“CIA, FBI? We’re all swimming around in the
same alphabet soup these days.”
—Leo G. Carroll as “Head of Security” in
Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959)
Eclectic, Frank Sturgis, aka ‘George’, decided while considering the dozen people seated around an ovular oak table. When was the last time he had come to such a conclusion ...?
Oh, of course. Cuba; November 30, 1960. My God! Was that less than three years ago? Seems like centuries.
Everything is so different. The thought that these people could come together then would have seemed madness. Now? Common sense. For here I am, representing the CIA, while ...
To George’s immediate right sat a middle-aged man who, only a few years previous, had been a member of the FBI. After that, he’d gone into business for himself, occasionally employed by the Company, today representing the Bureau. Just beyond him, a State Department official: gray hair and matching suit, deeply concerned, profoundly quiet.
Continuing on and around: a beautiful brunette, the sort that you expected to see as window-dressing in Hollywood movies though she’d never appeared in one; the Russian consul, known to be a KGB operative; a member of the Miami anti-Castro Cubans; a representative from Castro; the best-looking man in the Mob; a former vice-president; a slender blonde; an admiral, a five-star general. And, finally, a much revered showbiz celebrity.
“So here we all are,” George sighed. The others laughed uneasily in this safe-house, the one room in Washington, D.C. absolutely guaranteed to be 100 % free of internal wiretaps.
“Where’s Lee?” the FBI representative asked.
“That’s our first point of business. Two days ago, I approached him with our proposal.”
“Did he turn you down?” the anti-Castro representative wanted to know. “But you said that—”
“I know what I said. He did not turn me down. Not yet.”
“What precisely did he do?” the FBI man wanted to know.
“He visibly recoiled in horror.”
“Lee’s been so loyal—” the Mafioso mused.
“Lee was loyal to an idea he has in his head. His notion of patriotism turns out to be different from our own. At any rate, he’s supposed to call me today with his final decision.”
“If not Lee, who will ...” The State Department man couldn’t finish his question so George performed that function.
“Get the job done? Deciding that is our major concern. But I must say, I don’t anticipate it will be Lee Harvey Oswald.”
*
One day before the original 54/12 Group met, the subject of their current discussion strolled along Bourbon Street. Like his mentor, Lee experienced a sense of déjà vu. The last time he’d taken this route had been in late April, 1954.
I was fifteen years old then. I arrived feeling like a sick bird, pirouetting to the ground. Only to soar Phoenix-like back up into fresh skies after watching Suddenly.
A warm drizzle descended, even as it had that now long ago day. Lee glanced around at the drops landing on neon between Canal Street and Esplanade Avenue, the fabled eight blocks which constituted upper Bourbon. He passed Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, a vestige of that noble pirate who, at a crucial moment in our history, chose to do the right thing and help Andrew Jackson defeat the British. Nearby stood the Old Absinthe House, once a place of shame for those not strong enough to resist its lurid temptations, today a tourist-trap like most other artifacts.
Even the streetcar named Desire awaited world-travelers anxious to pose on its façade for the cameras of friends.
Not everything appeared the same. The recently elected District Attorney Jim Garrison had, on paper at least, closed down houses of prostitution, hoping to create a family-friendly atmosphere. Still, at hot-spots like Beyond the Green Door and Nightmare Alley, a visitor could still seek out girls of the night.
Even in broad daylight, no pun intended.
Not Lee. For one thing, he loved-—sincerely, truly, even devotedly loved—his wife, now that they had come to terms with each other’s true identities. Besides, pleasure of any sort—drinking, gambling, whatever—was not now a preoccupation.
The time to decide had come. He must reach a conclusion today that would determine the rest of his life. And far more. The fate of his country—the world!—was at stake here.
“Your next assignment,” George had whispered when they met two days earlier in the safest of all the Big Easy safe-houses, “will be the most important of your life.” This occurred in the office of Guy Bansila, an FBI agent and private-eye. Located in the Newman Building, this enclave featured an entrance on 531 Lafayette Street and, around the corner, another at 544 Camp.
George employed the former. Lee, following instructions from eccentric airline pilot George Ferrie, opted for the latter.
“Stop talking in circles and—”
“Brace yourself. On November 22, President Kennedy is scheduled to arrive in Dallas. A motorcade will whisk him through the downtown area, on his way to deliver several speeches. He will never arrive at those destinations.”
“Why?” Lee, growing anxious, asked.
“Because,” George continued, eyeballing Lee, “before he can, you will assassinate the president of the United States.”
*
Lee had arrived in New Orleans by bus from Dallas on April 25, carrying precious little along with him: a few clothes and books he’d hastily shoved into a pair of duffel bags, his secret papers, and the dismantled Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, along with its telescopic sight. The moment he disembarked, Lee headed for a pay phone and called Lillian Murret, she happily surprised to hear from her relative.
“My God. Lee? I’d know that voice anywhere!”
Lee had not contacted his aunt since mid-October, 1956, when he called to say he’d joined the Marines and would stay in touch though he failed to do so. Recovering from her surprise, Lillian inquired as to whether Lee had a place to stay. When he admitted he did not, and was likely headed for the Y.M.C.A, she invited Lee to her home over on French Street. Each morning, he rose early and, after a breakfast prepared by Lillian or her daughter Marilyn Dorothea Murret, a schoolteacher, headed off job-hunting.
“It’s so wonderful for me to rediscover my family.”
Both women were fascinated that after returning from a long day’s fruitless search, he would not, like any ordinary person, plop down in front of the TV after supper. Instead, Lee hurried up to his room, where he read late into the late night. “I didn’t have the benefit of higher education,” Lee told them. “I hope that, after the Revolution comes, all Americans, no matter how humble their origins, will be able to attend college...”
“What revolution?” Lillian, confused, asked.
“Why, the worldwide revolution, of course.”
Lee had spent a great deal of time thinking during his bus trip eastward, alternating quiet meditation with reading. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s final work, struck Lee as greater even than Crime and Punishment. How artfully the master spun what initially seemed little more than a domestic squabble in Staraya, Russia, as an absent father left his lonely sons to fend for themselves, into tragedy worthy of the Bard.
An absent father? Domestic squabbles? I can relate to that!
As one after another of the brothers were introduced, Lee related in turn to each: Dimitri, the hedonist, who wallowed in diversions of female flesh; Vanya, the man of logic, observing human suffering and as a result questioning the concept of a benign God; Aloysha, the boy whose faith could not be shaken by anything worldly, offering Vanya one extreme pole, if only his Existential questions could be set aside; and Smerdyakov, a dark nihilist who had given up not only faith but even the ability to care for humanity, the other extreme that also drew Vanya.
Ultimately, Vanya served as Doestoevsky’s central figure. For it was he who must decide whether to abandon all hope and enter the abyss from which there was no return, or be born-again, somehow accepting that life still had meaning.
Alternately, Lee read, transported into this land of long ago and far away, and slept. When he did, Lee dreamed, fiction by Dostoevsky mingling with facts of the contemporary world. His unconscious mind returned to “The Grand Inquisitor”: a Spanish nobleman who embodied Satan on earth, rejecting Jesus on his Second Coming, yet embraced, even kissed, by the innocent one.
What did this metaphoric episode finally mean? Should Lee too strive to love rather hate? If so, then he must reject the words George had passed on to him as a mantra, replaced by a code of his own: Any enemy of my friend is my brother.
This is the person who had met with George, he unaware of the sea-change within Lee, shortly after arrival. Yesterday, Lee had been told he would have the honor of killing Kennedy.
This appears vaguely familiar ... I feel as if I’ve been here before ... Oh, wow! ... Yes, I do remember ...
Lee found himself on a side-street, standing in front of the same run-down theatre he’d entered in 1954. Could history repeat itself? Might he once more find himself at the movies?
Lee glanced up at the marquee, which read: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE starring Frank Sinatra. Holy! Accident or destiny?
*
From the moment this film began, Lee sensed that he was watching something other than a conventional Hollywood movie, despite Sinatra’s star-power and big-scale production values. For one thing, there were no opening credits, not even a logo to identify the studio.
“Korea 1952,” appeared over the shot of Sinatra, playing Major Ben Marco, seated in the passenger seat of a military convoy truck beside Laurence Harvey. The cultivated English actor had been cast as Sgt. Raymond Shaw. Together, they pulled up to a brothel where troops partied inside. Looking dour—isn’t that the word so many people use to describe me?—Shaw left the vehicle and entered, assembling his squad for a combat mission.
Clearly, these soldiers had one thing in common: To a man, they hated Raymond, considered him pompous. As to their insults, Raymond answered with a sneer.
That’s me! Not educated and refined like him. Still ...
Shortly, they were taken captive, subject to brainwashing. An ever-circling camera alternated between an image of the Reds observing these captives as this scene realistically played out, and the manner in which the Americans saw, in their minds, what took place: they guests as some American garden-club.
I read an article somewhere, I think Saturday Review, that claimed movies will be different in the Sixties ... the old clichés will fall away. In their place, more ’daring’ films.
What alternately appeared as a normal American lady and a cruel communist agent approached Raymond, instructing that he pick out a squad member he disliked the least and strangle him. Without hesitation, Raymond did. Later, Raymond was instructed to approach his friend Marco, borrow that man’s pistol, then shoot a boyish trooper between the eyes. Raymond did as told.
As the Red leader explained, the notion that a man who has been brainwashed cannot be forced to commit an act that he finds morally repulsive is but a myth. Here was evidence. Two corpses lay on the stage, victims of Raymond’s brainwashing, proof that the process worked.
All this has something to do with me! Let’s wait and see.
After the surviving soldiers returned home, they shared a single opinion of their sergeant: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Whenever Raymond’s name came up, diverse characters would repeat that precise phrase as if by rote.
My God! Could that be true of me? Like Sinatra and the others, without even knowing it? Perhaps I’ve been listening to George for so long, without argument, I’ve lost any ability to think for myself. Accepting point blank my “legend.”
If so, is there anything left of Lee Harvey Oswald, the person I once was as compared to the persona that I play?
*
Initially, things went smoothly in New Orleans. When not out looking for work, Lee felt a compunction to make contact with his roots, as if aware on some level that the final chapter in the brief drama constituting his life had begun to unfold. On the final Sunday in April, four days after arriving, he headed out to Lakeview Cemetery. Here, his biological father lay buried.
In all these years, Lee had never once visited the site. Marguerite hadn’t brought him here, claiming “let sleeping dogs lie.” As always, Mama spoke in annoyingly timeworn clichés.
Had you lived, might everything have turned out different? I guess that’s one of those things I never will know ...
The following Monday, Lee borrowed Lillian’s phone book and poured over the listings for everyone in New Orleans with the last name of ‘Oswald.’ One by one, he called each, politely introducing himself, asking if they might possibly be related.
A few hung up; most were pleasant but said ‘no.’ A lady named Hazel answered: yes, indeed, she was the widow of his father’s brother. Lee took a bus to the outskirts of town and visited her. A simple, gentle woman, Hazel offered Lee tea and cookies, which he accepted in his most humble guise.
“To think, after all these years, you would show up.”
They spoke for hours about her memories of Lee’s dad, who came to life at last as a decent, hardworking fellow. As Lee was about to leave, Hazel recalled a framed photograph up in the attic.
“I want you to have it, Lee. After all, it’s been sitting there gathering dust. Hopefully it’ll mean something to you.”
Lee thanked her profusely. In the faded portrait, Lee's father smiled pleasantly. Lee set the framed image on the desk in his room. He fell asleep considering what might have been as compared to what was.
A week and a half later, Lee found a perfunctory job. He would lubricate machines used to process coffee at the William B. Reily Company on Magazine Street. He took a furnished apartment several doors down, so there would be no need to waste money on bus fare. Though paid a mere $1.50 an hour, Lee gleefully phoned Marina at Ruth Paine’s house in Dallas.
“It’s me. I’ve got a job and a room. Come, please?”
“Papa nus lubet!” Marina cried, cradling baby June. Lee knew enough Russian to understand this meant “papa loves us!”
For all he knew, Marina might still be in touch with the KGB. He, certainly, kept in daily touch with George. None of that mattered. No matter what happened in the world, it could not touch them now. Not after that sublime night in Dallas
“Come quickly, Marina? I so ache to hold you and June.”
Lee was to be disappointed. Though he offered to send Marina bus-fare, she allowed Ruth to drive them down and remain for several days. Lee tried to make the best of it, showing the women around his beloved Quarter, pointing out quirky facts as to the saints and sinners whose intrigues caused this town to be called The Big Easy. He could tell that Marina, at least while under Ruth’s influence, grew ever more uneasy.
Yes, she appreciated the rich atmosphere. But the apartment was shabbier even than the worst they’d occupied in Dallas-Fort Worth. Here, there were cockroaches, something new to her.
“Oh, God, Lee. When I stepped on one, it crunched.”
Things improved slightly after Ruth headed home. Then Lee could take Marina out to enjoy the few delights he had known as a boy. Along Lake Pontchartrain, anybody could roll up their pants nearly to the knees, step into the shallows, and go crabbing. She, five months pregnant with their second child, laughed out loud as the green-backed creatures desperately tried to slip away sideways.
“You did this as a child? With your friends?”
She sensed at once that the question, however innocent, saddened him. “I didn’t have friends. I went with my mother.”
At that moment, Lee noticed something that had eluded him. When Marina turned, her manner of movement recalled Marguerite, as she had appeared when they two crabbed here together.
*
As Raymond Shaw stepped off the plane from Korea, reporters anxious to speak with him instead found themselves interviewing his mother. Eleanor, played by Angela Lansbury, darted into the midst of the hero's homecoming, turning these proceedings, in Raymond’s words, into “a three ring circus.” Also, she affected an accent meant to suggest Southern gentility, coming across rather as vulgar.
Marguerite. She might as well be playing Marguerite!
Accompanying Eleanor was her second husband, Raymond’s stepfather, a right-wing senator from some unspecified state. “My two little boys,” Eleanor cackled, embracing them both.
Perhaps this is why Raymond is so dislikeable, an upper-class version of myself. Marguerite was the one who made me the way I was then. Why? It played into her deep, desperate needs.
“It’s a terrible thing to hate your mother,” Raymond Shaw confessed to Ben Marco. “But I didn’t always hate her. When I was a child, I only kind of disliked her.”
Does everyone in the world experience what I do at the movies? Believe the words and images are personal?
When Raymond mentioned that he was going to work for a liberal newspaper editor, mother screeched: “That communist?” Later, a moderate senator played by John McGiver says of Eleanor to Raymond: “One of your mother’s least endearing traits is to refer to anyone who doesn’t agree with her as ‘a communist.’” As for ‘Johnny,’ Eleanor’s right-wing spouse, he raises a worthless piece of paper in the air and absurdly announces: “I have here a list of 200 known communists working in the Defense Department.”
He’s supposed to be McCarthy! This isn’t just one more thriller. This film’s about politics. And they’re making a clown out of the man who terrified everyone so back in the Fifties as today the fear of anything Red diminishes. That’s the way I’ve been thinking. Castro might have leaned toward democracy if we hadn’t out of mindless horror at the thought of ‘revolution’ pushed him into the enemy camp by trying to kill him.
Who knows? With all the indignities we’ve heaped on the Beard, maybe it’s possible to win him back? If someone took it upon himself to head on down there, talk sense with the guy, maybe he’d be willing to let bygones be bygones ...
All it takes is one man daring enough to give it a try.
Raymond was trained to kill, the big Chinese guy with the huge mustache laughed, and not remember that he’d killed. Sent back to the U.S. to do the bidding of Manchuria and Moscow. All one of their agents need do was place a phone call, instruct the brainwashed youth to play solitaire; once Raymond turned over the Queen of Diamonds, his own self disappeared.
The enemy agents had Raymond kill his old mentor at the paper so he, the bright assistant, could assume the duties.
“There’s something phony going on,” Ben Marco, sweating at night with terrible dreams, told his military superiors. “With me, and Raymond Shaw, and the whole Medal of Honor.”
Marco had seen to it that Raymond received the decoration for wiping out an entire enemy brigade. He had wiped out an entire enemy brigade. That never happened. Marco too was brainwashed. Other soldiers also experienced the nightmares in which the truth, as they knew it to be, attempted to work its way up from repression to a conscious level.
I don’t necessarily believe George set out to brainwash me. All the same, he did create an identity I assumed. Until lately, when I’ve begun to harbor second thoughts. Just like Sinatra in his latest film.
Unlike George, I now believe that a balance between the extremes of far right and far left allows for individual initiative while insuring community survival. This has existed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt and The New Deal.
Kennedy? He stands for the same thing. The New Frontier: Ask not you’re your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. Best of all, his civil rights initiatives attempt to extend that “you” to black people at last.
My kind of president. And they want me to shoot him?
*
George had remained in daily contact with Lee during those hot spring months leading up to this crisis. And, unwittingly, George set Lee’s then-vague attitudes in place with another of his tactics. George instructed Lee to write a letter, dated May 26, to Fair Play for Cuba Committee, headquartered in New York.
This organization called for the U.S. to recognize Cuba and commence with a normalization of relations. Lee’s instructions were to request he be allowed to open a F.P.C.C. branch in New Orleans. George’s strategy: this would allow Lee to infiltrate the group and then help the CIA keep tabs on its members.
From the start, however, when he began reading materials mailed to him, Lee sensed that their approach was more or less identical to the one developing in his mind. Again, he dared not mention this to George. For the time being following orders, Lee rented a small room in an office building at 544 Camp Street. This would allow him to initiate such an infiltration.
Hardly by accident, this happened to be adjacent to where FBI agent Guy Bansila, along with George Ferrie and a local businessman, the ardent anti-communist Clay Shaw, orchestrated local anti-Castro activities. ‘George’ created this arrangement so Lee, upon receiving information, could walk across the way and turn it over to his confederates.
But do I really want to do that? And since when is the CIA comfortable working with the FBI? Are they coming together now?
*
Marina experienced déjà vu as she woke in the night at the realization that Lee was sitting, rather than lying, beside her. For a moment she believed they were back in Dallas. Then she realized where she was, Lee lost in the throes of yet another of his nocturnal epiphanies. As in Texas, she rose up beside him.
“What is it?” She kissed his cheek. “Tell me.”
“I now know what I must do next. In a word? Cuba.”
“You’ve been assigned to try and kill Castro again?”
He gasped. “How did you know I once attempted to do that?”
“I know everything. That’s not important now.”
“You’re right. All that’s important—other than you and me and baby June—is what I’ve got to do. And it isn’t kill him. Marina, I must be the one who makes Fidel see that now there’s an opportunity to put the terrible past behind us ...”
Lee had been considering several things JFK said in recent weeks. Clearly, Kennedy had turned against the CIA: “I don’t think the intelligence reports are all that hot. I get more out of the New York Times.” Several days later he also announced: “Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war, or corruption, or both.”
The president must be referring to Cuba. Castro turned left as a reaction to Batista’s right-wing regime and the unannounced war the U.S. had unofficially declared. If such belligerence were to cease, might not Castro come around to a more democratic approach to government?
“But, Lee,” she wept. “You have no official power—”
“All the better. Any power I have comes from my will to do the right thing. This is about the great good a single person can achieve if only he believes in his own abilities to—”
“You heard that in some old film. John Wayne or Errol Flynn said something like that, and it got stuck in your mind. Yes?”
“Well? Shouldn’t we strive to be like those heroes? Robin Hood, Davy Crockett. Righting the world’s wrongs—”
“Lee, darling. Don’t you understand? That’s only a movie!”
“Shouldn’t life be more like the movies?”
“Yes, But it isn’t! That’s the whole point. Why we go to movies. There, everything can work out wonderfully at the fade-out. This is reality. There are no happy endings.”
“I can’t accept that.”
“But how would you even get there? It’s illegal to travel from the U.S. to Cuba now.”
He cradled her in his arms. “I’ve thought that through. Mexico! If I travel down there, I can pick up a Visa—”
“What makes you believe the Cubans will approve it?”
Now, Lee grew excited. “I’ve figured that out, too. George ordered me to create a new ‘legend’ in which I appear to be a pro-Castro activist so as to betray that cause? Well, I’m already ‘in.’ Only I won’t betray them. I’ll betray George.”
“Lee,” Marina gasped. “He’d have you killed—”
“Not if I outsmart him.”
Thanks to a paper-thin beam of moonlight seeping in the window, Marina could see that Lee now grinned from ear to ear. As he did whenever he’d convinced himself he was the master.
“Don’t underestimate George, Lee. He’ll—”
He hadn’t even heard her warning. “As he wants me to do, I’ll attract as much attention as I can to myself with Fair Play, allowing George to believe this is all being done to bring them down. Instead, I’ll head to Mexico, bringing evidence of my work for pro-Cuban forces with me. Once the people at Castro’s embassy see that, they’ll let me into the country. I can argue for a pro-American, pro-Democracy, pro-Kennedy and anti-Russian, anti-communist, anti-Khrushchev Cuba.”
“And you believe, you honestly believe, that you, acting on your own, with no back-up whatsoever, can achieve this?”
He turned to face her, out of his private zone, back in the world of one man and one woman, together in one bed. “I don’t believe—I know! Marina, from when I was a child, I sensed there had to be a purpose to my life. I’ve found it! Show the world that democracy and socialism can co-exist in a new order.”
“Who do you think you are: Jesus Christ?”
That was a difficult one to answer, but Lee did. “Yes. I guess I do. On some level, I always have.”
“Well, they’ll crucify you, too, if you attempt this.”
“If that’s the only way to bring The Word, so be it.”
Marina sobbed. “And, me? June? The baby yet to come?”
Lee kissed her head gently. “You must know I love you and our family more than anything else. But what I speak of reaches beyond that. A man must do what he must do.”
“So be it, then,” she said, capitulating. “But I won’t watch you die. Tomorrow, I’ll pack and return to Dallas.”
“Like me, you have to do what you consider best.”
“I’ll always be waiting for you, Lee. I love you.”
“How can you? I’m not lovable. I never have been.”
*
In The Manchurian Candidate, Raymond Shaw also discovered his one true love. Like Marina, a beautiful child-woman, half naive fawn, half Earth Mother. Joslyn. She was played by Leslie Parrish, a young blonde who looked amazingly like Marilyn Monroe back in the early 1950s, still fresh and giddy, with that open smile which in time gave way to hard, cynical laughter.
“I’m not lovable,” Raymond wailed. “Yes, but I love you,” the blonde, insisted. At once innocent and experienced, however improbable that may sound, Joslyn reminded Lee of Marina.
Joslyn’s father, a milk-toast liberal senator, finally found the courage to face off with Eleanor at a costume ball. She asked him to support her Johnny for the vice-presidential nomination; he railed at the terrible mischief these two caused for America in the name of right-wing causes.
“I think if Johnny were a paid Soviet agent,” the senator concluded, “he could not do more harm to this nation than he is now!” What irony, Lee thought. This arch Right Winger achieves precisely what the communists most desire: Americans turning against each other as during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.
“The Queen of Diamonds,” a psychiatrist told Marco about the symbol employed to set the brainwashed Shaw off on one of his missions, “is reminiscent of Raymond’s mother.”
A couple had entered and sat behind Lee. The man clearly was familiar with the Richard Connell novel on which this movie was based. He whispered to the woman beside him: “In the book the relationship between Raymond and mother is more extreme. The reason he’s the way he is? They slept in the same bed until he was sixteen. That’s what made him such an intense nut case.”
Until the age of sixteen? Longer even than Marguerite and me. It seemed so nourishing then. My mother consumed me in ways that I can’t even begin to comprehend. Just like Raymond.
Both of us tragic figures, like Oedipus of old. What would I have done in life without that seventh grade English teacher?
During the party, Joslyn arrives wearing a Queen of Diamonds costume. Raymond crumbles into her arms, unable to resist her. As if he had found a socially acceptable way to sleep with Eleanor, the two women inseparable in his mind.
Is that true of me as well? Marguerite, Marina ...
Then, at his mother’s command, Raymond Shaw, not realizing what he’s doing, calmly kills Joslyn and her gentle father.
Now, the deceased liberal senator’s words make sense, as does the film’s title. Johnny, the right-wing crazy, is a plant by the communists. How better to destroy the U.S. than from the inside out, the McCarthy figure a tool of the Reds? They believe if such a man is elected president, after assuming the murdered nominee’s place, the country will grow so dissatisfied with him, far to the right of, say, Batista, that America must experience a revolution in response, even as in Cuba. Then, communism wins.
“They can’t make me doing anything, Ben. Can’t they? Anything!?” Meaning that which is repellant to his human nature.
“We’ll see, kid. We’ll see what they can do and what they can’t do.” Marco knows what Raymond does not; Eleanor and Johnny want Raymond to kill the presidential nominee when he addresses the convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Precisely as this middle-of-the-road hopeful delivers his key line: “Nor would I ask my fellow Americans, in defense of our freedom, that which I would not gladly give myself—my life. My very life.”
A great statement. A Kennedy kind of statement.
Raymond is to hide above, shoot down with a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight. He became a marksman in the service.
Just like me! How complex the political game of chess can be. Only by supporting one’s arch enemy can the checkmate move occur. I ought to know; I’m in this up to my neck.
Spotting the streak of light from his place in the vast auditorium, Marco rushed through the building’s inner workings, hoping to arrive in time to stop Raymond.
What do I do now? Watch the rest of the film and find out.
When the major yanks open the door to that small booth, out of breath, Raymond brings the presidential candidate into his sights ... then swerves to the right, shooting his mother and father-in-law. Clearly, the Red Chinese agent was wrong. Raymond broke beyond bounds of brainwashing, turning the gun on them.
Yes. Now I understand what I must do ...
“You couldn’t have stopped them,” Raymond wept to Marco before taking his life. “The army couldn’t have stopped her. I had to!”
Suicide; which I have so often considered. Perhaps I’ll do that as well, take my own life, once my purpose in life is, like Raymond’s, fulfilled ...
*
Minutes later, Lee stumbled out of the louse-ridden movie house. This can only be fate, bringing me around to where it all began. Sinatra again instructing me, reversing the message of Suddenly. If that were one bookend, this is its opposite.
I feel like all four Karamazov brothers rolled up into one. So lost was I after George’s call. Do I still have any semblance left of free will? Am I fated to follow his command or might I, like Raymond, do precisely the opposite?
This wasn’t only a movie. Like Raymond, I’ll agree to go through with it, as George requested. Then, at the last minute, I’ll take out the true enemies of the people.
Half an hour later, Lee called George and apologized for his earlier hesitancy, agreeing to kill JFK on 11/22/63.
*
“Lee called me,” George informed the committee members. “He apologized for his hesitation and has now accepted.”
“So?” the FBI man said, shrugging. “It’s settled.”
“Not if I know Lee. Remember, I mentored him. Beyond that, you might even say ... I created him.”
“Like Frankenstein with his monster?” the blonde suggested.
“As you’ll recall from that old story, the creature was supposed to carry out the doctor’s orders. Instead, he turned on the man who had created him and destroyed Dr. Frankenstein.”
“As you now believe Oswald will?” The pro-Castro Cuban asked, his voice riddled with concern.
“I know him better than anyone else. Better than his wife, his mother. Perhaps I know Lee Harvey Oswald better even than Lee Harvey Oswald knows himself.”
“What’s your concern?” the brunette chimed in. “Do you think he’ll get cold feet at the last minute?”
“That’s not Lee. The problem is more serious. Lately, He’s been talking a lot about Kennedy, particularly the Civil Rights initiatives. Lee has always considered himself ... I think the term he employs is ‘a white Negro.’ Any friend of the colored people is, therefore, ipso facto Lee’s friend as well.”
“And any enemy ...” the anti-Castro Cuban added.
“... his enemy,” the State Department man concluded.
“My worry is that Lee agreed to carry out the assassination only after deciding against doing so.”
“Meaning,” the Mafioso in turn responded, “he’s taking the job to make certain it doesn’t get accomplished.”
“Lee once told me that, as a kid, his favorite TV show was called I Led Three Lives. I believe that’s what he’s doing now. Or at least attempting to achieve.”
“Meaning he’ll double cross us?” the general asked.
“Not as Lee sees it. He’ll do anything, including sacrifice himself if need be, to stop what he believes is wrong. It’s more on the order of, I‘d say, a triple-cross.”
“But we’re not wrong,” the former vice-president insisted.
“In our minds. Just as Lee, in his, is absolutely right. The point is, Lee is playing a kind of chess game. Well, I’ve played with him on occasion. Good as he is, I’m better. I know the strategies he always relies on to create a check, allowing me to checkmate him. I’ve come up with a way this can further benefit us.”
George then explained his plan. They would take Lee up on his offer while also assigning several other shooters to take down Kennedy. If George’s guess as to Lee’s reasoning proved inaccurate, no problem: with three marksmen firing from three different positions, chances of success were that much better. If Lee came through, he’d escape with the rest of the team.
If Lee refused to take a shot, likely one of the others would bring the president down. Then, when the moment of truth came around, George had a plan to pin the assassination on Lee.
“If Lee betrays us,” George concluded, “then he’ll be our fall guy, making it easier for the team to escape.”
Everyone agreed on this course of action. They mapped out plans. Lee should be told that he was now one of three separate shooters. That would insure he arrived at the scene, to aid or try and avoid the assassination. When push came to shove, Lee revealing his true colors, George would take it from there.
“Is everyone agreed on this course of action?”
“Agreed,” the others chanted in unison.
*
It was late evening when the meeting let out. George bid his fellow conspirators goodnight and stepped into darkness. He needed to wind down. Most men would head for a bar but he didn’t drink while on a major operation. A film was better. That was one of the things he and Lee did have in common: both loved to escape from reality by taking in a movie. The difference was, at least in George’s mind, George knew Hollywood films to only be fantasies. Lee foolishly took them far too seriously.
Perhaps that’s what distinguishes Lee the most in my mind. I’ve never met a man who can be so deeply touched by a film!
Still, when George walked three blocks northward to the nearest theatre, he couldn’t control himself from laughing at the irony. Playing there was PT-109, starring Cliff Robertson as a heroic, lionized, larger-than-life John Fitzgerald Kennedy.