With Marina’s return to the Elsbeth Street apartment, the Oswalds began their new life together in Dallas. It was a lonely life for Marina, with Lee at work all day and only infrequent contacts with her Russian friends. One day shortly after Thanksgiving, Gary Taylor dropped by to return a copy of Lee’s essay “The Collective.” He intended to stay only a few minutes, but so warm was his welcome—Marina ran down the street and bought doughnuts for the three of them—that he stayed for an hour or two. The Oswalds hardly ever had callers, and Marina was overjoyed to see a face from outside. Gary thought husband and wife were getting along well.1
Another visitor after Thanksgiving got a very different impression. She was Lydia Dymitruk, a friend of Anna Meller’s and a fellow émigré. Marina had called Mrs. Meller, upset because the baby was ill and Lee would not take her to the doctor because he was afraid he could not pay the bill. Mrs. Meller did not have a car, but Mrs. Dymitruk did, and she could provide transportation.2
Marina was distraught when Mrs. Dymitruk arrived. The baby was burning with a fever of 103 degrees, and they drove immediately to the emergency room of Parkland Hospital, where the nurses gave the baby medicine for her fever and announced that a pediatrician would be in at five in the afternoon. They would do nothing more. Lydia, who had never had a child of her own, was frightened because the baby seemed to be having trouble breathing and embarrassed because Marina kept telling her the undoubted truth—that in her country such callousness toward a sick child would be unthinkable. They drove on to a clinic, where they were dismayed to find forty sick children ahead of them. Lydia begged the nurses to take little June right away. She had a fever; her case was an emergency. She would have to take her turn, the nurses said, and that might not be for three or four hours. Lydia told them that she would hold them legally responsible if anything happened to the baby. Still they refused to give treatment.
Lydia left Marina and the baby at the Elsbeth Street apartment, promising to return. Lee was not yet home from work when she reappeared about five in the afternoon; and, afraid to go off without him, Marina asked her to wait. Lee came in, calmly ate dinner, and announced that he refused to take the baby to the hospital. “She’ll be all right, she doesn’t need it,” he said. “Besides, I can’t afford it. I can’t pay.” His attitude was the more extraordinary because he doted on “his” baby and generally trembled with fear if she so much as hiccupped or coughed.
He and Marina went into the kitchen to discuss it, and Lydia heard the sounds of a verbal battle royal. Marina won. Husband and wife soon emerged and announced that they were going to the hospital.
At Parkland a doctor took a blood test and X-rayed the baby’s lungs. When he had finished treating her, he signed some forms and told Lee to take them to the service desk. There, the nurse asked his address. Lee gave a false reply. She asked his job. He answered that he was unemployed. Did he receive unemployment compensation? “No,” he replied.
“How on earth do you live?” she asked, astonished.
“Friends help,” Lee shrugged.
Lydia did not hear the questions and answers. But she heard Marina, standing behind Lee in line, hissing at him in Russian, “You liar! What on earth are you saying that for?”
The nurse gave Lee a slip requiring a token payment to the cashier. Lee merely stuffed the paper inside his pocket and muttered, “Let’s get out of here.” They clambered into the back of Lydia’s car and immediately fell to fighting over which one would hold the baby. Marina berated Lee all the way home. The baby was sick, had been seriously sick for three days, and Lee was lying again. Would it ever end?
Up front, Lydia heard only Marina’s shrewish, schoolteacherish tone, not the substance of the battle. She was sorry for Lee. Lydia sensed that he was angry and tense, sitting with fists clenched, trying to hold himself in until he came to his front door. The one thing he did say was that he ought not to have to pay at all, that in Russia doctors and medicines were free, and they ought to be free here, too.
Lydia was disgusted with both of them by the time she dropped them off, but much more disgusted with Marina. “No wonder he’s so mean to you,” she said to her later on. “In his place I’d be the same. I’m sorry for Lee. I don’t see how he stands it. You have a dreadful disposition. I couldn’t live with you a single second. You simply ate him alive.”
Self-critical as ever, Marina agreed. She thought she did, indeed, have a dreadful disposition and maybe a dreadful character as well. She actually liked Lydia for criticizing her to her face. But mentally she remarked: “Just you try living with Lee, and then see how you behave.”
Marina had caught her husband in another lie that afternoon, and that, in addition to the lies he told at Parkland, had been responsible for her vehement outburst. Sometime earlier Lydia had asked her to send back a pair of dictionaries loaned to her by Bouhe and Anna Meller. Marina answered, in all truthfulness as far as she knew, that Lee had already returned them. But when he came home from work, she found out that he had not returned them at all, as he had told her he had. In fact, he had even hidden them so that she would not find out.
Marina was furious. All through their marriage it was Lee’s lying and Marina’s telling him frankly what she thought of it that caused the worst fights between them. His lies were bad enough, but what made her even angrier was that he often placed her in a position where, knowingly or unknowingly, she ended up telling a lie, too. Marina hated lying; it was alien to her nature. Yet she found herself caught between two fires: either she told the truth and was a disloyal wife, by her lights, or she was compelled to lie to cover up for her husband. It was the sorest point of their life together as far as she was concerned.
When the Russians heard of Lee’s behavior at Parkland and Marina’s tongue-lashing, they were confirmed in their hands-off policy toward the Oswalds. What was the point of helping people who were hellbent on hurting themselves? George Bouhe was incredulous. “Just think!” he said. “Lee took help from the doctors. He was rude and contemptuous to the nurses, he told innumerable lies to get out of paying—two dollars!” Lee did indeed get a bill from Parkland in the mail for exactly $2. He paid it without a murmur and even mentioned how little it was.
Bouhe understood by now that Lee’s energies were so drained by inner turmoil that he had nothing left for anybody else. But his sympathies, as always, were with Marina. De Mohrenschildt said that Bouhe was still worrying about her as if she were his daughter. If Marina had behaved badly at the hospital, Bouhe said to himself, it could only have been because Lee had goaded her beyond bearing. Bouhe thought and he thought, and he came up with the direst of prophecies. “Just you wait,” he announced to the other Russians. “He’ll get her pregnant again.”
Alone among the Russians, the de Mohrenschildts did not give up on the Oswalds. George dropped by every other week or so, and he generally brought Jeanne. The couples presented quite a contrast: the hearty, high-spirited George and the flamboyant, energetic Jeanne, side by side with the grave and humorless Lee and the drab, dispirited Marina. “Ho, ho, ho, how are you getting along these days?” George would greet them as he came in the door. Then, to Marina, “And are you planning to leave Lee again?” No, not right away, she would say. Jeanne would remark that Marina’s return to Lee had all but killed George Bouhe, and this brought another roar of laughter from de Mohrenschildt. His high spirits had a way of rubbing off on those around him, and he always left the Oswalds in a far more cheerful mood than he found them. But Marina noticed that his visits left her with very little else—a few anecdotes and dirty stories but no residue, nothing of substance at all. Yet she was always looking forward to the next encounter.
It pleased George to get along with someone the other Russians had written off. It gave him a chance to tell them they were stuffy and narrow-minded. He particularly liked to show up George Bouhe on this score. Maybe it was a class thing—de Mohrenschildt was an aristocrat; Bouhe was not—but he felt distaste for Bouhe’s bourgeois, bookkeeping approach. One of the reasons he liked Lee was that he was “not a beggar, a sponger,” and he had bridled at taking help from Bouhe.3 If de Mohrenschildt gave you help, he promptly forgot all about it. There were no strings attached; it never occurred to him to ask afterward what you had done with it.
George was delighted to discover in Lee a pearl, where the other Russians had found only a prickly oyster. Besides, George thought that in Lee he had found an original. The émigrés were disgusting because Oswald, having seen Soviet reality, still had not given it up, still was reading Marx and praising Khrushchev. George, on the other hand, was enchanted when he asked Lee why he had left Russia and he answered simply, “Because I did not find what I was looking for.” “I knew what he was looking for,” George was to say later. “Utopia, and that does not exist any place.”4 But he was overjoyed to have found a fellow seeker.
Both George and Jeanne, however, also found him an enigma. “He switched allegiance from one country to another,” George remarked, “and then back again, disappointed in this, disappointed in that. He did it without the enjoyment of adventure. For him it was a gruesome deal.”5 Lee did not have any fun. His lack of gaiety, indeed, what might be called the deadness of his spirit, was a puzzle to the de Mohrenschildts, who had suffered and enjoyed so much. What to them would have been a glorious adventure to Lee was just another drink from life’s long, cold bucket of disappointment. But they resolved to back him up. When Katya Ford gave it as her view that Lee was “all mixed up and not very bright,” the two of them sprang to his defense. “No, no,” George objected. “He’s all right. The boy is thinking.”
Marina got the impression that as the de Mohrenschildts saw him Lee was an unbourgeois, uncalculating spirit who had dared go to Russia without giving a damn for the consequences—in short, a young man who was as unconventional as they were. Whatever it was they saw in him, both the de Mohrenschildts, and George in particular, gave Lee a warmth, an approval, and an emotional support that, after his return to America, he got from nobody else. And unlike the other Russians, they seemed, after the separation at least, to prefer Lee and look down on Marina. Part of the reason, of course, was George’s rebelliousness against his fellow émigrés. But there was another aspect to their relationship. George said of Lee: “He could be my son in age, you see.”6 George’s only son had died, and he had not recovered from the loss. That fall he was losing one son-in-law by divorce, Gary Taylor, with whom he was on good terms politically, and for political reasons he was on deteriorating terms with Jeanne’s son-in-law, Ragnar Bogoyavlensky-Kearton. Jeanne, too, was underfulfilled as a mother. She had no son of her own, and other things being equal, she liked men better than women. But the great thing both de Mohrenschildts shared was a passion for underdogs. As Jeanne was to put it later, Lee could be “disagreeable, very very disagreeable. The personality he had would make anybody miserable to live with.” But they also saw him as “a puppy dog everybody kicked.”7 For the two of them, that was enough.
If George considered Lee one of those rare Americans who cared nothing for money or possessions, he viewed Marina, by contrast, as a real American in spirit, a more or less “normal” person, a “happy-go-lucky” bourgeois mouse who was bewitched by the gadgetry of American life and wanted more of it. They saw her as Ulysses saw his son, Telemachus: as a more or less “blameless” being, “centered in the sphere of common duty.” She seemed simply buried in problems: a baby, diapers, beatings, no money, no friends. Even Jeanne, a woman so generous that one friend said she had “an overdeveloped mother tendency,”8 appears to have been irritated by the bottomless pit of need that Marina represented. Moreover, the de Mohrenschildts felt that Marina always had her hand outstretched, that she would take anything you gave her. Not Lee—Lee had pride.
As for the Oswalds, both of them were charmed by George. And Marina liked Jeanne right away, although Lee complained after their first meeting that she was too fat and lavished too much affection on her dogs. But he soon changed. He saw that Jeanne was a good cook, a splendid companion, and a loyal, devoted wife. He admired her for helping George financially. In fact, it was not long before he was holding her up as an example Marina ought to follow.
George was a tonic for Lee and shook him out of his depressed spirits. More than anyone else he met after his return to the United States, Lee was drawn to George, opened up with him, paid attention to his opinions, even sought his advice. They probably saw one another fifteen or twenty times in all, but people with resources far greater than the Oswalds’ still found any encounter with George unforgettable. And their score of meetings had all the more impact on Lee because they occurred in a vacuum. Outside the men he saw at work, he knew nobody else. Moreover, his usual way of dealing with people simply vanished when he was with this older, more experienced man. Lee used people to get what he wanted, then drove them away if they tried to get too close to him, if their usefulness was over, or if they expected something in return for their kindness. But when he saw that George expected nothing and did not intrude upon him, he left off maneuvering. He even lied less to George than he did to anybody else.
Curiously, de Mohrenschildt, too, who loved nothing better than to bruise the sensibilities of his bourgeois friends, was exquisitely tactful with Lee. Where nearly everyone else considered Lee arrogant, de Mohrenschildt found him “very humble. If somebody expressed an interest in him, he blossomed, absolutely blossomed. If you asked him some questions about himself, he was just out of this world. That was more or less the reason that I think he liked me very much.”9
De Mohrenschildt later insisted, however, that once the novelty wore off, once he and Jeanne had learned all they thought Lee had to tell them about Russia, they kept up with the Oswalds mostly out of sympathy. After that, George said, the relationship was “purely to give a gift”: take the Oswalds to a party, introduce them to people, feed them a much-needed meal. George’s epitaph of Lee might have been the epitaph of one of his dogs: “He was responsive to kindness.”10
Lee was indeed responsive. Sometimes, after they had talked over some political event and Lee heard what George had to say, he would alter his opinion. “George is right,” he would announce. It was Lee’s supreme accolade. With George alone among the émigrés, he did not feel that he had to defend the USSR. With George alone his discussions of Soviet affairs did not degenerate into argument and were not laced with hostility. Not feeling that he had to defend Russia, Lee spoke knowingly and from the inside, and far more critically with George than with anybody else. He received several Soviet newspapers, and George used to ask what was in them. Very often the two of them would compare the Soviet version of some event with the stories in the American press. Both assumed the American version to be the true one, and they had many a good laugh over the discrepancies between the two. “Those poor Russians,” Lee used to say. “They don’t know what’s going on.”
Both men admired Khrushchev, his de-Stalinization and his policy of peaceful coexistence. Besides, Khrushchev’s high spirits, his cheerful, slightly manic way of exuding aggressiveness, were not altogether unlike George’s own. But even George roared with laughter when Lee told him how Stalin’s statue had been dynamited in Minsk and carried away under the cover of night. “So they’re still doing things the same old way,” George said. “Things haven’t changed over there.”
Lee paid George another tribute. He asked him to read his manuscript, “The Collective,” which he had shown previously only to the typist Pauline Bates, his brother Robert Oswald, and to Gary and Alexandra Taylor. It was George’s opinion he cared about the most.
Lee must have been disappointed. George gave the manuscript only the most cursory glance. What he said of it to Lee is not known, but what he thought of it is. “He showed me his little memoirs,” George said afterward. “I did not take him seriously. That is all. All his opinions were crude.” George characterized Lee as a man of “exceedingly poor background who read rather advanced books and did not understand even the words in them. He read complicated economical treatises and just picked up difficult words out of what he had read and loved to display them. He loved to use the words to impress me. He did not understand the words—he just used them. So how can you take seriously a person like that? You just laugh at him. But there was always an element of pity I had, and my wife had, for him. We realized that he was a forlorn individual, groping.”11
Like the other Russians, George considered the possibility that Lee might be a Soviet spy. He discounted the idea; Lee was “too outspoken in his ideas and attitudes.” He later said: “I would never believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important. An unstable individual, mixed-up individual, uneducated individual, without background. What government would give him any confidential work? No government would. Even the government of Ghana would not give him any job of any type.” During one of their conversations, George recalled, “I asked him point blank, ‘Are you a member of the Communist Party?’ And he said no. He said, ‘I am a Marxist.’ Kept on repeating it.” George did not discuss it any further because, “knowing what kind of brains he had, and what kind of education, I was not interested in listening to him, because it was nothing; it was zero.”12
Whatever his private opinion, Lee felt that George respected him, perhaps because George, with his perfect democracy of manner, treated him exactly as he treated everyone, and Lee took a lot more teasing and criticism from George than he would from anybody else. Marina put her finger on it when she said: “The word ‘respect’ just doesn’t fit George. George has a respect for nature. But he does not respect human beings. He probably respects his dog or a good bottle of wine more than he respects any person.” Still, she thought that George liked her husband and treated him as an equal.
To both Oswalds, the de Mohrenschildts were figures of authority. Jeanne also treated Lee with warmth and respect, but she was frank with him, too. She scolded him for his strictness with Marina, whom he forbade to drink, smoke, or wear makeup. “Why do you forbid her to smoke?” Jeanne would ask. “She only does it because you disapprove. Let her smoke. I’m sure she’ll stop if you do.”
It was the same when it came to the English language. Both George and Jeanne told Lee emphatically that he must allow Marina, must encourage her, to study English. Lee refused with the usual excuse that he would forget his own Russian if he did not practice with Marina. “That is a very egotistical attitude on your part,” George said. Lee did not reply.
Jeanne was frank with Marina, too. Knitting away on a tiny jacket for one of her dogs, she advised Marina to give in to Lee more often. “You ought not to fight over trifles,” she said. But when Marina, encouraged, felt invited into the older woman’s confidence and sought some advice about sex, Jeanne was repelled. Sexually, Marina confided, Lee was “not strong.” He came to a climax very quickly. Was it her fault? Were there pills he could take that might help? Ought they to go see a doctor?13
Jeanne later claimed that Marina’s confidences were made in front of Lee, in front of all of them, and that she ran him down sexually to his face. Marina denies this vigorously, and her denial has the ring of truth. For one thing, her only other sexual confidences to friends were made in private. For another, she knew that Lee would beat her terribly if she dared say any such thing.
Like his wife, George avoided personal confidences. He had already interfered in Lee’s private life by encouraging Marina to leave him when they first moved to Dallas. He had seen Lee’s capacity for violence, he knew that Lee had beaten Marina, and he may have been fearful for her safety. But he respected the private lives of others, and he was not going to interfere again. Besides, George had a certain delicacy. He was discreet about his own sexual exploits and evidently did not readily lend an ear to those of others. What was more, he approved of Marina’s return to Lee. Maybe she had gone back too soon, as Jeanne and the other Russians thought, but she had made the right decision. George considered Lee a good fellow, and he hoped the marriage would stick.
The subject that George really liked to talk about with Lee was politics. He was later to claim that once they had exhausted the topic of Russia, he and Lee had little to say to each other.14 That, apparently, was not true. The two talked politics all the time. Sam Ballen and Declan and Katya Ford thought this was the real bond between them, and Marina remembers their talking politics every time they met. They spoke in English, and Marina missed most of what they said. Anyway, it was her job to keep the baby out of the way so that Lee could make the most of his moments with George. But when it came to his political ideas, she feels certain that her husband had no secrets from George. In this sphere alone, and with this one man, Lee was comparatively frank. Except for Alexander Ziger and Pavel Golovachev, Lee’s friends in Minsk, Marina thinks George knew her husband’s political views better than anybody else—and that he read Lee like an open book.
Domestically, the subject closest to them both was civil rights. Lee told George that “it was hurting him, the fact that colored people did not have the same rights as white ones.” They agreed that President Kennedy was doing a good job, doing more for the black man than any president had before him. “Yes, yes,” Lee would say, “I think he is an excellent president—young, full of energy, full of good ideas.”
The Cuban missile crisis may have tempered Lee’s opinion of Kennedy, although in spite of himself he may well have admired Kennedy’s bravura display. Lee did not say much about the crisis, but when he did talk about it, it was to George—perhaps in the week of the crisis, and certainly many times thereafter. Those who saw George at the time recall that on this occasion, and this occasion only, he was critical of Kennedy and that he was, as always, highly sympathetic to Castro. George sided with the underdog on principle, while Lee had long admired and even hero-worshipped the Cuban dictator, so the two were in strong agreement about Castro.
Another topic they discussed was the integration of Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Four times that fall, in September and early October, federal marshals and officials of the US Department of Justice had tried to enroll James Meredith, a black man, in the university; and four times they desisted because of opposition from Governor Ross Barnett and because an angry crowd, egged on by retired US Army Major General Edwin A. Walker, threatened to erupt into ugly violence. Finally, President Kennedy called out the National Guard and sent US army troops to nearby Memphis, and Meredith was allowed to register, but at the cost of a riot in which two men lost their lives.
Ironically, the same General Walker who exhorted the segregationists at Ole Miss had been ordered by President Eisenhower in 1957 to lead one thousand paratroopers into Little Rock, Arkansas, in the battle to integrate Central High School. He was then sent to Germany, where he used his post to disseminate extreme right-wing propaganda to the troops. Because of congressional objections, he was removed from his command. He retired from the army to live in Dallas and soon became a leading figure in the John Birch Society. For his provocative role in the demonstrations at Ole Miss, Walker was arrested on charges of insurrection and seditious conspiracy, sent to the US prison and medical center at Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric observation, and later released on $50,000 bond.
The John Birch Society, based in Massachusetts, had risen to national prominence while Lee was out of the country. But he had read about it, and about Walker, in the news magazines his mother had sent to Minsk. He talked frequently about the “Birchers” and the “Minutemen” with Gary and Alexandra Taylor when he first moved to Dallas. And the fact that Walker, who seemed to carry about in his very person the threat of “fascism” in the United States, actually lived close at hand in Dallas seems to have stirred Lee a good deal. He and George had endless discussions about the Birchers, Walker, and the danger of fascism. George was well aware from their conversations that Lee “disliked,” even “hated,” General Walker, and by his own remarks George may not only have helped fuel Lee’s hatred but, in an odd way, may have given his approval.
The fundamental bond between Lee and George, then, was politics; and despite the differences between them as human beings, their political views were strikingly alike. Both were rebellious and contumacious toward authority. Both were seekers. Unknown to either of them, however, what they were seeking was not a better world that lay ahead but a better world that lay behind, buried in the past of each. For each had lost his birthright, had lost something he considered rightly his. George had at one stroke lost his country, his mother, and his place in a secure social order. And the effect on him was magnified by the fact that the father he loved was suffering the very same losses. In later life George was to wander from country to country and never really feel at home in his adopted land, the United States. Yet his loss had at least been palpable, measurable, while Lee’s was infinite. For Lee had never known his father. He even attributed his character to this one fact and had written that his father’s early death had occasioned in him “a far mean streak of independence brought on by neglect.” What George and Lee had in common, then, was not just their politics but something deeper that they shared—a lifelong drama of dispossession. It was this that gave depth to their relationship, this that gave consonance and resonance to everything that passed between them.
Politically each was a sounding board for the other, but any account of the echoes that bounced back and forth is incomplete without reckoning in the wives, each of whom was likewise a sufferer in the drama of dispossession. Jeanne’s father had been killed by Communists and, in exile from her homeland, China, she had taken first a French and then an American identity. Marina was illegitimate, had never been at home in any of her Russian “homes,” and, like the other three, had left the country of her birth. All four were rebels. Thus the influence that George had on Lee may have been amplified by the women and especially by Jeanne, who was far out and vociferous in her opinions and was the only woman whose political views Lee respected.
But the differences were crucial, too. George, for example, had innumerable avenues through which he was able to express the central drama of his life, that of yearning to be “in,” yet having to be thrown out. He and Jeanne had countless harmless ways in which they could shock and outrage. As for Marina, she abhorred “politics.” It was Lee who was different. Unlike the de Mohrenschildts, Lee had no hobbies, no eccentricities, no minor ways of expressing himself. His only outlets were major ones. He had already expressed his political ideas on a grand scale twice, by abandoning first America, then Russia, all before he had reached the age of twenty-three.
One pair of onlookers spotted the critical difference between George and Lee, and that was Declan and Katya Ford. Their perspicacity was curious, for they liked George and disliked Lee. But it was Lee they respected. Lee was a “serious seeker,” and “idealist,” while George only wanted to be “a commissar,” wanted to be “on top” himself.15 George was a talker. What the Fords saw about Lee was that he was capable of acting on his beliefs.
Everyone who knew them agrees that Lee looked to George as a father. Marina says that her husband was slightly afraid of George and that for George alone, he might even go so far as to amend his political opinions. Gary Taylor thought that Lee would do anything George told him to do. He would even take his advice on such matters as what time to go to bed, where to stay, and whether to get a new job. Whatever George’s suggestions, Gary says, “Lee grabbed them and took them.”16 George himself has said that “he was clinging to me. He would call me. He would try to be next to me.”17
It did not occur to George what effect his political talk might have on Lee. Marina sensed that her husband was merely “the latest exhibit in George’s collection of friends,” and that George thought, “It would be interesting to see how he turned out.” George himself said that “he is just a kid for me, with whom I played around. Sometimes I was curious to see what went on in his head. But I certainly would not call myself a friend of his.”18
Such condescension, no matter how artfully concealed, must have been maddening to Lee. It was seldom that he looked up to anyone. And now he, who set the distances of all his relationships and kept nearly everyone at arm’s length, was himself being kept at arm’s length by the one man he longed to be close to, the one man whose esteem he coveted.
As the winter of 1963 began, the idea seems to have taken shape in Lee’s mind that by a single, dramatic act whose political thrust George would approve, he might compel George’s respect.