Oswald's Tale (65 page)

We have to assume that Oswald has found some kind of blind among the bushes in the alley behind Walker’s house so that he can look across the backyard from his concealed post and see into Walker’s windows. Presumably, the General, obligingly, will come into view.

McMillan:
On the morning of Wednesday, April 10, Marina thought Lee looked pensive and rather sad. With tears in his eyes, he confessed at last that he had lost his job. “I don’t know why,” he said. “I tried. I liked that work so much. But probably the FBI came and asked about me, and the boss just didn’t want to keep someone the FBI was interested in. When
will
they leave me alone?”

Marina ached with sympathy. She had no idea how to comfort him; and when he went out for the day she supposed he was looking for work. He was dressed in his good gray suit and a clean white shirt.
¹¹

On the night of April 10, when Oswald arrives in the alley, we do not know how long he has to wait, but he is able to draw a bead on General Walker, who, conveniently, is sitting at a desk in a well-lit room with no drapes drawn, no shades down. Of course, we cannot know whether Oswald went for nervous walks and came back, having concealed his rifle in shrubbery each time, or, indeed, whether his blind was so well concealed that he could sit and wait for the half hour or hour it took until Walker happened to come to his desk. Of course, if one wishes to see Oswald’s actions on this night as a piece of choreography inspired by Destiny, it is not impossible that Walker was at his desk as Oswald arrived. There he sat, an impeccable model for the crosshairs on Oswald’s scope.

Lee fired and took off without stopping to see whether he had hit his target or not. That alone can give us a sense of how much caterwauling anxiety had come pouring in on him with the pull of the trigger.

Thirty years later, Marina can no longer remember whether or not he came home for supper on April 10—she seems to think he did not—but in any event, she very much remembers being alone at 8:00
P.M.
and putting June to bed. By nine and ten o’clock, her ears preternaturally sensitive to every passing sound outside on lonely, shabby Neely Street, Marina’s condition at that hour deserves a name;
mate-dread,
one is tempted to call it. Nearness to a person gives all the intimations we don’t wish to have of how unstable he or she is, especially since he or she is not at home and yet feels so near to one’s senses as to make it certain that something is wrong, fearfully wrong.

By ten, she can no longer bear it. She invades his oversized closet, his
sanctum sanctorum.
On the writing table is a sheet of paper with a key placed on top of it. “Farewell!” says the mute presence of the key. As she would later tell the FBI, “[My] hair stood on end.”
¹²
She picked up the paper and read what he had written. It comes down to us in good stiff English furnished by Secret Service translators, who straightened out whatever was ungrammatical in the suspect’s Russian.

This is the key to the mailbox which is located in the main post office in the city on Ervay Street. This is the same street where the drugstore, in which you always waited, is located. You will find the mailbox in the post office which is located 4 blocks from the drugstore on that street. I paid for the box last month so don’t worry about it.

2. Send the information as to what happened to me to the [Russian] Embassy and include newspaper clippings (should there be anything about me in the newspapers.) I believe the Embassy will come quickly to your assistance on learning everything.

3. I paid the house rent on the 2nd so don’t worry about it.

4. Recently I also paid for water and gas.

5. The money from work will possibly be coming. The money will be sent to our post office box. Go to the bank and cash the check.

6. You can either throw out or give my clothing, etc., away. Do not keep these. However, I prefer that you hold onto my personal papers (military, civil, etc.).

7. Certain of my documents are in the small blue valise.

8. The address book can be found on my table in the study should you need same.

9. We have friends here. The Red Cross also will help you.

10. I left you as much money as I could, $60 . . . You and [June] can live for another 2 months using $10 per week.

11. If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of the bridge through which we always passed on going to the city . . .
¹³

9

Stoicism, Majestic in Purpose

In the depths of Oswald’s logic lies an equation: Any man who is possessed of enough political passion to reach murderous intensity in his deeds is entitled to a seat at the high table of world leaders. Such may have been Oswald’s measure. The route to becoming a great political leader—given his own poor beginnings—might have to pass through acts of assassination.

As we can see by his note to Marina, he was more or less prepared to be captured or to die. So, he had not only assembled the integument of his art—the plans, photographs, bus schedules, and his farewell letter—but had also attempted to give a presentation of his political thought. He was not only possessor of a unique rank, Private-General, but looked to hold the desk of Philosopher-General.

Under the burden of not knowing whether his social ideas would soon be read with the respect one gives to the last words of a dead man or used as a text in his trial—his defense would be political!—or, meanest option of them all, would end as no more than a few more notes written to himself (especially if he had no opportunity to fix his sights on Walker, or, worse, lost his nerve), he chose to print his message out by hand, and it appears with relatively few errors among his other papers.

What follows is a good portion of the several parts of this credo. He was but five years ahead of his time—which is to say that by 1968 he would not have felt so prodigiously alone. By then, in Haight-Ashbury, many of his formulations would have seemed reasonable. Hippies were moving up into Northern California and Oregon to found small societies on principles much like his. Indeed, what Oswald offers seems more a libertarian pronouncement than a radical call to arms, a menu of fifteen one-sentence programs large and small for the free man of the future.

The Atheian system

A system opposed to Communism, Socialism, and capitalism.

1. Democracy at a local level with no centralized State.

A
. That the right of free enterprise and collective enterprise be guaranteed.

B
. That Fascism be abolished.

C
. That nationalism be excluded from every-day life.

D
. That racial segregation or discrimination be abolished by law.

E
. the right of the free, uninhibited action of religious institutions of any type or denomination to freely function

G
. Universal Suffrage for all persons over 18 years of age.

H
. Freedom of dissemination of opinions through press or declaration or speech.

I
. that the dissemination of war propaganda be forbidden as well as the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.

J
. that Free compulsory education be universal till 18.

K
. nationalization or communizing of private enterprise or collective enterprise be forbidden.

L
. that monopoly practices be considered as capitalistic.

M
. That combining of separate collective or private enterprises into single collective units be considered as communistic.

N
. That no taxes be levied against individuals.

O
. That heavy graduated taxes of from 30% to 90% be leveled against surplus profit gains.

R
. that taxes be collected by a single ministry subordinate to individual communities. that taxes be used solely for the building or improvement of public projects.
¹

He is mounting a pincers attack on the status quo. With his Atheian system, he will look to reach the mass of Americans—that is one arm of the attack. He is also looking to abolish the largest obstacle to a new and powerful party of the left in America, nothing less than the Communist Party.

Only by declaring itself to be, not only not dependent upon, but
opposed
to, Soviet domination and influence, can dormant and disillusioned persons hope to unite to free the radical movement from its inertia.

Through the refusal of the Communist Party U.S.A. to give a clear cut condemnation of Soviet piratical acts, progressives have been weakened into a stale class of fifth columnists of the Russians.

In order to free the hesitating and justifiably uncertain, future activist for the work ahead we must remove that obstacle which has so efficiently retarded him, namely the devotion of the Communist Party U.S.A., to the Soviet Union, Soviet Government, and Soviet Communist International Movement.

It is readily foreseeable that a coming economic, political or military crisis, internal or external, will bring about the final destruction of the capitalist system, assuming this, we can see how preparation in a special party could safeguard an independent course of action after the debacle, an American course . . .
²

It is time to speak of larger purposes and awesome requirements:

No man, having known, having lived, under the Russian Communist and American capitalist system, could possibly make a choice between them, there is no choice. One offers oppression, the other poverty. Both offer imperialistic injustice, tinted with two brands of slavery.

But no rational man can take the attitude of “a curse on both your houses.” There
are
two world systems, one twisted beyond recognition by its misuse, the other decadent and dying in its final evolution.

A truly democratic system would combine the better qualities of the two upon an American foundation, opposed to both world systems as they are now.

This then is our goal.
³

Yet, Oswald does not wish to frighten everybody away. It is time for a disclaimer. Since he has learned (the hard way) that very few human beings will rush to take up arms against both world systems, one must hint that there will be help from the cosmos.

We have no interest in violently opposing the U.S. Government, why should we manifest opposition when there are far greater forces at work to bring about the fall of the United States Government than we could ever possibly muster.

We do not have any interest in directly assuming the head of Government in the event of such an all-finishing crisis.
⁴

Has there ever been a dictator who did not issue comparable statements in the early years of his revolution?

Lee Harvey Oswald will, however, underline the dedication necessary for those who would choose to be part of the Atheian system:

. . . only the intellectually fearless could even be remotely attracted to our doctrine, yet this doctrine requires the utmost restraint, a state of being in itself majestic in power.

This is stoicism, and yet stoicism has not been effected for many years, and never for such a purpose.
⁵

And then, because he is Oswald, and cannot be content unless he can even cheat on his own system, he adds a coda to these presentations:

Yes, these have been his writings in his time of preparation for terminating the life of Edwin A. Walker.

10

Waiting for the Police

From an FBI report:
She advised that about midnight that night,
OSWALD
came rushing into the house in a very agitated and excited state and his face was very pale. As soon as he entered the house, he turned on the radio. Later he laid down on the bed and
MARINA
again noticed how pale he was. She asked him what was wrong and he confessed to her that he had tried to kill General
WALKER
by shooting at him with a rifle but didn’t know whether he had hit him or not. He said he wanted to find out on the radio . . .
MARINA
said she became angry with
OSWALD
for shooting at General
WALKER
and he replied to her that General
WALKER
was the leader of the fascist organization here and it was best to remove him . . .

She stated
OSWALD
did not have the rifle with him when he returned to the house . . .
¹

Thirty years later, this is the way she recalls his return to their apartment on Neely Street:

He was out of breath. He was back—yet he was not. Still somewhere else. She showed him the note he had left, and he said, “Don’t ask me about that.” He turned on their radio. Nothing was there for him. She kept asking questions, and he kept saying, “Don’t bother me.” She went to bed and lay waiting for him, and now she can’t remember what time it was—but he was still in the other room, still waiting to hear something on that radio. Then he turned it off. He looked shocked. “I missed.”

She said, “What are you talking about?”

He told her, “I thought I’d shot General Walker.”

Of course, she jumped out of bed. “Are you crazy? What right do you have? Who is General Walker?”

He said, “Look how many people would have been spared if somebody had eliminated Hitler.”

He told her that General Walker was a pro-Nazi kind of person. A fascist.

She said he had no right to eliminate anybody.

He repeated himself. He said, “Look how many people would have been spared if that had been done to Hitler.”

She said, “Maybe it was good for Hitler’s time, but not right now. Not in America. Change your system.”

It is an odd, near-improbable conversation. He has just found out that he missed. An unlikely miss. He had been thirty-five yards away. He had been looking at Walker through a four-power scope. In the crosshairs, Walker’s head was large. One could not miss. As soon as he had squeezed the trigger, Lee had been off and running. And with what fear! Walker’s bodyguards might catch him if he remained long enough to take a second shot. So he had run—exaltation must have accompanied his fear.

Then he buried the rifle—in what a fever!—came home, and waited for confirmation. Now, the radio had told him that he missed. His anguish has to be intense: Once again he is the sorriest Marine in the training platoon. At that moment, he blurts out the truth. He has to tell someone that he has taken a shot at Walker. And missed!

The conversation about Hitler is not as easy to believe. Not for that moment. Perhaps Marina misremembers and it took place next day. Since we cannot know, let us go back to her account:

According to Marina, he soon fell asleep. He looked exhausted. Like a dead man. She began to walk around, just as she had been pacing for hours before he came home. Once again, she was listening to the night outside. Such a quiet street. She remembers thinking that at any minute police would be banging on their door. She had no idea if he had done it alone or with others—he never gave her one detail. She did ask him where his rifle was now, and he answered, “I left it where it will not be found.”

She looked at him asleep and got in beside him, but he took up all the bed. He was spread out, arms and legs extended, his bare bottom up, his backside open to the night air.

GENERAL WALKER.
. . . It was right at 9 o’clock and most of the lights were on in the house and the shades were up. I was sitting down behind a desk facing out from a corner, with my head over a pencil and paper working on my income tax when I heard a blast and a crack right over my head.

MR. LIEBELER.
What did you do then?

GENERAL WALKER.
I thought—we had been fooling with the screens on the house and I thought that possibly somebody had thrown a firecracker . . . Then I looked around and saw that the screen was not out, but was in the window, and . . . I noticed there was a hole in the wall, so I went upstairs and got a pistol and came back down and went out the back door, taking a look to see what might have happened.

MR. LIEBELER.
Did you find anything outside that you could relate to this attack on you?

GENERAL WALKER.
No, sir; I couldn’t. As I crossed a window coming downstairs in front, I saw a car at the bottom of the church alley just making a turn onto Turtle Creek. The car was unidentifiable. I could see the two back lights, and you have to look through trees there, and I could see it moving out. This car would have been about at the right time for anybody that was making a getaway.
²

When Walker had discussed it with the police, one of them said, “He couldn’t have missed you.”

GENERAL WALKER.
. . . But as I later was analyzing the thing, [that rifleman] couldn’t see from his position any of the lattice work either in the window or in the screens because of the light. It would have looked [to him] like one big lighted area, and he could have been a very good shot and just by chance he hit the woodwork.

MR. LIEBELER.
Which he did in fact?

GENERAL WALKER.
Which he did, and there was enough deflection in it to miss me, except for slivers of the bullet, the casing of the bullet, that went into my arm laying on the desk—slivers of the shell jacket.
³

Walker had seen a car go down the alley, and a fourteen-year-old neighbor, Kirk Coleman, was reported to have seen two cars. Having heard the shot, he went out to a fence in the back of his house, looked down the alley, and “saw one man putting something in the trunk of a Ford sedan and a few feet away, a second man getting into another car. Both cars then raced away.”
⁴

From a Secret Service interview with Marina: . . .
Lee Oswald told her, after reading in the papers that some young man saw an automobile containing three men pulling away from the scene of the shooting, that the Americans always think they [need] a car to get away from the scene of a crime and that he would rather use his feet to do so than to have a car. He also told her that he took buses to go to the Walker residence and that he took a different bus to return home after the shooting.
⁵

On the following night, Lee had anxiety attacks. He never did wake up, but two times, even three times an hour, he would begin to shake and to tremble beside her.

McMillan:
. . . She was afraid, terrified, that he would take another shot . . .

Marina immediately began to beg Lee . . . [never to] do such a thing again. She told him that . . . it had been a sign from fate. “If God saved him this time, He will save him again. It is not fated for this man to die. Promise me you’ll never, ever do it again.”

“I promise.”
⁶

With her good Russian soul, how could she not believe that Providence showed itself most clearly in those awesome moments when no one had any idea how things would turn out? “Promise me,” she had asked, and if Marina’s memory is correct, he did reply, “I promise.” Perhaps it was his belief as well.

Providence is Providence, but we have not accounted for the cars. Gerald Posner in
Case Closed
comes close to disposing of the issue:

Contrary to press reports that [the fourteen-year-old] saw two men get into separate cars and race away, he told the FBI that he only saw one car leave, and it moved at a normal rate of speed. At least six other cars were in the parking lot at the same time. Other neighbors contradicted Coleman’s story, saying no cars left after the noise.
⁷

It is the fundamental principle of evidence. If one witness says “A,” you can always find another to say “Z.”

Still, the odds are that Oswald made his attempt on Walker with no confederates. Indeed, the essay into his motive for shooting at Walker would be seriously flawed if Oswald did not do it alone. Yet, it is just as well to recognize that this narrative is an exploration into the possibilities of his character rather than a conviction that one holds the solution.

There is, after all, a possibility that other people besides Oswald had a motive to kill Walker. There are puzzling aspects to Oswald’s attempt. Unless someone inside Walker’s house was ready to steer the General at a given moment to a chair in front of a lighted window with no shades, how long would Oswald have had to wait until by chance Walker came into view? If it had taken hours, how could Oswald have remained unnoticed for so long? (Of course, hiding in a parked car while waiting does serve such a purpose.) The police did find a nick in the freshly painted fence that separated the alley from Walker’s backyard, and concluded that the gunman had rested his rifle there—the position conformed to the trajectory of the shot—but, of course, firing from one side of a fence, back exposed to passing onlookers in the alley, hardly sounds like a concealed blind.
⁸

It can be argued that in the course of his preparations, Oswald had scouted the house and knew Walker’s habits, but that is not likely. Walker was away on his tour until Monday, April 8, two days before the attempt. The only conclusion, if Oswald managed it by himself, running entirely on his own schedule, is that he went to Walker’s house on Wednesday night to shoot him, and there was the General in full collaboration. As stated earlier: Luck! Of course, luck may be the product of extra-sensory perception in crucial areas, and Oswald may be an unhappy example of a man with extraordinary luck.

Let us not banish, however, the possibility that certain extreme right-wingers had come to the conclusion that General Edwin A. Walker was not only eminently expendable but would be of much more use to his movement as a dead martyr than as a live embarrassment whose secret homosexual life was bound sooner or later to be exposed. Life, however, moves on a more dilatory schedule than paranoia, and it was only in the eighties that Walker, by then close to eighty himself, solicited a vice-squad cop in a men’s room, was arrested, and his lifelong homosexuality became common knowledge. Yet, his closet life was no secret in the circles close to Walker. The John Birch Society obviously had a problem.

Add one more observation: If the dedicated spirit of the Cold War encouraged the CIA to enter serious relations with the Mafia in order to assassinate Fidel Castro, why not assume that fantastical operations, if on a smaller scale, were being developed all over the Sun Belt? In the mountains, caves, and swamps of America, and in big cities like Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas, the warriors-for-liberty were gathering. A decision to assassinate Walker might have been one step in a serious set of moves to take over the John Birch Society.

MR. JENNER.
Now, Mr. Surrey, was there an occasion preceding April 10, 1963, that you noticed an automobile and some people in the automobile in and about General Walker’s premises?

MR. SURREY.
. . . April 8; yes, sir . . . the gist of the matter is that two nights before the assassination attempt, I saw two men around the house peeking in windows and so forth, and reported this to the General the following morning, and he, in turn, reported it to the police on Tuesday, and it was Wednesday night that he was shot at. So that is really the gist of the whole thing.
⁹

It is, of course, a huge jump in our comprehension of Oswald to believe he is now part of a right-wing conspiracy; we have no trace of connections to such people in that period of his life. On the other hand, from October 1962 to April 1963, there have to be a hundred, if not two hundred, hours that no one (certainly not Marina) can account for. Who knows what he did and whom he met in that time? We have, for example, no idea whether Lee and Yaeko Okui were having a romance or were cooperating in one or another intelligence function; or, for all we know, Yaeko saw him but once, at the Christmas party, and that was all there was to it. Still, one would add a footnote from Edward Epstein:

When interviewed in Tokyo in 1976, Okui said that she did not remember the subject of her conversation with Oswald, but that the one brief contact with him “ruined her life.” She would not elaborate further.
¹⁰

We have constructed a portrait of Oswald as a solitary man, but he has his sides—as we shall see in New Orleans. In any event, a man who can have congress with Stalinist and Trotskyite organizations at the same time when they have been implacable enemies for close to three decades, may be ready to deal with any political contradiction if it will advance his purpose. Moreover, some ultraright-wingers do not sound like reactionaries but libertarians; that, on the evidence of the Atheian credo, appealed to Oswald. It is certainly safe to believe he did wish to kill Walker, but it does not follow automatically that he thought he could do it without help.