Oswald's Tale (80 page)

. . . his eyes were wet with tears, and his hands shook . . . I began to console him, saying that it might seem terrible to him, [but] the reasons for his being victimized were not immediately evident [to us]. Valery repeated a few of my sentences in English. Regarding his visa to the Soviet Union, we explained our rules once again, but in view of his condition, I offered him the necessary forms to be filled out. [Then in] response to his persistent requests that we recommend that the Cubans give him a visa, as an alternative to obtaining our visa, we told him that Cuba was a sovereign nation and decided visa questions for itself . . .

Oswald gradually calmed down . . . [and] did not take the forms we offered him. His state of extreme agitation had now been replaced by depression. He looked disappointed and extremely frustrated. Valery and I exchanged glances and let it be known that the subject of this conversation had been exhausted and that it was time to break it up. I rose from the table. Oswald got up from his chair, and simultaneously grabbed the revolver and stuck it somewhere under his jacket, either in a pocket or in his belt. Turning to Valery, he once again said something about being followed. I bent down to get the bullets from the desk drawer. I then handed them to Oswald, who dropped them into a pocket of his jacket. We said good-bye with a nod of our heads. Valery also stood, calmly opened the door leading into the reception area, and after letting him go first, followed right behind him . . .
⁹

Here, Oleg, who has apparently opened the door again, now overlaps Yatskov’s account with his own:

At that moment I distinctly heard Oswald say that he was afraid to return to the United States—where he would be killed. “But if they don’t leave me alone, I’m going to defend myself.” Valery confirms these were Oswald’s words.

It was said without mentioning anyone in particular. At the time this phrase meant nothing to us. What happened to him in his own country was his problem. We recalled these words only on that fateful November twenty-second. When I led Oswald out of the reception area into the courtyard and showed him the way to the gate, he pulled his head down, and raised the collar of his jacket to conceal his face and thus attempt to avoid being clearly photographed . . .
¹⁰

Recently, Nechiporenko was asked by this book’s interviewers how it was possible that a responsible KGB man would give back not only a gun but its bullets to someone as disturbed in appearance as Oswald. Nechiporenko shrugged. It had happened, he said. He could not speak for why. Yatskov had done it, but it did not seem exceptional at the time.

“If this same episode had taken place in London, would any of you have returned the bullets?”

“Never,” said Nechiporenko.

That gave some purchase for believing this story. It could be proposed that these three KGB men had served in Mexico long enough to feel that it was wrong to deprive a man of his gun. That, by the Mexican logic of the
cantinas,
was equal to emasculation, and to a Mexican no act could be considered more heinous.

“All right,” he was asked, “one can understand giving back the gun. But the bullets! What if Oswald had reloaded his gun on the way out and shot the first person he encountered on the street? And then said, ‘The Russians gave me the bullets’?”

Nechiporenko shook his head. It had happened the way it happened, he said, and perhaps you had to be there to believe it. They just had not been afraid that this man Oswald would go out in the street and cause trouble with his gun.

They would never admit it, but perhaps they did think that he might need a weapon to defend himself against the FBI. After all, how many FBI men in the same situation would not believe that a Russian defector would need his bullets returned in order to defend himself against the KGB?

Or, if we are to muse upon Yatskov’s motive, perhaps he did not wish to create a situation where Oswald could go to the American Embassy in Mexico City and claim that the Soviets were holding some of his property. The fellow might be a skilled provocateur.

In any event, the three officers never got to the volleyball game that day against the GRU. Yatskov, Kostikov, and Nechiporenko were busy filing a coded cable to Moscow Center that described the meeting with Oswald. Since their team lost to the GRU, they felt guilty.

On that wholly frustrating Saturday morning, Oswald next went from the Soviet compound down the street to the Cuban Embassy and ran into another quarrel with the Consul, Eusebio Azcue:

Posner:
Oswald again demanded that he be issued a visa because of his political credentials, but the consul repeated it was impossible without a Russian visa . . . “I hear him make statements that are directed against us,” recalled Azcue, “and he accuses us of being bureaucrats, and in a very discourteous manner. At that point I also become upset and I tell him to leave the consulate, maybe somewhat violently or emotionally.” He told Oswald that “a person like him, instead of aiding the Cuban revolution, was doing it harm.” Azcue moved toward Oswald, prepared to force him physically out of the embassy. “Then he leaves the consulate,” recalled Azcue, “and he seems to be mumbling to himself, and slams the door, also in a very discourteous mood. That was the last time we saw him around.”
¹¹

It is painful to think of Oswald walking down the street, his documents in his ditty bag. All his striving had gone into collecting those documents, yet no one had been stirred by his deeds.

On Sunday, he went to a bullfight and on Monday he called Nechiporenko one more time. Had there been any affirmative word from Moscow on his application for a visa? None, replied Nechiporenko.

Oswald went to the bus terminal and bought a ticket home. If, once in 1959 and again in 1962, he had prevailed against the giant bureaucracies of the Soviet Union and the United States, he could no longer maintain the luster of that achievement.

On Wednesday, he departed from Mexico City at eight-thirty in the morning. In something like thirty hours, he was back in Dallas. He did not call Marina at Ruth Paine’s house in Irving, but instead took a room at the Y and, presumably, he slept alone with his arms around the ash-heap of his plans.

PART VI

DENOUEMENT

1

The Road to Domesticity

On the bus returning from Mexico, there is a revealing moment. As they cross the border into Texas, Oswald is eating a banana. Since there are signs displayed not to bring fresh produce into the U.S., he is gobbling his food down as they enter the Customs shed in Laredo. Or so the official remembers it. That’s all right, Oswald is told, take your time, you can finish your banana.
¹

It is a small episode, but it speaks of changes in him. After the ravages of Mexico, he is going to be law-abiding for a time. If the conflict in his adult life has been between fame and family, this last trip has turned the balance. He left in the belief that he might never see Marina again, but on his return, he is prepared to be loving.

First, however, having arrived in Dallas at mid-day, he spends the afternoon at the Texas Employment Commission, where he files his claim for the last of his series of unemployment compensation checks, and registers for work. Then he puts up at the Y that night and in the morning applies for a job as a typesetter. It is equal to Buster Keaton becoming a banker. Dyslexic Oswald will set type! Or does he see it as a major opportunity to print his own materials?

He certainly does well on the interview: “Oswald was well-dressed and neat. He made a favorable impression on the foreman of the department . . . Since Oswald had worked in a trade plant, I was interested in him as a possible employee . . .”
²

Unfortunately, Lee had listed Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall as a place of previous employment, and so, on the back of his application, Theodore F. Gangl, the plant superintendent who interviewed him, later adds: “Bob Stovall does not recommend this man. He was released because of his record as a troublemaker
—Has communistic tendencies.
”
³

Feeling confident that he would get the job, Oswald called Marina and hitchhiked up to Irving, where she was staying with Ruth.

McMillan:
He followed her like a puppydog around the house, kissed her again and again, and kept saying, “I’ve missed you so.”

Lee spent the weekend at the Paines’. Ruth left them alone as much as she could, and even tried to keep June out of their way. Carefree as children, they sat on swings in the back yard . . . All weekend he showed the greatest solicitude toward her, trying to get her to eat more, especially bananas and apples, to drink juices and milk, things that would strengthen her before the baby came. But Marina saw that he was distracted—worried about finding a job. As Ruth drove him to the bus station at noon on Monday, Lee asked if Marina could stay until he found work. Ruth answered that Marina was welcome to stay as long as she liked.
⁴

Back in Dallas, he rented a room from a lady named Mary Bledsoe, and it takes no more than a bit of her testimony to recognize that she is so classic a landlady, one can even visualize the pucker of her not-so-generous lips.

MR. BALL.
Did you talk to him about the use of the refrigerator?

MRS. BLEDSOE.
Well, he said he was going to put something in there, and I said—I didn’t have anything to say, and I hemmed-and-hawed, I said, “Well, no; I don’t have a very big refrigerator.”

Well, he said, “I won’t use it after this time.” He was very, very congenial.

MR. BALL.
Did he go down to the grocery store?

MRS. BLEDSOE.
He bought some peanut butter and some sardines, and some bananas and put it all in his room, except the milk, and he ate there, ate in his room. I didn’t like that either . . . Then he talked to somebody on the phone and he talked in a foreign language . . . I was in my room, and the telephone is over there [indicating], and I didn’t like that, so I told my girlfriend, I said, “I don’t like anybody talking in a foreign language.”
⁵

Oswald is a prodigious snob, but given some of the people he meets, who would not be?

He was paying seven dollars a week, and on Friday, ready to go back to Irving again, he spoke to Mrs. Bledsoe about a few housekeeping details:

MRS. BLEDSOE.
. . . he said, “And I want my room cleaned and clean sheets put on the bed.”

And I said, “Well, I will after you move because you are going to move.”

He said, “Why?”

I says, “Because I am not going to rent to you any more.” . . . He said, “Give me back my money.” Now, $2.

I said, “Well, I don’t have it.”

So, he left Saturday morning . . .
⁶

Without the two dollars. It was just after his first week back. Having lost a room for no evident reason, and a job he thought he had, Oswald could have come to the conclusion that the FBI was alerting people to his presence. So, for the next room he rented after his return to Dallas from the second weekend in Irving, Oswald gave his name as O. H. Lee to Earlene Roberts, who was taking care of the rooming house for the landlady, Mrs. Johnson. It was this alias, O. H. Lee, that may have brought him to the end of the drama that was his life.

His relations with Earlene Roberts were marginally better than his encounters with Mrs. Bledsoe.

MR. BALL.
Did you ever talk to him about anything?

MRS. ROBERTS.
No; because he wouldn’t talk.

MR. BALL.
Did he say hello?

MRS. ROBERTS.
No.

MR. BALL.
Or goodbye?

MRS. ROBERTS.
No.

MR. BALL.
Or anything?

MRS. ROBERTS.
He wouldn’t say nothing.

MR. BALL.
Did you ever speak to him?

MRS. ROBERTS.
Well, yes—I would say, “Good afternoon,” and he would maybe just look at me—give me a dirty look and keep walking and go on to his room.
⁷

Over the next forty days, he will see a great deal of Ruth Paine and her estranged husband, Michael, on weekends in Irving. Ruth, as indicated earlier, is an apostle of reason and decency, as archetypical a liberal as Mrs. Bledsoe is a landlady.

While Ruth Paine has no great comprehension of Lee, it is hardly fair to ask her to have divined the secret thoughts of a young man who draws his spiritual sustenance equally from authoritarians and anarchists.

Ruth Paine became, nonetheless, one of the stand-bys of the Warren Commission even if the FBI started with great distrust of her—could she be a KGB agent hooked into Marina? Then they found out that her husband, Michael, was the son of Lyman Paine, an American radical who had gone to Norway in the Thirties to visit Leon Trotsky, who was there in exile from Russia.

On questioning her, the Warren Commission discovered that Ruth had written numerous letters to her mother about Marina and Lee. In the course of having such letters read into her testimony, and indeed the letters are full of Ruth Paine’s gifts at fine-tuning her reactions to Lee and Marina, she ends up with the greatest number of pages of testimony—more than De Mohrenschildt, or Marina, or Marguerite, or Robert Oswald, or Captain Fritz of the Dallas police, a feat marred only by the fact that we don’t really learn a great deal more than we knew before. It is no great surprise to us that Oswald is, already by half, a most domesticated husband:

MRS. PAINE.
I disliked him actively in the spring when I thought he just wanted to get rid of his wife and wasn’t caring about her . . . I then found him much nicer, I thought, when I saw him next in New Orleans in late September, and this would be a perfectly good time to admit the rest of the pertinent part of this letter to my mother written October 14, because it shows something that I think should be part of the public record, and I am one of the few people who can give it, that presents Lee Oswald as a human person, a person really rather ordinary, not an ogre that was out to leave his wife and be harsh and hostile to all that he knew.

But in this brief period during the times he came out on weekends, I saw him as a person who cared for his wife and child, tried to make himself helpful in my home, tried to make himself welcome although he really preferred to stay to himself.

He wasn’t much to take up a conversation. This [letter] says, “Dear Mom—He arrived a week and a half ago and has been looking for work since. It is a very depressing business for him, I am sure. He spent last weekend and the one before with us here and was a happy addition to our expanded family. He played with Chris”—my 3-year-old, then 2—“watched football on the TV, planed down the doors that wouldn’t fit . . . And generally added a needed masculine flavor. From a poor first impression I have come to like him.”
⁸

The next excerpt may give a glimpse of Michael Paine, who was not without concern for the shadings of moral nicety:

MR. LIEBELER.
When did you have this discussion with your wife concerning whether or not you should let Marina live with you? Was that before they came back from New Orleans?

MR. PAINE.
Yes, it was.

MR. LIEBELER.
And you concluded at the time there was no reason why Marina should not come here; is that right?

MR. PAINE.
That is right. Of course, Ruth went in and sounded them out rather cautiously and reported to me also [Oswald’s] facial expressions and what-not when she was suggesting this, and he seemed to be glad of that rather than worried.

MR. LIEBELER.
Now, after Marina came and lived at your house, Oswald was there during parts of the months October and November . . . was [your opinion] reinforced on the basis of his activities and your observation of him during that period?

MR. PAINE.
It was reinforced.

MR. LIEBELER.
You did not think him to be a violent person or one who would be likely to commit an act such as assassinating the President?

MR. PAINE.
I didn’t—I saw he was a bitter person, [with] quite a lot of very negative views of people in the world around him, very little charity in his view toward anybody, but I thought he was harmless.

REPRESENTATIVE FORD.
Was this a different reaction from the one you had had at your first meeting or first acquaintance?

MR. PAINE.
When we first became acquainted I was somewhat shocked, especially that he would speak so harshly to his wife in front of a complete stranger, and it was at that point . . . that I was persuaded I would like to free Marina from her bondage and servitude to this man [so] I became interested in helping her escape from him. Of course, I was not going to try to force that. I didn’t want to be separating a family that could get along.

MR. LIEBELER.
This bitterness you detected following his return from Mexico, was that a new reaction?

MR. PAINE.
No. That bitterness had existed all along [but] when Marina came to our house, she gained in health and weight. She started to look better and it looked to me as if the strain was off the family relationship. They were not quarreling. They billed and cooed. She sat on his lap and he said sweet things in her ear.
⁹

Back in Dallas after the weekend in Irving, Lee would call every night, and each night he had the same sad story to recount: no job yet.

Later, many conspiracy theorists would find his employment at the Texas School Book Depository to be suspicious in the extreme, but on the face of it, he got the job through one of Ruth Paine’s neighbors, who remarked that “her brother worked in the School Book Depository and there was apparently an opening there.”
¹⁰
That Ruth would be instrumental in getting him hired was, naturally, one of the elements in the FBI’s early suspicion of her.

MR. TRULY.
I received a phone call from a lady in Irving who said her name was Mrs. Paine [and she said,] “Mr. Truly, you don’t know who I am but I have a neighbor whose brother [Wesley Frazier] works for you [and] he tells his sister that you are very busy. And I am just wondering if you can use another man . . . I have a fine young man living here with his wife and baby, and his wife is expecting a baby—another baby—in a few days and he needs work desperately.”

. . . I told Mrs. Paine to send him down, and I would talk to him—that I didn’t have anything in mind for him of a permanent nature, but if he was suited we could possibly use him for a brief time . . .

So he came in, introduced himself to me, and I took him in my office and interviewed him. He seemed to be quiet and well mannered.

I gave him an application to fill out, which he did . . . . I asked him about experience that he had had, or where he had worked, and he said he had just served his term in the Marine Corps and had an honorable discharge . . .
¹¹

He did not give Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall as a reference.