over to the police if he tried to slay the general again or pull off any other, in her words, “crazy scheme.”
Lee promised he would not. She did not quite believe him. He had promised to get rid of the Mannlicher-Carcano, but Marina observed later that “the rifle remained in the house.”
Oswald was guilty of attempted murder, but Marina was afraid to report him to the authorities. If he were arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison, it would destroy their family. And what would happen to her? Marina Oswald was not an American citizen. She was afraid the government would also punish her or deport her to Russia. In the Soviet Union, the family members of criminals were often held responsible for the offenses of their relatives. Marina decided to keep Lee’s secret not only to protect him but to safeguard her daughter and their life in the United States.
ON SATURDAY, April 13, three days after the shooting and the night before Easter, the Oswalds received unexpected visitors. It was their friend George de Mohrenschildt and his wife, Jeanne. George was an intelligent, well-educated, and exotic figure on the Dallas social scene who was acquainted with the local Russian émigré circle and had befriended Marina and Lee. Oswald enjoyed having political discussions with the fifty-two-year-old bon vivant and world traveler. People who knew them both could not understand the connection between the sophisticated European with aristocratic origins and the young, lower-class member of the Southern working poor. Lee viewed George as something of a mentor.
“Hey, Lee,” George bellowed as he approached the front door, “how come you missed?”
Lee and Marina froze. They were horrified. Their eyes locked. Each suspected the other of having confessed Lee’s crime to George. But George had been joking.
The Oswalds invited the de Mohrenschildts in, and both couples sat down. A nervous Lee served coffee to his guests. The assassination attempt fascinated George, and he wanted to talk about it. Lee said little, until finally he volunteered, “Oh yes, wouldn’t it be fascinating to know who did it and why and how?”
The next day, on Easter Sunday, Oswald retrieved his rifle.
MARINA WAS afraid to remain in Dallas. She suggested that Lee go to New Orleans to look for work. He knew the city and had family there. Once he found a job, she promised, she and the baby would join him. But Marina had an ulterior motive: “I insisted on that because I wanted to get him further removed from Dallas and from Walker, because even though he gave me his word, I wanted to have him further away, because a rifle for him was not a very good toy—a toy that was too enticing.”
Shortly after that, Oswald decided to follow Marina’s advice to leave Texas and move to New Orleans. He took his rifle with him.
From New Orleans, Lee mailed a photograph to George de Mohrenschildt. It was a print of one of the photos Marina had snapped of Lee in their backyard with his rifle and pistol. On the plain white reverse of the photo were two handwritten messages. They were in Russian. One read “Hunter of Fascists—ha-ha-ha!!!” The handwriting was Marina’s. Perhaps it was a humorous, mocking reference to George’s joke that it was too bad Lee had missed General Walker. The second inscription, dated May 4, 1963, was in Lee’s handwriting: “For my friend George from Lee Oswald.”
OSWALD’S ATTEMPTED assassination of General Walker was a psychological turning point. It was the first time he had ever tried to kill a man. He had joined the Marine Corps in peacetime and had never fought in a war. Shooting a rifle at a human being was a novel thrill. It had excited him. Yes, he had missed his target, but planning and executing the sniper attack had given him immense satisfaction. He had enjoyed it. He had proven, in his own words, that he was “ready for anything.”
The experience had taught him a valuable lesson. In Dallas he could shoot at a man and get away with it. Although Lee had botched his self-assigned mission, the failure of the police to catch him emboldened him and enhanced his smug attitude of superiority.
Now the taste for blood was in his mouth. He did not know it now in late April 1963, but in a little more than seven months, he would find another human target. But next time, Lee would not have to spend weeks stalking his victim. The next man who appeared in his rifle scope would come to him.