Information concerning the childhood and youth of Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova in Russia (Part One); her marriage to Lee Harvey Oswald, and their life together in Minsk (Part Two); and their life together in the United States, as well as her experiences after her husband’s death (Parts Three and Four), is derived from her own recollections as Marina Oswald in personal interviews with the author in Russian from June 1964 through December 1964, and as Marina Oswald and Marina Oswald Porter in subsequent telephone conversations and correspondence in Russian and English; from Warren Commission testimony by Marina Oswald in Vols. 1, 5, and 11 (see below); from an account of her life by Marina Oswald dated January 4, 1964, written for the FBI and published in Vol. 18, pp. 596–642; and from reports on FBI and Secret Service interviews with Marina Oswald appearing in the Warren Commission Exhibits.
Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964). The Testimony of Witnesses taken by the President’s Commission, hereafter referred to as the Warren Commission (Vols. 1–15), and the Exhibits published by the Commission (Vols. 16–26), are cited in the Notes only by volume and page number. Report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964) is cited hereafter as Warren Commission Report.
1. Marina was conceived in December 1940 when the worst of the purges was over and before the war with Germany began. This had made it harder for her to guess the reasons for her father’s disappearance. The best estimate appears to be that he was a late victim of the Great Purges of the 1930s.
1. To an outside observer, Marina does resemble Princess Mary, who was moody, intelligent and flirtatious. And Pechorin bears resemblances to the man Marina was to marry, Lee Oswald. Pechorin shunned emotional contact with other people. “How many times have I played the part of an axe in the hands of fate!” he boasted, adding that, “Fame is a question of luck. To obtain it, you only have to be nimble.” (A Hero of Our Time, by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Vladimir Nabokov in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov, a Doubleday Anchor book, Garden City, NY, 1958.) An American scholar writing about Pechorin has said of him, “He is a type and an individual, and he casts a dark and ominous shadow.” (Mikhail Lermontov, by John Mersereau, Jr., Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale, IL., 1962.)
Marina indignantly rejects any comparison between Pechorin and the man she married. She says that Pechorin was the much better man. He destroyed Princess Mary and others, but through his destructiveness he found himself, and she admires him for this. Oswald, on the other hand, failed to find himself through his destructiveness, and for this she holds him in contempt.
Thinking about Marina’s later life, an observer might wonder, unfairly perhaps, whether Marina married her Pechorin or created him. Did she marry Oswald sensing that he had some of Pechorin’s destructive qualities or, having married Oswald, did she herself unwittingly reinforce his destructiveness?
2. For Marina, the pain of learning that she was illegitimate was in no way eased by the fact that, according to published Soviet sources, as many as 20 percent of her classmates, children born during the late 1930s and early 1940s, may also have been illegitimate.
Warren Commission Hearings: Testimony of Richard E. Snyder, Vol. 5, pp. 260–299; Testimony of John A. McVickar, Vol. 5, pp. 299–306, 318–326; Testimony of Oswald’s Marine Corps associates, Vol. 8, pp. 288–323; Testimony of Kerry Thornley, Vol. 11, pp. 82–115; Oswald’s “Historic Diary,” Vol. 16, pp. 94–105; Copy of handwritten notes taken by Priscilla Johnson during interview with Lee Harvey Oswald on or about November 16, 1959, Vol. 20, pp. 277–285; Copy of article submitted by Priscilla Johnson to North American Newspaper Alliance, Vol. 20, pp. 286–289; Memos of Oswald’s record in US Marine Corps, Vol. 23, pp. 795–798. Warren Commission Report, pp. 383–394, 681–701. Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, by his brother Robert Oswald with Myrick and Barbara Land (New York: Coward-McCann, 1967), hereafter cited as Robert Oswald. Letters to the author from Richard E. Snyder, February 9, 1969, January 6, 1970, and December 2, 1976. Conversations with John A. McVickar, Marie Cheatham, Richard E. Snyder, and Edward L. Keenan.
1. Interview of the author with Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow, November 16, 1959.
2. Testimony of Paul Edward Murphy, Vol. 8, pp. 319–320.
3. Interview of the author with Oswald, November 16, 1959.
4. Recently declassified documents concerning the Martin Schrand case are: Warren Commission Document No. 35, December 1, 1963; Warren Commission Document No. 492, March 11, 1964; and Warren Commission Document No. 1042, June 3, 1964.
5. Oswald first described himself as a Marxist in writing in a letter to the Young People’s Socialist League dated October 3, 1956: “I am a Marxist, and have been studying socialistic principles for well over 15 months” (Warren Commission Report, p. 681). Oswald was not yet sixteen. In his interview with the author in November 1959, Oswald said that “for two years I have been waiting to do this one thing”; i.e., defect to the USSR. He was stationed at Cubi Point (Subic Bay) at the beginning of those “two years,” and it is not inconceivable that at this base or at one of the two other U-2 bases at which he was stationed, he did try to learn something about the super-secret aircraft that would heighten his acceptability to the Russians. (The rumor linking Oswald with Schrand’s death is mentioned in an affidavit by Donald Peter Camarata, Vol. 8, p. 316, and the fact that the hangar Schrand was guarding sometimes housed a U-2 appears in testimony by Daniel Patrick Powers, Vol. 8, pp. 280–281. Both men were part of the original group, including Oswald, that had been together since Jacksonville.)
6. Conversation with Marina Oswald.
7. Testimony of John E. Donovan, Vol. 8, pp. 292 and 298–299.
8. Testimony of Nelson Delgado, Vol. 8, p. 265.
9. Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 93.
10. Warren Commission Report, p. 688.
11. Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 77.
12. Exhibit No. 24, Vol. 16, pp. 94–95.
13. Exhibit No. 294, Vol. 16, p. 814.
14. Oswald told many lies and was very reticent with all the Americans who spoke to him in Moscow—Snyder, Aline Mosby, and myself. As a result, we thought he had arrived in Russia shortly before the scene at the embassy, and at the time of my interview, I assumed he had been in Moscow two weeks, not a month. Except for Oswald himself, Rimma Shirokova, and Soviet officials, no one knew of Oswald’s suicide attempt until after he was dead and his “Historic Diary” was published.
15. I have been asked by Warren Commission lawyers and others since 1963 whether, during my brief time with Oswald, I detected any signs that he was being manipulated by outsiders. In 1959 travel arrangements to the USSR could be time-consuming and complicated. If the would-be visitor went to the Soviet Embassy in one European capital, it might take four days to obtain a visa; in another city it might take three months; and in still another there might be no reply to the request at all. Aware of this, I asked Oswald how he learned the mechanics of entering Russia and defecting, and he was either evasive or mysterious in his replies. He said that it had taken him two years to learn the mechanics but it had not been “hard.” He refused to name any “person or institution” that had helped him. And he added that he had never met a Communist Party member until his arrival in the USSR and that officials there were not “sponsoring” him.
He was saying, I think, that he had no ties with the US Communist Party; but he seemed also to have been trying to create an impression that he was shielding someone, when in fact he could have learned what he wanted to know from a travel agency or from the Soviet embassies in Washington or Tokyo.
My own strong impression at the time was that, far from being manipulated from the outside, Oswald was, to a degree I found shocking, responding only to signals from within. Rather than being alive to, or stimulated by, his new environment, he was at pains to seal himself off from it. At first I attributed this to a feeling of foreignness or strangeness. Then I saw that he was motivated by another kind of fear: fear that if he took a hard look at the society around him, he might question his decision. Thus the feeling he gave was that he was wholly occupied by his inner preconceptions and by promptings from within, and that he did not want to be bothered by outside forces or facts.
16. McVickar wrote a memorandum about our conversation (Exhibit No. 911, Vol. 18, pp. 106–107), which is sometimes cited as evidence that I might have been working for the State Department, even though McVickar states in the memorandum that he had to point out to me that in addition to my duty as a correspondent, I also had a “duty as an American.”
In 1956, three years before my meeting with Oswald, I worked briefly for three embassies—the American, British, and Canadian—as a translator during the 20th Soviet Communist Party Congress in Moscow. The American ambassador, Charles Bohlen, tried to have my thirty-day employment extended, but the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, refused because I lacked a security clearance. Neither before nor since have I been employed by any agency of any government.
17. The information conveyed by Nosenko, who in 1959 was a KGB officer assigned to Intourist in Moscow, is to be found in numerous Warren Commission memoranda based on CIA and FBI interviews with him in 1964. Many of these memoranda were declassified in 1973 and 1975. Thus, according to an FBI memo dated February 28, 1964, Nosenko stated that Oswald from the time of his arrival in Moscow was regarded by the KGB as not “completely normal mentally” and not “very intelligent.” The KGB’s interest in Oswald was therefore “practically nil” and, when he was sent to Minsk in January, 1960, the KGB office there was merely told to keep a “discreet check” to make sure that he was not a “sleeper agent” for American Intelligence.
According to another interview with Nosenko (Commission Document No. 451, an FBI memorandum dated March 4, 1964), the KGB did not know about Oswald’s Marine Corps service when he arrived in Russia and, had it known, the information would not have been of interest or significance.
18. According to a memorandum from Allen Dulles, a member of the Warren Commission, to J. Lee Rankin, its chief counsel (Commission Document No. 1345, dated July 23, 1964), Henry Brandon, Washington correspondent of the London Sunday Times, was told by a member of the Soviet Embassy in Washington following the assassination that it was Yekaterina Furtseva, a member of the ruling Communist Party Presidium, who heard about the Oswald case, reversed orders, and arranged for him to remain.
The rumor may have been purposely planted to discredit Khrushchev, for he was known to be personally and politically close to Furtseva, and if, through her, he could be linked to handling of the Oswald case, he might then be made to suffer political damage in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Khrushchev did, in fact, fall from power less than one year after Kennedy’s death. On the other hand, the rumor Brandon heard may have been true. It is not unusual for Soviet leaders to concern themselves with individual cases: on one occasion my own visa was extended through the intervention of Anastas Mikoyan, then the number two or number three Soviet leader, who was close to Khrushchev and was identified with his pro-American policy. Khrushchev may have entrusted some very high party body, or one or more party leaders who were especially close to him, with seeing to it that the Spirit of Camp David was implemented, or at least not sabotaged, by his own bureaucracy. If something of the sort occurred, then Mme Furtseva would have been a logical choice to have supervised the handling of “humanitarian” cases.
The dates are worth noting. Khrushchev returned from the United States in early October 1959 and quickly departed on a trip to the Soviet Far East. It would have taken a few weeks for a new policy in handling Americans to be established. Oswald was told that he would have to leave the USSR on October 21, and he attempted suicide that day. On October 28, only one week later, he was interviewed by four new officials who, according to him, apparently knew nothing about his case. It is possible that Oswald was the beneficiary of blind luck in his timing and that that one week at the end of October, plus the suicide attempt itself, was sufficient for his case to be bucked to a higher level and decided in accordance with the new Spirit of Camp David.
19. Exhibit Nos. 294, 295, and 297, Vol. 16, pp. 814–823, 825.
1. According to Soviet hospital records, Oswald was not admitted to the hospital until the next day, Thursday, March 30, and was discharged on April 11.
2. The internal passports carried by Soviet citizens for travel inside the USSR are of three types. One is for Soviet citizens, another is for citizens of foreign countries who have permission to reside in the USSR, and the third is the so-called stateless passport, which Oswald carried, for the foreign resident who has not become a Soviet citizen but who may, or may not, have retained citizenship of another country. Confusion therefore appears to have been possible even for an official like Ilya Prusakov.
3. A small but interesting example of disarticulation of the Soviet bureaucracy may be seen here. In January, officials at OVIR, the Office of Visas and Registration, inquired whether Oswald was still interested in acquiring Soviet citizenship, and he answered no. He asked merely to have his residence permit extended for one year. Thus, OVIR in Minsk had at least a hint that he was thinking of leaving Russia. The following month, February of 1961, he wrote the US Embassy in Moscow asking to have his passport back and stating his desire to go home. His Soviet “Red Cross” subsidy was immediately cut off, an indication that his letter had been intercepted and the appropriate agency in Moscow, probably the KGB, knew his intentions. Yet two months later, in April, when he applied at ZAGS, still another official agency, to marry Marina, no effort was made to dissuade either of them. Usually, when a Soviet girl applies to marry a foreigner who is not a Soviet citizen and who may leave the country some day, strong pressure is brought on the girl not to go through with the marriage, and permission is very often denied. That the Oswalds were permitted to marry is a sign that it was generally supposed in Minsk that Oswald was already a citizen or was on his way to becoming one. The disarticulation was therefore a double one: what Moscow knew, Minsk did not; and OVIR in Minsk, which could have suspected Oswald’s intentions, did not communicate any suspicions to ZAGS, the bureau that registers marriages—another sign that controls in the USSR, as elsewhere, are not perfect.
4. Exhibit No. 24, Vol. 16, p. 103.
5. Exhibit No. 245, Vol. 16, pp. 685–687.
6. Exhibit No. 933, Vol. 18, p. 135.
7. Exhibit No. 932, Vol. 18, pp. 133–134.
8. Exhibit No. 934, Vol. 18, p. 136.
9. Exhibit No. 251, Vol. 16, pp. 702–704.
10. Exhibit No. 1085, Vol. 22, pp. 33–34.
1. Marina’s translation. Exhibit No. 108, Vol. 16, p. 476.
2. Exhibit No. 24, Vol. 16, pp. 94–105. In quoting correspondence and other writing by Oswald, spelling and punctuation have in some instances been corrected for the sake of clarity, and in others, such as this one, they have been left as Oswald wrote them.
3. Pavel seems to have understood Oswald very well, for in a letter he wrote both the Oswalds on September 15, 1962, when they were in the United States, he advised Marina that it was useless to complain about Lee’s lesser faults and that with some people it is a question of “remaking rather than repair.” He added, enigmatically, that there “are not equal standards about important things in this world.” (Unpublished Warren Commission Document No. 928, Memorandum dated May 6, 1964, by Richard Helms, Deputy Director of Plans of the CIA, titled “Contacts Between the Oswalds and Soviet Citizens, June 13, 1962, to November 22, 1963.”)
4. Exhibit No. 24, Vol. 16, pp. 94–105.
5. Testimony of Marine Captain George Donabedian, Vol. 8, pp. 311–315, and Donabedian Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 19, pp. 601–605.
1. Exhibit No. 252, Vol. 16, pp. 705–708.
2. Questions have been raised about the ease with which Oswald traveled to Moscow without official permission, a requirement for every foreigner traveling from one city to another. How did he purchase an air ticket or, for that matter, obtain a hotel room, when Soviet citizens as well as foreigners are required to surrender their passports at the front desk? The answer seems to be that while Soviet controls are strict, they are far from perfect; Oswald was watched, but he was not under heavy surveillance. He appeared reluctant to make the trip without authorization, yet his friends may have advised him that he could do so with impunity. Any one of them might have bought his ticket. But speaking reasonably fluent Russian and dressed in his working clothes, he probably bought it himself, and the agent for Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, simply did not bother to ask whether he had permission to travel. Foreigners often make unauthorized trips in the Soviet Union. Their success depends a great deal upon chance—who they are, where they are, and the vigilance of local officials. If they get caught, the worst that usually happens is that they are sent back to the city from which they came. Oswald also took his chances at the Hotel Berlin, where he had lived for about two weeks in 1959. The girls at the front desk remembered him, and since he presented Soviet documents instead of a foreign passport, it did not entail a great risk for them to assign him a room.
3. Letter from Richard E. Snyder to the author, February 9, 1969.
4. The Warren Commission Report states on p. 706 that Marina arrived in Moscow Sunday, July 9, citing as evidence Oswald’s diary, which is incorrect in several respects about the visit, and Marina’s testimony in Vol. 1, pp. 96–97. There Marina states that Oswald left Minsk “a day early and the following morning I was to come.” But Marina’s subsequent account to me is so clear as to appear conclusive: on Saturday, July 8, she worked as usual at the pharmacy and had her interlude with Leonid. On Sunday, July 9, Oswald telephoned, asking her to come to Moscow, and on the morning of July 10 she went.
5. Exhibits No. 935, Vol. 18, pp. 137–139, and No. 938, ibid., pp. 144–149, indicate that a Questionnaire and an Application for Renewal of Passport were executed at the embassy by Oswald on Monday, July 10, 1961.
6. Exhibit No. 935, Vol. 18, pp. 137–139.
7. Letters of Lee Oswald to Robert Oswald, May 31, 1961 (“… if I can get the government to drop charges against me …”), and June 26, 1961 (“I assume the government must have a few charges against me, since my coming here like that is illegal. But I really don’t know exactly what charges.”), Exhibit Nos. 299 and 300, Vol. 16, pp. 827–832.
8. Exhibit No. 100, Vol. 16, pp. 436–439.
9. Ibid.
10. Exhibit No. 935, Vol. 18, pp. 137–139.
11. Exhibits No. 25, Vol. 16, pp. 121–122, and No. 100, ibid., pp. 436–439.
12. Testimony of Richard Edward Snyder, Vol. 5, pp. 260–299, especially p. 290. See also Oswald’s diary and Exhibit No. 101, p. 440.
13. Marina laughed on hearing this particular statement of her husband’s and remarked that without an ulterior purpose he would never have said any such thing.
14. Exhibit No. 935, Vol. 18, pp. 137–139.
15. Marina remembers only one visit to the embassy, on Monday, July 10, and she thinks that both sets of interviews, hers and Oswald’s, were completed that day. Her memory, however, is in error, for Exhibits No. 944, Vol. 18, p. 158, and No. 959, ibid., pp. 335–338, indicate that her visa petition was filled out by McVickar and executed by Lee Oswald on Tuesday, July 11, 1961.
1. Exhibit No. 1122, Vol. 22, p. 87.
2. Exhibit No. 301, Vol. 16, p. 833.
3. Exhibit No. 985, Vol. 18, p. 477.
4. Oswald reported to his brother Robert: “I went hunting last weekend.… I shot a couple of birds with my single-barrel 15 gauge shotgun, but I couldn’t find them” (Exhibit No. 303, Vol. 16, p. 836). The letter was dated Monday, August 21, so the expedition must have taken place on Saturday or Sunday, August 19 or 20, 1961.
5. “The Collective” appears in Oswald’s handwriting in Exhibit Nos. 94–96, Vol. 16, pp. 347–421. For the version typed for Oswald in June 1962 by Miss Pauline Virginia Bates, a public stenographer in Fort Worth, Texas, see Exhibit No. 92, Vol. 16, pp. 285–336.
6. Later he admitted that he had actually been initiated into oral sex much earlier, by an older woman (probably a prostitute) in Japan.
1. Letter from Robert Oswald to the author, April 26, 1965.
2. After the assassination a fragment of the aria was found among Oswald’s belongings. It is in Oswald’s handwriting, in Russian, and it contains omissions, mistakes, and indecipherable phrases. It is probably an attempt to reproduce the words by listening to the recording (Exhibit No. 53, Vol. 16, p. 191). Author’s translation.
3. After the assassination, when Oswald had indeed performed a deed of “unheard-of prowess,” Marina again thought that he had done it to impress Rimma. It was a thought that may have been an unconscious attempt to repress the fear that he had done it to impress her. It is possible, however, that Oswald did, as Marina suspects, associate the opera, and the aria, with Rimma; it is quite likely that when he first saw The Queen of Spades in Moscow, Rimma went with him as his interpreter.
4. Oswald’s blood was tested November 25, 1961 (Exhibit No. 1391, Vol. 22, p. 718).
5. When the Warren Commission asked Marina whether she had been hospitalized for nervous difficulty during 1961, she denied it (Testimony of Marina Oswald, Vol. 1, p. 97). Only later did she remember that she had been hospitalized because of gas fumes on a bus. Because of her denial, and because medical records handed over by the Soviet government after the assassination contained only Marina’s outpatient record, not her hospital record, the Commission erroneously concluded that Marina had not been in the hospital at all and that Oswald had probably been lying (Warren Commission Report, p. 708).
6. Exhibit No. 307, Vol. 16, pp. 845–848.
7. Oswald was so impressed by the demolition of Stalin’s monument in Minsk that he wrote the second of the two essays he composed in Russia. Titled “The New Era,” it briefly describes the destruction of the “10 ton bronze figure of a man revered by the older generation and laughted at by the sarcastic younger generation.” He ends, however, on a pessimistic note: “But Bellerussia as in Stalin’s native Georgia is still a stronghold of Stalinism, and a revival of Stalinism is a very, very, possible thing in those two republics” (Exhibit No. 96, Vol. 16, p. 421).
8. In an FBI interview dated February 28, 1964 (Warren Commission document number and declassification date not legible), the defector Yury Nosenko stated that the KGB had no objection to Marina’s leaving the USSR. This was a crucial determinant
9. Report of Minsk Radio Plant Director P. Yudelevich, December 11, 1961 (Exhibit No. 985, Vol. 18, p. 433–434).
1. Exhibits No. 1124, Vol. 22, p. 90, and No. 1079, ibid., p. 27.
2. Exhibit No. 256, Vol. 16, pp. 717–718.
3. Exhibit No. 247, Vol. 16, pp. 691–692.
4. On February 6, 1962, the New York Times ran a UPI story from Rome, citing the Italian Communist Party newspaper, L’Unita, which was highly reliable on Soviet affairs, as follows: “L’Unita reports today unconfirmed rumors circulating among Western correspondents in Moscow that there has been an attempt on Nikita S. Khrushchev’s life … the assassination attempt was reported to have taken place at Minsk, on the Soviet-Polish frontier, two weeks ago.” I was in the Soviet Union the following summer and heard rumors about an attempt in Moscow, Stalingrad, Sochi, and Kislovodsk—one that Khrushchev was grazed on the arm and slightly wounded, and another that the bullet missed Khrushchev but hit the Minister of Finance, Zverev. In fact, Khrushchev left Minsk for Sochi and did not reappear in public for three weeks, a very good sign that an attempt on his life had occurred.
5. Exhibit No. 256, Vol. 16, pp. 717–718.
6. Warren Commission Report, p. 710.
7. Exhibit No. 314, Vol. 16, pp. 865–868.
8. Exhibit No. 315, Vol. 16, pp. 870–873.
9. In a memorandum to the FBI entitled “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Access to Classified Information About the U-2,” written after Kennedy’s assassination, Richard Helms, the deputy director for plans, conceded indirectly that Oswald may have seen the U-2: “Even if Oswald had seen a U-2 aircraft at Atsugi or elsewhere, this fact would not have been unusual nor have constituted a breach of security. Limited public exposure of the craft was accepted as a necessary risk.” Helms added, however, that Oswald could have heard “rumors and gossip” but that it was most unlikely that he knew the plane’s name or its mission, or that he “had the necessary prerequisites to differentiate between the U-2 and other aircraft which were similarly visible at Atsugi.” This is hard to believe, since the wingspan of the U-2 was so enormous that almost anyone would have seen instantly that its mission was aerial reconnaissance. (Unpublished Warren Commission Document No. 931, dated May 13, 1964, declassified January 4, 1971.)
10. Oswald claimed in a letter to Robert that he “saw” Powers in Moscow at his trial. This is almost certainly a lie. There were American reporters and embassy officials at the trial who had seen Oswald at the time of his defection and would have recognized him had he been there. The trial was televised in Russia, and Oswald probably “saw” Powers on television in Minsk.
11. Powers was not arrested or tried when he returned to America. After lengthy interrogation by military, intelligence, and government officials, he was allowed to go back to civilian life. But in writing of his experiences in 1970, long after Oswald himself had become a cause célèbre, Powers suggested that Oswald, a former radar technician with access to special height-finding gear, might have betrayed the great secret, the U-2’s maximum altitude, thereby enabling Russian SAMs to bring down his plane.—Francis Gary Powers and Curt Gentry, Operation Overflight (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), pp. 375–379. In an interview with the Times of London on April 20, 1971, Powers noted further that Oswald at Atsugi “had access to all our equipment. He knew the altitude we flew at, how long we stayed out on any mission, and in which direction we went.”
It is impossible to say how much Oswald learned about the aircraft at the three U-2 bases at which he was stationed. It is hard to keep information narrowly confined at some bases, and Oswald later did show himself to be accomplished at picking up on his jobs’ extracurricular information that he was not entitled to have. It is conceivable that at least after the Philippine period (1957), he wanted to acquire classified information that he could trade for Soviet citizenship. But despite offers of radar information which he made from the moment of his arrival in Moscow, the Russians were not impressed.
At about the time of Oswald’s arrival, the Russians had tried, and failed, to bring down a U-2 over Soviet territory. They tried, and nearly succeeded, on the next U-2 overflight in mid-April 1960. And on May 1 they brought down Powers. Their problem throughout this time appears not to have been lack of information about the U-2—its maximum flying altitude or its cruising altitude—but lack of the missile capacity to shoot it down.
Powers’ allegations to the contrary, the best guess remains that the Russians knew all they needed to know about the U-2 from various sources, and that Oswald, a former Marine Corps private with the lowest security clearance, was at no time viewed as a possible purveyor of needed information. Indeed, all the Soviet decisions regarding Oswald appear to have been made on negative grounds—which way of handling him would be least damaging to the USSR—and in a declassified memorandum to the Warren Commission, the CIA described five other defector cases that occurred within a year or two of Oswald’s, in which all five received quicker answers and better treatment than did Oswald.
Some experts on Soviet affairs have noted that, had the Russians received information of value from Oswald, their treatment of him would have been different from the very first day. They would not have allowed him to languish in Moscow hotels—within reach of Western reporters—for two and a half months before deciding what to do with him. They would probably have accorded him slightly better treatment than he received, a chance to study fulltime, for example, rather than a job as a factory hand. Lastly, and conclusively, they would not have allowed him to leave the country—ever. This they could have accomplished by granting him Soviet citizenship, which would have made him effectively their prisoner; or they could have given him a “stateless passport,” as they did, and then either refused outright, or simply declined any answer at all, when he requested an exit visa. As for Oswald, he, of course, would not have dared to go home had he given the Russians information of value but would have clung to the sanctuary he had.
12. Exhibit No. 250, Vol. 16, pp. 700–701.
13. Warren Commission Report, p. 764.
14. Exhibit No. 1123, Vol. 22, p. 89.
1. Exhibit No. 317, Vol. 16, pp. 877–879.
2. Exhibit No. 1315, Vol. 22, pp. 487–488.
3. Exhibit No. 196, Vol. 16, pp. 573–574.
4. Exhibit No. 1314, Vol. 22, p. 486.
5. Exhibit No. 42, Vol. 16, pp. 171–174.
6. Exhibit No. 950, Vol. 18, pp. 276–277.
7. In Exhibit No. 994, Vol. 18, p. 615, Marina wrote, soon after the assassination, that “we lived in an apartment in Amsterdam for 3 days.” As a result there has been confusion, and even speculation that the Oswalds were debriefed in a CIA “safe house” in Holland before leaving for the United States. Apart from the fact that such a procedure would have been highly unusual, the Oswalds’ documents make clear that they left Moscow on a two-day train trip on June 1, 1962, crossed the border at Brest into Poland on June 2, left East Germany on June 2, entered West Germany and Holland on June 3, and sailed on the Maasdam June 4. Thus they could have stayed in Holland only one night, Sunday, and Marina’s lament that all the shops were closed on the one day they were there fits the documentary record. (Exhibits No. 29, Vol. 16, pp. 137–145; No. 946, Vol. 18, p. 166; and No. 1099, Vol. 22, p. 48.)
8. Exhibit No. 100, Vol. 16, pp. 436–439, especially p. 439.
9. Ibid., p. 436.
10. Ibid., p. 439.
11. Exhibit No. 25, Vol. 16, pp. 121–122.
12. Exhibit No. 25, Vol. 16, pp. 106–112.
13. Ibid., pp. 112–116. Oswald’s writings suggest he had read Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and possibly Engels’s “Anti-Dühring,” or was at least familiar with their contents.
14. Ibid., pp. 117–120.
Affidavit of Edward John Pic Jr., Vol. 11, p. 82; Report of Dr. Irving Sokolow, Youth House psychologist (Exhibit No. 1339, Vol. 22, pp. 558–559); Testimony of John Carro, Vol. 8, pp. 202–214.
1. John Pic learned while he was growing up that his father did contribute to his support, although his mother told him constantly that the amount was not enough, only $18 a month. But according to Pic’s father, the amount was actually $40 (Testimony of Edward John Pic Jr., Vol. 8, p. 199). Pic was not disabused of his other illusion, that he had been the cause of his parents’ divorce, until years later, after the Kennedy assassination, when he was thirty-one years old and read about his parents in Life magazine (Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 5).
2. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 106.
3. Siegel Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 21, p. 491.
4. Testimony of Marguerite Oswald, Vol. 1, p. 253.
5. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 19; Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 33; Warren Commission Report, p. 671.
6. Testimony of Marguerite Oswald, Vol. 1, pp. 254–255.
7. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 27.
8. Testimony of Robert Oswald, Vol. 1, p. 281.
9. Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 36.
10. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 27.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 29.
13. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 113
14. Testimony of Myrtle Evans, Vol. 8, pp. 50–51 and p. 55.
15. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 28.
16. Exhibit No. 1874, Vol. 23, p. 680.
17. When Lee Oswald got into truant difficulty in New York, Marguerite told the social worker, Evelyn Stickman Siegel, that John had also been a truant and that she allowed him to go to work until he decided to return to school (Siegel Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 21, p. 493). However, according to John, he was bitterly hurt when his mother forced him to leave school. He went back over her opposition and even had to forge her signature on his report cards, excuse slips, and other school documents (Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 33).
18. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 73.
19. Ibid., p. 77.
20. Testimony of Hiram Conway, Vol. 8, p. 89.
21. Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 42.
22. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 73.
23. Robert Oswald, op cit., pp. 51–53.
24. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 39.
25. After Oswald’s death, Dr. Howard P. Rome of the Mayo Clinic diagnosed his difficulty from his writings and wrote a letter about it to the Warren Commission (Exhibit No. 3134, Vol. 26, pp. 812–817).
26. Exhibit No. 1339, Vol. 22, pp. 558–559.
27. Siegel Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 21, pp. 485–495.
28. Ibid., p. 493.
29. Hartogs Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 20, pp. 89–90.
30. Testimony of Myrtle Evans, Vol. 8, pp. 50–51 and 55.
31. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 49
32. Testimony of Marguerite Oswald, Vol. 1, p.254.
33. Robert Oswald, op. cit., pp. 47–48.
34. Jean Stafford, A Mother in History (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965), p. 106.
35. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 80.
1. Exhibit No. 2655, Vol. 26, p. 8.
2. Ibid.
3. Testimony of Martin Isaacs, Vol. 8, pp. 324–330 (esp. pp. 326 and 329).
4. Testimony of Robert Oswald, Vol. 1, p. 331.
5. Testimony of Marguerite Oswald, Vol. 1, pp. 131–132.
6. Conversations with Marina Oswald.
7. Testimony of Pauline Virginia Bates, Vol. 8, pp. 330–343.
8. Testimony of Peter Paul Gregory, Vol. 2, pp. 337–347; and conversations between Mr. Gregory and the author in August 1964.
9. Testimony of Max Clark, Vol. 8, p. 344.
1. The report of Special Agents John W. Fain and B. Tom Carter, dictated July 2, 1962 (Exhibit No. 823, Vol. 17, pp. 728–731); Testimony of John W. Fain, Vol. 4, pp. 403–418. It does not appear to have been unusual in any way for the FBI, and not the CIA, to have interviewed Oswald on his return from the USSR.
2. Testimony of Robert Oswald, Vol. 1, pp. 315 and 389.
3. Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 119.
4. Ibid., p. 121.
5. Testimony of Marguerite Oswald, Vol. 1, p. 133.
6. Exhibit No. 2189, Vol. 24, p. 872.
7. Testimony of Tommy Bargas, Vol. 10, p. 165.
8. Testimony of Marguerite Oswald, Vol. 1, p. 133.
9. Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 122.
10. Agent John W. Fain differed from Marina in his memory of how his second meeting with Oswald began (Testimony of John W. Fain, Vol. 4, pp. 420–423). He testified that he and another agent, Arnold J. Brown, staked out the house and waited down the road in a car. About 5:30 they spotted Oswald walking home from work. They moved up in front of the house. “Hi, Lee,” Fain called out from the car. “How are you? Would you mind talking with us just a few minutes?” According to Fain, Lee did not object, and he climbed into the back seat of the car. Marina recalls that Fain came to their door, and that recollection seems more likely to be correct, since it was her first contact with the FBI, the effect on her husband was vivid, and she remembers it in detail. Fain, on the other hand, paid many such calls in a year, and his recollection may have been fuzzy. For him the visit was routine; for Marina it was unique.
Another point on which Fain seems to have been in error is the time at which he and Brown spotted Oswald coming home. It was probably not at 5:30, as he reported, but a few minutes after 4:30, the hour at which Oswald got out of work. The interview probably lasted, as another FBI report stated, for an hour and a quarter, from 4:45 until 6:00.
11. Exhibit No. 824, Vol. 17, pp. 736–739.
12. Testimony of John W. Fain, Vol. 4, p. 423.
13. Exhibit No. 824, Vol. 17, p. 737.
14. Exhibit No. 986, Vol. 18, p. 486. Author’s italics.
15. Testimony of Marguerite Oswald, Vol. 1, pp. 136–137.
16. Ibid., pp. 138–140.
1. Testimony of Paul Roderick Gregory, Vol. 9, pp. 141–160.
2. Testimony of Peter Paul Gregory, Vol. 2, p. 341.
3. Conversation with George Bouhe, August 1964.
4. Testimony of George de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 231.
1. Conversation with Declan P. Ford, June 1964.
2. Conversation with Anna N. Meller, August 1964.
3. Testimony of George Bouhe, Vol. 8, p. 375.
4. Ibid., p. 371.
5. Testimony of Gary E. Taylor, Vol. 9, p. 78.
6. Conversation with Anna N. Meller, August 1964.
7. Testimony of John G. Graef, Vol. 10, pp. 174–181.
8. Conversation with George A. Bouhe, August 1964.
9. Ibid.
10. Conversation with Anna N. Meller, August 1964.
1. Testimony of Mrs. Donald Gibson (Alexandra de Mohrenschildt Taylor), Vol. 11, pp. 123–153.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Testimony of John G. Graef, Vol. 10, pp. 174–194; Testimony of Dennis Hyman Ofstein, Vol. 10, pp. 194–213.
6. Testimony of Elena A. Hall, Vol. 8, p. 396.
7. Ibid., p. 395.
8. Affidavit of Alexander Kleinlerer, Vol. 11, p. 122
9. Ibid., p. 120.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 121.
12. Testimony of Mrs. Donald Gibson, Vol. 11, p. 141.
13. Ibid., p. 131.
14. Testimony of Anna N. Meller, Vol. 8, p. 386.
1. Testimony of George de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 242.
2. De Mohrenschildt’s story is taken from his testimony, Vol. 9, pp. 166–284; from the FBI file on George S. de Mohrenschildt in the National Archives, Washington, D.C.; and from conversations with Samuel B. Ballen, George A. Bouhe, and Declan and Katherine Ford.
3. Remarks of Max E. Clark, quoted in de Mohrenschildt’s FBI file.
4. This account is taken from de Mohrenschildt’s FBI file. Of the informants whose hearsay remarks are used in this paragraph, one was anonymous, one was known personally to the author, and the third had been governess to Dorothy Pierson de Mohrenschildt.
5. Letters from Samuel B. Ballen to the author, June 18, 1968, and February 4, 1972.
6. Jeanne de Mohrenschildt’s story is taken from her testimony, Vol. 9, pp. 285–331, and from George S. de Mohrenschildt’s FBI file.
7. Testimony of Max E. Clark, Vol. 8, p. 352.
8. Comment by George A. Bouhe in de Mohrenschildt’s FBI file.
9. Conversation with Samuel B. Ballen, November 28, 1964.
10. Comment by Morris I. Jaffe in de Mohrenschildt’s FBI file.
11. Testimony of Igor Voshinin, Vol. 8, p. 464.
12. Testimony of George A. Bouhe, Vol. 8, p. 377.
13. Testimony of Igor Voshinin, Vol. 8, p. 468.
14. The Voshinins’ remarks are taken from de Mohrenschildt’s FBI file.
15. Conversation with Samuel B. Ballen, November 28, 1964.
16. Testimony of Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 312.
17. Ibid,. p. 309.
18. Testimony of Samuel B. Ballen, Vol. 9, pp. 47, 52–53; and conversation with Samuel B. Ballen, November 28, 1964.
1. Testimony of Anna N. Meller, Vol. 8, p. 387.
2. Conversations with Teofil Meller, Anna N. Meller, and George A. Bouhe.
3. Testimony of George S. de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 238.
4. Ibid.
5. Testimony of Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 309.
6. Testimony of George S. de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 232.
7. Ibid., and testimony of Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 313.
8. Testimony of George S. de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 232.
9. Testimony of Katherine N. Ford, Vol. 2, pp. 302–303; and conversations with the author.
10. Testimony of Declan P. Ford, Vol. 2, pp. 325, 333–334; and conversations with the author.
11. Exhibit No. 320, Vol. 16, p. 884.
12. Testimony of George A. Bouhe, Vol. 8, p. 377.
13. Conversation with Samuel B. Ballen, November 28, 1964.
14. Testimony of Max E. Clark, Vol. 8, p. 353.
15. Testimony of Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 325.
16. Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 52.
17. Ibid., p. 56.
18. Ibid., p. 59.
1. Testimony of Gary E. Taylor, Vol. 9, pp. 91–93.
2. Testimony of Lydia Dymitruk, Vol. 9, pp. 60–72.
3. Testimony of George S. de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 240.
4. Ibid., p. 246.
5. Ibid., p. 237.
6. Ibid., p. 266.
7. Testimony of Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, pp. 308–309.
8. Testimony of Everett D. Glover, Vol. 10, p. 9.
9. Testimony of George S. de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 227.
10. Ibid., pp. 243, 266.
11. Ibid., p. 237.
12. Ibid., pp. 236–237, 242.
13. Conversations with Marina Oswald.
14. Testimony of George S. de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, pp. 236, 242–243.
15. Conversations with Declan and Katherine Ford.
16. Testimony of Gary E. Taylor, Vol. 9, p. 96.
17. Testimony of George S. de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 238.
18. Ibid., p. 266.
1. Testimony of Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, pp. 319–321; Testimony of Katherine Ford, Vol. 2, pp. 305–307.
2. Exhibits No. 1859, Vol. 23, pp. 628–630, and Nos. 1860–1861, Vol. 23, pp. 630–632.
3. Testimony of Anna N. Meller, Vol. 8, p. 389.
4. Testimony of Mrs. Mahlon F. Tobias, Vol. 8, pp. 242–243.
5. Ibid., p. 244.
6. Oswald’s time sheets at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, Exhibit No. 1850–1856, Vol. 23, pp. 529–625.
7. Testimony of John G. Graef, Vol. 10, pp. 187–188.
8. Testimony of Dennis Hyman Ofstein, Vol. 10, p. 204.
9. This may actually have been the night Rachel Oswald was conceived. Marina’s menstrual period started on January 11, and she could have been fertile on the 26th. Rachel was born on October 20, weighed nearly 7 pounds, and was said to be full term. From January 26 to October 20, 267 days had elapsed, the average length of a full-term pregnancy. Moreover, Marina remembers no other occasion around this time when she failed to take precautions.
10. Cadigan Exhibit No. 12, Vol. 19, p. 285.
11. Testimony of Alwyn Cole, documents expert of US Department of Treasury, Vol. 4, pp. 375–377; Testimony of James C. Cadigan, documents expert of the FBI, Vol. 7, p. 424.
12. Exhibit No. 800, Vol. 17, p. 685.
13. Exhibit No. 12, Vol. 19, p. 579; Weinstock Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 21, p. 721.
1. Testimony of John G. Graef, Vol. 10, pp. 187–189, 193; Testimony of Dennis Hyman Ofstein, ibid., p. 205.
2. Exhibit No. 93, Vol. 16, p. 346.
3. Letters from Mrs. Gladys A. Yoakum to the author, April 6 and May 6, 1973.
4. Testimony of George S. de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 256.
5. Schmidt was never called to testify before the Warren Commission. The material in the paragraph above is all the FBI file on Schmidt in the National Archives contains about the conversation.
6. Conversation with Samuel B. Ballen, November 28, 1964.
7. Exhibit Nos. 6–7, Vol. 16, pp. 9–10.
8. Testimony of Mrs. Mahlon F. Tobias, Vol. 10, p. 243.
9. Testimony of Mahlon F. Tobias, Sr., Vol. 10, p. 256.
1. Letter from Major General Edwin A. Walker to the author, postmarked May 15, 1974.
2. Letters from Mrs. Gladys A. Yoakum to the author, April 6 and May 6, 1973, and May 24, 1975.
3. The Militant, March 11, 1963 (Vol. 27, No. 10), p. 7.
4. Other features that suggest the letter was written by Oswald include the tone of condescending flattery, even as the writer tells the paper what stories it ought to print; use of the term “gross error,” a direct translation of a phrase used frequently in Russian; use of quotes around the word “sensational,” a sarcasm characteristic of Oswald, when the writer really means that the Ortiz case was typical and not unusual or sensational; the lack of a transition between the remarks about reform politics and the story of the Ortiz case; the fact that Oswald’s pretext for leaving the Marine Corps was an injury that had left his mother “unable” to work; and the writer’s interest in “fundamentally transforming” the system, typical of Oswald’s beliefs.
Those who contend that Oswald did not write the letter have suggested that he would not have known or cared about reform movements in the Democratic Party, or about the campaign of H. Stuart Hughes in Massachusetts. But the handwritten document that he left behind and that is described in this chapter reflects his interest in using even elements of the Republican Party to bring about reform. In addition, the September 7, 1962, issue of Time magazine, to which Oswald subscribed, had a story about the Hughes campaign. Oswald could have learned about reform movements in New York and California from newspapers or from George de Mohrenschildt, whose close friend, Sam Ballen, was a New Yorker, and whose wife’s daughter and son-in-law, the Keartons, were interested in politics in California.
There are also those who concede Oswald’s link to the letter but believe that he lacked the skill to write it. They think that he must have had help and that such help points to his being part of a “conspiracy” in the spring of 1963–see Albert H. Newman, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: The Reasons Why (New York: 1970), pp. 154–161. But from other writings he has left behind, there is no doubt that Oswald had the capacity to write the letter, although it would have been filled with errors of spelling and punctuation that do not appear in the published version. The Militant does not have the original, and the editors are unable to say whether the letter arrived in typed or handwritten form or, indeed, whether Oswald was the author. The present managing editor has, however, carefully explained the paper’s policy in handling letters. Because the Militant has among its readers an unusually high proportion of poor people, working people, and even prisoners, it is a “longstanding policy” to edit for “syntax, grammar, spelling,” as well as to add transitions. The editor commented that his paper probably edits a good deal more heavily than most. (Telephone conversation of October 29, 1975, with Larry Seigle, managing editor of the Militant, and letter from Larry Seigle to the author, November 17, 1975.)
5. Exhibit No. 1351, Vol. 22, p. 585, pinpoints the dates of the photographs. From the progress of the construction of a large building in the background of the photos, it was the weekend of March 9–10, and since Oswald worked Saturday until 4:00 P.M., he must have taken the photographs on Sunday, March 10.
6. Exhibit No. 2, Vol. 16, pp. 3–8.
7. Testimony of Marina Oswald, Vol.11, p. 293.
8. Oswald’s time sheet on March 12 is evidence that he probably lied sometimes about his hours. On the day he ordered the rifle, he signed in from 8:00 A.M. to 5:15 (Exhibit No. 1855, Vol. 23, p. 605). The US postal inspector in Dallas, Harry D. Holmes, later testified that Oswald’s money order for the rifle was issued “early on the morning of March 12.” This appears to have been the case, for the order was imprinted on Klein’s cash register March 13. Since the post office window opened only at 8:00 A.M., Oswald probably lied when he signed in then. Thus the time sheets have to be used with caution.
9. Testimony of Robert Oswald, Vol. 1, pp. 391–392.
10. Exhibit No. 322, Vol. 16, pp. 886–888. Oswald had other reasons for keeping his brother at a distance. He did not want Robert to come when Marina was alone and learn from her the facts of his treatment of her. Nor did he want Robert to see the revolver on its shelf and the clutter of maps and photographs in his “office” and possibly guess his plan. Finally, Oswald had some insight into himself and may have understood that he was like a gun that is loaded, cocked, and about to go off. His target was General Walker. But if someone else came by for whom he harbored strong emotions–and he had strong feelings for both Robert and his mother–he might kill that person instead. He had to keep Robert away.
11. Exhibit No. 8, Vol. 16, pp. 11–12.
12. Exhibit No. 9, Vol. 16, pp. 13–20.
13. Oswald’s time sheets, Exhibit No. 1855, Vol. 23, pp. 613–614.
14. Since neither weapon was sent by insured or registered mail, the dates of arrival have to be guessed at. But in a letter to the author of February 6, 1976, A. M. Temples, manager of mailing requirements of the US postal service in Dallas, stated that a pistol shipped by REA Express from Los Angeles on March 20 and a rifle sent by mail from Chicago on the same day could both have arrived on the 25th, since each would have traveled at the rate of one time zone per day and each city was at a distance of five time zones from Dallas. Moreover, in another of his telltale misdatings, on his time sheets Oswald dated two successive days, Monday and Tuesday of that week, as March 25, a clue to the importance of the date.
15. REA Express no longer exists, but in 1963, the Dallas office was at 2311 Butler, near Love Field. According to former REA officials, office hours varied from city to city, depending on business. In Boston, packages could have been picked up at the REA office at Logan Field twenty-four hours a day; in certain other cities, offices were open until 8:00 P.M., and in others again, they closed much earlier.
16. Letters from Gladys A. Yoakum to the author, April 6 and May 6, 1973; May 24, 1975.
17. Exhibit No. 97, Vol. 16, pp. 422–430. This is probably the most significant document Oswald ever wrote, revealing both his emotions and his political ideas. It is striking for its apocalyptic, megalomaniacal tone, and the reader almost has to conclude that the author was possessor of the “narcissistic” personality described in Ernest Jones’s famous essay “The God Complex” (Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis by Ernest Jones [London], pp. 204–226). Politically, the author denounces both the US and Soviet systems and the US Communist Party; but his primary concern appears to be destruction of the capitalist system in the United States and its future replacement. Although written before the Walker attempt, the document looks forward to Oswald’s own future. It gives a better idea than anything else he wrote of what appears to have been his conscious purpose in killing President Kennedy, and of the resigned, stoical, and yet exalted spirit in which he went about it.
18. Exhibit No. 98, Vol. 16, pp. 431–434.
19. It has been stated that Sunday, March 31, 1963, was overcast and that conditions were not bright enough for Marina to have taken the photographs of Oswald with his guns. According to weather charts supplied by the National Climatic Center, Asheville, North Carolina, that described conditions at Love Field Observatory, 5½ miles northwest of downtown Dallas, there were high thin clouds during much of that day, but there would have been no difficulty taking pictures at any time that afternoon.
1. Testimony of John G. Graef, Vol. 10, p. 189.
2. Ibid., pp. 189–190.
3. Ibid., pp. 190–191.
4. Oswald’s time sheets, Exhibit 1856, Vol. 23, p. 621.
5. There is another reason Oswald may have wanted to be fired, although there is no evidence that he thought of it. On the day after shooting General Walker, he would be the most hunted man in Dallas and it might have been dangerous for him to show up for work. On the other hand, he had never missed a day at work, and failure to show up might have been dangerous, too.
6. Testimony of Dennis Hyman Ofstein, Vol. 10, p. 203.
7. Testimony of Everett D. Glover, Vol. 10, pp. 15–30.
8. Conversation with Michael R. Paine, August 1973.
9. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 393 ff.
10. Ibid., p. 403.
11. Once again Oswald’s timing was remarkable. He had been fired from his job and knew that he would be making his attempt on Walker within a few days. Marina and June might soon need help, and once he had been at the Paines’, he saw that they were in a position to help and might be disposed to do so. Marina has said that “from the moment he met Ruth, Lee think only how to use her,” and indeed, in his “Walker note” only a few days later, Oswald told Marina that they had “friends” who would help. After the Kennedy assassination, he used the same words and made plain to his brother Robert that the friends he was referring to were the Paines (Robert Oswald, op. cit., pp. 144–145).
It is also noteworthy that from the moment he returned to the United States, Oswald always had help from outsiders when he needed it: from his mother and the Robert Oswalds, the Russian émigrés, the Paines, the Murrets. The one time he was completely on his own was, interestingly, the one time he did not need help, while he was working at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, October 12 to April 6. It is uncanny that the Paines should have entered his life, together, on April 2, one day after he was fired.
12. The Warren Commission investigated data about bus routes, practice sites, and places where ammunition could be bought but did not put forward a definite theory about where or when Oswald practiced.
13. Exhibit No. 2694, Vol. 26, pp. 58–62.
14. Warren Commission Report, p. 192; Testimony of Sergeant James A. Zahm, Vol. 11, p. 308. Robert Oswald, who taught his brother how to shoot and had a similar Marine Corps record, noted that his marksmanship was only “average” when the two went small-game hunting in the summer of 1962, after Oswald’s return from Russia, because he was unfamiliar with the .22 he was using. But providing his brother had enough practice, Robert believes that he was capable of the feats attributed to him. While Oswald may have practiced only on April 3 and 5, he could also have practiced all or part of April 7 to 10.
15. Conversations with Marina Oswald Porter plus Exhibit No. 2694, Vol. 26, pp. 59, 60, and No. 1156, Vol. 22, p. 197.
16. Both de Mohrenschildts remembered that this episode occurred during their visit to the Oswalds’ apartment on Saturday night, April 13. (For George’s recollection, see Vol. 9, p. 249; for Jeanne’s, see ibid., pp. 314–317.) However, the rifle was not in the apartment on April 13– Oswald dug it up only on April 14. Moreover, Jeanne remembered under cross-examination (Vol. 9, p. 315) that April 13 was not her first visit to the Oswalds’ apartment. She had been there once without George. It is also extremely unlikely that Marina would have shown the rifle to anyone after her husband’s attempt on Walker’s life. She was afraid of him and, certainly after April 10, would not have referred to him as “my crazy husband” in his presence or his hearing, as would have been the case had the episode occurred as late as April 13.
17. Exhibit No. 1953, Vol. 23, p. 768.
18. Telephone conversation with Major General Edwin A. Walker, August 19, 1975.
19. It is possible, and even likely, that Oswald made up the story about the church announcement. E. Owen Hansen, counselor of the church, confirmed that his church had services every Wednesday from 7:30 to 9:00 P.M. and was generally empty fifteen or twenty minutes later (Exhibit No. 1953, Vol. 23, p. 763). Oswald, who had been stalking the neighborhood, may have known this already. Moreover, no announcement of the sort Oswald described has been found in either of the major Dallas dailies for that week.
20. Exhibit No. 1401, Vol. 22, p. 757.
21. Oswald could have been looking for their new apartment that night, and he could have been watching General Walker, who left Dallas on February 28.
22. Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 16, pp. 1–2.
23. All through the time that Marina was growing up in Russia, there was a law on the statute books—an infamous law of 1934—that provided that a close relative of anyone suspected of a serious crime against the state is as liable for the crime as the suspect, whether or not the relative knew of the crime either before or after it was committed. The atmosphere created by this and other laws appears to have affected Marina from the moment she learned of her husband’s attempt on General Walker. Although she had neither known of his attempt in advance nor approved of it later, Marina appears to have felt that she was as guilty as he was. Her special feeling of guilt in the Walker affair lingered for months, even years, and it probably cannot be understood without knowledge of the Soviet laws of complicity that existed throughout almost the whole of her life in the USSR.
Conversations with Marina Oswald Porter and her testimony in the Warren Commission Hearings, Vols. 1, 5, and 11; and conversations with Katherine Ford, Declan P. Ford, and Samuel B. Ballen.
1. Exhibits No. 1401, Vol. 22, pp. 756–757, and No. 2521, Vol. 25, p. 730.
2. Marina reports him as saying much the same (ibid.).
3. The Walker bullet was never traced definitely to Oswald’s rifle, not even after the Kennedy assassination. (See Warren Commission Report, p. 562, and Exhibit No. 2001, Vol. 24, p. 39.)
4. Walker later denied the police theory that he moved his head at the last minute and accidentally saved his own life. Contrary to his own early testimony, he believes that Oswald fired a near-perfect shot. He was standing 120 feet away behind a stockade fence, but with a four-power sight, Walker appeared to be only 30 feet away, an easy target. Walker was not, however, sitting profiled in the window. Rather, he was well inside the room, facing out, “a side shot with a frontal angle,” he explains. Firing under nighttime conditions, Oswald was at the mercy of the lighting, and the angles of light and shadow, distorted by the lenses of his sight, could have thrown off his aim. He appears, however, to have had a perfect bead on his target; but with light flooding the room outside as well as in, he was unable to see the window frame. Thus the bullet was flying straight at Walker when it hit strips of window casing and was deflected. Walker at first thought that a firecracker had exploded directly above his head. Then he saw the hole in the window frame, felt bits of wood and glass in his hair, and saw bits of copper casing in his arm. (Testimony of Major General Edwin A. Walker, Vol. 11, pp. 405–410; letter from General Walker to the author, undated but postmarked May 15, 1974; and telephone conversation of General Walker and the author, August 19, 1975.)
5. Although Marina was in no way culpable for keeping silent after her husband’s attempt to kill Walker, advising him to destroy evidence might, under the Texas penal code of 1974, render her culpable on two counts: accessory to attempted murder; and accomplice to the crime of destroying evidence. The present code was not in effect in 1963, however, and, indeed, the code then in effect gave a spouse immunity from being convicted for a crime committed by his or her partner.
6. Testimony of George S. de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 249.
7. Ibid., p. 250.
8. Testimony of Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, pp. 317–318.
9. A description of the bundle, the way the photograph was placed in it, and the inscription was given to the author by Pat S. Russell, Jr., de Mohrenschildt’s attorney, in a telephone conversation on April 21, 1977, after de Mohrenschildt’s death, and a copy of the photograph, with inscriptions, was subsequently sent to the author by Mr. Russell. Some persons have questioned the authenticity of de Mohrenschildt’s “find,” suggesting that he placed the inscriptions there himself. There appears to be no truth to this. De Mohrenschildt immediately told friends about his discovery. In a letter of April 17, 1967, George de Mohrenschildt wrote to George McMillan, husband of the author, that he had come into possession of some “very interesting information” about Oswald since his return to the United States, and on June 22, 1968, he invited George McMillan and the author to visit him in Dallas to discuss “some interesting material on Oswald plus a message [de Mohrenschildt’s italics] from him we discovered in our luggage.”
10. On May 4, 1963, Oswald was in New Orleans and Marina was staying with Ruth Paine in Irving, Texas. Marina does not drive a car and has no recollection of returning a bundle to the de Mohrenschildts with or without Ruth. Indeed, the de Mohrenschildts were out of town. Oswald, however, had taken all the family’s belongings with him to New Orleans, except for Marina’s clothes and the baby’s things. The package thus appears to have been mailed by Oswald from New Orleans.
11. Conversation with Samuel B. Ballen, November 28, 1964.
12. In a paper presented at the Midwestern meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Chicago, November 15–17, 1968, Dr. James W. Hamilton, a psychiatrist at the Yale University Medical School, notes the parricidal overtones of the Walker attempt and points out that Walker’s first name and initial, “Edwin A.,” were the same as those of Oswald’s stepfather, Edwin A. Ekdahl, whom Hamilton described as the “paternal surrogate who disappointed him.”
13. It is possible that Oswald handed out pro-Castro leaflets before the Walker attempt, on April 8, 9, or 10, not after, hoping perhaps to be picked up by the Dallas police before he could take Walker’s life. Given his intense preoccupation with his plan, however, it is more likely that he demonstrated after the attempt. Oswald’s letter to the F.P.C.C. is undated, and the only reference to time is the statement that “I stood yesterday …” A notation at the bottom of the letter, which was later found in the F.P.C.C.’s files, indicates that the pamphlets Oswald requested were sent on April 19. Thus it seems unlikely that he could have demonstrated any later than Monday or Tuesday, April 15 or 16 (V. T. Lee Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 20, p. 511).
14. Testimony of John R. Hall, Vol. 8, p. 409.
15. Marina later remembered that she had seen Nixon in newsreels while she was living in Leningrad and that in 1959, in Minsk, she had watched the famous Khrushchev-Nixon “kitchen debate” in newsreels or on television.
1. Testimony of Edward Voebel, Vol. 8, pp. 5, 7, and 13. Curiously, Lee’s aunt, Lillian Murret, uses identical words to explain Lee’s fights in Vol. 8, p. 119.
2. Testimony of Edward Voebel, Vol. 8, pp. 9–10.
3. Exhibit No. 1386, Vol. 22, pp. 710–711.
4. Ibid., p. 711.
5. Testimony of William Wulf, Vol. 8, p. 18.
6. Ibid., p. 21.
1. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 457–463.
2. Ibid., p. 448.
3. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 9, p. 460. Although Ruth apparently had already raised with Michael the idea of offering Marina a haven, I believe that Michael’s idea, as spelled out here, actually developed during the summer, after Marina’s stay at the Paines’ from April 24 to May 10, 1963.
4. Exhibit No. 422, Vol. 17, pp. 140–144.
5. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, pp. 348–349.
6. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, pp. 133–135.
7. Ibid., p. 128.
8. Testimony of Charles F. Murret, Vol. 8, p. 184.
9. Testimony of John Murret, Vol. 8, pp. 193–194.
10. Testimony of Marilyn Murret, Vol. 8, pp. 159, 160, 177, 178. Marilyn adds that even as a boy, Oswald always knew “he was somebody” and knew that “he was exceptionally intelligent” (Ibid., p. 177).
11. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 135.
12. Testimony of Marilyn Murret, Vol. 8, pp. 165–166.
13. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 136.
14. Exhibit No. 1919, Vol. 23, pp. 717–718, and No. 3119, Vol. 26, p. 765.
15. Exhibit No. 1927, Vol. 23, p. 722.
16. Exhibit No. 1919, Vol. 23, pp. 717–718.
17. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 136.
18. Exhibit No. 1945, Vol. 23, p. 745.
19. Exhibit No. 1144, Vol. 22, p. 162.
20. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 136.
21. Testimony of Myrtle Evans, Vol. 8, p. 58.
22. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 446, 447.
23. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, p. 370.
24. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, p. 509.
25. Ibid.
26. Exhibit No. 68A, Vol. 16, p. 228.
27. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, p. 396.
28. Pay later Marina did. According to a letter she wrote to Ruth in July, when she and Lee were living together in New Orleans, he had reproached her bitterly for even considering driving northeast with Ruth on vacation and gave it as still another example of Marina’s disloyalty to him. Marina added that it was one of the main bones of contention between them that summer.
29. In fact, Lee borrowed $30 or $40 from his uncle to make a first rental payment on his apartment. He repaid it promptly, after he had been at work a short time.
1. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 470–471.
2. In a speech on April 19, 1963, President Kennedy, in what was actually an effort to soften demands for a new invasion of Cuba, predicted that “in five years’ time” it was very likely Castro would no longer be the ruler of Cuba and, in the long run, the United States would be seen to have contributed to the result. In the Militant of April 29, 1963, a writer named William Bundy reported a statement by Robert Kennedy on April 22: “We can’t just snap our fingers and make Castro go away. But we can fight for this. We can dedicate all our energy and best possible brains to that effort.” Read from hindsight, with knowledge that the Kennedy administration was engaged in assassination plots against Castro, the two speeches, so closely timed together, suggest that not only Robert Kennedy and others high in the administration but also the president himself were aware of these plots. At the time, however, no one read these speeches in that light, the public question being whether there would be a second US invasion. As nearly as can be ascertained, Oswald knew nothing about any US assassination plots against Castro but was worried about an invasion.
3. A list of books borrowed by Oswald from the New Orleans Public Library, the main library and the Napoleon Branch, appears in Vol. 25, Warren Commission Report, pp. 929–931. A reason Oswald borrowed the Payne biography may be another article in the Militant, this one by William F. Warde on p. 5 of the April 29, 1963, issue. Warde discussed the possibility that Castro had become disillusioned with the Russians, suggested that he might soon visit China, and concluded that whatever Castro’s feelings about the Russians, “he has not become a Maoist either.” The possibility of Castro’s going to China may have kindled Oswald’s desire to read about Mao. Further, he probably identified himself with Mao, another revolutionary hero whom Payne describes as “a new kind of man: one of those who singlehandedly construct whole civilizations”—Robert Payne, Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung (New York: Abelard, 1961). Either Oswald saw himself as that kind of man, or else he wished to become so.
4. V. T. Lee Exhibit No. 2, Vol. 20, pp. 512–513.
5. Exhibits No. 1410, Vol. 22, pp. 796–797, 798–799, and No. 2543, Vol. 25, p. 770.
6. Exhibits No. 1411, Vol. 22, pp. 800–802 (including photographs of the application forms and membership cards), and No. 2548, Vol. 25, p. 773.
7. V. T. Lee Exhibit No. 3, Vol. 20, pp. 514–516.
8. Testimony of Marilyn Murret, Vol. 8, pp. 172–173.
9. Exhibit No. 408, Vol. 17, pp. 88–91.
10. A number of things may have stimulated Oswald’s interest in Castro, and his wish to travel to Cuba, among them Castro’s own triumphal tour of Russia and several articles in the Militant that he received at about this time. They included an editorial titled “Passport Curb Revived,” April 29, 1963; an unsigned story, “Travel to Cuba Arouses Inquisitors’ Ire,” May 13, 1963; and “HUAC Continues Anti-Cuba Smear,” June 3, 1963.
11. Exhibit No. 986, Vol. 18, pp. 518–519.
12. Testimony of Marina Oswald, Vol. 5, pp. 401–402.
13. Cadigan Exhibits No. 23 and 24, Vol. 19, pp. 296–297.
14. Cadigan Exhibit No. 22, Vol. 19, p. 295.
15. Letter from Leo J. Kerne, director, New Orleans Charity Hospital, to the author, March 15, 1965.
16. So close are southern Louisiana and Mississippi in geography and feeling that New Orleans is often called the southern capital of Mississippi. The closeness was evident that day, for the New Orleans Times-Picayune on Sunday, June 16, ran a huge front-page story on the Evers funeral, which nearly turned into a riot, and the paper also had an editorial denouncing the “senseless violence.”
17. Exhibit No. 1412, Vol. 22, pp. 804–808.
1. Testimony of Nelson Delgado, Vol. 8, p. 240.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., pp. 241–242.
4. Ibid., p. 263.
5. Ibid., pp. 243, 255.
6. John Rene Heindell was living in New Orleans during the summer of 1963, but he and Oswald did not see each other (Affidavit of John Rene Heindell, Vol. 8, p. 318).
7. Oswald’s post office box number was 30061. But when he fashioned this stamp, he evidently reversed the two final numbers by mistake, so that both the leaflets and his forged vaccination certificate were printed with the wrong address. On the vaccination certificate, “Hidell” was misspelled “Hideel.” Dyslexia plus Oswald’s state of mind probably produced both errors.
8. Mrs. Kennedy’s pregnancy was announced during the week after Easter, which was on April 14. It was Oswald who told Marina about it. Thus, between Walker and the “Nixon” episodes and in the ten-day period before Oswald left Dallas for New Orleans, he and Marina were looking at photographs of the president and Mrs. Kennedy attending church services in Palm Beach to see if the pregnancy was visible.
9. One picture of the type Marina describes appeared in Time magazine, September 20, 1963. The Oswalds, who subscribed to Time, would have received this issue in the last days before Marina left New Orleans for Dallas. Marina says that she kept leafing through Time, if this was, indeed, this issue, and coming back to the photograph.
10. Exhibit No. 986, Vol. 18, pp. 520–525.
11. Ibid., p. 526.
12. Unpublished Warren Commission Document No. 928, Memorandum dated May 6, 1964, by Richard Helms, deputy director of plans of the CIA, titled “Contacts Between the Oswalds and Soviet Citizens, June 13, 1962, to November 22, 1963,” and dated May 6, 1964.
1. Testimony of Charles Joseph LeBlanc, Vol. 10, p. 214.
2. Exhibit No. 1940, Vol. 23, pp. 734–735.
3. Exhibits No. 1898, Vol. 23, p. 702, and No. 1901, Vol. 23, p. 705; Testimony of Charles Joseph LeBlanc, Vol. 10, pp. 216–217.
4. Testimony of Charles Joseph LeBlanc, Vol. 10, pp. 215 ff.
5. Exhibit Nos. 1933 and 1934, Vol. 23, pp. 727–729; Testimony of Adrian Alba, Vol. 10, pp. 221 ff.
6. Reading these and other passages of the Manchester biography after the assassination, Marina decided that, warped as her husband’s mind was already, Manchester had unwittingly warped it even more. Since the country had lost its president, and she her husband, she was so angry and upset that she refused to grant an interview to Manchester, even though he was then Jacqueline Kennedy’s chosen chronicler of the assassination.
7. V. T. Lee Exhibit No. 4, Vol. 20, pp. 518–521.
8. Testimony of Vincent T. Lee, Vol. 10, pp. 90, 94.
9. The FPCC was neither large nor influential and existed so much on the fringe of American political life that it did not even dare keep a complete file of members. In December 1963 it went out of business altogether.
10. For an incomplete list, see Burcham Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 19, p. 212; Hunley Exhibit Nos. 2, 3, and 5, Vol. 20, pp. 205–211; Rachal Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 21, p. 283; and Exhibit Nos. 1908–1911, Vol. 23, pp. 709–713. Oswald ran a real risk of being caught in the false references he gave and other lies he told on application forms. But he evidently assumed that no one would check up on him, and he gave his fantasy free rein. Thus the paper trail he left behind, including his job applications and unemployment compensation forms, is helpful in any effort to understand his fantasies.
11. Testimony of Lillian Murret, Vol. 8, p. 149.
12. Exhibit Nos. 2648 and 2649, Vol. 25, pp. 919–928.
13. Exhibit No. 1145, Vol. 22, pp. 166–167.
14. V. T. Lee Exhibit No. 5, Vol. 20, pp. 524–525.
15. Testimony of Carlos Bringuier, Vol. 10, pp. 32–51; Testimony of Philip Geraci III, Vol. 10, pp. 74–81; and Testimony of Vance Blalock, Vol. 10, pp. 81–86.
16. Testimony of Francis L. Martello, Vol. 10, pp. 51–62.
17. Testimony of John Lester Quigley, Vol. 4, pp. 431–440; Quigley’s report on the interview is part of Exhibit No. 826 and appears in Vol. 17, 758–762.
1. In a document that was apparently written in February or March 1963, before the Walker attempt, Oswald wrote: “The Communist Party of the United States has betrayed itself!” He criticized the party as “willing, gullible messengers” of the Kremlin, “in servile conformity to the wishes of the Soviet Union” (Warren Commission Document No. 97, Vol. 16, pp. 422–430). His anger and contempt had now given way to other feelings, and he was still trying to strengthen his links to the party on the very last night of his life.
2. In his August 17, 1963, “Latin Listening Post” interview with William K. Stuckey, Oswald said that he had telephoned the city editor of the New Orleans Times Picayune-States Item before his demonstration of August 9, and had gone in person to the city room at 2:00 P.M. after the Trade Mart demonstration of August 16, and both times asked the paper to run stories about the demonstrations. Oswald claimed that both times he was refused on the grounds that the paper was unsympathetic to the FPCC (Stuckey Exhibit No. 2, Vol. 21, p. 626).
3. The transcript appears as Stuckey Exhibit No. 2, Vol. 21, pp. 621–632.
4. Letter from William K. Stuckey to the author, January 24, 1976.
5. Testimony of William K. Stuckey, Vol. 11, p. 166.
6. Ibid., p. 165; and letter from William Stuckey to the author, April 16, 1976.
7. Letter from Stuckey to the author, January 24, 1976. The FBI’s contact with Stuckey at this stage, while alluded to in Stuckey’s testimony, does not appear in FBI reports on its surveillance of Oswald in New Orleans as published in the twenty-six Warren Commission volumes. Warren Commission Exhibit No. 826, a report filed by Special Agent Milton R. Kaack in October 1963, which summarizes most of Oswald’s political activities in New Orleans, states erroneously that Stuckey’s first contact with the FBI on the subject of Oswald did not occur until August 30, 1963. It is possible that Kaack’s superior did not tell him of the contact with Stuckey, and thus it failed to appear in the file on Oswald in New Orleans.
8. Testimony of Carlos Bringuier, Vol. 10, p. 42.
9. Letter from Stuckey to the author, January 24, 1976. Butler, in a strange omission, was never called as a witness before the Warren Commission nor asked to give a deposition.
10. Testimony of William K. Stuckey, Vol. 11, p. 171.
11. Ibid., p. 175.
12. Testimony of Charles F. Murret, Vol. 8, p. 187.
13. Exhibit No. 1145, Vol. 22, pp. 168–169. The letter raises an intriguing question. For once, Oswald had been caught in a misrepresentation, and for the moment, at least, he showed himself chastened and willing to change course. If he had been caught oftener in his lies, or if he had suffered a good scare after his attempt on General Walker, his armor of omnipotence might have suffered a dent or two, and the magic circle of invulnerability of which he believed himself the center might have been punctured briefly. If so, would this have restrained him in the future?
14. Johnson Exhibit No. 4A, Vol. 20, p. 265.
15. Exhibit No. 1404, Vol. 22, p. 787; and conversations with the author.
1. See, for example, remarks by Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Eames in Exhibit No. 1154, Vol. 22, p. 191.
2. Exhibit No. 1915, Vol. 23, p. 715.
3. Testimony of Mrs. Jesse Garner, Vol. 10, p. 268.
4. Many questions have been raised about Oswald’s dry-firing in New Orleans, since it was the only time between the attempt on Walker in April and the shooting of Kennedy in November that he is known to have handled his rifle. One question is whether he pulled the trigger rapidly and at high speed. Marina believes the answer is no. She recalls a considerable interval between clicking sounds. Another question is whether he took the metal barrel and wooden stock apart when he cleaned the rifle. Marina does not remember. She remembers that he oiled and polished the rifle often and put it back in the closet, but she so disliked the sight of it that she watched as little as she could. Another question is whether he had a bench or some other sturdy rest to which he could clamp the rifle as he sighted it. Again, the answer is no. Marina remembers the porch as unfurnished. She thinks there was nothing on which he could have rested the gun. It might be added that, so far as is known, Oswald was then practicing to fight for Castro, not preparing for a particular murder.
5. Exhibit No. 410, Vol. 17, p. 103.
6. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 423.
7. Exhibit No. 421, Vol. 17, pp. 136–139; also Exhibit No. 1145, Vol. 22, pp. 169–170.
8. Exhibit No. 1145, Vol. 22, pp. 169–170.
9. Dobbs Exhibit No. 10, Vol. 19, p. 577.
10. Exhibit No. 1145, Vol. 22, p. 170.
11. Exhibit No. 93, Vol. 16, pp. 337–346.
12. In the Hearings of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, Sessions One and Two on FBI Oversight, held on October 21, 1975, and December 11 and 12, 1975 (Serial No. 2, Part 3), it became apparent that the FBI had no regular mail cover on Oswald following his return to the United States. It therefore had no idea of the extent of his contacts either with the Soviet embassy or with domestic organizations on the left.
13. Testimony of Marilyn Murret, Vol. 8, p. 174.
14. Testimony of Charles F. Murret, Vol. 8, p. 187; Testimony of Lillian Murret, ibid., p. 146.
15. Conversation with Ruth Paine, September 11, 1964.
16. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 414–418, and Vol. 9, pp. 436–444.
1. The controversy arises from a statement by a woman named Sylvia Odio that a man resembling Oswald, and using the name “Leon Oswald,” visited her in Dallas on the evening of Wednesday, September 25, in the company of two anti-Castro Cubans to discuss a plot to kill President Kennedy. Her statements were taken seriously by some staff lawyers for the Warren Commission and checked extensively during the Commission’s investigations and later by conspiracy theorists. The Warren Commission found no corroboration for her story. Moreover, had Oswald had any reason to be in Dallas in September 25, he could have driven there with Ruth and Marina, kept his appointment, and gone to Mexico City by bus from Dallas instead of New Orleans.
2. Warren Commission Report, Vol. 10, pp. 276–277.
3. Mrs. Twiford remembers that she received the call sometime between 7:00 and 10:00 P.M. on the evening of the 25th, and she assumes that it was a local call. Her recollection could be in error, for Oswald probably did not arrive in Houston until nearly 11:00 P.M. that evening. Or he may have made the call about 8:10 P.M. from Beaumont, Texas, a stop en route to Houston from New Orleans. There is no evidence that Oswald traveled by air either to or from Houston. (Sources include, besides the 1963 bus schedules, Affidavits of Horace Elroy Twiford and Mrs. Estelle Twiford, Vol. 11, pp. 179–180; letters to the author from Edward L. Ramsdell, assistant traffic manager of Continental Trailways in Boston, Massachusetts, January 13 and 16, 1976; letter to the author from Harold E. Donovan, public relations supervisor, New England Telephone Co., January 23, 1976; and conversation with Ms. Sandra Young, Public Relations Department, Southwestern Bell, Houston, Texas, January 16, 1976.) Oswald had told Ruth Paine that he had a contact who might help him find a job in Houston. Like most of his lies, this had a germ of truth in it. He did have a Houston contact, Twiford, but it was a political contact and had nothing to do with a job.
4. Affidavit of Dr. and Mrs. John B. McFarland, Vol. 11, pp. 214–215.
5. Testimony of Pamela Mumford, Vol. 11, pp. 215–224; Exhibit No. 2194, Vol. 25, pp. 20–24; and Warren Commission Document No. 78, p.6.
6. Warren Commission Document No. 963, p. 13. The document appears to have been declassified November 5, 1973.
7. The account of Oswald’s relations with the Soviet and Cuban embassies is drawn from the following sources: Warren Commission Report, pp. 733–736; Exhibit No. 2464, Vol. 25, pp. 636–637; Warren Commission Document No. 994, dated May 28, 1964, with appended translation, pp. 5–7; Warren Commission Document No. 651, March 11, 1964, declassified October 2, 1975, p. 30; Warren Commission Document No. 426, February 21, 1964, declassified January 14, 1971, p. 4; 111-page Memo to J. Lee Rankin from William T. Coleman Jr., and W. David Slawson, February 14, 1964, entitled “Oswald’s Foreign Activities: Summary of Evidence Which Might Be Said to Show that There Was Foreign Involvement in the Assassination of President Kennedy,” declassified March 13, 1975, pp. 91–96.
8. On August 27, 1964, I was present when Marina came across several items of Oswald’s which had not been previously confiscated. They included a portion of his return bus ticket; a booklet called “This Week—Esta Semana,” a schedule of events for the week September 28–October 4 in Mexico City; and a folding guide map of the city, which included an enlarged map of the downtown area. Oswald had marked several sites on the downtown map: the bus terminals at which he arrived and from which he departed; his hotel; a travel agency; the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic establishments; the Plaza Mexico bullfight arena; and the Palace of Fine Arts. On the index beside the map he had also marked several places of historical interest, a theater, and the Anthropology and Natural History museums (Exhibits No. 1400, Vol. 22, p. 739, No. 3073, Vol. 26, pp. 667–676, and Nos. 2488–2489, Vol. 25, pp. 689–706). And on the booklet, “Esta Semana,” he had written his own name in full, both in Latin and Cyrillic, and had added a doodle, which proved on close inspection to be a tiny, fancy, old-fashioned-looking dagger, drawn very carefully in ink.
9. According to the Soviet defector Yury Nosenko, a decision was made by the KGB in Moscow to deny Oswald a reentry visa.
10. Exhibit No. 2460, Vol. 25, pp. 618–619; Warren Commission Document No. 872 (declassified November 3, 1970), pp. 4–8.
11. Exhibit No. 2541, Vol. 25, pp. 768–769.
12. Warren Commission Report, p. 737.
13. Affidavit of Theodore Frank Gangl, Vol. 11, pp. 478–479, and Gangl Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 20, p. 3. On this job application, October 4, and on another, October 10, Oswald gave the name of George de Mohrenschildt as a reference.
14. Testimony of Mary E. Bledsoe, Vol. 6, pp. 400–406.
15. Conversation with Ruth Paine, November 23, 1964.
16. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, p. 509.
17. Conversation with Ruth Paine, September 11, 1964.
18. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 422.
19. Conversation with Ruth Paine, July 11, 1964.
20. Testimony of Roy Sansom Truly, Vol. 3, pp. 213, 214. Ironically, on October 15, the Texas Employment Commission got a call for twelve to fourteen baggage handlers from Trans Texas Airways at Love Field. The job was permanent and paid $310 a month, $100 more than Oswald would earn at the depository. Oswald was considered a good prospect, and the employment commission called him at the Paine house two days running, October 15 and 16. The second time, the person answering the telephone said that he had a job, and he was crossed off the list. (Affidavit of Robert L. Adams, Vol. 11, pp. 480–481.) Students of the assassination have noted that if Oswald had been considering killing the president as early as mid-October, this is the job he would have taken, since the one thing sure about the president’s itinerary at that date was that he would be landing and leaving at Love Field. I agree that Oswald was not thinking about killing the president at this time but doubt that his failure to try for this job is evidence. I do not know who happened to answer the telephone at the Paine house—a neighbor or a babysitter, perhaps, certainly someone who failed to inquire about the salary and apparently did not take any message—and therefore I cannot say how Lee missed this opportunity at a higher-paying job. The affidavit of Robert L. Adams, the employment officer who called the house, makes clear that Oswald was crossed off the list for the Trans Texas job on October 17, his second day of work at the depository, and it appears that he never received any message about the employment office call. If he had, and had followed up on the Trans Texas job, it seems likely that he would have considered it even though he liked the job he had, because it paid $100 more a month and was permanent, not temporary. (Asked about the job in her testimony, Vol. 9, pp. 389–390, Ruth Paine did not know about it.)
21. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, pp. 39–40.
22. Ibid., p. 40.
23. Audrey Hepburn, who played the role of Natasha in the Italian-American film version of War and Peace, one of Marina’s favorite films, was in private life married to Mel Ferrer, who played her betrothed, Prince Andrei, in the same film. Marina thought Ferrer bore a resemblance to her former suitor, Anatoly, in Minsk, and to President Kennedy.
1. Testimony of Mrs. Arthur Carl Johnson, Vol. 10, pp. 292–296.
2. Testimony of Roy Sansom Truly, Vol. 3, pp. 216–218.
3. Testimony of Bonnie Ray Williams, Vol. 3, p. 164; Testimony of Daniel Arce, Vol. 6, p. 364; Testimony of Roy Sansom Truly, Vol. 3, p. 218; Testimony of Billy Lovelady, Vol. 6, p. 337; and Testimony of Charles Douglas Givens, Vol. 6, p. 352.
4. In August 1964 Marina came across several of her husband’s possessions that the Secret Service had accidentally failed to confiscate. Among them was an English-Russian, Russian-English dictionary inscribed, in Lee’s hand, “Lee Harvey Oswald, Hotel Metropole, Moscow, November 22, 1959.” The date, of course, is coincidence, yet it underlines an impression that autumn was a time of unhappy events in Oswald’s life. His happier anniversaries appear to have been in the spring.
5. Conversation with Michael R. Paine, August 23, 1973.
6. Ibid.
7. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 401.
8. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
9. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, p. 474.
10. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 401, 409–410.
11. In her testimony before the Warren Commission (Vol. 5, p. 396), Marina stated that after the meeting that night Lee told her, “Paine knows that I shot at Walker.” Marina later said her memory was in error. Lee made the remark, as quoted in the text, before the meeting.
12. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
13. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 11, p. 403.
14. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 408.
15. Testimony of Raymond Frank Krystinik, Vol. 9, pp. 465–466.
16. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 408.
17. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973; Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 418–419.
18. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 409.
19. Ibid., p. 401.
20. Ibid., p. 419.
21. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 401, and Vol. 11, pp. 402–403. It is ironic that of all people it was Michael Paine—who considered himself a failure with people, and who thought his father was a genius at drawing others out but despaired of ever being able to do so himself—who better than anyone else has explained Oswald’s intellectual justification for the assassination of President Kennedy. He did so, with brevity and clarity, in two of his three appearances before the Warren Commission. Had the Commission accepted Paine’s summary as a true statement of Oswald’s beliefs, and placed it side by side with Oswald’s writings, it might have presented the American people not with the whole of his motive by any means, but with a rational component—with what Oswald thought he was doing.
22. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
23. An extrapolation by the author from her views and those of Michael Paine.
24. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 410.
25. Ibid., Vol. 11, p. 402.
26. Ibid., p. 411.
27. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, pp. 351–352.
28. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 414–418, and Vol. 9, pp. 437–448. Marina has been criticized for her failure to tell Ruth that Oswald had his rifle in her garage. But until mid-November, when Ruth happened to remark that she refused to buy toy guns for her children, Marina did not know Ruth’s feelings about weapons. Even then she did not know that the Paines were pacifists, or exactly what this meant. But Marina did realize that Ruth would not want the gun in her garage, and she still kept her silence. Her reasoning was that it was safer, especially now that they were back in Dallas, for the gun to be with her than in the rooming house with her husband. She asks: “Would it really have done Ruth any good if I had told her?”
1. Exhibit No. 1145, Vol. 22, p. 169.
2. Exhibit No. 1145, Vol. 22, pp. 170–171. The letter, postmarked November 1, reached Mr. Johnson only on the 29th, with a line across the envelope in back suggesting that it had been opened along the way (Testimony of Arnold S. Johnson, Vol. 10, pp. 103–104).
3. I have based the account of Hosty’s visits on November 1 and 5 and Oswald’s reaction to them on the testimony of James P. Hosty in Vol. 4 and in the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights (Hearings on FBI Oversight, Serial No. 2, Part 3); of Marina Oswald in Vol. 1; of Ruth Paine in Vols. 3 and 9; on a conversation with Ruth Paine on November 23, 1964; and on three separate conversations with Marina Oswald. The three principals differ on such questions as the time at which the November 1 interview took place (one says 2:30, another 3:30, the third 5:00 P.M.); the duration of the second interview and where it took place; where Hosty parked the second time; on which occasion Marina talked longer with Hosty and after which occasion she gave her husband the fuller account; and whether Oswald came to Irving on Friday both weekends. I have tried to reconcile the versions with an eye to the effect of the Hosty visits on Oswald.
4. Testimony of James P. Hosty before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, op. cit., p. 145. This information was not revealed in Hosty’s testimony before the Warren Commission.
5. Conversation with Ruth Paine, November 23, 1964.
6. The floor plan, rear and front views, of the Paine house, are Commission Exhibits No. 430–437, Vol. 17, pp. 158–162.
7. As of this day, so many years after the assassination, Marina still does not know that the question of how she got the license number is a matter of acute debate among students of the event. They say that she could not have seen the license number from her position inside the house. In his testimony before the House Hearings (cited in note 3 above), p. 163, Hosty says he thinks he parked in the Paine driveway and that Marina could easily have taken down his number as he drove slowly up and down the street before and after the interview. Neither he nor anybody else realizes that Marina went outside and studied the car. J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI, said later that the number she took down was “incorrect in only one digit” (Testimony of J. Edgar Hoover, Vol. 5, p. 112).
8. Oswald had told Marina that, while he liked the job he had, he wanted to find another, in photography. He did not want Ruth to learn about this, because she had helped him find his job and he did not want to hurt her feelings. Still, he told Marina that one Saturday he would stay in Dallas and look for photographic work. Marina thinks that this was the weekend and that he came to Irving only on Saturday, November 9. Ruth’s recollections preclude this and establish that he came on Friday, November 8. Michael Paine does not place him definitely at the dinner table on Friday, November 1, and it is barely possible that he stayed in Dallas until Saturday, November 2. But again, the weight of evidence is that he arrived in Irving about 5:30 P.M. on Friday, November 1. (No photography lab in Dallas has any record of a job application by Oswald after early October.)
Marina’s confusion about the dates may result from the fact that the Hosty visits were, because of their impact on Oswald, by far the most traumatic event in her married life since Walker.
Two other points can be made. First, the fact that Oswald was thinking of another job indicates that he was not wedded to the book depository site. Second, he had been talking about coming late one weekend, and it may well be that, far from feeling angry when Marina told him not to come the November 15–17 weekend, he may actually have welcomed it.
9. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, pp. 101–102.
10. Ibid., p. 13.
11. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, p. 394; and conversation with Ruth Paine, November 23, 1964.
12. Exhibit No. 103, Vol. 16, pp. 443–444. It is interesting that Oswald exonerated the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and blamed everything on the Cuban consul. According to the defector Yury Nosenko, it was the Russians who were to blame for his troubles, the KGB in Moscow having decided to refuse him a visa. Nosenko has added that, but for the assassination, Marina and her children would probably have been granted reentry visas, although Oswald would not have been permitted to return to the USSR. Oswald’s blaming the Cuban consul, however, is a clue to his frame of mind after his return from Mexico, when he turned against Cuba and resumed his old faith in the USSR. Questions have been raised about how Oswald knew that the Cuban consul in Mexico City, Señor Asque, had been replaced. On Oswald’s last visit to the consulate, September 27, Asque was closeted with the man who was to replace him when Mrs. Duran called Asque out and asked him to speak to Oswald.
13. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, pp. 14–17.
14. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 412; and conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
15. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 17, and Vol. 9, p. 395.
16. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 17.
17. In her testimony before the Warren Commission, Vol. 1, p. 45, Marina stated that he had to do the envelope “ten times,” but in conversation with the author she said it was more like four.
18. Warren Commission Exhibit No. 986, Vol. 18, pp. 538–539.
19. Interestingly, Oswald’s solution, his visit to FBI headquarters, incorporated Ruth’s advice that he go straight to the FBI. It did not, of course, incorporate the rest of her advice, that he tell them everything they wanted to know.
20. According to the Warren Commission Report, pp. 439–440, the FBI in Washington became aware of Oswald’s letter to the Soviet embassy on November 18 and routinely informed the Dallas office. Hosty learned of it only on the afternoon of November 22.
21. No one in the Dallas office of the FBI in November 1963 recalls on what day the note was delivered, although Mrs. Fenner’s memory and other evidence suggest that it was delivered on the earliest possible date, November 12.
In his letter to the Soviet embassy mailed that day, Oswald claimed that he had already made his protest to the FBI. This was false, for he knew of Hosty’s second visit when he wrote the embassy, and he only learned of that visit on Friday, November 8. Because of the long holiday weekend, Tuesday, November 12, was the first day Oswald could have left the note. He would have to have been severely upset to go to the FBI offices at all. In fact, he picked a time when he could be almost certain that Hosty would be out. But when he was severely upset, he had a tendency to act quickly. All of this suggests that he delivered the note on November 12. The question has arisen whether he delivered it during the week of November 18, the week of the assassination itself. It is unlikely that Oswald would have called attention to himself by going to FBI headquarters with such a note at a time when he was thinking of killing the president. Thus Mrs. Fenner’s recollection that the note was delivered ten days before the assassination in itself is evidence that Oswald was not yet considering the act.
Testifying before the US House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights (op cit., pp. 35–59) on December 11, 1976, Mrs. Fenner created a considerable public stir by claiming that when Oswald tossed the note on her desk, it fell out of the envelope, and she read these words: “I will either blow up the Dallas Police Department or the F.B.I. office.” The FBI was then severely blamed for having ignored Oswald as potentially violent.
James Hosty’s description of the way the note was folded inward, with the writing inside, is in contradiction with Mrs. Fenner’s description, and his account of the contents also is at variance with hers (Hearings, op. cit., pp. 129–130 and 145–147). It appears almost certain that Hosty’s account is correct (interestingly, it matches that of Oswald) and that Oswald never made any threat of violence. If he had, Hosty would surely have tried to confirm the identity of the writer. But he has testified that he only became “100 percent certain” who the note was from on the afternoon of November 22 when Oswald, on meeting him in the county jail, became very upset and refused at first to speak to him (Hearings, op. cit., pp. 132 and 160).
22. On November 22, 1963, on his return from interviewing Oswald in the Dallas County Jail, Hosty was confronted at the FBI office by Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin with the note that Oswald had left several days earlier. Shanklin, who appeared “agitated and upset,” asked Hosty about the circumstances in which he had received the note and about his visits to Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald. On Shanklin’s orders Hosty dictated a two- to four-page memorandum setting forth all he knew, and he gave the memorandum, in duplicate, to Shanklin.
Between two and four hours after Oswald’s death on November 24, Shanklin summoned Hosty. Hosty recalls that Shanklin was standing in front of his desk and that he reached into a lower right-hand drawer and took out both the memorandum and Oswald’s note. “Oswald is dead now,” he said. “There can be no trial. Here, get rid of this.” Hosty started to tear up the documents in Shanklin’s presence. “No,” Shanklin shouted. “Get it out of here. I don’t even want it in this office. Get rid of it.” Hosty then took the note and memorandum out of Shanklin’s office, tore them up, and flushed them down a toilet at the FBI. A few days later Shanklin asked Hosty whether he had destroyed Oswald’s note and the memorandum, and Hosty assured him that he had. (Hosty’s testimony appears in Hearings, op. cit., pp. 124–175, Shanklin’s on pp. 59–129.)
Meanwhile, on November 23, Ruth Paine had given Hosty Oswald’s handwritten draft of his November 9–11 letter to the Soviet embassy (Oswald having left it on Ruth’s desk when he left the house on November 12, as if he wished her to find it), and a day or so later, she gave another FBI agent the copy she had made in her own hand on November 10. Hosty and the second agent, Bardwell Odum, told Shanklin about the letters, and again, from his remarks, they thought he was ordering their destruction. The two agents concluded that Shanklin was on the edge of a nervous breakdown; instead of destroying Oswald’s letter, they sent both copies to the FBI in Washington (Exhibits No. 15 and 103, Vol. 16, pp. 33–34 and 443–444).
Hosty’s testimony makes it appear that his answers on an internal FBI questionnaire were subsequently falsified either by Shanklin or by someone in FBI headquarters in Washington to admit “poor investigative work” in the Oswald case. Hosty received letters of censure from J. Edgar Hoover, was placed on probation, was reprimanded for his Warren Commission testimony, and demoted to Kansas City. Years later a promotion that was recommended for him was blocked by Clyde Tolson, chief deputy of J. Edgar Hoover. Except for Shanklin and two others, every FBI agent who had anything to do with the Oswald case in 1962 or 1963 was censured, transferred, demoted, or barred from promotion, while Shanklin received several letters of commendation from Hoover. The treatment of Hosty appears extraordinary, since it was he who saw that Oswald might warrant looking into and had recommended that the case be reopened in March 1963, after it had been closed for several months.
The statements of several witnesses before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights were at variance, particularly those of Hosty and Shanklin. Shanklin under oath denied that he had told Hosty to destroy the note and did not recall the rest of the incident as Hosty recounted it. Members of the subcommittee warned Shanklin, who is now retired, that he might be exposing himself to prosecution under federal perjury statutes. But prosecution has not been brought.
23. On April 19, 1963, President Kennedy delivered a speech on Cuba, and on April 22, Robert Kennedy made remarks in New York on Cuba that were reported in the Militant. Taken together, the remarks of the two men create a presumption that President Kennedy, and not just his brother, knew of plans physically to eliminate Castro. On September 9, while Oswald was still New Orleans, the Times-Picayune displayed prominently an AP dispatch from Daniel Harker, in Havana, quoting Castro: “The leaders of the US should think that if they are aiding in terrorist plans to eliminate the Cuban leaders, they themselves cannot be safe.” There has never been any indication that Oswald put two and two together in either April or September and realized that the United States government was engaged in actual assassination attempts against Castro.
As for Castro, his interviews with Jean Daniel, foreign editor of the French newspaper L’Express, who was acting as an informal intermediary for President Kennedy and was with Castro when Kennedy died, suggest that Castro hero-worshipped Kennedy in spite of the assassination plots, of which he was aware. Castro said, “At least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed,” and “I’m convinced that anyone else would be worse.” Referring to Kennedy’s Cuban policy, Castro used words similar to those Oswald used in conversation with Marina the previous summer: “He inherited a difficult situation. I don’t believe a President of the United States is ever really free, and I believe Kennedy is … feeling the impact of this lack of freedom.” (The Daniel articles appeared in the New York Times, November 27, 1963, and the New Republic, December 7 and 14, 1963.)
There is no evidence that Oswald ever felt much animus against Kennedy because of his Cuban policies or that such animus played any part in his decision to kill Kennedy. To the contrary, Oswald gave every appearance of having lost interest in Castro by November 1963, and to have shot Kennedy for totally different reasons.
1. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
2. In his testimony before the Warren Commission in 1964, Hosty said that he was carrying twenty-five to forty cases in November 1963; but in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights in 1975, he said that he had been carrying forty to fifty cases.
3. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 100.
4. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 515–516.
5. Testimony of Mrs. Arthur Carl Johnson, Vol. 10, pp. 297–298.
6. In the Daily Texan of May 13, 1964, the late Helen Yenne showed how, over a period of several days, news of the Barghoorn affair was printed in the Dallas papers near, or next to, stories about President Kennedy’s visit. Characterizing Oswald as a “paranoid schizophrenic,” Mrs. Yenne suggested that he may have hated Kennedy for “loving” Barghoorn in a way that he did not “love” him, and it was her view that the Barghoorn case could actually have triggered the assassination. So strikingly apt did Mrs. Yenne’s analysis appear to the small circle of people who read her article and were also acquainted with Oswald that the weekend of November 16–17 was long afterward known among them as “Lee’s Barghoorn weekend.” Mrs. Yenne, who was unaware that Oswald ever actually mentioned the Barghoorn case, was brilliant in spotting the significance of the affair.
Publicity about Professor Barghoorn continued in newspapers, on radio, and on television through Wednesday, November 20, at which time the exact route of the Kennedy motorcade through Dallas was known. Some writers on the assassination have alleged with cruel inaccuracy that Barghoorn told Kennedy in the Oval Office following his release that he was a spy. Professor Barghoorn denies the allegation. Moreover, he never met President Kennedy and never saw him in the Oval Office—that week or any time. (Letter from Frederick C. Barghoorn to the author, August 11, 1976.)
7. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, pp. 43–44.
8. Warren Commission Report, p. 40.
9. Testimony of Roy S. Truly, Vol. 7, pp. 381–382; Testimony of Warren Caster, Vol. 7, pp. 387–388.
10. After the assassination, this is precisely what Oswald said about the discovery of his rifle in the Book Depository Building.
11. Exhibit No. 3009, Vol. 26, p. 536.
12. Testimony of Buell Wesley Frazier, Vol. 2, p. 222.
13. In her testimony before the Warren Commission (Vol. 1, p. 66), Marina said that it was she who asked Lee that evening to buy her a washing machine and that after he agreed, she told him not to bother but to get something for himself instead. Thus the story arose that the Oswalds had a fight over a washing machine on the night of November 21, and that this was a pivotal event—a story that was widely circulated after the assassination among newspapermen and lawyers for the Warren Commission. But in the many interviews I have had with Marina, she says, and I believe her, that each time the subject of a washing machine came up (and it seems to have arisen three to five times in New Orleans and Irving), it was Lee who raised it, not Marina. On November 21 he apparently mentioned it as an inducement to get her to move to Dallas; and on that evening, Marina stresses, he did not say, “I’ll buy a washing machine,” but, “We’ll buy a washing machine.” Lee and Marina did not fight that evening about a washing machine. As for the car, on the long Veterans Day weekend of November 9–11, Marina and Lee had admired a secondhand car that Michael had just bought for $200. So there was a question about what the Oswalds would buy first after they had saved enough for an apartment: a car for Lee or a washing machine for Marina.
14. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, pp. 47–48.
15. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 18.
16. It is possible that Oswald waited what appears to have been nine days to tell Marina in person that he had been to the FBI, because he feared the Paines’ telephone was being tapped. He had not, after all, signed the FBI note, and as long as he did not mention it over the telephone, the FBI would not know for certain who it was from.
17. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 11, pp. 391–393.
18. Exhibit No. 2124, Vol. 24, p. 695.
19. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 47.
1. Exhibit No. 2008, Vol. 24, p. 407.
2. Exhibit No. 2009, Vol. 24, pp. 408–409.
3. Exhibit No. 1381, Vol. 22, pp. 677–678 and 673 respectively.
4. Because he did not go in the domino room, Oswald almost certainly did not see the full-page hate group advertisement in the Dallas Morning News that day, which, surrounded by a heavy black border, proclaimed: “Welcome, Mr. Kennedy, to Dallas,” and addressed twelve questions to the president that implied that he was helping the Communist cause.
5. Testimony of James Jarman Jr., Vol. 3, pp. 200–201 and 210.
6. Exhibit No. 1381, Vol. 22, pp. 681–682.
7. Testimony of Charles Douglas Givens, Vol. 6, p. 350.
8. Ibid., p. 349.
9. Ibid., pp. 349–350.
10. Exhibit No. 723, shown in Warren Commission Report, p. 80, and in Vol. 17, p. 504.
11. Testimony of Charles Douglas Givens, Vol. 6, pp. 350–351.
12. Testimony of Bonnie Ray Williams, Vol. 3, p. 169.
13. Ibid., p. 175; Testimony of Harold Norman, Vol. 3, p. 191.
14. Testimony of Bonnie Ray Williams, Vol. 3, p. 175.
15. Testimony of Harold Norman, Vol. 3, pp. 191–197.
16. Testimony of James Jarman Jr., Vol. 3, p. 211.
17. Testimony of Bonnie Ray Williams, Vol. 3, p. 175; Testimony of Harold Norman, Vol. 3, p. 192.
18. James A. Zahm, a Marine Corps master sergeant who is expert in rifle training, testified before the Warren Commission (Vol. 11, pp. 306–310) that the four-power scope is ideal for moving targets at ranges up to two hundred yards because it enhances viewing power with a minimum exaggeration of body movements. Zahm added that the fact that Kennedy’s car was moving slowly away from Oswald at a downward grade of three degrees straightened out the line of sight in such a way as to compensate for greater distance between the first (176.9 to 190.8 feet) and last (265.3 feet) shots (15 to 22 yards as seen through the scope).
Robert Oswald was critical of the Warren Commission for its reliance on experts and its failure to consult him about his brother’s capabilities with a rifle, since he taught Oswald to shoot and was familiar with his special qualities as a marksman. Robert states that “Lee had very rapid reflexes” and was “much stronger than he looked,” adding that he had “unusual strength in his hands” and that his forearms were powerful and well developed. (Robert Oswald, op. cit., pp. 209–211.)
A final point. So far as is known, Oswald never fired his rifle between April 10 and November 22. But Zahm and others have said that Oswald’s dry firing in New Orleans, working the bolt, manipulating the trigger, and aligning the sight, would have been extremely helpful, with the scope aiding him to identify any errors in trigger manipulation.
19. Testimony of Marrion L. Baker, Vol. 3, p. 252; Testimony of Roy S. Truly, Vol. 3, p. 225.
20. Testimony of Mrs. Robert A. Reid, Vol. 3, p. 274.
21. Testimony of Mrs. Mary Bledsoe, Vol. 6, pp. 409–410.
22. Warren Commission Report, pp. 161–162.
23. Testimony of Roy S. Truly, Vol. 3, pp. 226–277.
24. Testimony of Roy S. Truly, Vol. 7, p. 383.
25. Testimony of Roy S. Truly, Vol. 3, p. 230.
26. Testimony of J. W. Fritz, Vol. 4, p. 205.
27. The description broadcast on Tippit’s radio was of a slender white male, about thirty, 5 feet 10 inches in height and weighing about 165 pounds (Oswald weighed between 140 and 150 pounds). The description came from a steamfitter, Howard Leslie Brennan, who watched the motorcade from a retaining wall facing, and just across the street from, the southeast corner of the book depository. Brennan twice saw a man, the same man, in the sixth-floor corner window. Once, before the motorcade’s approach, Brennan watched him sit sideways on the window sill, thus seeing the man from the waist up. Brennan next saw the man as he took aim for his final shot. He appeared to be standing, resting against the window sill, holding the gun in his left hand and against his right shoulder. Brennan estimated that he took a couple of seconds to aim and fire, then drew back and paused for a second, as if to be sure that he had hit his mark. Brennan claims to have seen 70 to 85 percent of the gun.
Immediately afterward, Brennan saw everyone, including the police, running in the wrong direction, toward the west side of the building. He went to a policeman in front of the building and was taken to Forrest Sorrels, a Secret Service man who was parked in front in a car, and then to the sheriff’s office. At 12:45 P.M., the description he gave of the man he had seen in the window went out on police car radios. It was this description that presumably caused Tippit to stop and question Oswald. That night, however, Brennan refused to identify Oswald positively in a police lineup as the man he had seen that day. He later told the Warren Commission that he refused out of fear: the shooting might be part of a conspiracy, and he and his family could be in danger if he were the sole eyewitness. Once Oswald was dead, Brennan felt the danger was over and he could safely identify him as the man he had seen in the window. (Testimony of Howard Leslie Brennan, Vol. 3, pp. 140–161, and Vol. 11, pp. 206–207.)
28. The account of Oswald’s movements from the Tippit shooting to the end of the chapter is taken from the Warren Commission Report, pp. 165–180; and from David Belin’s November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury (New York: Quadrangle Press, 1973), pp. 23–48 and 272–277. This quote appears on p. 273.
1. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, pp. 432–433.
2. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, pp. 68–71.
3. Ibid., pp. 69, 78–79.
4. Ibid., p. 79.
5. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 424, and Vol. 9, p. 449; Testimony of Raymond Frank Krystinik, Vol. 9, p. 472.
6. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
7. Testimony of George de Mohrenschildt, Vol. 9, pp. 274–275.
8. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 81.
9. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 83, and Vol. 9, pp. 371–372.
10. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 83.
1. Oswald told his brother, Robert, later that day that he considered the Paines to have been true friends to him and Marina, and that he believed the Paines would continue to care for Marina and the children (Robert Oswald, op. cit., pp. 144–145).
2. Warren Commission Report, p. 200.
3. Ibid., p. 601.
4. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, pp. 85–87.
5. Testimony of H. Louis Nichols, Vol. 7, pp. 328–330.
6. The account of Oswald’s funeral is from Robert Oswald, op. cit., pp. 149–165.
1. Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 169.
2. Telephone conversation with Samuel B. Ballen, May 20, 1977.
3. Conversation with Samuel Ballen, November 28, 1964.
4. Telephone conversation with Samuel B. Ballen, April 21, 1977.
5. Because of de Mohrenschildt’s friendship with Oswald, and his acknowledged affiliation with at least one intelligence service in the past (French Intelligence during World War II), the question has arisen whether de Mohrenschildt might have been working for the CIA in Haiti, and from there might have played a part in the assassination. The available evidence does not support either of these speculations.
According to Warren Commission Document No. 1012, dated June 3, 1964, and declassified May 31, 1977, Richard Helms, formerly the CIA’s deputy director of plans, advised Lee Rankin, general counsel of the Warren Commission, that in 1942 the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, considered de Mohrenschildt for employment but did not hire him because of allegations that he was a Nazi agent. According to the Helms memo, the CIA first established contact with de Mohrenschildt in December 1957, after he returned from a mission in Yugoslavia for the International Cooperation Administration. The CIA had several meetings with de Mohrenschildt at that time and maintained “informal, occasional contact” with him until the autumn of 1961.
The rest of the memo, as well as another Helms memorandum, Warren Commission Document No. 1222, dated July 6, 1964, and declassified June 1, 1977, constitutes reports on de Mohrenschildt in Dallas, Haiti, and elsewhere, reports from which it appears that he could not conceivably have been a CIA employee at any time, nor have had any connection with it during the Haiti period.
As for de Mohrenschildt’s remorse over the “frivolity” of his behavior toward Oswald, to some it appeared that it was more serious, resembling that of Ivan Karamazov toward his father’s murderer, Smerdyakov.
6. The number three is, indeed, conceded to have a universal symbolic meaning, since it crops up in nearly every form of human expression: in religion, mythology, folklore, and literature. In psychoanalysis the number is frequently taken to be a castration symbol. Freud called it “symbolic of the whole male genitalia.” In the Christian religions the number signifies a splitting apart, the separation of a whole into three parts and unification into one, as in the Holy Trinity, “the Three in One, the One in Three.” Still another example, one closer to Oswald, perhaps, is the “thesis, antithesis and synthesis” by which the German historian Hegel, the forerunner of Marxist philosophy, believed the forward movement of history is determined.
7. The Huey Long Murder Case, a book by Hermann Bacher Deutsch, which Oswald took out of the New Orleans Public Library on June 1, 1963, opens with the words: “Assassination has never changed the course of history.”
8. Sung in the Stanley Kramer production, High Noon, lyrics by Ned Washington, music by Dmitri Tiomkin, copyright 1952.
9. Much of the suspense in High Noon is created by the ticking of a clock that hangs on the wall of a railway station. As the action proceeds, the hour hand moves slowly toward twelve noon. In “The Queen of Spades,” too, there is a clock, and the hands move from twelve midnight to 12:25. In the Texas School Book Depository, Lee Oswald was seen at 11:55 A.M. and again at 12:10 P.M. The first shot was fired at President Kennedy a few seconds after 12:30 P.M.
10. Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
11. Joan and Clay Blair Jr. The Search for JFK (New York: Berkley-Putnam, 1976).
12. Poems by Alan Seeger (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916).
13. William Manchester, The Death of a President (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 121.
14. Not only would Jacqueline Kennedy witness Oswald’s act, but there was a real danger that he might hit her accidentally. When asked about this, Dr. David Rothstein of Chicago, who has written extensively about assassinations, suggested in conversation with the author on May 4, 1971, that Oswald’s willingness to risk hitting Mrs. Kennedy while aiming at her husband was an example of the “unconscious matricidal wish showing through.”
15. U. E. Baughman and Leonard Wallace Robinson, Secret Service Chief (New York: Harper & Bros., 1961), pp. 254–255.