CHAPTER 2

“THE GLOW FROM THAT FIRE”

In the spring of 1963, John F. Kennedy had come a long way in the last decade. He had been what was once called, back in the day, a “confirmed bachelor.” He enjoyed the social scene and had been known for his associations with a number of attractive women. But in that era, it was considered odd—especially for a politician—to be unmarried.

In May 1951, the journalist Charlie Bartlett and his wife, Martha, hosted a dinner party at their Georgetown home and invited their friend Congressman Kennedy. They also invited an attractive young woman named Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, a stylish, educated, and well-bred twenty-one-year-old debutante who had, like him, been raised to assume a place among the wealthy American elite. Jackie once teased Charlie and Martha for “shamelessly matchmaking.” It was the beginning of a love story. The courtship began slowly, but Jack and Jackie fascinated each other. She liked his handsome features, wit, confidence, and devil-may-care attitude. He was drawn to her good looks and sophistication and was intrigued by her private and mysterious personality.

In September 1953, at the age of thirty-six, John Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier. Their wedding in Newport, Rhode Island, was the social event of the season. However, soon his lifelong health problems began to haunt him once again. He had been plagued by painful back injuries in his youth, and an incident during the Second World War had exacerbated the problem. Kennedy had narrowly escaped death in the Pacific when, on August 2, 1943, at 2:30 A.M., his boat, PT-109, was rammed and sliced in two by a Japanese warship. Two crewmen were killed, others were injured, some of them severely. One sailor was so badly burned, he could not swim. Jack clenched in his teeth a strap attached to the man’s life jacket and towed him to a nearby island. He and his men were eventually rescued. The incident had tested his physical and mental endurance. Now Jack faced death again. He underwent a series of agonizing surgeries to cure the problem. He was given the last rites and almost died, but he struggled to live, and he survived.

IN JANUARY 1960, Kennedy declared himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. He outmaneuvered his older and more experienced rivals, including Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, the powerful Senate majority leader, and won the nomination.

The Republicans nominated former senator Richard Nixon of California, who had for the past seven years served as vice president of the United States under the popular president Dwight Eisenhower, the victorious supreme allied commander during the Second World War. Kennedy and Nixon shared many similarities. Both had served as navy officers in the war, both had been elected to Congress in 1946, and then to the Senate. There they worked cordially with each other, shared an interest in foreign affairs, and agreed on one of the great issues of the day—the danger posed by Communism and the Soviet Union.

But in another way, they could not have been more different. John Kennedy’s family was rich, and he had enjoyed all the privileges that money could buy—a fine Harvard education, world travel, material possessions, leisure, and his father’s contacts. John Kennedy never had and never would have to work for a living a day in his life. His father wanted to free his sons from that pressure so they could pursue political careers.

Richard Nixon, by contrast, came from a poor family and grew up without privilege. Whatever he had in life—a college education, a law degree, and political office—he had to earn on his own with hard work and a keen mind. What John Kennedy was given, Richard Nixon had struggled to attain. In college, Kennedy was an indifferent student, but he developed a love of American and European history. By the time he captured the Democratic nomination, he had evolved into a mature leader who, like Nixon, was a voracious reader, a savvy politician, and a formidable debater. Both men possessed brilliant minds.

The presidential election of 1960 was one of the closest in American history. Nixon entered the contest as the favorite. He possessed a track record of significant achievements, and the majority of voters respected his years of experience as vice president. One of the top issues of the day was preventing the spread of Communism around the world and curbing the influence of America’s rival superpower, the Soviet Union. And Richard Nixon had unsurpassed credentials as an anticommunist politician whose views were respected by the majority of Americans.

The most sustained effort to put Communism into practice began with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the dictatorships of Vladimir Lenin and later Joseph Stalin. Communists claimed that their philosophy, when put into practice, would serve the common good. It proved to be a naive dream that was soon corrupted. Millions of people who resisted Communism in Russia and some thirty other countries throughout the twentieth century were killed—more than one hundred million victims in all. In pursuit of their goal, Communists established totalitarian political regimes that flouted individual rights, banned freedom of speech, eliminated free elections, set up police states, corrupted the rule of law, and imprisoned and murdered opponents.

World War II had ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan by the Allies—the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. With Germany and the Axis powers crushed, the Allies emerged as the great political powers of the postwar era. Of the Allied powers, only the Soviet Union was a Communist nation and not a democracy. The end of the war resulted in a delicate balance of power—a cold war in which no shots were fired—between the democratic nations and the Soviet Union. Former British prime minister Winston Churchill warned in a famous speech that an “iron curtain” now divided Europe into the free, democratic nations in the west, and the totalitarian, Communist nations in the east. Richard Nixon owed his meteoric political career to his vigorous anticommunism at the height of the Cold War. But some Americans thought that Nixon had gone too far, and they associated him with what they believed were excesses committed at home by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee during their investigations of Communists in the United States in the 1950s.

John Kennedy, too, began the race for the presidency with some disadvantages. No Catholic had ever been elected president. In that era, a prejudice that does not exist today might have prevented a person of that faith from becoming president. Kennedy argued that he would not be a “Catholic president” but merely a president who happened to be Catholic. He persuaded enough people that a person’s religious beliefs should not bar him from the office.

Kennedy’s other disadvantage was his lack of experience. Yes, he had served in the House and the Senate for fourteen years when he began his race for the presidency, but he was not particularly accomplished as a legislator. Nixon’s supporters portrayed Kennedy as a callow young man who was only forty-three years old and who had not taken his time in Congress seriously. They said his lack of experience made him unqualified to serve as president. Indeed, fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson referred to Kennedy as a “boy.” Johnson believed Kennedy should wait his turn, until he was more mature, and not challenge him now for the nomination. Kennedy disagreed. He believed in the power of fate, and that his illnesses, injuries, and near-death experiences had marked him as a man who might be deprived of a long life. He was a man of action determined to make the most of his time, who wanted to accomplish things now.

In a series of televised debates between the two parties’ presidential candidates—the first in American history—Kennedy leveled the playing field as seventy million people watched. Nixon was famous as a relentless and ruthless debater, and many expected him to vanquish Kennedy. But before the evening of the first debate, Kennedy relaxed, shaved closely, and allowed stage makeup to be applied to his face. Nixon spent the day campaigning and had aggravated a painful leg injury. He showed up at the television studio with a day’s growth of beard, a five o’clock shadow. He refused makeup. People who listened to the debate on radio thought that Nixon had won. Those who watched it on television, however, thought Kennedy had won.

John Kennedy had a brilliant insight. He recognized that television would change political campaigns forever. Once, all that mattered was what a candidate said. Now it mattered just as much how he looked while he was saying it. During the first debate, John Kennedy looked relaxed, fit, and charismatic. Richard Nixon looked uncomfortable, swarthy, and nervous as he sweated under the hot lights. Kennedy also looked much younger, even though Nixon was only four years older than he. In content, the debate was almost a draw. The performances of the candidates were evenly matched. In the end, it was not necessary for John Kennedy to win the debate on the issues. It was enough that he looked as though he belonged on the same stage with Richard Nixon. He did.

When Americans went to the polls on November 8, 1960, no great issues divided the candidates. Both men advocated strong missile defense against the Soviet threat. Kennedy was as anticommunist as Nixon; both opposed Communist expansion, including in Cuba, an island ninety miles off the coast of Florida, and both saw the Soviet Union as a dangerous rival. Neither candidate was then at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Voters chose between the personalities of the two men as much as they did between their stands on the issues. Kennedy presented himself as the voice of a new generation who would get the country “moving” again toward a “new frontier.” Nixon argued that he, not Kennedy, had the proven leadership experience to guide the nation in a dangerous world. Out of 68.3 million votes cast, John Kennedy received only about 119,450 more votes than Richard Nixon. Nixon had lost the presidency by just two tenths of 1 percent of the popular vote. It was one of the closest elections in history.

Late into the night, neither man knew who had won. Not until the morning after the election was Kennedy declared the winner. Nixon did not demand a recount and conceded victory to Kennedy. Without his father’s wealth, which funded much of his campaign, and without Lyndon Johnson as his vice presidential running mate delivering the electoral votes of Texas, Kennedy would not have won.

ON JANUARY 20, 1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy stepped forward on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol to take the oath of office as the thirty-fifth president of the United States and to deliver his inaugural address. Half of America had voted against him, but on this day, he behaved and spoke with confidence. Although he knew he had not won by a large margin at the polls, he sought to win a mandate now with his words. He summoned the American people to stand up for freedom in the shadow of the Cold War.

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

He cautioned other countries not to doubt his commitment to freedom in what he predicted would be a “long twilight struggle.”

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Then he suggested that nations pursue peaceful cooperation, not military confrontation.

“Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.”

He reminded his audience that this would take time.

“All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even, perhaps, in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”

Kennedy suggested that his election coincided with a special moment in history. “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”

Perhaps the most quoted and famous line from the speech is Kennedy’s call to self-sacrifice: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” It was a patriotic call to the people of the United States to be civic-minded and politically active.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS and fighting the spread of Communism around the world dominated John Kennedy’s first two years in office. He was a Cold Warrior who had a personal fascination with counterinsurgency warfare, covert action, and special military forces, including the Green Berets, a small, elite unit of the U.S. Army. A fan of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, President Kennedy had an instinctive and enthusiastic appetite for secret operations. He also had an obsession with Cuba and with its leader, Fidel Castro.

A revolutionary who overthrew the Cuban government in 1959, Castro seemed at first that he might turn to America for inspiration and support. Instead he turned to the Communist Soviet Union for aid and set himself up as the repressive dictator of his nation.

During the administration of President Eisenhower, the Central Intelligence Agency had developed a secret plan to help anti-­Castro Cuban exiles—living outside Cuba, trained and equipped by the United States—to invade their homeland, depose Castro, and overturn Communism. The CIA asked Kennedy to approve it.

Kennedy authorized what became known as the Bay of Pigs operation, named for the spot on the Cuban coastline where the armed exiles would land. The invasion, on April 17, 1961, was a catastrophe. The fourteen hundred freedom fighters, heavily outnumbered, found Castro’s troops waiting for them. Within two days, most had been captured, wounded, or killed. The CIA and the U.S. military had persuaded President Kennedy to support the plan by arguing that its success would not require him to send American troops or air support into battle against Castro’s forces. They predicted that the invasion would trigger a spontaneous uprising by the Cuban people against their leader.

That revolt never happened. The assurances by CIA officials and military generals had proven wildly optimistic—even deluded—and now they implored Kennedy to commit American forces to save the catastrophic operation. He refused. He feared that it might trigger a direct military conflict with the Soviet Union. The CIA plan had failed. It had been a humiliating disaster that would haunt his presidency. But Kennedy accepted responsibility for it and learned a valuable lesson: in the future he would be more skeptical of overconfident promises made by his military and intelligence advisers.

The Bay of Pigs episode did not stop the CIA from developing other secret plans—including one called Operation Mongoose—to overthrow or even assassinate Fidel Castro. Kennedy worried that Cuba might influence or contaminate Latin America with Communism.

Nor did the Cuban failure deter Kennedy from opposing the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. When Kennedy took office, there were several hundred American military advisers in Vietnam. He increased their number to seventeen thousand, believing that America should make a stand against Communism there to prevent the ideology from conquering not just Vietnam but also neighboring countries.

In 1961, to prepare for the challenges ahead, President Kennedy asked Congress to increase the size and budget of the U.S. military. To promote peace and international cooperation, he also inspired thousands of young Americans to join public service by establishing the Peace Corps, an organization to help developing countries improve their public health, education, and agriculture. He wanted America to look both merciful and mighty.

Eighteen months after the Bay of Pigs, the United States and the Soviet Union almost went to war over another confrontation in Cuba. In October 1962, American spy planes detected the presence of Russian missile bases under construction there. The short distance between the island nation and the United States meant that from these sites Cuba or Russia could launch nuclear missiles at major cities and military bases in the eastern United States. The Soviets sent missiles to Cuba to deter any future invasion of the island by the United States and because, beginning in 1961, the United States had deployed in Italy and Turkey nuclear missiles that could be launched to attack the Soviet Union.

Kennedy revealed the frightening discovery in Cuba in a televised address. He warned that he would not tolerate nuclear missiles in Cuba. The volatile Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had assumed, after the Bay of Pigs affair and an unimpressive personal meeting with Kennedy two months later, that the young president was weak and would do nothing when the Soviets parked their missiles in Cuba. Over thirteen days—from October 16 to 28, 1962—the United States and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear war during what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Many of Kennedy’s advisers urged him to attack Cuba at once, first bombing the missile bases and then invading the island. Knowing that such a rash response might provoke war with Russia, Kennedy took his time, delaying his decision and hoping for a diplomatic solution. In the meantime, he declared a naval quarantine around Cuba and insisted that no Soviet ships carrying missiles or military supplies would be allowed to approach the island. At the last minute, to avoid a war, Khrushchev ordered his ships to turn back. But that alone did not end the crisis. Kennedy and Khrushchev negotiated a settlement: the United States agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey and promised not to invade Cuba, and in return the Russians agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba. President Kennedy had taken the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of a nuclear war in which millions might have perished, but he had solved the dispute in a responsible manner. The most dangerous crisis of his presidency was over.

The competition between democracy and communism—between the United States and the Soviet Union—was not limited to Cuba, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, or even to planet Earth. Each superpower believed it could tip the balance of influence in its own favor by placing satellites in space and men on the moon. National pride was at stake: Which country would be the first to launch a rocket into space and spin a satellite in orbit around Earth? This “space race” captured Kennedy’s imagination.

The Soviet Union had already beaten America into space when it launched the first satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957. Then, on April 12, 1961, the Russians launched the first man into space. These successes shocked the American people. For reasons of prestige, and also national security, President Kennedy decided that America must catch up.

On May 25, 1961, the president addressed both the House and the Senate—a joint session of Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”

Later, in a speech on September 12, 1962, Kennedy emphasized the importance of the issue: “No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. . . . We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Inspired and supported by President Kennedy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the agency in charge of America’s space program, recruited more astronauts, designed giant rockets, and planned the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs.

Domestic issues captivated John Kennedy less than foreign affairs, although he was keen to reduce individual federal income tax rates and also corporate taxes, which he believed were too high and stifled the economy. There was one domestic issue that, above all others, he wanted to avoid: the fight for civil rights for African Americans. Kennedy was not, of course, against civil rights. He was not one of the Southerners who had disagreed with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the school desegregation case in which the Court declared it unconstitutional to ban black children from attending public schools with white children.

Nor did he want, as did many members of his own party in the South, to suppress other rights of citizenship, including voting, attending public universities, or patronizing restaurants, shops, and hotels. During the century since the Civil War and the end of slavery, African Americans had not enjoyed equal rights. Segregation and suppression were rampant. But Kennedy worried that becoming a civil rights champion was premature, and that doing so would stir up political opposition among Southern Democrats and endanger the programs and legislation that he wanted Congress to approve. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was, by contrast, a more enthusiastic advocate for civil rights; however, his authority was limited.

But a series of events made it impossible for John Kennedy to keep the civil rights movement at arm’s length anymore. Back in September 1962, he was forced to send federal troops to the University of Mississippi to suppress rioting that ensued when a black man, James Meredith, was threatened with death after he tried to enroll as a student there. In May 1963, Americans—including President Kennedy—watched on television as Eugene “Bull” Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, turned dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators. Then, Governor George Wallace refused to desegregate the University of Alabama, blocking the entrance with his own body.

John Kennedy decided he could not wait any longer. Ugly images of racist white mobs were broadcast all over the world, exposing the evil of racial discrimination in “the land of the free.” This played into Communist propaganda that the United States was the land of oppression of blacks and hypocrisy, not liberty. On June 11, 1963, Kennedy gave a televised address to the nation on civil rights.

“This is not a sectional issue,” he said, not wanting to single out and inflame the South. He knew that blacks also received poor treatment in the North. Indeed, Martin Luther King Jr. would say that when he led civil rights demonstrations in Chicago, the racism he encountered there was as vicious as anything he had seen in the Deep South. “This is not even a legal or legislative issue alone,” Kennedy continued. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”

In 1963, Kennedy’s focus on foreign affairs gave him two of the greatest pleasures of his presidency, the first occurring in Berlin. In 1945, at the end of World War II, a treaty signed by the Allies divided all of Germany into zones of occupation. The zones controlled by the United States, Great Britain, and France became West Germany, and the zone controlled by the Soviet Union became East Germany. Berlin, the national capital, was within the Soviet zone, and the city was divided into four sectors, each occupied by a different Allied power.

President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson meet with civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. on the afternoon of the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.

(Cecil Stoughton, courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

In 1963, the Soviet Union still controlled East Germany. Indeed, in August 1961, during the first year of Kennedy’s presidency, the Soviets began to build a concrete-and-barbed-wire wall between East and West Berlin to prevent the population of the Soviet sector from fleeing Communism and escaping to the western zones. During the years that wall existed, Russian and Soviet-controlled East German soldiers shot to death several hundred men, women, and teenagers who tried to cross over it to freedom. On June 26, 1963, President Kennedy stood on the free side of the Berlin Wall and spoke to a throng of three hundred thousand people in the square.

President Kennedy addresses a crowd in Berlin, June 26, 1963.

(Robert Knudson, courtesy of the National Archives)

“Freedom has many difficulties,” he said, “and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.”

He told the massive, cheering crowd that “all free men, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words Ich bin ein Berliner.” He had touched the German people with his empathy. And he told people around the world that if they wanted to understand the difference between Communism and freedom, “let them come to Berlin.” The ecstatic crowd was the largest one that Kennedy had ever addressed. It was the high point of his worldwide popularity, and he said that he could not imagine enjoying a better day than this.

He would enjoy another foreign affairs triumph that fall.

LIKE JOHN Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald had always wanted to star in a historic moment. With every success that JFK had enjoyed, Oswald had matched it with failure. In the spring of 1963, John F. Kennedy was on an upward trajectory. Lee Oswald was not.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in October 1939, the youngest of three brothers. But it seemed as though a dark cloud had formed over him even before he entered the world. His father died two months before he was born, and during his unsettled childhood, his odd and unstable mother changed husbands, houses, jobs, and cities frequently—often turning over the care of Lee and his two brothers to orphanages or relatives.

When Lee was growing up, he lived, among other places, in New Orleans, Fort Worth, Manhattan and the Bronx in New York City, and then New Orleans and Fort Worth again. He had disciplinary problems at school, made few friends, threatened family members with knives, rebelled against any kind of authority, and missed so much school he was tracked down by truant officers and ordered to appear at court hearings.

As a teenager, Oswald became interested in the Soviet Union and the teachings of socialism, Marxism, and communism. These were strange pursuits for an American boy during the middle of the Cold War, an era in which the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an intense ideological battle. And, of course, proclaiming oneself a communist in America at that time could trigger a government investigation.

In September 1956, Oswald dropped out of high school altogether. And in October, after he turned seventeen, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He served at bases in America and Japan, where he was court-martialed twice: once for assaulting a superior and another time for accidentally shooting himself in the arm with a pistol.

Throughout his three years in the Marine Corps, Oswald was a malcontent and constant complainer who loved to argue with his superiors to show that he was smarter than they were. He also made no secret of his interest in Communist societies. He never received a better than average performance rating, but the Marine Corps managed to teach him to do one thing well—shoot a rifle with skill and reasonable accuracy.

Lee Harvey Oswald as a fifteen-year-old high school student.

(courtesy of the National Archives)

In September 1959, under false pretenses, he was granted a dependency discharge to care for his mother, and then, in October 1959, in a series of bizarre events, he traveled to the Soviet Union, showed up in Moscow, and tried to commit suicide there when his visa expired and he was ordered to leave the country. That incident led him to the United States embassy, where he attempted to renounce his American citizenship. Soviet officials, though suspicious that he might be a spy or more likely mentally unstable, allowed Oswald to remain in the country and assigned him a job at a radio factory.

In April 1961, he married a nineteen-year-old Russian woman named Marina Prusakova. After a few years, Oswald grew dissatisfied with life in Russia, and he wanted to return to the United States. He was no longer the exotic foreigner and center of attention he had been when he had first defected. He, Marina, and their infant daughter left the Soviet Union in June 1962 and traveled to Fort Worth, Texas, where his mother and brother lived.

Between the summer of 1962 and the spring of 1963, Oswald struggled as a member of the lower class of Southern, white, working poor. After his failed attempt at killing General Walker, Oswald, at his wife’s insistence, retreated to New Orleans with his tail between his legs to start over with another low-paying, entry-level job that would never allow him to fulfill his grandiose dreams.

In late May, Oswald wrote to the New York City office of an obscure organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). It was a group that lobbied for fair treatment of the island nation after its revolutionary dictator, Fidel Castro, had installed a Communist regime there. Around this time, Marina and their little girl joined Lee in New Orleans. It didn’t take long for Marina to discover that Lee still possessed his rifle. He kept it in a closetlike room where he hung his clothes and stored his other belongings.

At night, Lee would often take the rifle out of the closet. “We had a screened in porch,” Marina recalled, and “sometimes evenings after dark he would sit there with his rifle.” Under the cover of darkness, when neighbors could not see him, Lee practiced aiming his telescopic sight. On several occasions, Marina found him on the back porch, sitting alone in the dark, fondling the rifle.

By June, Lee was distributing FPCC handbills on the streets of New Orleans. In July, he was fired from yet another job, and the U.S. Navy (which had jurisdiction over the Marine Corps) affirmed its decision to change his discharge from the Marine Corps to “undesirable” after it learned he had tried to defect to the Soviet Union. In letters to Secretary of the Navy John Connally, Oswald had argued, without success, that the service should reinstate the honorable discharge he had been given when he left the Marines, before he moved to Russia.

In August 1963, Oswald got a taste of the celebrity he had always craved. He was arrested in New Orleans after a street brawl with Cuban anti-Communists who objected to his distribution of pro-Castro literature. Oswald was jailed overnight, and Marina did not know where he was or why he did not come home that evening. It was another one of his mysterious, annoying disappearances.

The next day, he returned and explained what had happened. Marina was relieved. At least he had not tried to shoot someone. But she was scornful. She thought Lee’s pro-Cuban efforts were foolish: “I would make fun of him, of his activity . . . in the sense that that it didn’t help anyone really . . . I would say . . . to Lee . . . that [he] could not really do much for Cuba, that Cuba would get along well without him, if they had too.” Oswald shrugged his shoulders and told Marina that she did not understand him but boasted that some people understood the importance of his work. He was about to get the recognition he longed for.

Oswald’s arrest had attracted the attention of the press. He made a brief television appearance on WDSU-TV, when the station filmed him demonstrating in front of the International Trade Mart. He enjoyed watching himself on the news that night. And on August 17 and then again on August 21, Oswald participated in two New Orleans radio shows to discuss Cuba, Communism, and Marxism. His first appearance was on the WDSU-Radio program Latin Listening Post, hosted by William Stuckey. Oswald did not go out over the airwaves live. Stuckey taped the interview and then condensed it down to a five-minute segment for broadcast. Today it is hard to grasp the hold that Cuba had on the American mind—and on the minds of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald—in the early 1960s. Half a century later, the program feels dated, like a dusty, antiquated artifact from the Cold War.

Stuckey announced what he had in store for his audience.

“This is the first of a series of Latin Listening Post interviews of persons more or less directly concerned with the conflict between the United States and Cuba. . . . Tonight we have with us a representative of probably the most controversial organization connected with Cuba in this country. The organization is the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The person, Lee Oswald, is secretary of the New Orleans chapter for the . . . Committee. This organization has long been on the Justice Department’s black list and is a group generally considered to be the leading pro-Castro body in the nation.”

Oswald was an exciting find for Bill Stuckey, a New Orleans reporter who had covered Latin American affairs in the city for several years. He had been hunting for a live specimen like Oswald for a long time. “Your columnist,” Stuckey confided to listeners, “has kept a lookout for local representatives of this pro-Castro group. None appeared in public view until this week when young Lee Oswald was arrested and convicted for disturbing the peace. He was arrested for passing out pro-Castro literature to a crowd which included several violently anti-Castro Cuban refugees.”

It was not hard for Stuckey to persuade Lee to appear on his show. He craved the publicity and was eager to show off his knowledge and oratorical skills.

“When we finally tracked Mr. Oswald down today and asked him to participate in Latin Listening Post,” Stuckey explained, “he told us frankly that he would because it would help his organization to attract more members in this area.”

Stuckey played up the drama by touting Lee as some sort of pro-Castro mastermind. “Knowing that Mr. Oswald must have had to demonstrate a great skill in dialectics before he was entrusted with his present post, we now proceed on the course of random questioning of [him].” Stuckey’s flattery must have pleased his guest. Oswald had not won the coveted title of secretary over the other members of the New Orleans chapter because of his talent in “dialectics.” He was the organization’s only member, and he had awarded the title to himself.

During the interview, Stuckey probed Lee for details about the FPCC, questioning him about the size of the membership rolls, the specific goals of the organization, whether its members believed that Cuba was a puppet of the Soviet Union, and whether the FPCC was itself Communist controlled. For a novice, Oswald handled himself well. He said that both the number of members and their names must remain secret.

He explained that the organization’s central principle was “Hands Off Cuba!”—a policy of American nonintervention in Cuban affairs—the motto printed on the handbills that he had distributed. Oswald denied Stuckey’s assertion that Cuba was a Soviet colony in the Western Hemisphere. “Castro is an independent leader of an independent country,” Oswald insisted.

Stuckey asked him if the FPCC would continue to support Castro if he broke off relations with the Soviet Union. “We do not support the man. We do not support the individual,” Oswald explained. “We support the idea of independent revolution in the Western Hemisphere, free from American intervention. . . . If the Cuban people destroy Castro, or if he is otherwise proven to have betrayed his own revolution,” Oswald added, “that will not have any bearing upon this committee.”

Then Stuckey asked if the Castro regime was a Communist one. “Every country which emerges from a sort of feudal state as Cuba did, experiments,” claimed Oswald, “usually in socialism, in Marxism.” But he insisted that Communism had not taken over the island. “You cannot say that Castro is a Communist at this time, because he has not developed his country, his system this far. He has not had the chance to become a Communist. He is an experimenter, a person who is trying to find the best way for his country.”

In any event, Oswald argued, the United States government had no right to interfere. “If he chooses a socialist or a Marxist or a Communist way of life, that is something upon which only the Cuban people can pass . . . but we cannot say . . . it is a threat to our existence and then go and try to destroy it. That would be against our principles of Democracy.”

Stuckey asked Oswald to provide his definition of democracy. Lee stumbled on the answer and stalled until he could think of one. “My definition, well the definition of democracy, that’s a very good one. That’s a very controversial viewpoint. You know, it used to be very clear, but now it’s not. You know, when our forefathers drew up the Constitution, they considered that democracy was creating an atmosphere of freedom of discussion, of argument, of finding the truth. The rights, well the classic right of having life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In Latin America, they have none of those rights, none of them at all.”

If the Castro regime is good for the Cuban people, Stuckey wondered, then why have fifty to sixty thousand of them fled the island? “A good question,” replied Oswald. “Needless to say, there are classes of criminals there . . . people who are wanted in Cuba for crimes against humanity, and most of those people are the same people who are in New Orleans and have set themselves up in stores with blood money.”

“You know,” said Oswald, “it is very funny about revolutions. Revolutions require work, revolutions require sacrifice, revolutions, our own included, require a certain amount of rationing, a certain amount of calluses [sic], a certain amount of sacrifice.”

Speaking of the Bay of Pigs, Oswald said, “I always felt that the Cubans were being pushed into the Soviet Bloc by American policy.” Oswald suggested that if America had adopted a different policy toward Cuba, and if the CIA had not meddled in its affairs, then “we could be on much friendlier relations” with Cuba. “If the situation had been handled differently,” Oswald concluded, “we would not have the big problem of Castro’s Cuba now.”

Stuckey was pleased with Oswald’s first appearance on radio. He was a provocative and garrulous guest, and Stuckey was eager to interview him again. But the host had no idea that Lee Oswald had withheld an explosive secret about his past.

ON AUGUST 21, Oswald was a guest on the WDSU radio show Conversation Carte Blanche, hosted by Bill Slatter. Joining Slatter as cohost was Bill Stuckey, who had four days earlier debuted Oswald to the public on his Latin Listening Post and had brought Oswald to Slatter’s personal attention. Slatter introduced the program, beginning with the headliner: “Our guests tonight are Lee Harvey Oswald, who is secretary of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee; it’s a New York–headquartered organization which is generally recognized as the principal voice of the Castro government in this country.”

Slatter brought into the studio two other people to debate Oswald. “Our second guest is Ed Butler, who is the executive vice president of Information Council of the Americas, which is headquartered in New Orleans and which specializes in distributing anti-communist educational literature through Latin America. And our third guest is Carlos Bringuier, a Cuban refugee and a New Orleans delegate of the Revolutionary Student Directorate, one of the more active of the anti-Castro refugee organizations.” Oswald and Bringuier eyed each other with suspicion. They had encountered each other before.

Stuckey briefed listeners on the FPCC: “The only member of the group to have revealed himself publicly so far is twenty-three-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald. He first came to public attention several days ago when he was arrested and convicted for disturbing the peace.” Slatter explained: “The ruckus in which he was involved started when several local Cuban refugees, including Carlos Bringuier, discovered him distributing pro-Castro literature on a downtown street.” Bringuier would have another go at Oswald tonight: “Mr. Oswald and Bringuier are with us tonight to give us opposing views on the committee and its objectives.”

Stuckey boasted that Oswald was his discovery: “I believe that I was the first New Orleans reporter to interview Mr. Oswald on his activities here. Last Saturday, in addition to having him on my show, we had a very long and rambling question and answer session over various points of dogma and line of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”

According to FPCC propaganda, Stuckey explained, “Castro’s government is completely free and independent and is in no way controlled by the Soviet Union. Another cardinal point . . . is that . . . Castro seeks aid only because the U.S. Government refused.”

“Mr. Oswald also gave me this rundown on his personal background. . . . He said . . . that he had lived in Forth Worth Texas before coming here to establish a Fair Play for Committee here . . . ”

If Oswald was expecting another genial conversation like the one he had enjoyed with Bill Stuckey a few days ago, he was mistaken. Unbeknownst to Lee Oswald, Slatter was setting him up. In the four days since Lee’s appearance on Latin Listening Post, Slatter and Ed Butler had both researched his life. They had found remarkable newspaper stories about things that Oswald had failed to disclose. The host of the program was about to expose him.

Now Slatter pounced: “However there were a few items apparently that that I suspect that Mr. Oswald . . . left out from this original interview, which was principally where he lived between 1959 and 1962.” He told the audience that he and Butler had found old clippings that revealed that Oswald had attempted to renounce his American citizenship, had defected to the Soviet Union, and had returned to the United States in 1962.

Slatter confronted his guest: “Mr. Oswald, are these things correct?”

“That is correct, yes.” He had the good sense not to try to deny the information that Slatter had collected on him.

“You did live in Russia for three years?”

“That is correct. And I think those—the fact that, uh, I did live for a time in the Soviet Union gives me excellent qualifications to repudiate the charges that Cuba and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee is communist controlled.” It was not a bad recovery for a radio novice.

But it inflamed the hotheaded Bringuier, who demanded in an excited clipped tone, “I want to know exactly the name of the organization that you represent here in this city, because I have some confusion. Is it Fair Play for Cuba Committee or Fair Play for Russia Committee?”

Unruffled, Lee deflected the young Cuban’s sarcasm.

Oswald had been blindsided, but he was willing to discuss his life in the Soviet Union. He was enjoying the notoriety and public attention he was receiving tonight.

“Well of course that is very provocative,” Oswald replied in a calm voice, “and . . . I don’t think it requires an answer.” Then Bringuier recited a collection of boring statistics on the number of automobiles, telephones, and televisions per person in Cuba versus Russia, and the price difference for Cuban sugar when sold to America versus Russia. It was a long and confusing statement that Bringuier insisted Oswald explain.

Lee replied with humor: “Well, in order to give a clear and co-concise and short answer to each of those—let’s say, well questions . . . ” The audience could hear him chortle. To any listener, Oswald sounded relaxed and amused. He dismissed the excitable Cuban exile in one line: “This I do not think is a subject to be discussed tonight. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee, as its name implies, is concerned primarily with Cuban American relations. . . . ”

Bill Slatter obliged with a pointed question on the subject: “How many people do you have on your committee here in New Orleans?”

Oswald was evasive: “I cannot reveal that as secretary of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”

Ed Butler jumped in: “Is it a secret society?”

“No, Mr. Butler, it is not. However it is, ah, standard operating procedure for a political organization consisting of a political minority to, ah, safeguard the names and number of its members.” It sounded like dialogue from a Hollywood spoof of an espionage film.

Butler dug in: “Well, the Republicans are in the minority. I don’t see them hiding their membership.”

Oswald parried well. “The Republicans, are not a, well [laughs], the Republicans are an established party representing a great many people. They represent no radical point of view. They do not have a violent and sometimes emotional opposition.”

The conversation veered into a long discussion about whether Oswald ever tried to renounce his U.S. for Soviet citizenship. Oswald lied and denied it, at which point Stuckey contradicted him with old newspaper clippings that claimed he did. Oswald tried to get off the topic by saying “any other material you may have is superfluitous.” Lee, whose vocabulary was limited, either could not remember the correct word, superfluous, or had forgotten how to pronounce it. So he made up a new malapropism of his own.

But Stuckey pursued him: “You apparently by your past activities have shown that you have an affinity for Russia, and perhaps communism, although I do not know that you admit to being a communist or ever have been one. Are you or have you been a communist?”

“Well, I have answered that, uh, prior to this program on another radio program.”

“Are you a Marxist?”

“Yes, I am a Marxist.”

“What’s the difference?”

“As I said . . . very great.”

Oswald launched into a long-winded and unconvincing list of countries as he tried to carve a vague distinction between Marxism and Communism. Then the host announced that it was time to break for a commercial. As soon as the show returned to the air, the interrogation continued.

Stuckey asked Oswald how he supported himself in Russia, and whether he had enjoyed a government subsidy. Lee stumbled. “Uh, well, as I, um will uh.” Then he stalled. “Well with that I will answer your question directly then, since you will not rest until you get your answer.” He said that he held a job.

Stuckey continued to ask Oswald about his time in Russia and pressed him again on whether he had tried to renounce his American citizenship. “Well, it’s a long drawn out situation.” Then he resorted to false logic. “Well, the very obvious answer is that I am back in the United States. A person who renounces his citizenship becomes by definition unable to return to the United States.”

That may have been true, but it did not answer whether Lee had attempted to renounce his citizenship. This evasiveness would become one of Oswald’s verbal trademarks.

Ed Butler demanded, “What did you do between October 31 and November 16, 1959?” and then asked Oswald if he had ever been to a particular street in Russia. The intricate question sounded obscure and meant nothing to the audience. Oswald said no, he had not been there but in the next breath he revealed that he knew the street (and pronounced its name with a proper Russian accent) and that the Soviet foreign ministry was located there. He knew that, he said, only because he had once lived in Moscow.

For a man who had lived in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, his comments about Russia were superficial and uninteresting. If this was his moment to prove that he was a sophisticated political thinker, his performance was not that impressive.

Oswald kept his cool but was getting frustrated. He objected to the whole line of questioning about his background: “Of course this whole conversation—and we don’t have much time left—is getting away from the Cuban American problem.” But it was fine, he added, if they wanted to grill him about Russia all night: “. . . I am quite willing to discuss myself for the remainder of this program.”

Bill Slatter jumped in to rescue Oswald: “Mr. Butler, let me interrupt. I think Mr. Oswald is right. . . . We should get around to organization of which he is the head in New Orleans, Fair Play for Cuba.” Slatter had omitted the last word of the organization’s name. Oswald corrected him at once. “Committee,” Oswald interjected, “Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”

Slatter asked, “As a practical matter, what do you hope to gain through your work?”

At last, Oswald must have thought: a political question that he longed to answer. The program was almost over, but now he would have the opportunity to explain. “The principles of the Fair Play for Cuba [now Oswald failed to say the word Committee, the very lapse for which he had just chastised Slatter] consist of restoration of diplomatic, trade and tourist relations with Cuba. That is one of our main points . . . we are in a minority surely. We are honestly not interested in what Cuban exiles, or rightist . . . organizations might have to say. We are primarily interested in the attitude of the U.S. government towards Cuba.”

Oswald rejected the insinuation that he was a Soviet puppet. “We are not at all Communist controlled regardless of the fact that I lived in Russia. Regardless of the fact that we have been investigated. Regardless of any of those facts, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee is an independent organization not affiliated with any other organization. Our aims and our ideals are very clear and in the best keeping with the very traditions of American democracy.”

Carlos Bringuier could no longer remain silent. “Do you agree with Fidel Castro when in a speech [on July 26, 1963] he characterized President Kennedy as a ruffian and a thief?”

Oswald demurred. “I would not agree with that particular wording. However . . . does the U.S. government . . . ah, the State Department and CIA had made some serious mistakes in its relationship with Cuba . . . which put Cuba onto dogmatic Communism.” No doubt he was referring to the CIA sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis ten months ago.

Then Oswald got into the question of American support for Castro’s overthrow of Batista.

Ed Butler asked, “Why are people starving today?”

Oswald spoke of the unavoidable consequences of reforms and diversification of agriculture. He meandered onto topics like the production of sugar and tobacco versus sweet potatoes, lima beans, and cotton. Then time expired and the program petered out without a dramatic climax.

After the broadcast, Stuckey felt sorry for Oswald. He invited him out for a drink.

WHAT DO Oswald’s little-remembered radio appearances tell us? He handled himself reasonably well when confronted by four hostile questioners on live radio. He kept his cool; he used humor to foil sarcasm and anger. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He did not come off as angry or hostile. He may have been naive or wrong, but he did not sound crazy. Yes, Oswald had made some factual mistakes and exhibited some verbal tics. Two laughable vocabulary mistakes gave clues to his lack of education: He said “superfluitous” when he meant to say “superfluous,” and he said “co-concise” instead of “concise.”

But Lee was proud of his Fair Play for Cuba Committee work. In a document he prepared, he describes the beginning of his involvement with the FPCC as though he had accomplished something of significance. “On May 29, 1963 I requested permission from the FPCC headquarters at 799 Brodwig New York 3, N.Y. to try to form a local branch in New Orleans. I received a cautionet [cautionary] but enthusiastic go-ahead from V.T. Lee National Director of FPCC. I then made layouts and had printed public literature for the setting up of a local FPCC. I hired person to distribute literature.”

In the extract below, Oswald’s overblown description of his counterintelligence operations against anti-Castro exiles sounds ludicrous. He appropriates the language of “spy talk” that in his imagination a CIA agent might use. Oswald’s writings are a riot of misspelled words, grammatical mistakes, punctuation errors, and lack of capitalization. It is obvious that they are the musings of someone of limited education, even an autodidact, possibly dyslexic. They make him sound like a fool who has no idea what he is talking about:

I than [then] organized persons who display recetive [receptive] attitudes toward Cuba to distrube [distribute] pamphlets . . . I infiltraled [infiltrated] the Cuban Student directorate and then harresed [harassed] them with information I gained including having the N.O. city atterny [attorney] general call then in an out restraining order pending a hearing on some so-called bonds for invasion they were selling in the New Orleans area. I caused the formation of a small, active FPCC organization of members and sympathizers. where before there were none.

In truth Oswald was a nonentity. He was the only member of FPCC in New Orleans, and he had failed to recruit another soul to serve Castro’s cause. Oswald, as was so typical for him, was suffering from another one of his delusions of grandeur. All he did was write a letter and print some handbills. But Oswald made it sound important. “I received adive [advice], direction and literature from V.T. Lee National Director of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee of which I am a member. At my own expense I had printed ‘Hands off Cuba’ handbills and New Orleans membership Blanks for the F.P.C.C. local.”

Oswald fancied himself a propaganda expert and claimed a hitherto unrecognized expertise. “I am experienced in Street agitation having done it in New Orleans in connection with the F.P.C.C. In Aug. 9 I was accousted [accosted] by three anti-Castro Cubans and was arrested for ‘causing a disturbance’ I was interrogated by intelligence section of New Orleans Police Dept. and held overnight being bailed out the next morning by relatives I subsenly [subsequently] was fined 10.$ charges against the three Cubans were droped [dropped] by the judge.” Oswald was too uneducated to realize how pathetic his boast of being an expert in “street agitation” would seem to any real intelligence agent.

But Oswald was proud of the media coverage he had received. It allowed him to indulge the conceit that he had actually accomplished something. Finally, Oswald must have thought, people wanted to hear his opinions. He had so many of them. He was, he believed, on his way to becoming an important public spokesman for a cause. His voice would be heard.

In the Soviet Union, he had been a novelty—the American who rejected capitalism and chose socialist life in Russia. But his celebrity there had lost its sheen. Now he had a second chance at fame. Now he was another kind of novelty—the American who had chosen life in Communist Russia but rejected it and came back home, only to become a disciple of Fidel Castro and his revolution. He was in the limelight again, and he liked it. But his moment in the spotlight did not last long. The media lost interest, the invitations dried up, and it looked as though his brief brush with fame was over.

Nothing that Oswald said on the New Orleans radio programs would have given any listener cause to suspect that he had already attempted to murder one man and soon would try to kill another. In twelve weeks, he would attempt to assassinate the president of the United States. Soon Oswald would speak to a much larger audience than had heard him on a New Orleans radio station, when he would answer hostile questions in the same manner as he did on the radio show.

MARINA NOTICED that after Lee’s arrest and radio appearances, he started to bring his rifle out to the porch more often: “It began to happen quite frequently after he was arrested . . . in connection with some demonstration and handing out of leaflets.” Not only did he sit in the dark on the back porch peering through the telescopic sight at imaginary targets, he worked the bolt action of the Mannlicher-Carcano. “He would sit there with the rifle and open and close the bolt.”

In the six months he had owned it, Marina had seen him clean the weapon four or five times. Before he tried to kill General Walker, she thought nothing of it. “I thought it was quite normal that when you have a rifle you must clean it from time to time.” Now, in New Orleans, she asked him why he continued practicing with the rifle. It looked to Marina as though he was preparing again for . . . something.

His answer stunned her. He planned to go to Cuba, he said. Marina was exasperated. She warned Lee that if he did that, she would stay in New Orleans. There was no way she was going to agree to leave the United States and move to Fidel Castro’s notorious revolutionary island. Lee had fantasized about killing Richard M. Nixon, JFK’s republican opponent in the 1960 presidential election. Marina barricaded Lee in the bathroom until he cooled off and promised he would not try to do it. He also fantasized about hijacking a plane to Cuba. “He wanted very much,” Marina said, “to go to Cuba and have the newspapers write that somebody had kidnaped an aircraft.”

“For God’s sakes, don’t do such a thing,” Marina pleaded.

Lee asked her if she would help him. Of course not, she said. “I told him that I would not touch that rifle.”

He said that if she did not want to, it was fine. He could do it himself, and everything, he said, would go well. Oswald started studying airline schedules.

Despite Lee’s obsession with Cuba, he never complained to Marina about President Kennedy. Oswald, a man who wanted the United States to keep its “Hands Off Cuba!” as the leaflets of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee demanded, had reasons to resent JFK for the U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, but not once did he rant to Marina about the anticommunist American president.

Marina admired JFK and wanted to know more about him. “I was always interested in President Kennedy and had asked [Lee] many times to translate articles in a newspaper or a magazine for me, and he always had something good to say . . . from Lee’s behavior I cannot conclude that he was against the president.”

She was well aware, however, of her husband’s delusions of grandeur. “He said that after 20 years he would be prime minister.” How absurd, she thought. “I think that he had a sick imagination—at least at that time I already considered him to be not quite normal—not always, but at times. I always tried to point out to him that he was a man like any others who were around us. But he simply could not understand that. I tried to tell him that it would be better to direct his energies to some more practical matters.”

Lee was not interested in his wife’s sanguine opinion of his limitations. “At least his imagination, his fantasy, which was quite unfounded, as to the fact that he was an outstanding man. And the fact that he was very much interested, exceedingly so, in autobiographical works of outstanding statesmen of the United States and others.”

Marina became convinced that Lee viewed himself in heroic terms. “I think that he compared himself to these people whose autobiographies he read. That seems strange to me, because it is necessary to have an education in order to achieve success of that kind.”

A man born with what Oswald called his mean independent streak and the smug sense of superiority he exhibited in the Marine Corps could never function in Soviet society. But he could not fit in in America, either. He felt like a man without a country. Marina suspected he was incapable of being happy anywhere. She once said, “I am sure that if he had gone there (to Cuba) he would not have liked it there, either. Only on the moon, perhaps.”