On Friday, November 1, Lee went to the post office in Dallas. There he dropped into the mail a membership application that he had picked up at the October 25 meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union, the meeting he had attended with Michael Paine. With the application he sent in a $2 membership fee. The application was processed in New York on November 4, and Lee formally became a member of the organization he had only just told Michael he would never join because it was not political enough.
He also transacted an item of business at the post office. He rented a box for the period of November 1–December 31 for a total fee of $3. The boxes were rented at $1.50 per month, and Lee, who counted every penny, probably would not have rented a box for a two-month period unless he expected to be in Dallas the entire time. The box was not at the main post office, which he had used before, but at the terminal annex station, near his job. He took it in his name and Marina’s, a sign that he expected that by the end of the year they would be living in Dallas. He listed as nonprofit organizations entitled to receive mail at his address the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union.
And he mailed another letter to the Communist Party. Arnold Johnson, information director, had long ago answered Lee’s letter from New Orleans requesting information about how to contact the party when he moved to the Northeast. He had suggested that Oswald get in touch with the party in New York when he moved, and the party would find a way to contact him in Baltimore or wherever he might be.1
Lee’s new letter, postmarked November 1, was a continuation of the earlier correspondence. He announced that he had not moved north after all but had settled for the time in Dallas. He went on to report that he had been to a right-wing meeting “headed” by General Walker on October 23, and to a meeting of the ACLU on the 25th. “As you see, political friction between ‘left’ and ‘right’ is very great here,” he wrote. He added that the ACLU was in the hands of liberal, professional people, including a minister and two law professors; “however, some of those present showed marked class awareness and insight.” Lee’s question was this: “Could you advise me as to the general view that we had on the ACLU and to what degree, if any, I should attempt to highten its progressive tendencies?”2 It was an unreal and remarkable letter, suing “we” as if he were a party member and seeking advice in the same spirit.
That same day, in Irving, Ruth and Marina had a visitor. A day or two earlier, they had come home from their errands to be told by a neighbor that a strange man had been asking for them. The neighbor, Dorothy Roberts, informed Ruth that the man paid a call on her and asked who was living at the Paines’. Ruth translated for Marina, and the two decided that it must be someone from the FBI.
Marina was frightened of the FBI, partly because she equated it with the KGB in Russia, of which she had been afraid all her life, and partly because she knew that Lee desperately feared the FBI. But she noticed that Ruth took the news calmly and that her conscience was clear. Therefore Marina did not worry much about the visit, even though the man had said to Mrs. Roberts that he would be coming by again.
On the afternoon of Friday, November 1, the children were sleeping, Marina was using Ruth’s hair dryer to beautify herself for Lee’s arrival, and Ruth was doing jobs around the house when the visitor reappeared.3 Ruth was not surprised to find a dark-haired stranger at the door who introduced himself as Agent James P. Hosty of the FBI. She greeted him cordially, asked him in, and the two sat in the living room talking pleasantries. Hosty said that, unlike the House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI was not a witch-hunting organization.
Gradually, Hosty switched the conversation to Lee. Was he living at Ruth’s house? Ruth answered that he was not. Did she know where he was living? Once again the answer was a surprising “No.” Ruth did not know where Lee was living, but it was in Dallas somewhere, and she thought it might be Oak Cliff. Did Ruth know where he was working? Ruth hesitated. She explained that Lee thought he had been having job trouble on account of the FBI. Hosty assured her that it was not the FBI’s way to approach an employer directly. At this Ruth softened, told him where Lee was working, and together they looked up the address of the book depository in the telephone book. Lee worked at 411 Elm Street.
While they were talking, Marina wandered in. She was frightened and a little repelled when Hosty introduced himself and showed her his credentials. He saw that she was alarmed, was aware that she had lately had a child, and tried to calm her. He explained, with Ruth translating, that he was not there to embarrass or harass her. But should Soviet agents try to recruit her by threatening her or her relatives in Russia, she had a right to ask the FBI for help. Marina was delighted. She liked this plumpish, pleasant-looking dark-haired man who was talking to her about her rights and offering to protect her. No one had given her so much attention in a long time, much less offered to protect her rights.
The talk turned to Castro. Hosty remarked that from what he had read in the American papers, he thought Castro was a threat to the interests of the United States. Marina said she doubted that the American press was being fair. Hosty said he knew of Lee’s activities passing out pamphlets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans and asked whether he was doing anything similar in Dallas. Marina thought of the series of childhood diseases her husband had lately been passing through and said cheerily: “Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s just young. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He won’t do anything like that here.”
Before Hosty left, Marina begged him not to interfere with Lee at work. She explained that he had had trouble keeping his jobs and thought he lost them “because the FBI is interested in him.” (He had, in fact, blamed the loss of his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall on the FBI, but not the loss of his job in New Orleans.)
“I don’t think he has lost any of his jobs on account of the FBI,” Hosty said softly.
Ruth and Marina urged the visitor to stay. If he wanted to see Lee, they said, he would be there at 5:30. But Hosty had to get back to the office; and since he did not have a second man present (as is the FBI custom during an interview), and since the New Orleans office had jurisdiction over the case until it was established that Oswald had a residence in Dallas, he was not eager to see Lee. But he asked Ruth to find out where he was living. Ruth thought that would be no problem; she would simply ask Lee.
Hosty had another reason for not being anxious to see Lee. The FBI had learned of his visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and was now worried about him as an “espionage case.” The bureau did not want to give away to him either what it knew of his trip or the techniques by which it had acquired knowledge. “We would be telling him more than he would be telling us,” Hosty said.4
Hosty’s visit ended as it began, on a friendly note. Marina was all smiles. She would be glad to have such a pleasant visitor any day. Hosty wrote out his name, office address, and telephone number for Ruth to give to Lee. Since Ruth was sure Lee had nothing to hide, she expected that he would go straight to the FBI himself.
Lee arrived late that afternoon in a fine, outgoing frame of mind. But when Marina told him about Hosty’s visit, his face darkened. He wanted to know everything—what Ruth had said, how long the man stayed, and what he had said. Marina explained that she had not understood much, and Lee scolded her. Marina was astonished at how nervous he had suddenly become, and at the effort he was making to conceal it.
While they were at supper Ruth, too, told Lee about Hosty’s visit. “Oh,” said Lee, elaborately casual, “and what did he say?” Ruth described their conversation and handed Lee the slip of paper with Hosty’s telephone number and address.
Ruth realized that both Lee and Marina were afraid. She had heard that fear of the FBI was typical of many people coming out of Russia, especially if they were Russian. To reassure them and show that she was not afraid, she told them of her experience during World War II, when her brother and many of his friends were conscientious objectors. Ruth had been only a high school student, but she realized that the FBI was visiting the neighbors and asking about her brother and his friends. So far from threatening their rights, she concluded that the FBI had protected them. She told Lee and Marina that the FBI men she had seen were “careful and effective.”
Ruth was certain that Lee was not an agent and knew nothing of interest to a foreign power. It seemed clear to her that he was “neither bright enough nor steady enough to have been recruited” by anyone.5 Since he had nothing to hide, she thought by far the best thing he could do was go to the FBI office, preempting their initiative, and tell them everything they wanted to know. Only in this way would they, too, see that he had nothing to hide.
Marina was watching Lee’s reactions. To her eye he was a changed man. He was sad and subdued throughout supper, and he scarcely spoke a word all evening long. For the first time since his return from Mexico, there was no sex at all between them that weekend, not even the limited sex that had been possible since Rachel’s birth. The next day he again asked Ruth about the visit. Marina could tell that he was straining to catch every word, yet at the same time trying not to betray his nervousness.
He put diapers in the washing machine for Marina, hung them on the line, and tried to carry on his family life as usual. No one but Marina understood how distraught he really was. During the afternoon he watched a football game on television, and his spirits seemed to improve. Then he drew Marina aside and instructed her that the next time the FBI came she was to study the car with care, note what color it was, what model, and write down the license number. They might send a different agent, he explained, but the car would still be the same. He even told Marina where to look for it. If the car was not across the way from Ruth’s, he said, it would be down the street in front of the neighbors’. Marina was puzzled by his behavior. Again she could see that he was calculating at great speed, trying to think of everything, yet at the same time hide his anxiety. Still, telling her what to do seemed to calm him.
On Sunday Ruth gave Lee his second driving lesson—parking. He wanted to take June along, but Marina forbade it. “If you want to break bones, break your own,” she said.
He came back to the house pleased with himself. “I haven’t practiced much,” he boasted, “and look how well it’s going.”
His elation was momentary, however, and for the rest of the weekend Lee was withdrawn, taken up with thoughts of his own. Marina tried to leave him in peace, but by now she, too, was annoyed at the FBI. Not at Mr. Hosty—she knew he was only doing his job—but at the astonishing change his visit had wrought in Lee and in their relationship. Everything between them had been wonderful, or nearly wonderful, for a month. Now he would hardly speak to her.
Lee went to work on Monday morning, and on Tuesday, November 5, Hosty came again. He was on his way to Fort Worth with another agent, and he decided to stop at the Paines’ to see if Ruth had Lee’s address. He says the interview was brief: “I didn’t go in the house. I just went in the front door.” Ruth met both men at the doorstep and said that Lee had been there over the weekend but she had not gotten his address. Lee had told her he was a Trotskyite, and Ruth said to Hosty, with a trace of amusement, that she considered him “a very illogical person.” Hosty asked Ruth whether in her opinion there might be anything wrong with Lee mentally. She answered, in a fairly light way, that she did not understand the thought processes of anyone who claimed to be a Marxist.
Hosty says he did not see Marina on this visit; Ruth says he did. Marina appeared toward the end of the visit, and both Ruth and Hosty were surprised to see her. Marina, for her part, remembers this visit as being the longer, and more charming, of her conversations with Hosty about her “rights.” She was no longer afraid. On the contrary, she was glad to see Hosty because, as she puts it, he had “a nice personality.” At the end of their conversation, however, she did appeal to him not to come again because news of his first visit had upset Lee very badly.
Ruth had thought, while she and Hosty were talking, that Marina was in her bedroom taking care of Rachel. So she was, but at some point—it could have been while Hosty and the other agent were at the doorway before they came in the house—she slipped out of the bedroom, into the kitchen and dining area, out of the kitchen door, and around the house.6 She had no trouble finding Hosty’s car, and without the smallest feeling of being in a hurry—“I am a sneaky girl,” she laughs—she walked around and around it, trying to figure out what make it was. This she was unable to do because she could not read English. But she studied the color and memorized the license number. Then she came back inside the house. Once Hosty had gone, she wrote the number on a slip of paper and left it for Lee on their bureau.7
Later, she and Ruth discussed whether to tell Lee about the visit. Ruth thought it might be better to wait until the weekend, and Marina agreed. Each time he called that week (he called twice a day, during his lunch break and at 5:30 in the afternoon), he started by asking: “Has the FBI been there?” Each time Marina said no.
No sooner had he arrived on Friday than Lee went outside where Marina was hanging diapers and asked, “Have they been here again?”8
Marina said yes.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I had a lot on my mind. I forgot. Besides, it wasn’t that important to me.”
“How on earth could you forget?”
“Well, it upset you last time, and I didn’t want to upset you again.”
“It upsets me worse if you keep it from me. Why must you hide things all the time? I never can count on you. What did he want to know?”
“Ask Ruth. She remembers better.”
“I want to hear from you.”
“It was the same nice man as before, darkish and very likable.”
“I didn’t ask what he was like; I want to know what he said.”
Marina said that through Ruth he had explained to her that if anybody from the Soviet Union or the United States harmed her or tried to use against her the fact that she was from Russia, she had a right to ask the FBI for help. “He’s such a nice man, Lee. Don’t be frightened. All he did was explain my rights and promise to protect them.”
“You fool,” said Lee, his voice full of anger, as if it were Marina’s fault that Hosty had come at all. “Don’t you see? He doesn’t care about your rights. He comes because it’s his job. You have no idea how to talk to the FBI. As usual, you were probably too polite. You can’t afford to let them see your weaknesses. What did he say next?”
Again, Marina told him to ask Ruth. By now she was angry at Lee for ruining her good spirits and refusing to believe the favorable things she had to say about Hosty.
Her words had no effect at all. Lee was angry at her because she failed to remember every detail and had forgotten to warn Ruth in advance that she was not to say anything to Hosty. His tone went beyond anger: he was accusing Marina.
It is Marina’s recollection that Lee then went straight to the kitchen and quizzed Ruth, who was fixing dinner. After that he found Marina in the bedroom and started pumping her all over again. He treated her as if she were untrustworthy and had no understanding of how important the whole matter was. “You fool,” he said again. “You frivolous, simple-minded fool. I trust you didn’t give your consent to having him defend your ‘rights’?”
“Of course not,” said Marina, “but I agreed with him.”
“Fool,” he said again. “As a result of these ‘rights,’ they’ll ask you ten times as many questions as before. If the Soviet embassy gets wind of it and you agreed to let this man protect your ‘rights,’ then you’ll really be in for it. You didn’t sign anything, did you?”
“Nobody asked me to, Lee. But I promise you I’ll never sign anything without your consent.”
Suddenly he remembered something. “Did you write down the license number?”
Marina gave a little wave. “It’s on the bureau,” she said, repeating the number out loud.
“You’ve got a good memory,” he said, “but only for some things.”
Marina was exhausted. She felt as if he had squeezed her dry.
At supper Lee questioned Ruth again, and this time she saw more clearly than the previous weekend just how upset he was. She tried to be reassuring. “You have a right to your views even if they’re unpopular,” she said.
Lee complained that he felt “inhibited” by the FBI and hated being bothered all the time.
Ruth wondered if he was worried about his job, and he said he was.
Ruth then told him the only other thing there was to tell. Hosty had inquired whether he might have a mental problem. Lee did not even answer. He barely suppressed a “scoffing laugh.”9
Lee was pensive and withdrawn for the rest of the evening. Seeing how disturbed he was, a part of Marina decided that she must be a fool indeed not to have understood the seriousness of the whole affair. But another part kept telling her that Lee was making a mountain out of a molehill. She was tired of the way he was always blowing things up out of all proportion and trying to make her as suspicious as he was himself.
Early the next day, Saturday, Lee asked Ruth if he might use her typewriter. Ruth assented, and as he began typing she carried Junie in her high chair over beside him, where he could keep an eye on her. When she came near, Lee quickly covered up the paper written in longhand that he was typing from. His gesture aroused her curiosity.10
About eleven that same morning, after Lee had finished typing, all seven of them—Ruth, the Oswalds, and the four children—piled into Ruth’s station wagon and drove to the Texas Drivers’ License Examining Station in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Lee wanted to apply for a learner’s permit, get a license, and then buy a car so he would qualify for better jobs. But the station was closed because of the Veterans Day weekend. Finding themselves in a shopping center, all seven then trooped into a dime store, where Ruth bought a few items for her children and Lee bought rubber pants for June and Rachel. “Rachel is so rich,” he said with pride. “Junie didn’t have so many clothes when she was born, and I didn’t either. She’s lucky. She was born free of charge, and the neighbors have given her lots of clothes and such a fine bed!”
On the way home in the car, Lee was as cheerful as Ruth had ever seen him. “He sang, he joked, he made puns” and word plays on the Russian language that caused Marina to double up with laughter.11
Marina was relieved at the change in him. She understood that whatever he had written that morning had calmed him after his fright of the evening before. He had been similarly calmed after ordering her to obtain the license number, and calmed again after he took the number off their bureau.
Ruth left the house to vote after lunch, and Lee, cutting up a little again and behaving like a naughty child, said, “Hurry up, Marina. Make me some potatoes and onions before Ruth gets back.”
“As if Ruth will mind if you eat potatoes.”
“I feel funny eating her potatoes every day.”
Marina fried some potatoes and onions mixed with flour and eggs, and for once it was a success. “Finally it comes out right,” Lee said, seating himself on the floor in front of the television set. “I told you again and again how to do it, and at last you know. Now I feel like a king!” He proceeded to down it with gusto.
When there was a break in the football game, Lee shepherded the children down the street to buy popsicles. Chris Paine ran on a little ahead, and Lee was afraid that he would end up under a car. He caught Chris, smacked him on the bottom, and carried him the rest of the way. When they got home, he still had Chris in his shoulders. “This little brigand got away,” he explained, “and I was afraid he’d be hit by a car. So I gave him a little spank on the behind. He’s such a big boy that I can hardly carry him on my shoulders.”
Marina told Lee that he had no right to spank somebody else’s child.
“Thanks,” said Lee. “And if anything happened to him, it would be my fault.”
After the football game he got down on all fours, allowed Chris to ride on his back, and played “Horsey” on the living room floor. The two of them enjoyed it greatly, and Marina could see that her husband still was dreaming of having a son.
That night was a special one for them. It started on a playful note, with Marina, in bed, begging Lee to give up any thoughts of going back to Russia.
Half teasing, half thinking out loud, he said: “We’ll go to Russia. I’ll get a decent job at last. I’ll work, you’ll work, the children will go to kindergarten. We’ll see Erich and Pavel.”
“I don’t want to go to Minsk. Let’s go to Leningrad.”
“I don’t want Leningrad. Let’s go to Moscow,” he said.
“Alik, if you want Moscow, I won’t go. Come on, Alka, let’s not go to Russia at all.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Hooray,” Marina nearly shouted, pouncing around the bed like a kitten. “Do you swear?”
“I swear.”
“Word of honor?”
“How you need my word of honor?”
“Because sometimes you promise one thing and do another.”
“I won’t betray you this time.”
At that moment he looked just the way Marina liked him best—“no clouds in his head.”
Suddenly Lee turned tender and was more frank with her than he had ever been before. Neither of them had said much to the other about the lives they had led before they met, for what each had been seeking in marrying the other was a new life. In fact, it had only been a month or so before, in New Orleans, that Marina finally told Lee that as a teenager in Leningrad she used to go around cold, hungry, and threadbare, delivering telegrams during the New Year’s season. She had hardly ever mentioned Petya and Tanya, her brother and sister, or her stepfather, Alexander Medvedev.
Lee had told Marina even less, but tonight he wanted to talk about every woman he had ever cared about before he met her. The first had been in Japan while he was stationed there in the Marine Corps. She had been thirty-four years old, nearly twice his age, but she looked much younger than she was. He threw her over, he said, after she had taught him something about sex and he realized that she wanted to marry him. The next one had been thin, but she had had a great many lovers, and he was afraid of catching venereal disease. The third had cooked for him, and he saw more of her than of anybody else. “But she was fat, I soon got tired of her, and she bored me,” Lee said. “I went to see her more for her cooking than for love.” He had had five other women in Japan.
In Russia he had at first gone without a woman for a year. Then there had been a whole parade. “But it’s all in the past,” he said. “I was only tricking them. Then a girl came along in a red dress—and she tricked me.”
The girl in the red dress was Marina, of course, but he did tell her a little about the others, especially Ella Germann, the girl he had asked to marry him. “Her grandmother scared her away,” Lee said. “Being American, she thought that I must be a spy.” He added that he was grateful to Marina because she had never thought he was a spy. And he told her that of all the women he had known, she was the only one he ever loved.
“Oh, Alka, you don’t love me. Look at the way we fight.”
“Everyone does that.”
“If you loved me, maybe we wouldn’t fight.”
“You silly, don’t you see that I love you?” He stroked her hair. “Did you grow your hair long especially for me?”
“Who else but you?”
“Mama will have long hair now. See how pretty her hair is. I love Mama’s eyes, her little bones, her nose, her ears, her mouth.” And he began to kiss her. “Who taught you to kiss?” he asked her, looking into the mirror above her head.
“It’s all in the past,” she said.
The next morning, Sunday, Ruth was up ahead of everybody else. She went to the living room, and there, on her desk, lay the handwritten note Lee had been typing from the day before. The note was folded, and Ruth started to read below the fold. The words she saw were these: “The FBI is not now interested in my activities …” Ruth was thunderstruck. She had no idea to whom these words were addressed, but she of all people knew they were not true. She was not accustomed to reading other people’s letters without permission. But Lee was using her typewriter for his lies, and she felt, in a way, that she had the right. So she read the whole thing:
This is to inform you of events since my interview with Comrade Kostine in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City, Mexico.
I was unable to remain in Mexico City indefinitely because of my Mexican visa restrictions which was for 15 days only. I could not take a chance on applying for an extension unless I used my real name so I returned to the US
I and Marina Nicholeyeva are now living in Dallas, Texas.
The FBI is not now interested in my activities in the progressive organization FPCC of which I was secretary in New Orleans Louisiana since I no longer live in that State.
the FBI has visited us here in Texas. On Nov. 1st agent of the FBI James P. Hasty warned me that if I attempt to engage in FPCC activities in Texas the FBI will again take an “interest” in me. This agent also “suggested” that my wife could “remain in the US under FBI protection,” that is, she could defect from the Soviet Union.
Of course I and my wife strongly protested these tactics by the notorious FBI.
I had not planned to contact the Mexican City Embassy at all so of course they were unprepared for me. Had I been able to reach Havana as planned the Soviet Embassy there would have had time to assist me. but of course the stuip Cuban Consule was at fault here I am glad he has since been replaced by another.12
Ruth was suddenly alarmed.13 She wondered what sort of man she was giving shelter to, and she saw immediately that he was a good deal “queerer” than she had supposed. The letter sounded to her less like that of a spy than of someone who was trying to make an impression on someone else who was a spy. It contained, in any event, statements she knew to be lies, weird language like “the notorious FBI,” references to Mexico, and a false name. Ruth wondered whether a single word was true.
The shower was running; Ruth hoped that Lee might be in it, and she hurriedly made a copy of the letter, stuffed it in an envelope, and shoved it deep into a corner of her desk. If anybody from the FBI came that week, she would hand it over right away, for she wanted to be rid of the thing. Ruth was convinced that the FBI must know a lot about Lee, more than Hosty had let on. She therefore expected that the FBI would know what to make of her discovery. Meanwhile, she put the original of the letter back where she had found it, right in full view on the desk, and there it lay all day Sunday as it had lain all day Saturday. Its being there for everyone to see did not seem to bother Lee a bit.
As usual he looked at football that afternoon. Michael was at home and had occasion to step over Lee while he was lying stretched out on the floor. Michael felt a pang of self-reproach. He thought he was being rude, stepping over Lee that way without even trying to make small talk. But he had given up trying to build a bridge to Lee or understand him because Lee seemed to block it somehow. Michael thought it a shame that they should be there, two men in the same house, and be unable to talk to one another. He wished they could communicate better.
Michael had another thought. He did not resent Lee lying on his floor, watching his television, and crowding his house a bit. But he did feel that for a man who professed to be a revolutionary, Lee had an awful lot of time on his hands. To be a revolutionary, Michael thought, is a perfectly good and valid thing. But if Lee wanted to be a revolutionary, he ought to go out and be one. To lie around watching television all day, Michael said to himself, “is one hell of a way for a revolutionary to be spending his time.”14
Late in the afternoon Ruth gave Lee his third driving lesson—backing, parking, and a right-angle turn. She thought Lee really got the feel of parking that day.
In the evening she decided to rearrange the living room furniture, and she asked Lee and Michael to help. Preceding them into the room, she saw Lee’s letter still in full view on her desk. She popped it inside the folding front and the three of them moved the furniture around. When they were through, she put the letter gingerly back where it had been before.15
At the end of the evening, Ruth was still upset by the letter and knew that it would be a while before she could get to sleep. She sat on the sofa next to Lee, who was watching a spy mystery, hoping to ask him about the letter. She wanted to say, “What is this I found on my desk?” But she did not want him to think that she was watching him, and she was fearful. Mostly, the letter made her think that something was wrong with Lee mentally. But supposing he was a spy. Would it not be better in that case just to give the letter to the FBI? Ruth did not know what to do.
Suddenly, Lee turned sweet with her. “I guess you are real upset about going to the lawyer, aren’t you?” he asked sympathetically, knowing that Ruth was to see a divorce lawyer in a day or two.
Ruth was disarmed. It had been thoughtful of Lee to ask. She watched the mystery a moment longer, then left him and went to bed.16
It was the Veterans Day weekend, and Lee did not have to go to work on Monday. Ruth was gone the first part of the day and parked her children with a neighbor, leaving the Oswalds to themselves. Lee was pensive and withdrawn. He sat alone in the backyard on the children’s swings. Then he came into the house and went back to work on his letter. He told Marina that he was writing the Soviet embassy in Washington to complain about the FBI. He even asked her to sign it. She refused. She was sorry he was fussing with the embassy again, but somehow she felt that she was never going to have to go back to Russia.
She noticed that Lee was nervous. He typed the letter twice before he got it right and had to do the envelope at least four times.17 Once he put the return address where the embassy’s address ought to be and other times he simply left letters out of the address.
Lee’s letter is similar but not identical to the draft version Ruth had seen. In one significant change in the next to last paragraph of the final version, he betrayed his newly made promise to Marina that they would never return to Russia. The paragraph read: “Please inform us of the arrival of our Soviet entrance visa’s as soon as they come.”18
That Monday afternoon, while they were hanging up diapers again, Lee and Marina had another talk about the FBI. After Christmas the two of them expected that they would have saved enough money to find an apartment of their own. Lee insisted that their new address should remain a secret from the FBI. But Marina told him that after all Ruth had done for them, she could and would not turn her back on Ruth and keep their address a secret. How, then, to keep it secret from the FBI?
“I know,” said Lee. “Ruth is too honest. If you ask her not to say a certain thing, she won’t be able not to. She doesn’t know how to lie. She’ll tell them where we are living and how. And I don’t want the FBI to know anything about me.”
Marina repeated that it would be a “swinish” trick not to give Ruth their address. She liked Ruth and wanted to remain her friend.
“I’ll think of something,” said Lee.
And he did.19
The next morning, Tuesday, November 12, he kissed Marina goodbye while she was still in bed. He lifted Rachel’s foot and kissed it, too. “She’s so warm. And I’ve got to go to work.” Then he either left his letter to the Soviet embassy for Ruth to mail along with her letters, or he dropped it into a mailbox opposite the house of Wesley Frazier, with whom he was riding into town. The letter bears the postmark: “Irving, Texas, 5:00 P.M., November 12”20
Lee reported for work at the book depository, and during the noon hour, taking Ruth’s advice, in a way, he went to the main FBI office at 1114 Commerce Street, not far from the depository. He walked up to the receptionist, Nanny Lee Fenner, looking “awfully fidgety,” with what she later said was “a wild look in his eye” and an unsealed envelope in his hand. He asked if Agent Hosty was in, and she told him Hosty was out to lunch. “Well, get this to him,” he said and tossed the envelope on her desk. He turned and walked back to the elevator.
Soon afterward Hosty stopped by. “Some nut left this for you,” Mrs. Fenner said and handed Hosty the letter. The envelope, a 10-inch white business envelope, had one word written across it—“Hasty.” It contained a single sheet of eight-by-ten-inch bond paper. It had no greeting, no signature, and no return address. There were only two handwritten paragraphs. One stated that Hosty had been interviewing the wife of the author without permission, and the author did not like it. If you want to see me, come to me. Don’t bother my wife, it said. In the next paragraph the writer warned that if Hosty did not stop talking to his wife, he would be forced to take action against the FBI. He did not say what that action would be.21
Since the note was not signed, Hosty was not certain who had left it. He surmised that it might be Oswald or one other person who had been giving him trouble. Either way the complaint seemed “innocuous,” the kind he got a good many of, and it did not appear to require action. He put it in his work box and left it.22
Oswald’s letter to the Soviet Embassy and his warning note to the FBI are the work of a man who had come a long way in only a few days down the road of his own delusions. It is true that Oswald had suffered an accumulation of disappointments in the year and a half since his return from Russia and had lately suffered a serious blow at the hands of Castro’s chief consul in Mexico City. The letter to the Soviet embassy confirms what Marina had noticed: an ebbing of her husband’s enthusiasm for Cuba and a revival of his faith in the USSR. But what apparently completed his inner undoing, and in little more than a week, were the visits of FBI Agent James P. Hosty to the Paine household on November 1 and 5.
The FBI is, indeed, an organization with an exceptional capacity to magnetize, then crystallize, the fears and longings of many people. And Oswald’s feelings toward the FBI did contain an element of longing, did have their favorable side. In a New Orleans jail only a few months earlier, he had asked to see an agent of the FBI, and his request had been granted. The FBI’s attention elated him then, for it was proof of his importance. Moreover, his summoning the FBI into his life that summer, two months after he had for the first and only time paid a visit to the grave of his father, suggests that for Oswald as for others, the FBI was a symbolic father whose approval and protection he craved.
Now it was altogether different. Oswald’s state of mind was no longer what it had been in August. And this time, unlike the last, it was the FBI that was coming after him. To Oswald this apparently meant only one thing—he was about to suffer retribution for all his sins, both those he had actually committed and those that existed only in his imagination. It was not simply a loving father who had found him out, but an avenging one. It was this he had been dreading; it was for this he had been waiting, all his life.
There was something else, too. Maybe Marina described Hosty’s visits in a teasing, slightly provocative manner, or maybe Oswald merely took her description that way, but the visits evidently caused him to feel that his sexual hold over her was in jeopardy.
Thus the threat that the Hosty visits held for Oswald could scarcely have lain deeper than it did. It was a threat that was both heterosexual and homosexual in nature, for it entailed the threat of being found out and punished for his “sins,” on the one hand, and, on the other, the threat and promise of unification, of being joined with and becoming part of the symbolic father whom Oswald dreaded and loved at the same time.
The visits to Ruth and Marina by an obscure agent of the FBI appear to have been linked in Lee’s mind with the forthcoming visit by President Kennedy, which was now only ten days away. Since Hosty was an emissary of the government, his arrival was like a herald, or a precursor, of President Kennedy’s. And since Hosty’s status with the FBI made him a sort of stand-in for a father, his visits were a paradigm, an emotional equivalent, of the president’s.
Ironically, the visits to Irving by an agent of the United States government appear to have been a catalyst and a precipitating element of the events that lay ahead.23