“In my opinion he had two lives, spending most
of his time in his own separate life.”
—Marina Oswald, reflecting on Lee, 1977
Members of the Russian community in Dallas considered G. De Mohrenschildt their mystery man. The most obvious aspect of his identity concerned business dealings with Col. Lawrence Orlov, an oil speculator. But while people knew the precise nature of Orlov’s company, De Mohrenschildt’s role remained fuzzy. What exactly did he do to earn his salary? No one could say, not for certain.
However, wealth and its vestiges (expensive cars, imposing home, hand-tailored suits, rumors of affairs with lovely women) create a confederacy of silence around awesome individuals.
On that first visit to the Oswalds’ home, De Mohrenschildt regaled Marina with glorious tales of his escape from the Russian revolution while still a child. According to this scenario, his father, a marshal of the old nobility, and mother were killed by crazed peasants. But not before passing their eight-year-old boy to a tribe of loyal gypsies. They smuggled the child out of the country and, in time, to France. Distant relatives there provided him with a first-class education.
What De Mohrenschildt did not confide to the Oswalds: In May 1938, he arrived in the United States aboard the SS Manhattan. A year later, authorities arrested him when ‘Jerzy’ (as he now called himself, claiming to be Polish) was caught sketching naval installations at Port Aransas, TX. Accusations that he might be a German spy were dismissed by the articulate European. He was a filmmaker, he said; these merely story-boards for a movie he would shortly produce. Yet no one in Hollywood, when contacted, had ever so much as heard of him.
During World War II, he initially appeared to prove his loyalty by offering to oversee all operations of the French underground in the United States. An FBI investigation rather suggested that he had infiltrated this organization to provide stateside Nazi agents with key information.
Ultimately, no one could decide if this man was an agent, a double agent, or triple agent; and, whichever he might be, if De Mohrenschildt ever owed any true loyalty to the Allies or the Axis, or if he were manipulating everyone for reasons known only to himself, probably for the sake of personal gain.
In the end, any evidence against De Mohrenschildt proved so self-contradictory that the authorities shook their heads with frustration and allowed him to walk free. Still, the FBI kept an open file on this man, as did, beginning in 1957, the CIA.
When the Cold War with Russia replaced the hot one against Germany, everything altered. Clearly, De Mohrenschildt had established contact with Soviet operatives who had entered our country. Yet he lived so lavishly as a capitalist that all his whispered asides—“I’m infiltrating, don’t you see, to serve the U.S.?”—were, if not entirely believed, anxiously considered.
“And so I appear before you now, proud both of my Russian heritage of a type that is no longer recognized in my homeland and of my status as a U.S. citizen as well.”
Lee smelled a rat. The way in which De Mohrenschildt spoke struck him as so many details picked up while watching old movies: Adolph Menjou by way of Maurice Chevalier crossed with Erich von Stroheim. As someone who had drawn his own identity from films, sniffing out a similar approach on the part of this different person did not prove difficult for Lee Oswald.
*
“Which would you care to hear first: the good news or the bad?” De Mohrenschildt asked early in October, 1962. He, his eighteen-year-old daughter Alexandra, and her husband Gary had driven down from Dallas, ostensibly to catch the Van Cliburn competition, they claiming to be musical sophisticates.
“Why don’t you choose?”
“I will, then! The bad isn’t, in truth, so bad at all. You must move to Dallas at once.”
Just as Lee had suspected, the seemingly magnanimous man hoped to seize control of their lives. If De Mohrenschildt did turn out to be what Lee suspected——he had spoken to George, who confirmed this shady figure was on their dubious-persons-list—this move would be for political as well as personal reasons.
“We like it well enough here.”
De Mohrenschildt glanced around the small, shabby apartment while rolling his eyes in contempt for the sad surroundings.
Oh, this guy is good! Very good. But I’m better.
“A close friend of mine in the Russian community has found a more rewarding job. And you will earn twice as much.”
“Metalworking is an honest task for a working-man.”
“Oh,” Marina gasped, trippingly assuming center stage in the little scene. “Lee, that would be wonderful. At last we could have a place like your brother Robert’s. You did promise.”
During the next several days, Marina wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, informing Vitaliy A. Gerasimov as to her current whereabouts. He operated in the U.S. much as Richard Snyder did in the Soviet Union. An embassy job served as cover for his secretive role as intelligence-gatherer for the KGB.
When Gerasimov responded, stating that her new status had been placed on file, he communicated through sub-textual implications his role as her key contact. In truth, Marina, like Lee, had begun to waver. She would gladly consider deserting the Soviet Union if she came to believe a more happy life might exist here.
What’s best for me and June? I must decide and soon.
Considering her unattractive apartment, Marina had determined they must make the move to Dallas. Once there, if she so chose, she could prove more useful to the KGB in such a prestigious area. On the other, should she choose to abandon ship and join Lee in marriage for real, how better to relocate there, in an upscale development, her husband transformed into a white collar worker.
Once in Dallas, I’ll discover what I ought to do.
Though sexual relations between wife and husband had been nil since moving into “the dump,” that changed. As a result, Lee began to appear less dour and pallid, whistling on his way to work. At her insistence, he traveled to Dallas for the job interview.
After all, I did promise, as Marina said ...
Everything might have worked out precisely as Marina had planned were it not for something that occurred several nights later, even as they were preparing for the move. While Marina slept soundly, the phone rang. Lee answered.
“Lee!” George spoke in a hushed voice, calling from Miami, Langley, wherever he might happen to be at the moment. “You must listen, and listen carefully! Your wife is a KGB agent.”
“Marina-—”
“There is no Marina. The actual name of the woman living with you is believed to be Alexandrovna Medvedeva. Marina is her ‘legend.’ She married you so as to come to America as a spy.”
Lee felt dizzy. “But ... we have a baby ...”
“All part of the KGB’s master plan. I know this must hurt. Hurt terribly! That’s not why I’m telling you. From now on, be ultra-careful what you say in front of her. Understand?”
“I understand,” Lee gasped, “that my marriage is a sham.”
I’m her ... patsy!
“Continue as if nothing has changed. She must not know that you know. Keep a close eye on her, watch for anything suspicious she may say or do. But act as if everything is just as it was.”
Lee hung up. He sat on a dilapidated wicker chair on the porch for several hours, staring into space. Then he heard the baby crying inside. Marina would give the child a bottle and that would shut June up. Moments later, the sobbing halted.
“Lee?” Marina called. “Where are you?”
“Here,” he said softly, re-entering. Marina, smiling, moved toward her husband, expecting an embrace. Instead, he fell into a rage and beat her. She screamed for mercy, but when Marina fell to the floor Lee came over on top of the terrified woman and kicked her twice. Hard.
I won’t be your fall-guy. I won’t! Or anyone’s ...
Then he strolled to the refrigerator, took a can of beer, and sat down on a stuffed chair. Lee guzzled the brew, muttering to himself while she attempted to rise up from the floor.
*
Several days later, De Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne, having learned of the incident via a frantic phone call from Marina, drove to the Oswalds’ in their chic convertible, doing so during the day, while Lee remained at work. De Mohrenschildt told Marina to pack her clothes, take hold of baby June, and come with them at once.
Twenty minutes later they arrived at a pleasant, spacious home in Farmers Branch, an upper-middle class Dallas suburb. Here lived Henry C. Bruton, with whom De Mohrenschildt had cultivated a friendship half a year earlier. He had managed this by charming the serious-minded, level-headed retired admiral’s giddy wife, impressed as so many upper-middle-class Americans are with aristocratic Europeans. He now begged Mrs. Bruton (her husband was away on business) to allow this beaten woman and her child to remain there for the time being.
The well-intentioned lady took one look at this child-woman and the poor baby resting in Marina’s arms and readily agreed.
Perfect! I’ll be in their home, the home of former director of Naval Communications; the man who not long ago reorganized the global system which the U.S. Navy employs to choreograph the movements of submarines, battleships, aircraft carriers, jets, even nuclear missile bases. Information the KGB hungers for!
“When your husband returns,” Marina said, having picked up some everyday usage of English, “I hope he won’t mind—”
So I will play the dear, abused ‘adopted-daughter’ figure, with access to this home while the admiral is off in Richardson. I will discover Bruton’s copy of the codes and relay them to the embassy in Washington, the information then going from there to Moscow. I will alter the course of history, thanks to my natural gifts: my beautiful face, this perfect body, and a brilliant brain.
“You let me take care of him. Make yourself at home.”
If all of this works out as I believe it will, Lee Harvey Oswald can crawl off and fuck himself for all I care. And if not then I can always take him back for the sake of our baby.
“I hardly knew my own mother. Oh, can I consider you my mother? That would be so wonderful.”
Either way ... I win! Me. ‘Marina’ ...
“What the name of God do you think you’re doing?”
The small group in the Brutons’ living room had become so intense in their discussion they did not realize someone stood at the screen door. Lee: unshaven, his hair slicked back in a retro-1950s greaser style, wearing a dirty T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. He slammed the door open and entered, like an angry beast. A skinny real-life incarnation of Stanley Kowalski, Tennessee Williams’ brute likewise hailing from New Orleans.
A Streetcar Named Desire one more film Lee had loved.
“We thought it best for Marina if we—”
De Mohrenschildt didn’t have an opportunity to finish before Lee grabbed Marina’s left arm and pulled the woman, her baby cradled in the right, out onto the street.
“I know what’s best for my wife! You all stay out of it.”
Shit! My idiot of a husband had to show up and ruin all these carefully laid plans. In only a few days I’d have—
*
Back to the apartment on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth. But if De Mohrenschildt had failed to slip his new protégée into the home of a recently retired Naval officer, he had but begun his mission to bring the Oswalds to Dallas, What De Mohrenschildt didn’t know was that the CIA understood what he was up to, planning to manipulate his manipulation for their own good.
George had contacted J. Walter Moore, top CIA operative in the Dallas area. George instructed him to approach Lee directly about this upcoming attempted abduction. As the Company hoped to set a trap and snare both De Mohrenschildt and Marina, such a move was as imperative to “our side” as to “theirs.” Moore’s message was clear. When De Mohrenschildt visited the Oswalds a few days later, acting as if the incident at the Bruton’s home never occurred, again encouraging Lee to take a better job and relocate, Lee played his role and agreed, saying it was all for Marina’s sake. Still bruised and battered, she came alongside her husband and kissed him gently.
“It’s set, then? Wonderful. I’ll make the arrangements.”
Asshole! While Marina is spying on me, I’ll be spying on her. In Japan, I learned the oldest of Asian curses: May you get your heart’s deepest desire. That’s about to happen to you, my phony-aristocratic ‘friend.’ And you will pay dearly for it!
The Oswalds would live at the home of De Mohrenschildt’s daughter and her husband for the time being. This would allow him to keep them under constant surveillance. Only it didn’t work out that way. While Marina did move in with the Taylors, Lee insisted, for reasons he would not explain, on taking an apartment of his own. Also, he set up a post office box so that his mail would not have to pass through others’ hands.
Lee did, however, allow De Mohrenschildt’s influential friends to arrange for a job at Jaggers Chiles-Stovall, one of Dallas’ largest typesetting firms, located downtown. There Lee used his photographic skills to create layouts for varied advertising displays.
“Hey, Lee. Very good work. We’re lucky to have found you.”
Shortly, however, Lee noticed that Jaggers did other jobs, too, including projects for the U.S. military. Here, those raw pictures taken by U2 surveillance planes of the Russian terrain were transformed into accurate maps that could then be used to pinpoint Soviet military and industrial locations. Though these were supposed to be kept Top Secret, Jaggers contracted for this work only if they guaranteed the military brass such stuff would be considered Confidential, clearly that wasn’t the case.
Important papers were left out in the open, spread across desks, the company clearly lax. Their attitude must have been: Come on, we’re all good Americans here. Right?
Okay, I’m beginning to get it. De Mohrenschildt is a Soviet spy. So far as he knows, I’m still on their side, having never renounced my Marxist beliefs. He will ask me to photograph those maps and turn the pictures over to him so he can relay them to the U.S.S.R. Then they will know how much the U.S. knows.
My guess is, George will want me to go along with this.
“So that’s why De Mohrenschildt wanted you in Dallas so badly. Strong ‘check’ move on his part. Here’s how we’ll ‘checkmate’ him. Alter the ‘legend’ again. Start expressing second thoughts about Russia. Maybe you were too hard on the system. You’re thinking maybe it’s time to reconsider, arrange for you, Marina, and June to go back. Make sure De Mohrenschildt hears this.”
“Listen, before you hang up, one other thing. While in the darkroom, and using the film drying machine, I noticed something else. In addition to the Soviet Union, a large number of the U2 photos appearing daily now feature images of Cuba.”
“Huh! The military didn’t tell us about that. Maybe they think there are secrets too secret even to share with the CIA.”
“Well, I thought you ought to know. Lots of Cuban place-names. It appears they’re constructing concrete bunkers in hidden enclaves. My take? They’re installing some sort of electronic equipment in the eastern area near San Cristobal.”
A long pause at the other end. Then: “The Cubans aren’t sophisticated enough for that. My guess? The Russians are in this up to their necks. What we feared most: Soviets in Cuba.”
“Creating observation posts to detect our U2 flights?”
“Could be even worse than that. Missile launchers, atomic warheads pointed directly at the U.S.”
“Oh, shit. Just a hop, skip and a jump south of Florida? What a terrible advantage that would give them if war—”
“Can you re-photograph all the Cuban stuff, send it on directly to me? We’ll then get it to the president.”
“Of course. Maybe that’ll repair things between Kennedy and the Company after that ugly mess at Bay of Pigs.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t trust him, ever since he laid the blame for that fiasco on us. I gotta say, though, Lee, who I do trust. You! You’ve proven yourself our very best operative.”
This time, a pause at Lee’s end. “Thank you!”
“One last thing. It would be opportune for us to know what sort of information De Mohrenschildt already possesses. You ready to put some of your expert marine training into effect?”
A week later, De Mohrenschildt left Dallas for a three-day business trip. As always, he remained mum about precisely where he was headed, even to his wife Jeanne. To keep her mind off any growing concerns, repressing her fear that she might be married to a traitor, Jeanne flew off to New York for upscale shopping.
When De Mohrenschildt returned, he knew at once that the papers in his office were not in the same arrangements he had left them. Reports about his expedition to Mexico and Central America had clearly been marked in pencil. This had to mean that someone slipped in, photographed everything, those half-erased pencil marks employed to focus a camera.
The CIA did this! Lee Harvey Oswald can’t be ruled out. These are the very kinds of skills I was going to ask him to employ in copying maps at Jaggers for us. Might he be a triple threat? If so, he and I have more in common than I realized.
*
Lee broke and entered De Mohrenschildt’s home under orders from George. Shortly, he would attempt a more serious crime on his own. To a degree Lee’s appetite for blood had been whetted by the killing of that taunting marine in the South Pacific. Then he had been involved in personal revenge on a bully.
Now, another plan took form, one he knew George would not approve of. Lee devised a plan to assassinate an American military officer. Slowly, the idea developed in his unique mind.
“Lee? What’s wrong?” In the wee small hours of the morning, Marina emerged from a deep sleep, filled with nightmares.
She had been drawn to consciousness by a realization that her husband sat, rather than laying beside her. She could feel his intensity, smell his cold sweat, sense the wild emotions now possessing him. On some level she realized that, for at least a moment, performance was no longer the order of the day.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Lee whispered. “Everything’s right. I understand now what I was born to achieve.”
“What?” she asked, rising up naked from beneath the sheets. Marina seized the shivering youth in her arms.
Whoever she is, whatever her name may be ... at this moment, I so want to believe her love for me is sincere ...
“I must assassinate an enemy of the people,” Lee confided.
He felt as she did. George’s words of warning about her true status, their marriage a charade, mattered not a whit, to him or to her. They were man and woman in the most primal sense.
Come morning, all of that might be lost, dawn’s light bringing reality back into play. At this moment, they existed in near-darkness, the black enormity cut by moonlight, sneaking through the window, carrying lunacy into their shadow-world.
“What?” Marina gasped, cradling Lee like a child, he as much a baby for the moment as June. “Have you gone mad?”
They were in Dallas now, together again, at the apartment in an old house on Elsbeth Street in Oakcliff, a Tudor-style building with handsome brick which Lee rented for $68 a month.
A month later, they would move to yet another apartment, a mere two blocks away, on Neely Street, a considerably downscale piece of property with shingles falling off its façade and a strange smell in the hallways. This would mark their eleventh residence in less than half a year.
She sensed that her husband, for reasons unclear to her, perhaps even to him, now repeated the pattern of his youth.
“How can I tell you anything?” he sobbed. “I know you are not who you claim to be. Marina is only a myth.”
She drew Lee down on the bed, crawling over on top.
“Forgive me,” she cried, her words emanating from some deep space inside her, from the heart, not the head, as she had no control over their flow. “It’s true. Can you forgive me, Lee?”
“Yes, and I’m truly sorry I hit you. I was so shocked—”
“I understand. The sense of betrayal you must have felt—”
“But I betrayed you, too. Pretending to be what I was not.”
Her mouth shushed him with kisses. “Listen to me. None of that matters now. Not who you were, or are. Me neither. At this moment, we are man and woman, husband and wife. Nothing matters but the two of us. Not country, not values, not politics—”
“How I wish I could believe that.”
“Believe it!” She then proceeded to fuck him in a way that Lee had never been fucked before. This was not pleasure-fucking or power-fucking; not ego-fucking, fantasy-fucking, manipulative fucking, mercy-fucking, or procreation-fucking. Not any kind of fucking other than the purest fucking that exists, fucking which is instinctual rather than conscious. Their fucking alternately gentle and crude. Fucking that felt creative, fucking as the world’s original art form, long before humankind diverted such passion into philosophy, painting, poetry. They fucked as if their lives depended on how hard each could fuck the other.
Neither fucked for him or herself, only for the mate. They fucked their brains out. Their hearts, souls, and bodies, too. They fucked until they couldn’t fuck anymore. Then they fucked some more. They fucked until the sensuality of fucking gave way to something far more profound. Spiritual, even.
They fucked as ancient Celts fucked, in the moonlight. Fucking as a form of worship to some dark pre-Judeo-Christian goddess. Fucking not as civilized religions perceive fucking, as original sin; rather, as a form of prayer, a full surrender to nature within the self as a means of absolutely surrendering to the greater, outer nature around them. They said nothing to one another the entire time, for that would have broken the spell.
They fucked as a means of communication that eons earlier preceded language; a primitive, pure means of revealing all to another person. And when, finally, they finished fucking, each felt born again. Their lives would start over; a clean slate.
“From now on,” Marina whispered into Lee’s ear, “it’s you and me against the world.”
“I knew that before you told me.”
“Of course you did.”
“This is real, then?”
“As real as it gets. As real as it can ever be.”
“They can’t beat us. Not now that we have each other.”
“We do, don’t we? We didn’t. Until tonight.”
“Now, tell me what consumes you so. Your secret is safe with me. That was not true before. It is now. You must believe.”
“I do! Marina ...if that is indeed your name ...”
“Shakespeare said: ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’”
“So you’re smart. And educated.”
“Yes. From now on, I will always be the real me with you, whatever you choose to call me. Now, share the real you.”
“Since I was little, I believed I had a special purpose in life. Never once did I feel normal, another ordinary person. I was an invisible man, worthless; or I had some higher function to perform. For me, there could be no in-between. Either Lee Harvey Oswald was nothing at all or a truly great man.”
Marina gasped, sincerely weeping, “You are frightening me!” She held him tighter than before, as if his life, and her own, depended on her assuming the strength of an Earth Mother.
“I’m frightening myself,” he answered, kissing her hair, cheeks, mouth. “I was born to take another man’s life—”
“You’ll go to jail,” she cried. “Maybe be executed—”
“Not,” he insisted, recalling Nietzsche, “if I truly am what I believe myself to be: beyond good and evil.”
The Superman. A supreme being. Unrestricted by morality.
Not that I can’t be wounded, even killed. Only that such a thing would not mark the end of Lee Oswald. Only the beginning.
*
If Dwight D. Eisenhower was the kindly Dr. Jekyll of those generals who commanded our military during World War II, then Edwin ‘Ted’ Walker provided his dark doppelgonger, an evil Mr. Hyde. Ike, according to those who worked with him, performed a spontaneous victory dance after learning that President Harry Truman would follow through on the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision to integrate the military and begin the end of racism in society; Ted, as members of his command recall, spat.
He complied, only because as a general he could not disobey orders. A dozen years later, President Eisenhower put Walker in charge of the forced desegregation of public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. Again, the general followed his commands.
Eventually, Walker retired from the military in protest. As a civilian, and by entering politics, he could defend everything he held most dear: a white Protestant ruling class, lording it over what he referred to as “the mongrel races”: blacks, Jews, Italians, Spanish, Asians, the Irish. Catholics constituted in his mind an “impure” breed of Christians.
“Hitler had the right idea,” he told his supporters. “We can’t put the ethnics in camps, this being America. But we sure ought to go back to the good ol’ days when we didn’t let them sit next to us on buses or use public toilets.”
For Walker, the breaking point came when an Irish-Catholic was elected president of the United States. Ted could no longer take pride in saluting the flag. His anger turned to rage.
“We have to take our country back before it’s too late,” he howled. A small minority of Americans agreed with him.
When JFK announced that the army would be deployed to Mississippi in September, 1962, to assure an African-American, James Meredith, be admitted as student at the state university, Walker decried JFK represented an even more clear and present danger than Ike. This, despite JFK’s secretive leadership in the attempt to overthrow Castro during the CIA led Bay of Pigs, and the president’s upcoming face-off with Khrushchev over Russia’s deployment of missiles in Cuba. Working from classified data referred to him by the CIA, these military secrets had been uncovered by a top agent working out of Dallas, Texas.
What did George say so long ago now? ‘Keep this in mind, Lee: John Fitzgerald Kennedy will become the most important person in your life ...’
To a moral monster like Walker, none of this mattered. A common belief that all Americans ought to be equal, regardless of skin color, qualified Ike and JFK as part of the problem in Walker's patently racist mind.
“I only wish someone would shoot him,” Walker confided to his closest friends about JFK. He dare not say something like this in public for fear of being branded a traitor ...
To Lee Harvey Oswald, a fervent supporter of Eisenhower’s 1957 effort at desegregation and JFK’s 1962 follow-up, such statements qualified Gen. Walker as an enemy of the people. If America were ever to move forward, become the great land it had the potential to be, such a fascist must be silenced.
Gradually, Lee had come to believe that this was the job he had been born for. Save JFK; save America. Kill Walker.
Without George or the CIA knowing anything. They likely wrote Walker off as a nut-case appealing only to extremists.
But that’s how Hitler got started. Early on, no one took him seriously. Then, when they finally did, it was too late. All those innocent lives lost! I know what people say: ‘It can’t happen here.’ Well, I know better. It can, unless we stop it.
Or, more correctly, unless I stop it!
*
On January 28, Lee—employing the alias ‘A.J. Hidell’-—put in an order with Seaport Traders, in Los Angeles, for a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, the cost $29.95 plus postage and handling. Nine days later, the gun was delivered to his Elsbeth Street apartment.
In mid-March, a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, complete with state of the art telescopic sight, arrived for Lee, now living on West Neely, addressed to his alias.
“Lee? Are you going to take up hunting again?”
“In a manner of speaking, Marina.”
Lee took to slipping out of the house late at night with his Imperial Reflex camera. When he arrived for work at the photographic lab the following day he carried along with him undeveloped rolls of film. In the evening, he returned with blow-ups of an alley behind some stately house in the Turtle Creek section of Dallas.
Marina begged to know what was going on. Lee insisted that he trusted her completely now. They truly were man and wife. Now and forever. But she was safer not knowing.
“If what you say is true, I ought to know everything.”
“I can’t and won’t endanger you.”
On March 31 Lee, dressed entirely in black. He cradled his new rifle, the pistol worn on his hip as a Western cowboy might position it, holding in his free hand copies of Red newspapers, The Worker and Militant. Lee instructed Marina to take his camera from the kitchen table and requested that she accompany him into their narrow back-yard. There, Lee raised the rifle and, offering his signature sneer, insisted that Marina snap pictures.
“What for?” she dared ask.
“Posterity.”
On April 5, while General Walker traveled on a fund-raising tour to fund his anti-equality-for-ethnics political campaigns, Lee took his rifle, positioned himself in the alley behind the general’s mansion-like home, and stared through the telescopic sight into Walker’s office. There he general often sat alone.
“Where are you going?” Marina whispered as he left.
“Target practice,” Lee laughingly replied.
When he returned, the gun was gone. Marina so wanted to believe Lee had abandoned it. More likely, he hid the piece for future use. She couldn’t sleep, thought about calling the police for Lee’s own good. If she did that, he would never forgive her.
He demands total loyalty. I cannot deny him this.
On April 10, Marina headed over to the home of one Ruth Paine, another Russian émigrés, living in Irving, for a visit. As the two conversed, Marina burst into tears and threw herself into the stunned woman’s arms. When Ruth asked if Lee were abusing her again, Marina offered a surprising retort: “I only wish it were that!” When Ruth attempted to learn more, Marina refused to continue, though she wept uncontrollably.
When at last the tears subsided, Ruth suggested that Marina leave Lee and move in with her. Marina agreed to consider that. She also mentioned that she had been thinking about a return to Russia for herself and baby June.
“And ... Lee?”
“That is yet to be determined.”
Marina truly did love Lee now. But she had to put her baby first, all dreams of romantic adventures in espionage long gone. As an acceptable holding pattern she’d remain in Irving, thereby removing herself from Lee’s immediate presence without actually deserting him. That was the best Marina could do for now.
“Yes, Ruth. June and I will move in with you at once.”
This explains why Marina was not at home when Lee returned from work Wednesday, April 10. Confused, he scrawled:
If I am apprehended by the police tonight, or killed by them, or am forced to flee without seeing you and the baby one last time, send any information as to what happens to me to the Soviet embassy in Washington. Newspaper clippings, any hard-copy that you can locate. As you know, The Red Cross in Russia serves the secret police. They can help you!
At nine p.m. precisely, General Walker, having returned home the previous day, sat at his desk before the half-open window, preparing his income taxes. A bullet tore through the glass, past his left ear, into the rear wall. The plaster there exploded, shards flying over Walker, leaving the general whitewashed. He, utterly unaware of the irony here, sat motionless, not believing this had happened.
Seconds later, he regrouped, leaped up, and called the police. They arrived shortly and thoroughly searched the area but the would-be assassin was long gone, and without a trace.
I had him in my sights. Even a lousy shot such as I could not miss at that range, not with a telescopic site. So how did it happen? Blame Dostoevsky, the existential issues he raised in Crime and Punishment. Does any person have the right to take another man’s life, even for the good of humanity?
While I don’t necessarily accept that such a thing is wrong I’m not altogether certain I can live with it. Something in my subterranean self rose in opposition against my conscious intent and caused me to blink. Alright, that’s over and done with.
I can’t change the past. But if push ever comes to shove again—if I ever have to kill a man I consider evil to do good for humanity—then Dostoevsky be damned, I will shoot true!
One of the many films Lee had watched on TV in his youth was titled Man Hunt. Released to theatres in 1941, after America entered the war, it was written and filmed before that occurred. The story concerned a rogue male, played by Walter Pidgeon, who sets out alone with his rifle, planning to assassinate Hitler.
Tripped up in his effort by unforeseen circumstances, he fails to accomplish his task. There are no regrets as to the attempt. “Millions of lives would be saved!” he insists.
“Millions of lives would be saved!” Lee told Marina when she returned home to pick up clothing and bid him farewell. He shivered with fear, answering her hesitant question about what he’d been up to by admitting that only a little more than an hour earlier he had attempted to assassinate General Walker.
Unable to respond, she packed her bags, grabbed the baby, called a taxi and headed off the home of Ruth Paine.
“It is not that I love you less, Lee,” she said while on her way out the door. “Only that I love our child more.”
*
“Lee,” De Mohrenschildt asked when he came to visit the following day, after the news reported an anonymous person had attempted to take Walker’s life. “How did you miss?”
“First, how did you know it was me?”
“Who else?” De Mohrenschildt asked, extending his arms.
“In truth,” Lee laughed, “I’m trying to understand that.”
Lee never saw or spoke to De Mohrenschildt again. Nor did Lee have an opportunity to take a second shot at Walker. That night, George called him at home, obviously considering the situation too important to wait for the secret phone contact.
“Have you gone freakin’ crazy?”
“Maybe I’ve finally come to my senses.”
A long pause. “Do you want to continue as an agent?”
“More than anything in the world.”
“Alright, then. I cannot allow you to remain in Dallas if I believe you may be planning another attempt. Tomorrow, board a bus to New Orleans. There’s work that needs to be done there.”
“Is that an order?”
“Yes. Listen, Lee. I hate racism, too. We all of us do. But that’s not our primary concern at the moment.”
“It’s every decent man’s primary concern. Always!”
“Yes, yes. But we have another big job coming up and you are the one to handle it. See you in the Big Easy.”
Alone, missing his wife and baby daughter, Lee spent his last night in Dallas sipping beer and crying over old Sinatra records. One song, called “The House I Live In,” referred to the U.S. itself, those many wonderful ‘rooms’ open to its citizens, each some aspect of our abundance of riches. Lee appreciated the final line: “Most of all, the people, that’s America to me!”
Me, too! As always, you speak directly to me.
In its purest form, that’s what Marxism is all about. Trying to achieve the most good for the largest amount of ordinary, everyday people. I hear you, Frankie. I get it.
This led Lee to reconsider the current president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, if for no other reason than that Sinatra had campaigned for JFK. For the longest time, Lee had taken George’s word on anything and everything at face value. That included JFK. Up until Bay of Pigs, JFK was considered to be a wild card; no one in the CIA seemed certain as to what this new president might do next. Initially they supported him, as JFK did appear to clearly favor them over the FBI.
Then came the Bay of Pigs, a turning point in the relationship between the president and the Company.
That’s when everything swiftly headed south, for JFK and the CIA figuratively. Now, for Lee Harvey Oswald. Literally.