Oswald's Tale (73 page)

MR. LIEBELER.
Now it doesn’t seem likely, does it, that Oswald would go around handing out literature in the streets like he did if he was actually attempting to infiltrate the anti-Castro movement?

MR. BRINGUIER.
Remember that that was after I turned down his offer and after I told him that I don’t have nothing to do with military activities and here there is nothing, and that I turned down completely him . . . he went openly to do that after he was turned down . . .
⁹

Oswald had landed in jail late on Friday afternoon—not the easiest time to get out. Dutz Murret was away on a three-day religious retreat, Lillian Murret was in the hospital for an eye operation, and the only person available to help him was his cousin Joyce Murret O’Brien, one of Lillian’s daughters. She certainly did not get her cousin out on Friday night, but Joyce did stay at the jail long enough to tell the authorities that Lee Harvey Oswald had been in Russia.

MRS. MURRET
. . . . she had been there twice with the money in her hand, and each time she came back out again . . . She told me she had talked to this officer there and [that] the man told her not to be foolish and give her money up like that, because she might not get it back . . . . He said, “Have somebody parole him.” So Joyce didn’t know what to do. She had been out of New Orleans a long time . . . . This officer showed her the sign they said Lee was carrying . . . “Viva El Castro,” so when Joyce saw that . . . “Oh, my God,” she said, “I am not about to get him out of here if he’s like that,” so she didn’t . . . give up her money. She said, “Here he was supposed to be out looking for a job, and he was doing things like that, walking up and down Canal Street all day long with signs and everything.”
¹⁰

Next morning, Oswald was the center of attention. That seems to be equal to saying that he was calm and cool. The officer questioning him was Lieutenant Francis Martello of the Intelligence Division of the New Orleans police force, and he compiled a report of their meeting.

. . . I then asked him if he was a communist and he said he was not, I asked him if he was a socialist and he said ‘guilty.’ We then spoke at length concerning the philosophies of communism, socialism, and America. He said he was in full accord with the book Das Kapital, which book was written by
KARL MARX.
I know that this book condemns the American way of government in entirety. I asked him if he thought that the communist way of life was better than the American way of life and he replied there was not true communism in Russia. He said that
MARX . . .
was not a communist but a socialist. He stated this was the reason he did not consider himself to be a communist. I asked him what was his opinion of the form of communism in Russia since he had lived there for two years and he replied, ‘It stunk.’ He said they have ‘fat stinking politicians over there just like we have over here,’ . . . I asked him what he thought about President
JOHN F. KENNEDY
and
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV.
He said he thought they got along very well together. I then asked him if he had to place allegiance or make a decision between Russia or America, which he would choose and he said, ‘I would place my allegiance at the foot of democracy.’
¹¹

MR. LIEBELER.
Now, your memorandum indicates that you asked Oswald what he thought about President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev . . .

MR. MARTELLO
. . . . all of his thoughts seemed to go in the direction of the Socialist or Russian way of life, but he showed in his manner of speaking that he liked the President, the impression I got, or if he didn’t like him, of the two he disliked the President the least. He is a very peculiar type of an individual, which is typical of quite a few of the many demonstrators that I have handled during the period of 2 years while in the Intelligence Division. They seemed to be trying to find themselves or something. I am not expert in the field or anything, not trying to go out of my bounds, but quite a few of them, after lengthy interviews you find that they have some peculiarities about their thinking that does not follow logically with their movements or their action.

MR. LIEBELER.
Did he indicate which [country] in his opinion, was the lesser of the two evils?

MR. MARTELLO.
From the way he spoke, the impression I received, it appeared to me that he felt Russia was the lesser of the two evils.

MR. LIEBELER.
Did he express this idea with great forcefulness, or just sort of a “pox on both your houses” fashion, that really it was just too ridiculous, and that sort of thing?

MR. MARTELLO.
With a nonchalant attitude. He was a very cool speaker . . . no aggressiveness or emotional outbursts in any way, shape, or form. It was just a very calm conversation we had, and there was no emotion involved whatsoever.

MR. LIEBELER.
Did he show any hesitancy about expressing these ideas to you as a member of the police department?

MR. MARTELLO.
None whatsoever, sir.
¹²

Oswald is thirsty for conversation. He will speak to anyone. He wishes to establish himself as a unique figure in the political, social, and police theatre of New Orleans. Since we have yet to steal up to the question of whether he was doing all this entirely for himself or was receiving a stipend from some official, semi-official, or impromptu group, a few sinister possibilities have to be kept in mind. Yet not unduly so. We have not grasped anything of Oswald if we assume that if he is being paid by the FBI to perform their left-wing activities, we are obliged to change all our ideas of him. Even if he was doing a little work for the FBI, there is no need to assume he was loyal to them. His fealty would be to himself and to his own ideas. Any actions he performed for others—if indeed he did—would be adapted to his personal agenda, which was to get to Cuba with impressive credentials. Creating attention for FPCC in New Orleans would not only serve the aim of the FBI to enhance a few Red-baiting possibilities, but would increase his own importance.

Stimulated to the hilt, therefore, by police interest in him, he now informs Lieutenant Martello that he wishes to be interviewed by somebody from the FBI. He has obviously enjoyed talking to Martello, and must be in a state of high adrenaline. He is ready for ultimates—so why not test his wits with an FBI man? If we need a more self-serving motive, it is fair to assume he was also afraid—what with the virulence of local anti-Castro sentiments—of getting roughed up and/or raped in that jail; given the shilly-shallying of cousin Joyce, he might have to spend another night in the can. Requesting the presence of an FBI man would give the prison personnel and the prison population a few second thoughts about taking him on.

Special Agent John Quigley’s testimony on their meeting is a model demonstration of how the FBI can reduce an uncommon event to a common one:

MR. QUIGLEY
. . . . At one point of the interview he told me that he had held one of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee meetings at his home. I asked him, “Well, how did you get in touch with the other people?” “Well, I don’t care to discuss that.” “Who were the persons at the meeting?” “I don’t know.” “Did you know any names at all?” “Yes. They were introduced to me by first names only.” “What were their first names?” “I cannot remember.” So it was apparent to me that he was certainly not going to furnish anything . . . for example, I asked him about A. J. Hidell . . . “Well, Mr. Hidell had a telephone.” “What was Mr. Hidell’s telephone number?” “Mr. Hidell’s telephone has been disconnected.” “What was the number?” “I can’t remember.”
¹³

MR. STERN.
Would it be usual, or had it occurred before that someone would ask for an interview and then refuse to respond to your questions? Didn’t that seem strange?

MR. QUIGLEY.
Not necessarily; not necessarily. Frequently people will have a problem and want to talk to an FBI agent and they want to tell them what their problem is, but then when you start probing into it then they don’t want to talk to you. I think that is just human nature. If you are probing too deep it gets a little touchy.
¹⁴

After Joyce had come back without Lee, Lillian Murret called a friend of the family, Emile Bruneau, a state boxing commissioner who got Oswald out on his own recognizance until his trial, Monday, August 12. Lee came home from jail late that Saturday morning, August 10.

On Friday night, Marina had not fallen asleep until three in the morning, but she had not felt anything like the dread she had known on the night of April 10 in Dallas. Here on Magazine Street, his rifle was still in the closet, and so she assumed correctly that he had been arrested for distributing his pamphlets.

McMillan:
Lee arrived home in scapegrace good spirits, dirty, rumpled, unshaven, with a glint of humor in his eye and an air of gaiety about him. “I’ve been to the police station.”

“I thought so,” said Marina. “So that’s the way it turned out.”

She wanted to know where he slept. He explained that the beds had no mattresses, so he had taken off all his clothes and made a mattress of them.

“You slept without any pants on?”

“It was hot. And it was just men, anyway. If they didn’t like it, they could have let me out sooner.”
¹⁵

Oswald was taking his pants off, and to hell with what every hungry con thought of his ass. Or so he claimed. But we know that he knew better. One doesn’t take one’s pants off on a one-night stand in jail.

McMillan:
That evening, Dutz Murret, home from the retreat, went immediately to the Oswalds’. He noticed with horror Castro’s photograph pinned to the wall, and asked Lee straight out if he was part of any “Commie” group. Lee answered that he was not. Dutz told him in no uncertain terms to show up in court the next day and, after that, go out, get a job, and support his family.
¹⁶

MR. BRINGUIER.
On August 12, we appear in the second municipal court in New Orleans. I came first with my friends, and there were some other Cubans there, and I saw when Oswald came inside . . . See, here in the court you have two sides, one for the white people and one for the colored people, and . . . he sat directly among [the colored people] in the middle, and that made me angry too, because I saw that he was trying to win the colored people for his side. When he will appear in the court, he will defend Fidel Castro, he will defend the Fair Play for Cuba, and the colored people will feel good for him, and that is a tremendous work of propaganda for his cause. This is one of the things that made me to think that he was really a smart guy and not a nut.
¹⁷

Oswald pled guilty to “disturbing the peace,” paid a $10 fine, and left. His coup of sitting among the blacks may have balanced his annoyance at having to accept the fine, but then, his feelings for blacks could have been genuine. Moreover, it was hardly a cheap gesture. Only two months had passed since Medgar Evers had been gunned down in Mississippi.

Was Oswald oblivious of the irony that Emile Bruneau, a big-time gambler, had helped to get him out of jail? That had been fitting. He had been gambling all his life for the largest personal stakes. Like his brethren, he had runs of luck, and doubtless he believed that you had to run with your luck and bet double with your winnings.

Since the lecture at the Jesuit House of Studies had gone well and his arrest had just established his credentials to speak for Castro’s Cuba, it was now time to search out the media.

McMillan:
On Friday, August 16 . . . Lee waited with unaccustomed patience for Marina to iron his favorite shirt. He had already called the local TV stations to tell them that there would be a Fair Play for Cuba demonstration that day in front of the Trade Mart building in downtown New Orleans.

Lee hired two recruits . . . to help him hand out his leaflets. The fifteen- or twenty-minute demonstration went off without trouble, and pictures of Lee were shown on the televised news that night.
¹⁸

The media arrived next day at 8:00
A.M.
in the form of a thin, bearded man named William Kirk Stuckey, who had a radio program on WDSU called “Latin Listening Post.”

8

Fair Play

MR. STUCKEY
. . . . I went early because I wanted to get him before he left.

MR. JENNER.
This was a Saturday?

MR. STUCKEY.
It is a Saturday. I knocked on the door, and this young fellow came out, without a shirt. He had a pair of Marine Corps fatigue trousers on. I asked him, “Are you Lee Oswald?” And he said, “Yes.”

I introduced myself and I told him I would like to have him on my program that night . . . . He said he would ask me in for some coffee but that his wife and baby were sleeping so we had better talk on the porch.
¹

Oswald showed him a pamphlet of a speech by Fidel Castro translated into English—“The Revolution Must Be a School of Unfettered Thought”—and another by Sartre, “Ideology and Revolution.”

MR. STUCKEY
. . . . I asked him about the membership of this organization, and he said there were quite a few . . . members. The figure 12 or 13 sticks in my head, I don’t really recall why now.
²

Oswald and twelve apostles. An ideologue dreaming of world-shaking action, he takes it for granted that he can find points of identification with everyone from Jesus to Hitler.

MR. JENNER.
Just give your best recollection of what he said on that occasion.

MR. STUCKEY
. . . .he was very vehement, insisting he was not the president, but was the secretary, and that was the occasion in which he pulled out his card showing that . . . this other gentleman, Hidell, was the president . . . He appeared to be a very logical, intelligent fellow, and the only strange thing about him was his organization. [It seemed incongruous that] he should associate with a group of this type . . . he did not seem the type at all . . . I was arrested by his cleancutness . . . I expected a folksinger type . . . somebody with a beard and sandals and . . . instead I found a fellow who was neat and clean, [and] seemed to be very conscious about all of his words, all of his movements, sort of very deliberate . . . He was the type of person you would say would inspire confidence. This was the incongruity that struck me, the fact that this type of person should be with this organization . . .

I asked him to meet me at the radio station that afternoon about 5 o’clock . . . and he agreed [to give] a recorded interview prior to the broadcast.

MR. JENNER.
Why would you do that?

MR. STUCKEY.
To avoid the possibility of errors. It is a risky business going on live. You know, you never know when you are going to slip up and, particularly, with somebody as controversial as a representative of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee you want to know what you have in hand before you put it on.
³

The excerpt that follows is taken from the full thirty-seven-minute interview. This passage and the debate Oswald will have with anti-Castro spokesmen a few days later are two of the best examples of his style of speaking and his skill in argument. If he had not been dyslexic, it is more than likely that he would have been able to write at least as well as he spoke, and that would have been not unimpressive for a twenty-three-year-old polemicist.

STUCKEY:
Tonight we have with us a representative of probably the most controversial organization connected with Cuba in this country. The organization is the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The person, Lee Oswald, secretary of the New Orleans Chapter for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This organization has long been on the Justice Department’s blacklist and is a group generally considered to be the leading pro-Castro body in the nation. As a reporter of Latin American affairs in this city for several years now, your columnist has kept a lookout for representatives of this pro-Castro group. None appeared in public view until this week, when young Lee Oswald was arrested and convicted for disturbing the peace. He was arrested passing out pro-Castro literature to a crowd which included several violently anti-Castro Cuban refugees. When we finally tracked Mr. Oswald down today and asked him to participate in “Latin Listening Post,” he told us frankly that he would because it may help his organization to attract more members in this area . . . And knowing that Mr. Oswald must have had to demonstrate a great skill in dialectics before he was entrusted with his present post, we now proceed on the course of random questioning of Mr. Oswald.
⁴

With such an introduction, how could Oswald not be near to heaven? He is, however, no longer in the world of manners but in the media. His host moves quickly to the attack:

STUCKEY:
Mr. Oswald, there are many commentators in the journalistic field in this country that equate the Fair Play for Cuba Committee with the American Communist Party. What is your feeling about this and are you a member of the American Communist Party?

OSWALD:
Well, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee with its headquarters at 799 Broadway in New York has been investigated by the Senate sub-committees who are occupied with this sort of thing. They have investigated our organization from the viewpoint of taxes, subversion, allegiance and in general, where and how and why we exist. They have found absolutely nothing to connect us with the Communist Party of the United States. In regards to your question as to whether I myself am a Communist, as I said, I do not belong to any other organization . . . .

STUCKEY:
Does your group believe that the Castro regime is not actually a front for a Soviet colony in the Western Hemisphere?

OSWALD:
Very definitely. Castro is an independent leader of an independent country. He has ties with the Soviet Union . . . That does not mean, however, that he is dependent on Russia. He receives trade from many countries, including Great Britain to a certain extent, France, certain other powers in the Western Hemisphere. He is even trading with several of the more independent African states, so that you cannot point at Castro and say that he is a Russian puppet . . . . I believe that was pointed out very well during the October crisis, when Castro definitely said that although Premier Khrushchev had urged him to have on-site inspection of his rocket bases in Cuba, that Fidel Castro refused.

STUCKEY:
Do you feel that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee would maintain its present line as far as supporting Premier Castro if the Soviet Union broke relations with the Castro regime in Cuba?

OSWALD:
We do not support the man. We do not support the individual. We support the idea of an independent revolution in the Western Hemisphere, free from American intervention . . . . If the Cuban people destroy Castro, or if he is otherwise proven to have betrayed his own revolution, that will not have any bearing upon this committee . . . .

STUCKEY:
Do you believe that the Castro regime is a Communist regime?

OSWALD:
They have said . . . that they are a Marxist country. On the other hand, so is Ghana, so is several other countries in Africa. Every country which emerges from a sort of feudal state, as Cuba did, experiments, usually, in socialism, in Marxism. For that matter, Great Britain has socialized medicine. You cannot say that Castro is a Communist at this time, because he has not developed his country, his system, this far. He has not had the chance to become a Communist. He is an experimenter, a person who is trying to find the best way for his country. If he chooses a socialist or a Marxist or a Communist way of life, that is something upon which only the Cuban people can pass. We do not have the right to pass on that . . . .

STUCKEY:
Mr. Oswald, does it make any difference to you if any of the activities of the local branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee benefit the Communist Party or the goals of international Communism?

OSWALD:
Well, that is what I believe you would term a loaded question. However, I will attempt to answer it. It is inconsistent with my ideals to support Communism, my personal ideals. It is inconsistent with the ideals of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to support ideals of international Communism. We are not occupied with that problem. We are occupied with the problem of Cuba. We do not believe under any circumstances that in supporting our ideals about Cuba, our pro-Castro ideals, we do not believe that is inconsistent with believing in democracy. Quite the contrary . . . .
⁵

They began to speak of other countries in Latin America. Oswald remarked: “Who will be able to find any official or any person who knows about Latin America who will say that Nicaragua does not have a dictatorship?” They had come to the crux of the discussion. Stuckey may have thought that Oswald was now in trouble:

STUCKEY:
Very interesting. [We] have heard about these dictatorships for many, many years, but it is curious to me why no Nicaraguans fled to the United States last year, whereas we had possibly 50,000 to 60,000 Cubans fleeing from Cuba to the United States. What is the Fair Play for Cuba Committee’s official reply to this?

OSWALD:
Well, a good question. Nicaragua’s situation is considerably different from Castro’s Cuba. People are inclined not to flee their countries unless some new system, new factor, enters into their lives. I must say that very surely no new factors have entered into Nicaragua for about 300 years, in fact, the people live exactly as they have always lived in Nicaragua. I am referring to the overwhelming majority of the people in Nicaragua, which is a feudal dictatorship with 90 percent of the people engaged in agriculture. These peasants are uneducated. They have one of the lowest living standards in all of the Western Hemisphere [so] no new factor, no liberating factor has entered into their lives, they remain in Nicaragua. Now the people who have fled Cuba, that is the interesting situation. Needless to say, there are classes of criminals; there are classes of people who are wanted in Cuba for crimes against humanity and most of those people are the same people who are in New Orleans and have set themselves up in stores with blood money and who engage in day to day trade with New Orleanians. Those are the people who would certainly not want to go back to Cuba and who would certainly want to flee Cuba. There are other classes. There are peasants who do not like the collectivization in Cuban agriculture. There are others who have one reason or another . . . for fleeing Cuba. Most of these people . . . are allowed to leave after requesting the Cuban government for exit visas. Some of these people for some reasons or another do not like to apply for these visas or they feel they cannot get them; they flee, they flee Cuba in boats, they flee any way they can go, and I think that the opinion and the attitude of the Cuban government to this is good riddance.

STUCKEY:
Mr. Oswald, this is very interesting because as a reporter in the field for some time I have been interviewing refugees now for about three years and I’d say that the last Batista man, officially, that I talked to left Cuba about two and a half years ago and the rest of them that I’ve talked to have been taxicab drivers, laborers, cane cutters, and that sort of thing. I thought this revolution was supposed to benefit these people . . .

OSWALD:
. . . You know, it’s very funny about revolutions. Revolutions require work, revolutions require sacrifice, [and] people who have fled Cuba have not been able to adapt themselves to the new factors which have entered these peoples’ lives. These people are the uneducated. These people are the people who do not remain in Cuba to be educated by young people, who are afraid of the alphabet, who are afraid of these new things which are occurring, who are afraid that they would lose something by collectivization. They are afraid that they would lose something by seeing their sugar crops taken away and in place of sugar crops, some other vegetable, some other product, planted, because Cuba has always been a one-product country, more or less. These are the people who have not been able to adapt.

STUCKEY:
Mr. Oswald, you say their sugar crops. Most of the Cubans I have talked to that have had anything to do with agriculture in the last year and a half have not owned one single acre of ground, they were cane cutters.
⁶

If Stuckey has made a telling point, it will hardly stop Oswald. Potentially, he has debater’s reflexes worthy of Richard Nixon—he treads water for the duration of three sentences, gathers his reply, and proceeds to give it:

OSWALD:
That is correct and they are the ones who are fleeing the Castro regime. That is correct, sir. That is very, very true and I am very glad you brought that point up. You know, it used to be that these people worked for the United Fruit Company or American companies engaged in sugar refining, oil refining in Cuba. They worked a few months every year during the cane cutting or sugar refining season. They never owned anything, and they feel now that . . . the right to work for five months a year has been taken away from them. They feel that now they have to work all year round to plant new crops, to make a new economy, and so they feel that they have been robbed, . . . of the right to do as they please . . . What they do not realize is that they have been robbed of the right to be exploited, robbed of the right to be cheated, robbed of the right of New Orleanian companies to take away what was rightfully theirs. Of course, they have to share now. Everybody gets an equal portion. This is collectivization and this is very hard on some people, on people preferring the dog-eat-dog economy.
⁷