Assassination!: The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents (22 page)

Oswald was put up in a hotel room while waiting to hear back about his request for Soviet citizenship. During this time, he practiced his Russian and wrote to his brother, saying he would “never return to the United States, which is a country I hate.”

But when his weeklong visa expired, Oswald was informed he must return to the United States. Unable to handle this unexpected rejection, Oswald filled the bathtub and slit his wrist. He was found by his tour guide and rushed to a hospital.

After a week of recovery in the hospital, Oswald marched into the American Embassy, turned in his passport, and renounced his American citizenship. He further threatened to pass on to the Soviets any and all military information he acquired as a radar technician for the US Marines.

The Soviets did not offer citizenship to Oswald, but they did supply him with foreign residence documents and sent him 400 miles away to Minsk to work at a radio and TV factory. He was given a very large apartment by Russian standards and a salary about twice what his coworkers received.

Popular with the ladies from the local college, Oswald had several brief flings before falling madly in love with foreign language student Ella Germann. When she rebuffed him, Oswald was devastated. To get back at her, Oswald immediately began dating, and three weeks later married, the nineteen-year-old pharmacy student Marina Prusakova.

Oswald grew tired of Soviet life after a year, and attempted to patch up relations with the American Embassy so he could return to the United States. Another year and a half passed as the Americans and Soviets decided how to handle the situation. Oswald’s first daughter, June, was born a few months before he and his family were allowed to come to the United States.

Settling in Fort Worth, Texas, Oswald worked a series of menial jobs to support his family. Speaking only Russian at home, he discouraged Marina from learning English. The marriage quickly soured. Marina routinely berated Oswald, and Oswald often struck back with physical abuse.

Now disenchanted with the Soviets’ overly bureaucratic form of communism, Oswald began to idealize Fidel Castro’s Cuba and began his attempts to build his credentials as a Marxist revolutionary. He mail ordered a .38 caliber revolver and a World War IIera Italian rifle with a telescopic sight.

Living nearby in Dallas at this time was the outspoken, ultra-rightwing, militantly anticommunist retired Major General Edwin Walker, who was in the midst of a speaking tour condemning the Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy administration, and calling for a full invasion of Cuba to rout the communists.

During March of 1963, Oswald carefully documented a plan to assassinate Walker. Standing in their backyard, he had Marina take photos of him posed with his guns, holding up copies of socialist newspapers, The Worker and The Militant. He inscribed one photo “To Junie” saying it was “to remember Papa by sometimes.”

Oswald had also just completed writing a rambling political manifesto, in which he predicted that a “total crisis” would soon destroy the US government and that a small elite party would pick up the pieces to establish a “democratic, pure communist society” that would include free speech, racial and religious tolerance, abolition of all armies, and gun control.

On April 10, Oswald left behind a note for his wife in case of his death or capture, and after eating dinner at home, traveled to the woods outside Walker’s house where, in previous preparations, he had buried his rifle.