Oswald's Tale (54 page)

1

Honeymoon

Robert Oswald and his wife, Vada, had two children; Lee and Marina had June. Robert’s house was small. Marguerite Oswald, as we can recall, visited Lee and Marina on their second day home, and made an executive decision. She would give notice on her nursing job in Crowell, Texas, move to Fort Worth, rent an apartment, and Lee and Marina could live with her. In a matter of two or three weeks after Oswald’s return, he was, therefore, back in his mother’s domain. “Mr. Rankin,” she tells her interlocutor at the Warren Commission, “we had no quarrels. This month was beautiful. Marina was very happy.”

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
. . . I had the car and the television and we went around.

As I say, they were free to come and go like they want. They would take long walks.

If you are not familiar with Fort Worth, Texas, from the Rotary Apartment to Leonard Brothers is approximately 3 miles, and they used to walk there, and they came home—Marina came home with a Cancan petticoat and some hose that Lee bought her with a few dollars that Robert and I had given him—he spent [it] on his wife.

So that was a very happy time . . .

MR. RANKIN.
How did Marina treat you then?

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
Fine. But then Marina was not satisfied with the things that I bought her.

As you see, the way I am properly dressed—I don’t say I mean to be the height of fashion, but I have—before becoming a nurse I was in the business world, and I have been a manager in the merchandise field. So I do know clothes.

And I bought her some shorts. And she wanted short shorts, like the Americans . . .

And I bought her a little longer shorts.

And “I no like, Mama.”

I said, “Marina, you are a married woman and it is proper for you to have a little longer shorts than the younger girls.”

“No, Mama.”

And I will stress this—that Marina was never too happy—“No, Mama, no nice, no, Mama, no this.”

That was perfectly all right. I thought she didn’t understand our ways. I didn’t feel badly about it . . .
¹

“I didn’t feel badly about it,” Marguerite says, and probably she is lying.

As described by others, including her sons John and Robert, Marguerite is characterized as unfeeling, self-centered, keyed on money, a virago when she does not get her way. All this is true, doubtless, for those she does not really love. When it comes to Lee, however, she is ready to travel down the loneliest aisles of her heart to encounter his rebuffs, his surprises, his betrayals: She helps to get him out of the Marines on a hardship discharge and he spends but one night with her before going to Russia, and all without warning. Yet she continues to love him with a full operatic passion equal to all the unutterable arias of those who are talentless at love, adores him as only a selfish woman who has lost out in various ways with three husbands can still love one child.

He, of course, whenever he returns to the stifling surround of a mother always ready to overtax his restricted capacity to love, is obliged to repel her. He and Marina stay with Marguerite for a few weeks; he finds work at a sheet-metal factory called Leslie Welding, where he earns $50 a week and, other than disbursements for can-can petticoats for Marina, spends nothing on rent or for food. Marguerite is taking care of his family from her savings. She cooks his favorite dishes. Marina will comment on how much Lee, a finicky eater, will gobble down when Marguerite cooks. Free rent, all the food you can eat . . . and an exorbitant demand for love. He saves one week’s pay, then another, and puts down a monthly rent of $59.50 in advance on a semi-detached little bungalow with a porch in a flat row of similar boxes on Mercedes Street, the leviathan warehouse of Montgomery Ward staring back at them from the end of the street. Then, he enlists Robert and moves out of Marguerite’s apartment with no warning to his mother. While Robert waits outside in his car and Marina looks bewildered, Lee and Marguerite have a passionate shouting match, after which Lee takes off, leaving Marguerite in the doorway like a dark-eyed heroine in a silent film. She does not know where he is going. She even runs after the car. But let us take up the continuation from Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s book
Marina and Lee:

McMillan:
. . . his mother soon reappeared, wholly unchastened, on the steps of the house on Mercedes Street. No one quite knew how she got there, since both Lee and Robert had been at pains to conceal the address [but three days later, Marina] heard a knock on the door. She looked out and there, to her astonishment, stood “Mamochka,” looking just as blithe and unconcerned as if the hysterical scene of parting had never occurred. Marguerite brought a high chair for the baby and silverware, dishes, and utensils for Marina and Lee. Marina welcomed her in, Marguerite played with the baby, and then left.
²

MARINA OSWALD.
. . . I felt very sorry for her. [Lee and I] had a quarrel because he said to me, “Why did you open the door for her, I don’t want her to come here anymore.” . . . It seemed peculiar to me, and I didn’t want to believe it but he did not love his mother, she was not quite a normal woman. Now, I know this for sure.

MR. RANKIN.
Did he tell you that at the time?

MARINA OSWALD.
. . . Lee did not want to talk to her. And, of course, for a mother, this is painful and I told him he should be more attentive to his mother but he did not change. I think one of the reasons for this is that she talked a great deal about how much she had done to enable Lee to return from Russia, and Lee felt that he had done . . . the greatest effort in that respect and didn’t want to discuss it . . .
³

From this point on, we will be using citations from
Marina and Lee
more than any other source but the Warren Commission. Mrs. McMillan interviewed Marina over a period of many months in the year following the assassination, and in a certain sense the author was even doing an approved biography, since her relation to Marina’s material was exclusive. While one hardly agrees with McMillan’s understanding of Lee Harvey Oswald (her approach to him was clinical) and while some of her material on Marina in Minsk is inaccurate due in the main to Marina’s still trying at that time to protect many an uncovered base, nonetheless McMillan is an invaluable source for many insights into the home life of Mr. and Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald, even if one does not have to come to the same interpretations as McMillan on many of Lee’s actions and deeds. Since the opportunity was present, however, for Marina’s latter-day interviewers to query her on the accuracy of McMillan’s descriptions of personal scenes, one had the advantage of being able to choose only those excerpts from
Marina and Lee
which Marina, thirty years later, would accept, somewhat grudgingly, as more or less accurate. That seemed preferable to forcing Marina back into events where her memory of the past was virtually burned out or laid to waste by the depredations of thirty years of media investigation of her marriage.

At this juncture let us go back, however, to the Warren Commission. Marguerite’s version of the same event Marina described for them is not nearly so unhappy.

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
. . . I bought [a] highchair and brought it over there, and Lee was not at home. And Marina didn’t know what a highchair was. I said, “How do they feed babies in Russia?” . . .

“We put baby on lap, Mama, and baby eat on lap . . .”

So approximately 2 or 3 days later I go over there and Lee says to me, “Now, Mother, I want you to understand right here and now—I want you to stop giving all these gifts to me and my wife. I want to give Marina whatever is necessary, the best I can do. I want you to keep your money and take care of yourself, because today or tomorrow you take sick, and you spend all your money on us, I will have to take care of you.” Which makes very good sense.

But he strongly put me in my place about buying things for his wife that he himself could not buy.

MR. RANKIN.
What did you say to that?

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
I agreed with him. And I said—the shock of it—I realize what a mother-in-law I was in interfering. And, of course, that is the part that we mothers do unconsciously. We try to help out our children, and in a way we are interfering in their life. They would rather have their own way of doing things.

And I realize that I had interfered, and the boy wanted to take care of his wife. So no more was said about it . . .
⁴

If relative peace could now be found with Marguerite, their abode was soon disturbed by another visit.

From Marina’s narrative:
. . . One day Lee came home from work and had not yet changed his clothes when some man knocked at the door. He turned out to be an FBI agent and asked Lee to come into a car, which he had parked across the street. There was one other man in the car. They talked for two hours, and I started getting angry at these uninvited guests, since it is no fun to heat up dinner several times. Lee came home very upset but tried not to show it . . .
⁵

This is now the second time that the same man from the FBI, John W. Fain, has had a talk with Lee:

MR. STERN.
What was Lee Harvey Oswald’s demeanor in the course of this interview?

MR. FAIN.
He was tense, kind of drawn up, and rigid. He is a wiry little fellow, kind of waspy.

MR. STERN.
Did he answer all of your questions?

MR. FAIN.
No, he didn’t . . . he was a little insolent in his answers. He was the type of individual who apparently doesn’t want to give out information about himself, and we asked him why he had made this trip to Russia, and he looked like it got under his skin, and he got white around the lips and tensed up, and I understood it to be a show of temper, and in a show of temper he stated he did not care to relive the past. He didn’t want to go into that at all . . . We wanted to find out whether or not the Soviets had demanded anything of him in return for letting him come on over . . . he said, “No.” . . . He downgraded it all the way through, and belittled himself. He said, “I was not that important . . .”

MR. MCCLOY.
You felt he constituted no security risk to the United States? . . .

MR. FAIN.
Well, I am suspicious of any Communist, obviously, and I think any Communist is a threat because I think they are atheistic, materialistic; I don’t think they know what the truth is, [but the] checks we made were to the effect that he was not a . . . member of the Communist Party. [So] I closed it because my investigation was completed . . . The man had found a job, he was working, he was living in this duplex with his wife, and he was not a member of the Communist Party . . .

REPRESENTATIVE FORD.
Do you have in this area, or did you have at that time in this area reliable confidential informants?

MR. FAIN.
Yes, sir; yes, sir. Excellent informants.
⁶

The American Communists, who were by the end of the 1950s as dangerous to the security of the United States as the last American buffalo, nonetheless stimulated an all-out FBI effort at penetration into their ranks. Many of the most active members of the American Communist Party were, by the early 1960s, FBI men working under cover, and they kept the Bureau very well informed about what was going on in every corner of the Party. Out in the field, therefore, wearing the badge, FBI Special Agents like John Fain, decent, God-fearing, right-thinking, and comfortably ignorant of Marxism, were able nonetheless to have the confidence that specific individuals were or were not members of the Party.

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
. . . I said to Lee, “Lee, I want to know one thing. Why is it you decided to return back to the United States when you had a job in Russia, and as far as I know you seemed to be pretty well off . . .”

He said, “Mother, not even Marina knows why I have returned to the United States.”

And that is all the information I ever got out of my son. “Not even Marina knows why I returned to the United States.”
⁷

Would Oswald have been ready to admit that he came back to America to find fame? He was looking for our most cherished asset, but then, America is the land where the value of fame is understood by all. From Oswald’s point of view, he is one of the few world authorities on the separate and misunderstood characters of Communism and capitalism. His knowledge is unique. He comprehends the dire comedy of the Cold War—which is to say the near-fatal misperceptions and misinterpretations each nation has of the other.

A meeting, therefore, with John Fain, where he was obliged to declare that he had not amounted to much in the Soviet Union, had to leave him with more than a lingering depression.

2

In the China Closet

Putting together aluminum doors, louvers, and windows at Leslie Welding left Oswald no happier than he had been at the radio factory in Minsk, and probably he was obliged to work harder at Leslie. Once again it was not what he had been looking for. When it came to labor, his dream was of clean hands—dealing with nothing heavier than books and writing paper. Indeed, in the first week after he was back in America, he made a serious effort in that direction.

MR. LIEBELER.
Would you tell us about your first contact with Lee Harvey Oswald?

MR. GREGORY.
Yes, sir.

It was in the middle of June 1962. On that particular morning, I was in the office, my telephone rang, and the voice on the other end told me that my name was given to him by the Fort Worth Public Library. He knew I was teaching Russian at the library, that he was looking for a job as a translator or interpreter in the Russian and English languages, and that he would like for me to give him a letter testifying to that effect . . . so I suggested . . . that he might drop by my office and I would be glad to give him a test. He did. He came by the office about 11 o’clock that morning, and I gave him a short test by simply opening a book at random and asking him to read a paragraph or two and then translate it.

He did it very well, so I gave him a letter addressed to whom it may concern that in my opinion he was capable of being an interpreter or translator . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
Did you and Mr. Oswald have lunch together that day?

MR. GREGORY.
Yes, sir. It was about noontime when I gave him that test, and so I invited him to lunch, and during the lunch being naturally curious about the present day life in the Soviet Union, I was asking him questions, asked how the people lived there and so forth.
¹

Peter Paul Gregory was a petroleum engineer in his early sixties, a Russian born in Siberia who had come to America in 1923, and he was sufficiently intrigued by his visitor to pay a visit to the Oswalds on Mercedes Street. Depressed by their drab circumstances, he decided it was time to introduce the Oswalds to the Russian community in Dallas–Fort Worth. So, he set up a dinner party in mid-August, to which he invited his friend George Bouhe, an accountant born and raised in St. Petersburg and curious to meet Marina after hearing that she had grown up in Leningrad.

Bouhe was a bachelor, in his early sixties, and by general account was also bossy, fussy, opinionated, and powerfully fearful of complications. Before he even came to the dinner, he checked with a man named Max Clark, a lawyer at General Dynamics rumored to be on good terms with the inner councils of the FBI, and Clark gave Bouhe the reassurance he needed.

MR. CLARK.
. . . I said, “As far as Oswald coming back here, you can be assured or bet that when he returned to the United States the FBI has got him tagged and is watching his movements or I would be very much surprised . . .” I said, “You know that they know exactly where he is in town,” and I said, “I imagine they know who he is contacting because I know enough about the boys in the FBI; they would keep a record.”
²

Bouhe went to the dinner. Marina had her first social success in America on this occasion.

MR. LIEBELER.
You also conversed with Marina in Russian, did you not?

MR. BOUHE.
Oh, yes; she is very good, I must say, to my great amazement . . . I complimented her, because most of the displaced persons whom we met here who went through wars and mixtures and Germany and French speak a very, very broken, unpolished Russian, which I tried to perfect . . .

And she said, “My grandmother who raised me”—I don’t know what period—“she was an educated woman. She went to—” and she gave me a school for noble girls. Something like—I don’t know, are you a Dallas man?—perhaps Bryn Mawr.

MR. LIEBELER.
Some prominent school?

MR. BOUHE.
Yes. The grandmother was a graduate and she gave me the name, which is a top school. And when you come out of that school as a young girl, you are polished—Smolny Institute for Noble Girls.
³

Did Marina steer him toward this misapprehension, or did he choose to believe it in order to justify his positive reaction to Marina? Positive evaluations are no trivial matter for a snob!

In any event, Bouhe began to focus on the Oswalds’ lives. Appalled by the conditions in which this well-brought-up young waif and this American escapee from the Soviet system were now living, Bouhe organized a food-and-clothing rescue operation.

MR. BOUHE.
. . . The sense of charity is very deep in me. Marina and the child, the latter sleeping on the floor, attracted me very much. As I repeated to the FBI and Secret Service many times, while they were not relatives of mine, I still felt that if I enjoy a good automobile and a good meal and if I know around the corner somebody’s kid is sleeping on the floor, I will not digest that dinner so very good.

So being endowed with what I thought was boundless energy, when I saw the situation, I thought I would make an effort the first time to put them on their feet. I always thought that communism breeds among the down and out and the dissatisfied people . . . I thought that by, so to speak, putting a little meat on his bones, lift the kid into bed, get a little clothes for the kid, meanwhile assembling from all of the ladies some clothes for Marina, who was in rags, I thought I will make [Oswald] less bitter, which he was, and he will see, as I told him, that it can be done here if you apply yourself. And I added to him, “Lee, I am exceedingly uneasy from being a foreigner by birth, telling you, a native-born American, that you can lift yourself by your own boot-strap here and live a decent life because the opportunities are here if you just only take advantage of them.” . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
Did Oswald seem to appreciate your efforts?

MR. BOUHE.
No; he passed a remark shortly after the second or third visit to their house when the ladies brought clothes to Marina and such—I even brought two shirts for him—not new, used, and this is where I saw him for the first time trying to show his displeasure over me.

He measured and he measured the shirts so many times, and those were not new shirts. Finally, I said, “Lee, this is go-to-work. Wear them 3 or 4 times, get them dirty, then throw them away.” So finally he folded it up and gave it back to me. “I don’t need any.”

Then I understood that he objected that myself and a couple of others brought groceries to the kid and something for them when the icebox was empty.
⁴

It is worth noting another comment from the rescue party.

MR. LIEBELER.
Mr. Bouhe also bought a bed for the baby?

MRS. MELLER.
. . . I think we bought her one dress, probably couple underwears, couple pairs, and stockings; something she is really need and certainly more groceries. Then one day when came with groceries like that Lee Harvey come from work and [he] was furious why we did all that and buy all that and he said, “I don’t need”; he was in rage; “I don’t need,” he say.
⁵

Marguerite Oswald provides our counterpoint:

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
. . . Now, it has been stated in the paper that the Russian friends have gone into the home and [found] that there was no food in the house and no milk for the baby.

I say Marina nursed the baby.

. . . Maybe they didn’t have at that particular time any milk in the box. Maybe Lee was going to bring groceries home. But I know they were not in destitute circumstances in that respect . . . I brought groceries and I brought a roll of scotch toweling . . . And the next day when I went by, the scotch toweling was in the kitchen, on a coat hanger, with a nail.

And I think that is real nice, a young couple that doesn’t have any money, that they can use their imagination and put up the scotch toweling to use on a coat hanger. They are just starting married life in a new country. And they have no money. But here is the point. The Russian friends, who were established, and had cars and fine homes, could not see this Russian girl doing without. They are the ones that interfered. They are the ones that interfered . . . and within a short time, then, this Russian girl had a playpen, had a sewing machine, had a baby bed, and a Taylor Tot . . .

I say it is not necessary for a young couple to have a playpen for a baby. We have millions and millions of American couples in the United States that cannot afford playpens for the children. I, myself, have been in that position.

So I think those things were immaterial.

The point I am trying to bring out is that these Russian friends have interfered in their lives, and thought that the Russian girl should have more than necessary.

And my son could not supply those things at that particular time. He was just starting to work . . . it was in this period of time that all these things were accumulated from Russian friends.

And no man likes other people giving—interfering in his way of living, and giving all these things to his wife that he himself cannot supply. This is a human trait, I would say . . .
⁶