Marina awoke on the morning of November 22 with a strained, unhappy feeling. Something had been wrong the evening before: Lee’s asking her to move into Dallas with him so insistently, her refusing, his practically kicking her in bed. There had been something nasty between them.
But she was soon distracted. Knowing Marina’s fascination with the president and Mrs. Kennedy, Ruth had left the television on when she went out. Marina did not bother to get dressed. She tended to Rachel, gave cookies and milk to little June, and settled down on the sofa to watch the president. She saw him arrive at Love Field and give a speech. Jackie, dressed in a raspberry-colored suit, looked wonderful. Marina watched a rerun of a breakfast Mr. Kennedy had attended in Fort Worth. Somebody gave him a ten-gallon hat, and he seemed to enjoy it.
Marina was glowing by the time Ruth returned home about noon. She said that it was a pity Ruth had missed the president’s arrival. What a welcome he had had!
Ruth went into the kitchen to fix lunch, and Marina went to her room to get dressed. The television set was on, and suddenly Marina heard a lot of noise. Ruth ran into the bedroom, very pale, and said that someone had shot at the president. The two women dashed to the living room and stared at the set. There was no picture now, only a newsman reporting what had happened. Marina kept asking Ruth to translate. Was it very serious? Was Jackie all right? Ruth listened closely, then said the president had been taken to the hospital. There was not much news of him yet, but he had been hit in the head.
They forgot about lunch. Ruth lit some candles, and she and her little girl prayed. Marina went to her room and cried. She wondered what Ruth would think of her crying for a man who was not even her president. She prayed for the president’s life, and also for Mrs. Kennedy, who might be left alone with two children.
A little later Marina was outside hanging up clothes. Ruth came to join her and told her that the reporters were saying the shots that hit the president had come from the Texas School Book Depository. At that, Marina’s heart “fell to the bottom.”1
“Is there really anyone on earth but my lunatic husband crazy enough to have fired that shot?” she asked herself. Unlikely and unexplained occurrences suddenly started to drop into place: Lee’s unannounced visit the night before, his shrugging and saying he knew nothing about the president’s visit. Marina hid the fear that had seized her; she did not want to reveal it to Ruth.
She need not have worried. Ruth was not thinking that way. It had not occurred to her to connect Lee to the crime. She merely thought they knew someone in the building, close to the event, who would give them a first-hand account.2
Neither Ruth nor Marina had realized that the place where Lee worked was on the president’s route. Ruth knew that the Book Depository had two warehouses, and she was not certain which of them Lee actually worked in. She had copied Lee’s address, 411 Elm Street, three weeks earlier for James Hosty, but she had forgotten it.
Marina was numb. She left Ruth at the clothesline and went to the house. When she was certain Ruth could not see her, she crept into the garage, to the place where Lee kept his rifle wrapped in paper inside the heavy blanket, a green and brown wool blanket of East German make that he had bought in Russia. Looking for parts to June’s baby bed three weeks earlier, Marina had rolled back a corner of the blanket and spied the rifle’s wooden stock. Now she found the bundle and stared at it. It was lying on the floor, below, and parallel to, a window in the garage. Marina did not touch the blanket, but it looked exactly as it had before. Thank God the rifle was still there, Marina thought, feeling as if a weight had been lifted from her. Yet she wondered if there was really “a second idiot” in Dallas, anyone else crazy enough, besides her husband, even to think of such a deed. And so, in spite of the blanket’s reassuring contours, she was unable to compose herself.
She was sitting on the sofa next to Ruth when the announcement came over television that the president was dead. “What a terrible thing for Mrs. Kennedy,” Marina said, “and for the children to be left without a father.” Ruth was walking around the room crying. Marina was unable to cry. She could not believe the news. She felt as if her blood had “stopped running.” A little later an announcement came that someone had been captured in a movie theater. No name.
An hour, or a little less, after the president’s death was announced, the doorbell rang. Ruth went to answer. She was greatly surprised to find six men standing on her doorstep. They were from the sheriff’s office and the Dallas police, they said, and they showed their credentials. Ruth’s jaw dropped.
“We have Lee Oswald in custody,” one of the policemen said. “He is charged with shooting an officer.”
It was Ruth’s first clue that Lee might be linked in any way to the events of the day.
The men wanted to search the house. Ruth asked if they had a warrant. They did not but said they could get the sheriff in person. Ruth told them to go ahead and search.3
The men could not have been more rude. They spread out all over the house, “turned the place upside down,” Marina recalls, and took everything they wanted, even records and photographs, belonging to both the Oswalds and the Paines. Marina felt like a sleepwalker, and it was hard for her later to remember what she did, or how she managed to move at all. But she was aware that her hands and her feet were cold, and her face covered with cold sweat. She glanced out the window and saw more men standing outside. They were in civilian clothes, and they seemed to be wearing special insignia on the underside of their lapels. Marina was surprised to see so many of them.
“Your husband is under arrest,” somebody said to her. “It’s probably an accident,” Marina thought. “They’re picking up everyone who has been in Russia, and besides, Lee is always under suspicion.”
Then came a question: “Does your husband have a rifle?” “Yes,” Marina said in Russian and led them straight to the garage, with Ruth following a translate.
Ruth, meanwhile, was telling the officers what she believed to be the truth, that Lee did not have a rifle. Whispering rapidly in Russian, Marina corrected her. She told Ruth that Lee did have a rifle, and it was inside the blanket. Forgetting her Quaker faith, her pacifism, her impeccable truthfulness, Ruth stood on the blanket in an instinctive gesture to protect Marina. At the same time, paradoxically, she faithfully translated to the officers exactly what Marina had said to her—that Lee Oswald did have a rifle, and it was inside the blanket.
The officers ordered her to step off it.
The blanket looked exactly as it always had, as if there were something bulky inside. As always, it was carefully tied in string. Marina shook all over, trying not to show her fright, as an officer stooped down to pick it up. It hung, limp, on either side of his arm.
Ruth looked at Marina. She had gone ashen.4
“So it was Lee,” Marina thought. “That is why he came last night.” For Marina it was again one of those moments when kaleidoscopic and inexplicable occurrences suddenly clicked into place. She knew now why Lee had told her to buy “everything” she and the children needed, why he had left without kissing her good-bye.
About three o’clock they went back inside the house. At that moment Michael Paine appeared.
In the cafeteria at Bell Helicopter that noon, Michael had been talking to a co-op student about the character of assassins.5 Just then a waitress came over and told them the president had been shot. Michael considered it a bad joke. Then he noticed a group of people clustered around a transistor radio and went to join them. He was unable to hear anything, but he realized that the waitress had not been joking. He returned to his lab and tuned in to the radio there. Before long the name of the Texas School Book Depository was mentioned. Michael’s heart jumped.
“Isn’t that where Lee Oswald works?” Michael’s fellow worker, Frank Krystinik, asked.
“I think so,” said Michael. “He works for that organization.”
“You don’t think it would be him?” Krystinik ventured.
“No, of course not. It couldn’t be him,” Michael said.
For the next half hour Krystinik, who had met and talked with Oswald at the ACLU meeting on October 25, kept telling Michael that he really ought to call the FBI.
Michael resisted. Lee Oswald had been to Russia. He was already a black sheep, Michael thought, and “everybody will be jumping on him.” Michael did not want “to join the hysterical mob in his harassment.” He was, after all, one of the few people who stood in a position of friendship to Lee.
But Michael was nervous. He was trying to assemble a vibration meter, and his fingers trembled so badly that he was unable to put in the screws. And his efforts at concentration were interrupted constantly by Krystinik, who went on urging him to call the FBI.
Michael still refused. He knew something about Lee’s beliefs. And he did not, at that moment, see how the act of assassination fitted Lee’s philosophy or “how it was going to forward his causes.” Lee would have to be irrational to do it, and, Michael says, “I didn’t think he was irrational.” On the other hand, Michael knew that in principle Lee was not against violence. And so Michael did not consider such a murder automatically out of the question.
While Michael was carrying on this inner dialogue, a report came over the radio that shook him a little more. An eyewitness who had seen the assassin in the book depository window reported that the man fired “coolly,” that he took “his jolly good time,” and drew his rifle back inside the window “just as unconcerned as could be.” To Michael it sounded like Lee.
News reports came over the radio that the police were chasing suspects all over town. Then, less than an hour and a half after the president’s shooting, there was word that a man had been captured in a place called the Texas Theatre, in Oak Cliff, for the shooting in cold blood of a Dallas police officer, J. D. Tippit. The man’s name was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Michael knew that Lee had a job at the School Book Depository. And now he had been arrested in a part of town far away from where he worked for the random killing of a police officer. Years later, still trying to put distance between himself and the event, Michael said: “I realized that Lee must be uptight about something—and I’d better be getting on home.”
Lee had another friend whose intuition was working that day. George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt were at a reception at the Syrian Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot in their home city of Dallas. As they drove away from the reception, they wondered who on earth the assassin might be. Could it be anyone they knew?
They went to the home of a friend who worked for the American embassy. He greeted them and told them a suspect had been captured. The name was “Lee, Lee, Lee Someone,” or else it was “Somebody Lee.”
All of a sudden George remembered the rifle with a telescopic sight, “Can it,” he cried at the top of his voice, “be that crazy Lee Oswald?”
“Yes,” said the host, to the incredulous de Mohrenschildts. “That is the name, I guess.”7
The moment they discovered that Lee’s rifle was missing, the police announced to Marina and the Paines that they would all have to go to police headquarters in downtown Dallas. It was plain that every one of them, Marina and the Paines, were under suspicion.
Marina, who was wearing slacks, wanted to change into a dress. “Come along, hurry up, we don’t have time to wait for you,” the policemen told her and refused to allowed her to change. Ruth protested, but the police not only refused to let Marina change, they also refused to allow her to use the bathroom with the door closed. Marina was angry. “I’m not a criminal,” she thought. “I didn’t do anything.”
Soon she was outside the house, with no idea how she got there, and she was shaking all over with fright. She had her children with her, and the Paines had theirs.
On the way to Dallas in a car, Marina turned to Ruth and asked the question that was uppermost on her mind: “Isn’t it true that in Texas the penalty for shooting someone is the electric chair?”
Ruth said that it was true.
Marina turned to her again. This time, with characteristic bluntness, she said: “Your Russian has suddenly become no good at all.”8
At police headquarters all of them were interrogated, with Ruth acting as Marina’s interpreter. Marina was shown a rifle and was asked if it belonged to Lee. She hated rifles; to her they all looked alike. She knew that Lee’s was dark and had a sight on it. Beyond that, she could not say. Glancing through a glass partition as the rifle was being held up in front of Marina, Michael suddenly realized what had become of the “camping equipment” he had held in his arms.
Marina was truthful in her inability to identify the rifle, but she was in a quandary over what she might be asked next, and what she ought to reply. She had no idea that Lee was charged with shooting a police officer; she had never even heard the name Tippit. She was aware only that Lee was suspected of killing President Kennedy, and she had no idea whether or not he was guilty. The facts appeared to be against him, but then, Lee was always in trouble, and Marina thought that his arrest might be a provocation or a misunderstanding. Whatever she did, she did not want to add a scintilla to any evidence the police might have against him. For behind the president, as she alone was aware, lay General Walker. Suppose Lee was cleared of killing Kennedy. They still might find out about Walker. And Marina mistakenly assumed that Lee was as likely to be put in the electric chair for an attempted murder as for murder itself.
Marina asked to see Lee. She was told that he was upstairs being interrogated and she could not see him that day.
Everything was topsy-turvy—Marina could make no sense of it at all. At first she had been offended and angered by the way the police officers had burst into Ruth’s house, ransacked everything, routed them out, and brusquely carried them off as if they were all criminals. But at the police station she felt badly frightened, and she expected to be arrested any second. That was how it would have been in Russia. Even if your husband were innocent, they would arrest you until it was straightened out. Now, inexplicably, the police were much nicer than they had been at Ruth’s. One officer offered to get her coffee, and another offered help with the baby. They saw her fear and tried to calm her. Even the officer who questioned her was kind. He was not harsh with her and did not try to twist her answers or catch her out in a lie. That was lucky, Marina thought. She did not want to say anything that might hurt Lee.
After the police finished questioning her, Marina saw Marguerite Oswald, Lee’s mother. It was the first time Marguerite had seen Rachel—indeed, she had not known that Marina and Lee had been expecting a second child—and she greeted Marina and the children warmly. Marina also caught a glimpse of Lee’s brother, Robert. He was sitting alone, very pale, with his head in his hands.
Marina has no idea how long they were at police headquarters, but eventually she, Ruth, Michael, and the five children were allowed to go back to the Paines’. She does not remember whether they ate, or what they ate, or who did the cooking. But the house was in an uproar. It was overrun by reporters who wanted to talk to Marina, Ruth, and Marguerite. Suddenly there were angry words between Ruth and Marguerite. Ruth was defending Marina’s right to speak, but Marguerite would not allow it. “I’m his mother,” she shrieked. “I’m the one who’s going to speak.” Then she told Marina that neither of them should talk to the reporters, and Marina, without being told, understood her reason—money. For a while they had the television on, and Marina remembers watching Lee being led through a corridor at the police station.
Despite the shocks she had had, Marina had her wits about her. Alone in the bedroom she found June’s baby book, which, by some miracle of oversight, the policemen had left behind. In it were the two small photographs of Lee dressed in black and wearing his guns. He had given them to her to keep for June. Not looking at them closely, Marina thought they were two copies of the same photograph. These, she realized, were evidence. She took them out of the baby book carefully and, in the privacy of the bedroom, showed them to her mother-in-law. “Mama,” she said, pointing to the photographs and explaining as best she could in English, “Walker—this is Lee.” “Oh, no,” Marguerite moaned, raising her hands to her head. She gesticulated a bit, put her finger to her mouth, pointed toward Ruth’s room, and said, “Ruth, no.” She shook her head, meaning that Marina was not to show the photographs to Ruth, or tell her anything about them.
Marina later made a terrible discovery. She happened to glance at the bureau and saw that, again by a miracle of oversight, the police had left another of her possessions behind. It was a delicate little demitasse cup of pale blue-green with violets and a slender golden rim that had belonged to her grandmother. It was so thin that the light glowed through it as if it were parchment. Marina looked inside. There lay Lee’s wedding ring.
“Oh, no,” she thought, and her heart sank again. Lee never took his wedding ring off, not even on his grimiest manual jobs. She had seen him wearing it the night before. Marina suddenly realized what it meant. Lee had not just gone out and shot the president spontaneously. He had intended to do it when he left for work that day. Again, things were falling into place. Marina told no one about Lee’s ring.
Before they went to bed that night, Ruth and Marina had a talk in the kitchen. Ruth thought Marina was “stunned.” Marina said that everything she had ever heard about the Kennedys came from Lee. If he had minded translating articles about them or telling her what he knew about the president, she was sure she would have known it.
Something else hurt Marina and left her bewildered. Only the night before, she told Ruth, Lee had suggested that they get an apartment together in Dallas soon. How could Lee have made such a suggestion, she wondered aloud, when he must already have been planning an act that would destroy their life together?9
“Do you think he did it, then?” Ruth asked.
“I don’t know,” Marina said.10
Marina did not sleep that night. All she saw before her was the electric chair. She knew nothing about American law, the long trials and appeals that might take years in the courts. She thought that it would be over in three days and that Lee would be electrocuted.
What should she do if he were tried? She thought she would have to testify and would be committing a crime if she failed to tell everything she knew. She could tell them nothing about the Kennedy shooting. But she did know about Lee’s attempt on Walker. If they asked her about that, she would not be able to lie. And yet to say anything about it would be to incriminate Lee, help seal the case against him, and put him in the electric chair. To send your husband to his death—that would be a real crime.
Marina did not know if Lee was guilty, although the signs seemed to point that way. And so, of course, she could not know if he would confess. He might, claiming that his actions had been justified. Then again he might not. Either way, Marina thought, he would love being in the spotlight and would use it to proclaim his ideas. In his eyes his political ideas stood higher even than himself. He would talk about Marxism, Communism, and injustice all over the world.
None of this helped Marina as she tried to figure out what to do. Again and again, her thoughts came back to the electric chair. If Lee was guilty, then within three days he would be strapped in that chair and he would be dead. She herself would be in prison. What provision do they have in America, she wondered, for babies whose parents are both gone, one dead, the other in prison?