“Not even Marina knows the real reason why
I’ve returned to the United States.”
—Lee Harvey Oswald to Marguerite;
Friday the Thirteenth; July 1962
A little voice inside Lee had told him that were he to marry Marina they would, as if in a fairytale come true, live “happily ever after.” That phrase, though, hardly described their existence once the two made their way to the U.S., settling in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Their very living conditions revealed the extreme contrast which Marina (or the woman playing a part called ‘Marina’) experienced between her earlier existence in Minsk and current situation in Texas.
In the U.S.S.R., everything was supposed to have been functional, non-luxurious, anti-decadent. Yet she’d resided in an elegant (at least by Russian standards) suite with her ‘uncle and aunt.’ Marina moved into Lee’s smaller but pleasant rooms.
Coming to America turned out to be a revelation and shock to her system. As it turned out, the land of plenty, at least for the Oswalds and their baby daughter, proved anything but.
One person who visited them often, G. De Mohrenschildt, described a visit to one of the Oswalds’ living place: “the atmosphere of the house and neighborhood (are) conducive to suicide. The living room was dark and smelly, the bedroom and kitchen facing bleak walls ... the place spruced up by lovely photographs of the Russian countryside.” These were taken by Lee during his travels through thick forestlands adjoining Minsk.
The photos, De Mohrenschildt decided, constituted a visual plea for help; an admission of the mistake she made; evidence of her dream to return to Russia, at any cost, by any means.
De Mohrenschildt decided on the spot that he would do all he could to facilitate that unarticulated request. Yet while he served the KGB, and had been assigned as this beautiful spy’s contact, De Mohrenschildt had trouble grasping whether such nostalgic melancholia came from the created-character called ‘Marina’ or the woman who had been assigned to play that part.
In truth, Marina herself could no longer be certain where the one left off and the other began.
*
This G. De Mohrenschildt had sought the Oswalds out soon after their arrival in Texas on June 13, 1962. In actuality, plans for Lee’s return to the U.S. began on May 2, 1960. Lee then still hoped to win the mysterious dark-haired Ella. On that day when Gary Francis Powers had been shot down, Lee made some feeble excuse to leave Ella and proceed to the local bakery.
“Hello, Mr. Oswald. Fascinating news, yes?”
“That, Yuri, is putting the situation mildly.”
This was, like the butcher shop he entered on his first day in the city, one more of those “safe places” where Lee could secretly slip a message off to George.
“What now?” Lee demanded. Everything he and George had planned extended from a single conception: a) The KGB had to learn everything about the U2; b) the CIA must make certain the Russians happened upon such information so its existence could serve as a deterrence to atomic war; c) American security could not be allowed to appear lax; d) an individual traitor could, owing to a ‘coincidence’ of his past military experience, offer the KGB such details; e) the Russians would detain such a person in the provinces until convinced of his sincerity; f) if this were decided in his favor, he would then be brought back from Minsk to Moscow, serving there as a secret agent.
Overnight, all that was ruined. The Soviets had in their possession an actual U2 jet, as well as the pilot. Listening to news reports about a wild card—the weak link in the plan that George, despite his genius at espionage, had somehow missed—now rendered Lee’s function in Russia largely irrelevant.
“Change in legend,” George replied. “L.H.O. disenchanted with Russia, longs to return home.” With that, Lee had to now rewrite the fictional character who shared his actual name.
“If I should decide to return to the U.S.,” he asked Ella, “would you consider coming along?”
That bitch! She never loved me ... If I could, I’d like to wring her pretty neck with my bare hands...
Trusting Lee implicitly to fill in the blanks as to details George left everything open except the grand finale: Home-word bound, where another assignment, Lee trusted, would be waiting.
The first thing to do was create a fake diary in which he re-imagined everything, viewing events he previously accepted as positive in the most unflattering manner to provide a basis for his about-face. Here, Lee hesitated. One way to achieve this would be to express a growing distrust of Marxist ideals. That, he decided, was too simplistic; too likely to be questioned as suspicious when he filed papers requesting his release.
I’m too good at this spy game now to trap myself with such a feeble cover. This must be more complicated, more convincing.
Quickly, his nimble mind seized on another, more believable approach. The problem was not Marxism per se, which Lee actually did find impressive in its purest form. The problem: Lee (the ‘real’ Lee) found some of those ideas attractive, if as a CIA plant (a ‘legend’) he was supposed to reject the Red way.
Constantly, he told himself that he did. But another of those little voices inside questioned whether that remained true. The ideal of human equality, he could not deny, was most appealing. That poor people, like he and his mother back home, ought to be regarded as society’s spine rather some ugly appendage, struck him as valid. Of course, that was not the way things worked around here. Pompous party officials lorded it over the working class.
Lee was, then, able to maintain his loyalty to his sworn cause—America and all it stood for—owing to his contemptuous feelings for the despicable realities in contemporary Russia.
That’s it, then! My new legend will incorporate much of what I truly do believe. The problem here is not that Marx, or Lenin, or Engels were wrong. Only that the Soviet Union, living and breathing those values during its first decade of existence, tragically fell into Stalin’s hands.
A country, any country, is only as good as its current leadership. Khrushchev is as bad as Stalin. The premise itself from Marx through Lenin was enlightened. Yet I despise the results once a lofty dream passes from the greatness of a libertarian like Vladimir into the hands of lesser, self-serving men.
Yet how will George react to all of this? I know he will take delight in reading my faux journal of a gradual defection from belief in contemporary Russia to disparagement. What might be the case, though, if he were to learn this is not very far from what I, the real me, have come to believe?
That communism, if and when fairly implemented, is not the natural enemy of democratic capitalism but a likely ally?
“I become increasingly conscious of just what sort of society I live in,” Lee wrote that night. “Mass gymnastics, compulsory after work meeting; usually political information meeting. Compulsory attendance at lectures and the sending of the entire shop collective (except me) to pick potatoes on a Sunday.” The communist Party secretary at the Factory, whom Lee had always found friendly, he now described as “a fat, forty-ish no-nonsense party regular” who forced Lee to attend “fifteen meetings a month ... always held after work time.” Such insistent regimentation must “turn to stone all except the hard-faced communists with roving eyes looking for any bonus-making catch of inattentiveness on the party of any worker.”
A week and a half later, he concluded: “The work is drab. The money I get has nowhere to be spent ... No places of recreation except the trade union dances.” (That was patently absurd, as he attended the movies almost every night, and there were endless cultural events such as ballet, opera, also comic and dramatic theatre of a type that did not exist in comparably small-to-medium-sized cities in the U.S.) “I have had enough!”
While the entries themselves would be convincing for anyone who gave them a quick read-over, Lee made the mistake of mixing up dates in this creative recreation of the past. He jotted down events as if he had done so at that point in time. What he would later present as his “daily diary” constituted what might better be called a nonfiction novel, filled with specific errors.
*
There was but one sticky point to all of this, as he had truthfully become nostalgic for the U.S. and very much wanted to return. Incredible as it might seem, Lee even longed to see his mother again, despite any ill feelings as to their relationship in the past. After such a long absence, the negatives had grown fuzzy, Marguerite’s strange sense of devotion to Lee what he now best recalled. At any rate, the one drawback to going home was Ella, whom Lee at this juncture still believed in love with him.
That would be quickly concluded by her rejection of Lee. He bridled at the realization that he had been an innocent sentimentalist about beautiful women. Never again! He swore.
To facilitate his return, if it proved warranted, Lee had followed George’s explicit orders as to how he must operate once he arrived back in Moscow. Lee was to offer to give up his U.S. citizenship without ever actually getting around to doing so. Had he, any such reversal would have presented a labyrinth of complications, taking years to resolve. As is, the situation might have been simple. The U.S.S.R. no longer desired to pay large sums of money to someone rendered worthless in terms of valid information who all at once spoke negatively of their land.
Everything might have gone like clockwork had Lee not met Marina. Believing her a none-too-bright Bardot-like beauty, unaware that this constituted a character created specifically for him, Lee fell in love.
At, of course, first sight.
Despite what he had been told in the service by a wise sergeant, he proceeded to make precisely the same mistake as had before, of course expecting totally different results now.
“Marina, will you ...?
“Give me time, Lee. Please? A week ...”
“I’ll wait forever if need be, darling.”
Already under orders to say yes, having been instructed to manipulate Lee into asking, Marina insisted on time to think so that Lee, no fool, would not begin to wonder if she accepted too quickly to be believed. The character called Marina had to be consistent and that girl would not jump so fast. She would hesitate, and in so doing make her manipulations appear invisible.
“Lee? Where have you been? Yes, of course, I’ll marry you.”
Seemingly, Lee proposed to Marina from his hospital bed. That in actually had been Lee’s twin, the real Lee off in Cuba, trying to kill Castro to facilitate the Bay of Pigs invasion by making it difficult for Cubans to respond without their leader.
Lee’s mission and the greater scheme had failed miserably. In proposing, the twin had been following orders from George, who withheld this from Lee while Lee recuperated in Miami. Lee’s surprise, upon confronting Marina after a return to Minsk, must ring entirely, precisely true.
George knew that women, with their remarkable sixth sense, can detect an act, particularly on the part of a man in their lives, immediately. This held true even if that woman is herself offering a performance. Anyway, Lee’s response had to be real.
“Oh. That! Why, that’s wonderful, Marina. Wonderful!”
Reports trickling in from agents in Moscow and Minsk did point to the possibility that Marina was actually working for the KGB. And that, unlike Ella, she had been assigned to marry Lee. He could not be told this, at least not yet, for fear that Lee would become suspicious of her every move. And she, being a perceptive woman, would spot this in his eyes and manner.
This, George could not allow; it would interfere with his learning what he and the CIA must know, what they could discern from observing her attempts to collect information. Also, the Company had grown concerned about a group of Russians living in the Dallas area, serendipitously near Fort Worth, where Robert lived. This allowed Lee a logical reason to settle there.
These were American citizens of Russian descent who claimed aristocratic blood dating back to the czar. Their forefathers fled the Russian Revolution of 1919 even as so many Cubans now settling in Miami had run away from Castro and his own communist takeover forty years later. All claimed to be proud of their Russian heritage but pro-democracy and fervently anti-communist.
The CIA wasn’t so certain. As several recent circumstances suggested, they might be employing their status as a welcome minority as a “legend” of their own making, reporting back to the KGB. One way or the other, the CIA had to know.
What better means to learn than have Ozzie bring home a wife who might be working for the KGB? If Marina were such a plant, and if the Dallas/Fort Worth Russians were something other than what they claimed to be, they would contact a recent arrival under the auspices of helping a fellow country-person feel at home, deep in the heart of Texas. While, without her husband realizing it, put his bride to work within their cell.
On the other hand, if Lee turned out not to be such a fool but a CIA agent, so much the better. Marina could employ her feminine wiles to draw from her fool of a husband all sorts of information he believed spoken in a special sort of confidence.
*
“I am returning to America. Will you go with me?”
“Oh, yes,” Marina exclaimed, slipping into a seemingly spontaneous dance of joy. “Anywhere, Lee, in the world!”
“Now, I know you are filled with childish dreams about streets paved with gold. This is not the way things are.”
“Those are only stories. Still, I know that life will be better for me there than it is, or ever can be, here.”
Lee took Marina in his arms and kissed her. “I will do all I can to make our lives wonderful once we arrive. I promise.”
“I know that, Lee. Oh, but I can’t wait. Just think! Me, little Marina: In the wonderful world that is the U.S.A.”
When Richard Snyder in Moscow received word from Lee that he not only wanted to return home but bring a Soviet bride with him, the official Consul and secretive CIA agent made certain the process went as smoothly as possible from his end. The KGB, eager to have Marina overseas, contacted the passport office to speed things along.
The only possible problems might be the FBI. There, so far as anyone knew, Lee was indeed a traitor, perhaps coming home to spy on the U.S. for the Russians. Hoover ordered his agents to question Oswald on return, the CIA still insistent that the FBI must not be allowed to know what the Company was actually up to. Not only with Lee, but as to any of their secret operatives.
Previous to the Oswalds’ arrival, the FBI set up a special file to monitor their travels: 327-925D. Agent John Fain was sent from D.C. to the Fort Worth office to study Lee’s every move, then report back to J. Edgar. This necessitated that the CIA create a counter-network to throw Fain off course.
For Hoover to learn Lee was a government agent, working for “the other side” of information security, without his own branch having been alerted to this for fear that the fewer people in on a secret the better, would likely cause a blow-up. Which could further complicate the duel of wits being waged between the Bureau in D.C. and the Company not far away in Langley VA. The situation had already grown tense enough without that.
So even as Fain attempted to learn more about what was going on in northern Texas, interviewing Lee’s relatives, various CIA operatives were dispatched to keep knowledge about Lee’s actual status, which Marguerite and Robert knew nothing about, from surfacing. Fain’s interviews with them were, then, superfluous. On the other hand, once the couple arrived, the Company had to continually watch over Lee and Marina, in order to maintain the secretive status of his “legend.” And hers!
Meanwhile, Lee flew from Minsk to Moscow on July 8, 1961, checking in at Hotel Berlin, visiting Snyder in a considerably less irritated mood than Lee had been in, or performed, on their previous meeting. Several days later, Marina joined Lee and was interviewed by Snyder’s co-worker John McVickar, who found her a pleasant young woman. McVickar stamped her papers as “acceptable without suspicions or hesitation.”
Pregnant, Marina announced that while the process took its course, she would fly to Kharkov to bid farewell to an old aunt. In actuality, the woman calling herself ‘Marina’ met with KGB officials, planning out her long-term approach in America.
This left Lee to spend his 22nd birthday alone, less than pleased at this status. After all, the previous year he had two beautiful Russians with him. That now seemed a lifetime ago. Lee wondered about contacting Rima and Rosa but guessed that, like himself, they had gone through considerable life changes during the intervening months. Those women would be totally different people now, with little if anything to say to a man who had briefly figured prominently in their own lives.
So Lee lay in bed, naked, dreaming of Marina, and the child that soon would add so much to their now intertwined lives.
Also, trying, as always, to grasp who Lee Oswald really was. This was a question that would consume this man throughout his brief existence.
As I study, relentlessly study, and learn new words, or discover the true meaning of words I thought I knew, I come to the conclusion that I am either a stoic or a narcissist.
So ardently do I wish to see myself as a stoic, in the old Roman sense: Refusing to show any emotions, however deeply I may experience them. Even moreso, perhaps, than ‘normals.’
Always, though, putting on a false front to conceal my pain when insulted or rejected, so often the case in my life.
Am I better off now? I believed myself to have come so far, achieved so much, transformed completely.
Yet here I am, alone my birthday. As alienated and isolated as I felt when, as a lost little boy ...
Also, I fear myself to be narcissist: Unable to love, truly love, anyone or anything other than myself. Is it possible that I might be both? Like a schizophrenic, which I sometimes fear I may be, roaring from one extreme to the other.
Both elements inside me, waging a constant war with one another, for my mind, my soul. If such a thing even exists.
*
Back home, when a blithe J. Edgar Hoover suggested to the State Department that it might not be in America’s best interest to have Lee back, Robert I. Owens in the Soviet Affairs section, he very much in the know thanks to constant contact with Allan Dulles, filed a report stating: “it is in the interest of the United States to get Lee Harvey Oswald and his family out of the Soviet Union and into the United States as soon as possible.”
To Hoover’s disbelief and anger, the other agencies set his deep concerns aside, doing all they could to pave the way for Lee and his bride, Marina now seven months pregnant, to come to America. On February 15, 1962, she gave birth to a daughter whom they named June. This occurred while waiting for her exit visa which, inexplicably to Lee, took much longer to process than had been expected. The Russian government had decided to purposefully create a delay so that the child would be born there. They were planning ahead: should it ever be necessary for Marina to make a hurried return home, the baby, born a Soviet citizen, would not create a problem that might delay their hasty exit from the U.S.
“Oh, Lee,” Marina wept, these of course crocodile tears, she fully aware of the reasons for a slow-down in the process. “What if we are not allowed to leave? What will we do?”
“They can’t stop us. I won’t let them.” How strong he felt when speaking so to Marina, the stoic side of him dominant now. Lee projected a false sense of total security. The narcissist in him too loved to believe this little lie about his own powers to change fate, determine the outcome, and win in the end. Lee had continued reading Nietzsche. A seminal line, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” leapt up at him from the page.
It all makes sense now. My disastrous childhood? Necessary to make me the powerful man I am today. Thank you, then, God, for putting me through all the torture I cursed you for, over so many years. Not random and unfair, as I once falsely assumed.
All part of your great master plan. Assuming, of course, that there is a higher being, which I doubt. But do not dismiss.
Who am I? Someday, when I come to know for certain if you are there or not, then I will also know who I am.
*
Husband, wife and child soon traveled through Poland, East Germany, West Germany and the Netherlands. One night they were obliged to share a dinner table with an American couple. When during a pleasant conversation the husband inquired as to what Lee did for a living, the response, accompanied by a sardonic grin, was: “I might just be a spy!” All laughed loudly.
Then followed a joyous four-day vacation in Amsterdam. Arm in arm, the happy couple and their adorable child wandered the quaint streets, enjoyed sausage-rolls on the docks, giggled at brazen prostitutes behind red glass windows, and visited the Van Gogh museum. Lee experienced one of his great epiphanies there, staring at the famed self-portrait of a misunderstood man, his sad, bitter eyes gazing out at the onlooker as the world around him, as he portrayed it, reflected the artist’s tortured psyche.
The brain beneath that anguished face had to be wondering if he were the genius his heart and soul insisted or the non-talent fool everyone in his world apparently believed him to be.
Such anguish! He paints the way I feel ... I am not alone ... others have walked this path ... and, in the end, many reigned supreme, if only after passing through hell on earth . .
The Oswalds took the Moscow-Berlin express to Rotterdam, boarding SS Maasdam, sailing for America June 4. Lee delighted at what he considered an appealing circumstance or one more bit of evidence his life did follow some preordained pattern, the ever-twisting trail inextricably linked to that of his favorite singer/star, Frank Sinatra: The boat would dock at Hoboken, New Jersey, the scene of Sinatra’s humble birth and childhood.
Lee couldn’t wait to see the town for himself, albeit briefly, hoping to track down the building where The Voice had been raised. Like the Italian kid from a northern Sicilian ghetto in the U.S., this Southern boy from an urban slum had crawled up and out. Sinatra was blessed with that remarkable tool, his talent. Lee’s attributes? Considerably less obvious.
Still, he’d never forgotten something Sinatra once said in an interview when the TV host asked him to explain how he had defied the odds and hit the big-time: “I refused to fail!”
Lee had accepted that as his mantra. If it was good enough for Francis Albert Sinatra, then it would be good enough for Lee Harvey Oswald. At any rate, he was home.
However bad his experiences here may have been, Lee was an American, true blue to the core. Why his patriotism remained so strong and firm, Lee could not yet put into precise words.
What was the line from that movie ... ? Oh, of course: Just because you love something doesn’t mean it has to love you back. Monty Clift, From Here to Eternity, 1953 ...
There was another movie, a modern western called Home From the Hill, made just two years ago, starring Robert Mitchum. It had been set in Texas, Lee even now on his way back there. The title derived from a poem Lee read while in that seventh grade English class, with that teacher who made all the difference.
A poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. How did it go?
Home is the sailor, home from the sea, The hunter, home from the hill ...
That’s might be me the poet wrote of, long before I was born. I am the sailor, here on this ship’s deck, gazing at the Statue of Liberty, my beautiful bride and wonderful child beside me. Sea-spray splashes up on us, circling gulls squawk, people cheer at the site New York harbor. I am the hunter, as I have stalked my prey, righteously killed my enemy.
No one can now doubt my manhood. His blood flowed through my fingers; I delighted in watching him suffer. I have killed and, if necessary, for my good or my country, will kill again.
I know now that this is what I, Lee Oswald, was born for.
I was blessed, or cursed, with a talent for killing.
“Darling? You look so intense. Is anything wrong?”
“No, Marina. Actually, things have never been so right.”
*
Marina’s disillusionment with what was supposed to be her own American Dream-come-true began ten days before reaching the U.S. On George’s suggestion, Lee had booked them into a Third Class cabin aboard the Maasdam, hopefully not attracting any unwanted attention: i.e., where did these supposedly simple folk get the money for a luxurious passage? The FBI would ask such questions upon their disembarking, blowing his cover.
Though the guise worked, a toll was taken as to Marina: she despised the cramped quarters, the inedibly bad food, the sense of having been reduced from a Beautiful Person a short while earlier to a virtual pauper, when this great sea-change that she had agreed to brought her down, not up, socially.
“I do not mind the bareness of it all. But this is dirty.”
“Stay strong. In a week we will be home. This will end.”
Aboard the ship, a Russian-speaking waiter named Pieter Didenko delighted Marina with his conversations about the Old Country. Delicately, he let her know that he would be her KGB contact while sailing. Any messages which needed to be conveyed to the KGB could be passed through his resources.
Also, wherever in the U.S. the couple settled, she would be contacted. A network of Russian agents would quietly follow the Oswalds’ every move. She hinted that Lee had said something to her about wanting to join his family in the Fort Worth area.
“Fabulous. Our most reliable people live near there.”
After disembarking, Lee was singled out from the other passengers and interrogated at length by Spas T. Raikin. He claimed to be a Russian speaking caseworker with Travelers Aid in New York City. From the barrage of pointed questions, Lee guessed Raikin to be an FBI plant or an operative for the Bureau assigned to learn as much as possible as to what was going on inside his mind. Lee stuck to the legend he had concocted and which George heartily approved of. This left Raikin confused as to how Lee Oswald ought to be summed up: More socialist than communist and, from what he said, more pro-American than ever following his discouraging experiences in the Soviet Union.
“Will being back in America make you happy?”
“Happiness,” Lee responded, “can exist only in taking part in a struggle to achieve a state in which there is no borderline between one’s personal world and the world in general.”
What in the name of God is this guy even talking about? Is Lee Harvey Oswald an innocent, a Soviet agent, or a philosopher?
Following a one night stay at the Times Square Hotel, where Marina expressed some delight in the bright neon lights below and constant rush and flow of people, everyone in some great hurry to be somewhere other than where they currently were, Lee, Marina, and June flew from New York International Airport on Delta Flight 821 to Dallas’ Love Field.
There they were greeted by Robert Oswald and his wife Vada. “Welcome home, little brother. Keep your nose clean?”
“Of course. I brought one of your handkerchiefs along.”
During the ninety minute car trip back to Fort Worth, where husband, wife and daughter would temporarily stay with the warm couple, Robert and Vada attempted to strike up a friendly conversation with their new family member. They were surprised to learn Marina spoke not a word of English. She would merely smile sweetly in response to everything they said, nodding her head in a manner that suggested she had not a clue what they were talking about but desperately hoped to be liked, accepted.
“She’s very beautiful, Lee.”
“Thank you, Vada. Does she remind you of Brigitte Bardot?”
“A little, perhaps.”
“I think so. Very much. I always dreamed of being married to a movie star. Or someone who looks like one.”
“I only hope she can make you happy. As the old saying goes, looks aren’t everything.”
“But of course they are!” Lee laughed.
Oh, my dear, pathetic brother in law. Are you ever in for it! As I guess you will soon learn ...
In actuality, the woman playing Marina, whose name may well have been Alexandrovana Medvedeva, spoke fluent English, this one of the many reasons the KGB picked her for this position. But by pretending to be ignorant, as well as a near-idiot, the lovely, apparently shy secret agent could create a situation in which people spoke openly in front of her, just as she wished.
*
At 7313 Davenport Street in Fort Worth, Marina marveled at the everyday objects of suburban American culture: toasters, a TV, an extra bedroom, two bathrooms and, most charming of all, a garden in their small back yard, rich with multi-colored flowers.
Her mood improved. She asked Lee in Russian if they would soon be able to afford something like this. He was obliged to tell her Bob had worked his way up to an executive with Acme Brick, and that since Lee must begin at the bottom, wherever he might find a position, such comparative luxury would be some time coming.
“Oh! But a short while, yes?”
“I’ll work hard, Marina. I’ll do what I can?”
“Soon, though. Something like this. For us?”
“Understand, Robert is paid higher than some common worker. Vada brings in additional money as a beautician.”
“But this is what I want, at least for a beginning.”
“I can’t promise anything. Only that I’ll try.”
Lee noted disappointment in her eyes. Marina at once fell into a depression. Lee did, too, if for an entirely oppositional reason Marina could not possibly guess.
When George had instructed Lee to recreate his Legend, the manner in which he did so had been left up to the agent in the field. As such, Lee arrived at a decision to attack Russia’s cynical form of communism, no better than the supposed opposite pole of fascism. As an American, he believed this fully, had before he even arrived, his experiences offering excellent proof of such a belief.
On the other hand, his “legend” held that he remained a Marxist-idealist, believing a pure state of all-power-to-the-people could be achieved and that such a state would be the best place on earth.
So he rejected Russia as a failed experiment, accepting other situations in the world as potential success stories.
The problem, if there was one, had to do with a gradual but serious blending process between his assumed legend and his true self. Lee had attempted to put his current state into words in his debriefing by Raikin. That extremely ordinary man clearly had no idea what Lee attempted to express.
One aspect of his earlier “legend,” first in the service, then after arriving in Russia, was to decry the U.S. owing to his own past life: though a hardworking woman, his mother had not been able to bring herself and her children up from poverty. The American Dream of eventual success via hard work was but a myth. Perhaps the Marxist ideal, if ever fully augmented, would provide a better way of life for the common working man.
Over time, Lee had begun to believe that this might be the case. Life in the Soviet Union only assured him that such a pure communist state did not exist. At least not yet. And not there.
But could it? Will it? Could I help make that happen?
For the first time since their initial meeting, Lee had experienced a thought-process he did not share with George in any of their constant secretive correspondences. To do so would likely cause Lee to be drummed out of CIA service, and he did not want that. How powerful, as well as patriotic, all this made him feel!
Also, he did want to aid the U.S. in its conflict with the Soviet Union, which he had never admired, now strongly disliked.
Still, he had to reconcile the Company’s abiding attitude—all Communism, in any form, anyplace in the world, constituted a threat—with a gnawing, growing belief that pure Marxism, if it ever instituted, might be better than capitalistic democracy.
*
Lee considered writing a book on the subject. But the need to find work so as to feed his family, rather than rely on the good will of Robert (Lee feared an ugly scene like the earlier one in New York), demanded that any literary career be put off indefinitely. Lee applied for a job with the Texas Employment Commission as a possible translator of Russian, should anyone be in need of such services. While this did not immediately provide work, it put Lee in contact with an executive at that office, Peter Paul Gregory. A friendly man, he suggested that Lee soon contact members of the local Russian community.
Meanwhile, Marguerite had arrived from Crowell, TX. Within a week Lee, Marina, and baby June shared an apartment with Lee’s mother on Seventh Street, a baker’s dozen blocks away from Robert’s.
Though Marguerite made a fuss over the young woman and their darling baby, her personality was no different than before, other than perhaps more advanced in such directions.
“Oh, Lee. Such a wonderful family you have now! I’m so proud of you. And so delighted that you came back.”
“Yes, Momma. Please understand, though. As soon as I locate a decent job, Marina and I want a place of our own.”
“What?” Marguerite, suddenly appearing faint, collapsed on the couch. “After all I’ve done, all I’ve suffered ...”
“We’re a young couple, Momma. A young family now.”
“And me?” she wept. “I’m not part of that family?”
“That’s not what I meant. Momma, stop crying, please?”
Marguerite had not changed. If anything, Marguerite was more Marguerite than before. Her bouts of hysteria and overdone performances of gentility confused and irritated Marina, who missed the calm, easygoing company of Robert and his family, as well as their more appealing apartment.
“Hang on, darling. This will all change—”
“Yes, Lee? But that’s what you said onboard the boat.”
Lee did find work with the Leslie Welding Company at its louver-door factory where he labored as a humble metalworker. At least this allowed him, toward the end of July, to move out of his mother’s apartment, over to their first “own place” at 2703 Mercedes Street. Even as Robert drove them there, Marguerite sobbing about being deserted once again by her baby boy, Lee experienced a sense of déjà vu.
What he’d hated most about his childhood was the constant dislocation, those frenzied moves from one place to another. Now supposedly in charge, the same thing was happening once again.
“Here, Lee? Here is where we’ll stay?”
“For the time being, Marina. We’ll have to see ...”
Meanwhile, Lee sent to George the documents he’d smuggled out of Russia: photographs of the emergent technology at the factory where he’d worked, images too of the adjacent military compounds he had taken while off on hunting trips with his .22.
Breaks in the monotony arrived in the form of a flurry of invites to homes of local ‘White Russians.’ In particular one senior citizen, George Bouhe, a successful accountant and ardent capitalist, accepted Lee and Marina with open arms.
At one party that took place in late summer at Bouhe’s home, another guest, Anna Meller, noticed a sincere if terrible contradiction whenever Lee was asked to join a conversation. Years later, she would recall: “He’s against the Soviet Union; he’s against the United States. He made the impression that he didn’t know what he likes.”
In fact, Lee had finally come to understand precisely what as a unique individual he did and not like. “Each one of us,” Lee explained to Meller, “ought to be always out and about, attempting to take the best of possible worlds we can imagine, and make that come to life around us.”
“If you want to live in a dream world go visit Disneyland.”
“That’s just my point. What is that called? ‘The Happiest Place on Earth?’ Well, why not make the world more like that?”
“Because it’s a fantasy. This? Reality!”
“Sometimes dreams do come true.”
“Yes. I believe they’re called nightmares.”
Somewhere in-between the extremes of raw capitalism and corrupt communism, there might be a Utopia in which the people, actual people, true people, the workers, could at last become the center of interest. Could America, if we would only accept and adopt the best aspects of socialism, become that Shangri-La?
*
Lee was wondering about that one day when a sudden rapping came at the front screen door. Hurrying to see who it might be, Lee found himself face to face with a 6’ 2,” early fifties, immaculately coiffed, expensively suited gentleman; his hair silver-grey, the stranger spoke in an upper-class European manner that combined elements of the old Russian aristocracy with a seductive Austrian lilt.
Epicurian. That’s the first word that come to mind upon meeting whoever this is. I don’t mean that in a positive way.
“Hello,” the jovial fellow announced with supreme self-confidence. “My name is De Mohrenschildt. My wife Jeanne and I live in Dallas. I heard from the Fort Worth Russians you and your family had recently arrived so I swung on down to say 'hi.'”
For reasons he could not fully comprehend, Lee hated this dapper intruder on first sight.