Oswald's Tale (49 page)

MR. JENNER.
Did Lee share your enthusiasm for collecting weapons? . . .

MR. VOEBEL.
. . . I don’t think Lee was interested in the history of any weapons. For example, he wanted a pistol . . . just to have one, not for any purposes of collecting them or anything . . .

MR. JENNER.
Did Lee ever own a weapon?

MR. VOEBEL.
. . . Not that I know of . . . he did own a plastic model of a .45 . . . and he showed that to me. I guess you want to know now about his plan for a robbery. Actually, I wasn’t too impressed with the whole idea at first, [and] it really didn’t bother me until he did shock me one day when he came up with a whole plan and everything that he needed for . . . stealing this pistol [from] a show window, on Rampart Street . . . It might have been a Smith & Wesson. I think it was an automatic, but I really didn’t pay too much attention to it . . . The following week I was up at his house and he came out with a glasscutter and a box with this plastic pistol in it, and . . . he had a plan as to how he was going to try to get in and get this pistol.

MR. JENNER.
You mean in the Rampart Street store?

MR. VOEBEL.
Yes. Now, I don’t remember if he was planning to use this plastic pistol in the robbery or not, or just . . . cut the glass and break it out . . . I don’t think he was really sure even then how he wanted to do it [but] we walked over there to this store and we looked at this pistol in the window . . .

He said, “Well, what do you think?” and I . . . happened to notice this band around the window, a metal tape that they use for burglar alarms, and I got working on that idea in the hope that I could talk him out of trying it, . . . I said, “Well, I don’t think that’s a good idea, because if you cut that window, it might crack that tape, and the burglar alarm will go off,” . . . and so [he] finally gave up the idea . . . I don’t think he really wanted to go through with it, to tell you the truth . . . I think maybe he was just thinking along the lines that if he went through with it, that he would look big among the guys, you know . . .
⁸

It was in this period that Oswald began to read Marxist literature. Just which books is somewhat in question. He would tell several people in Moscow and Minsk that his radical politics were first stirred by a pamphlet about the execution of the Rosenbergs handed to him in 1952 by an old lady outside a subway stop in New York, and he would also remark that he took out
Das Kapital
and
The Communist Manifesto
from his local library in New Orleans. On the other hand, he is reading
Das Kapital
seriously in Minsk, and his remarks suggest it is for the first time. In New Orleans, it is probably
The Communist Manifesto
that is giving him all the fire he needs for striking radical opinions at the age of sixteen.

William E. Wulf, a studious young man, contributes to such a picture. Oswald worked for a time at Pfisterer Dental Laboratory in New Orleans as a delivery boy and had made friends with another runner there named Palmer McBride, who was a member of the New Orleans Amateur Astronomy Association (a group of high school students), of which Wulf was president. Oswald was interested in astronomy, he informed McBride. After a preliminary phone call, Oswald and McBride dropped in one night around ten or eleven at Wulf’s house.

MR. WULF.
[I told him that] we were not very much interested in teaching some fledgling all this data we had already gone through over the years, and he would actually be hampered in belonging to the group, and I actually discouraged him from joining for that reason. This is all I can remember of the first contact, because it was kind of late . . .
⁹

However, Oswald came over again with Palmer McBride, and this time began to expound on politics.

MR. WULF.
. . . McBride had always told me that he wanted to get into the military service as a career, especially rocket engineering and rocketry—like we were all nuts on rocketry at the time—and I told him, I said, “This boy Oswald, if you are associated with him, could be construed as a security risk . . .”

MR. LIEBELER.
What led you to make that statement to McBride?

MR. WULF.
[Oswald] was reading some of my books in my library, and he started expounding the Communist doctrine and saying that he was highly interested in communism, that communism was the only way of life for the worker, et cetera, and then came out with the statement that he was looking for a Communist cell in town to join but he couldn’t find any [and then] my father came in the room, heard what we were arguing on communism, and that this boy was loud-mouthed, boisterous, and my father asked him to leave the house and politely put him out of the house, and that is the last time I have seen or spoken with Oswald . . .
¹⁰

On his sixteenth birthday, with a birth certificate forged with Marguerite’s connivance, he tries to enlist in the Marine Corps and is rejected as too young. So, he has to undergo another year of memorizing that Marine Corps manual. How much he must have absorbed about the erection of pup tents and squad tents, care of one’s weapon, close-order march, proper salute, disassembly of the .30 caliber machine gun, dress uniform, guerrilla tactics, traversing a three-rope bridge, aims and standards of the Marine Corps obstacle course and, of course, the procedure for firing the M-1 rifle from prone, standing, and sitting positions.

Marguerite moved from New Orleans back to Fort Worth in July of 1956, three months before Lee would be seventeen and so eligible to enlist. On October 3, 1956, just twenty-one days before he would sign up for the Marines on October 24, he put his
X
on a coupon from an advertisement found in a magazine: “I want more information about the Socialist Party.” Then, he added a personal letter to the coupon:

Dear Sirs,

. . . would like to know if there is a branch in my area, how to join, etc. I am a Marxist and have been studying my Socialist principles for well over fifteen months. I am very interested in your YPSL.
¹¹

John Pic had a short comment on why Lee had gone into the Marines:

MR. PIC.
He did it for the same reasons that I did it and Robert did it, I assume, to get from out and under.

MR. JENNER.
Out and under what?

MR. PIC.
The yoke of oppression from my mother.
¹²

In April 1960, during Oswald’s first spring in Minsk, an FBI agent named John W. Fain was making inquiries about Lee in Fort Worth and here refers to an interview with a neighbor of Marguerite Oswald:

Mrs.
TAYLOR
stated that the subject was a student in Arlington Heights High School and was only about 16 or 17 years of age when the
OSWALDS
moved to this address [and] that the subject was a peculiar boy inasmuch as he read a great deal and kept very much to himself . . . Mrs.
TAYLOR
stated that she actually felt sorry for the subject inasmuch as it appeared to her that he had few if any friends and no social life. She stated she pitied the boy because . . . she has never seen anyone stay at home more closely than did the subject. She stated that Mrs.
OSWALD
. . . on occasion urged him to go out and seek employment but that he preferred to sit at home and read . . .
¹³

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
Yes, sir. [This] is a picture of Lee in Atsugi, Japan, in 1958, showing his strength.

MR. RANKIN.
That shows him in [his] Marine uniform also, does it?

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
In his Marine uniform showing his muscles to his mother.
¹⁴

6

The Loose End

There can be little doubt that the Warren Commission came to the unvoiced conclusion that it might be all for the best if Oswald turned out to be homosexual. That would have the advantage of explaining much even if it explained nothing at all. The Warren Commission did have, after all, a lone killer as their desired objective, but there was no evidence of particular animus by Oswald toward Kennedy, and more than a few key witnesses testified to Oswald’s positive utterances concerning JFK. So, a history of homosexuality located in Oswald’s closet would prove helpful to them. In 1964, homosexuality was still seen as one of those omnibus infections of the spirit that could lead to God knows what further aberration.

Nonetheless, there is a real chance that Oswald had considerably more of a sexual career as a homosexual than as a heterosexual through his Marine Corps days and through his first year in Minsk. Paradoxically, it would help to explain the patience with which he wooed Ella and the haste with which he married Marina. Indeed, his young life is a study in one recurring theme—I am not yet a man and I must become one—which in the late Fifties and early Sixties became a compelling motif for many young men terrified by homosexual inclinations and ready to go to great lengths to combat and/or conceal them.

One must always read accounts of Oswald’s behavior with double vision: Yes, he was serious—no, he was jesting; yes, he was gay—no, he was merely shy with women; yes, he was obsessed with violence—no, he had only a small and intermittent interest in such matters. Any attempt to put a thematic stamp on him will run into contradictions—his actions are not often predictable—but given the oppressive psychological climate of the Fifties, we have to entertain the possibility that one of the major obsessions in Oswald’s life was manhood, attaining his manhood. If he was in part homosexual, then the force of such a preoccupation would have doubled and trebled.

From the affidavit of David Christie Murray, Jr.:

. . . Oswald did not often associate with his fellow Marines. Although I know of no general explanation for this, I personally stayed away from Oswald because I had heard a rumor to the effect that he was homosexual . . .
¹

Much is said to this effect by another Marine, Daniel Patrick Powers, a high school football and wrestling coach at the time of his Warren Commission testimony. He must have seemed an ideal soldier to the Commissioners. Powers was a big man physically, and his testimony gives off an air of sincerity which powerful men often possess when they know they can depend on their bodies more than most.

MR. POWERS.
. . . he had a large homosexual tendency, as far as I was concerned, and . . . a lot of feminine characteristics as far as the other individuals of the group were concerned, and I think possibly he was an individual that would come to a point in his life that he would have to decide one way or the other.

MR. JENNER.
On what?

MR. POWERS.
On a homosexual or leading a normal life, and again, now, this is a personal opinion.

And I think this, more than any other factor, was the reason that he was on the outside of the group in Mississippi.

He was always an individual that was regarded as a meek person, one that you wouldn’t have to worry about as far as the leadership was concerned, a challenge for leadership or anything . . .

He had the name of Ozzie Rabbit, as I recall . . .
²

This question of whether he was or was not homosexual may hinder our understanding of Oswald more than it helps. Why not suppose instead that he had the kind of double nature which would leave him miserable after gay activities and more certain than ever that he was really heterosexual, whereas, conversely, when with a woman a year or two later, he might feel more powerful homosexual inclinations than when he was with men. It may have mattered less what he did than what he was tempted to do. In any event, we can be reasonably certain of one matter: By the age of seventeen and a half, he had not yet had a woman.

We are advancing too quickly, however. Powers did not meet Oswald until Lee had been in the Marines for almost half a year, and so Powers’ account skips over one of the most telling periods in any soldier’s life—his basic training—but then, the Warren Commission was not about to delve too deeply into Oswald’s military career. After all, what if Oswald turned out to be some spawn of military intelligence? Better not to open that door more than a crack.

Assassination by conspiracy was, however, not a likely topic for the Warren Commission—their emphasis was on family values. A bang-up job they did, and we can take the benefit of that, but no one could ever say that keen inquiry was the Warren Commission’s prevailing passion. Their treatment of Oswald’s Marine Corps days can only be termed slack. In
Legend,
his landmark work on CIA involvement with Oswald, Edward Jay Epstein gives us a richer portrait of Oswald’s military service than do all the volumes of the Warren Commission, for he managed to uncover a dozen Marines who had known Oswald and not been interviewed.

All the same, there is not much anywhere about his boot camp in San Diego, just enough to let us know that Oswald had a hard time. The Marine Corps manual could hardly have prepared him for the reality. A trainee in Oswald’s platoon named Sherman Cooley described it as “holy hell.”
³
Of course, all basic training can be so described—it was just that the Marine Corps liked to pack two basic trainings into one. Oswald, according to Cooley, was soon being called
shit-bird.
He had trouble managing to qualify with his rifle, and that was horrific. The Marine Corps laid it out for you: Your ability with an M-1 was equal to your virility—there was no reason to be in the Marine Corps if virility was not the center of your focus.

From San Diego, Oswald went on to combat training at Camp Pendleton in California—full menu—infantry assaults in coordination with tanks, bayonet drill built around hand-to-hand combat, training for amphibious landings—it is a little painful to think of this mother’s boy, over-loved and much neglected, Hamlet to Marguerite’s much-mortified Gertrude, conceiving in his fantasies of great and noble Marine glory (to accompany his Marxism), now reduced to the spiritual rank of shit-bird. He had begun to toughen up in New Orleans, but hardly enough to be prepared for the kind of tests that the Corps would lay on him. He had to feel feminized by his failures. It must be repeated: In the mind-set of the 1950s, a century away from the prevailing concepts of the 1990s, to be weak among men was to perceive oneself as a woman, and that, by the male code of the times, was an intolerable condition for a man.

Such a set of values hardly helped Oswald to balance the opposites in himself. Hysterical and timid, he still has an ego ready to judge the world around him. The form it takes in his personality is to be cool, reserved, and sardonic whenever and wherever he can—his first nine months in the Marine Corps offer little opportunity for that. Powers describes how Lee, on the boat over to Japan (following aircraft and radar control school in Jacksonville, Florida, and at Keesler, in Biloxi, Mississippi), would play chess with him all day and virtually do a war dance of delight when he would win: “‘Look at that. I won. I beat you.’”
⁴

On September 12, 1957, two years and one month before he will enter Russia, Oswald lands at Yokosuka, Japan, close to Tokyo. He and Powers have read
Leaves of Grass
on the troopship, and he gives the book to the big Marine.

At Atsugi airbase, thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo, where he was now based in a two-story wooden barracks, Corporal Thomas Bagshaw was his roommate. Bagshaw, who was making a career in the Marines, told Epstein that Oswald was “very thin, almost frail, shy and quiet.” At that time, he was five feet nine inches tall, and may not have weighed 135 pounds.

[Bagshaw] also recalls feeling sorry for him when other Marines in the barracks began “picking on him.” The rougher Marines in the barracks, who generally preferred spending their liberties carousing in Japanese bars and finding women, considered Oswald (who spent his early liberties in the television room of the barracks alone, watching
American Bandstand
and replays of football games) a natural object of derision. They called him Mrs. Oswald, threw him in the shower fully dressed and hassled him in every other conceivable way. Oswald would not fight back; he would just turn away from a provoker and ignore him.
⁵

To this should be added a keen observation by another of Epstein’s Marines, Jerry E. Pitts, who pointed out that there was an unspoken rite of passage for every new recruit, and the initiation took different forms.

. . . [Pitts] explained that savvy Marines could breeze right through such treatment, laughing off the insults and swapping them back. But Oswald was the exception. He seemed to take each insult seriously and responded with a quiet fury that he was incapable of converting into physical violence . . .

Pitts . . . remembers . . . “certain areas—such as indecent references to his mother—that really set Oswald off . . .”
⁶

There is one sympathetic portrait of Oswald in this period. Gator Daniels, who had been an alligator wrestler in the Florida swamps, a huge man who had spent his first eighteen years fishing and trapping, described Lee as “‘simple folk, just like I was . . . we were a bunch of kids—never been away from home before—but Oswald came right out and admitted that he had never known a woman . . . . It was real unusual that a fellow would admit that. Like me, he was naïve about a lot of things, but he never was ashamed to admit it . . . . He was just a good egg,’ Daniels remembers. ‘He used to do me favors, like lending me money until payday . . . the sort of friend I could count on if I needed a pint of blood.’”
⁷

Nonetheless, hazing continued, and one day Oswald discharged a pistol into the wall while a few Marines standing nearby were riding him mercilessly.

It is a complex account and well worth avoiding; the descriptions vary a good deal. One of the more sinister versions, as described by Edward Epstein, has a Marine, Pete Connor, insisting that “the derringer which Oswald was playing with as he sat on a bunk, discharged and sent a bullet seven inches above Connor’s head to slam into a wall locker.”
⁸
Since Connor, by his own admission, was one of the Marines ridiculing Oswald, a suspicion arises that the shot was no accident.

Then there is another episode, perhaps a couple of weeks later, when Oswald wounds himself with the same derringer. Oswald’s outfit had been alerted that they were shipping out in a few days from Japan to parts unknown, and scuttlebutt had it that he nicked himself purposely to avoid going. By the record, Oswald grazed his upper left arm with a .22 caliber bullet from his mail-order derringer, and then said to the several witnesses who rushed in, “I believe I shot myself.”

He could have faced an immediate court-martial, but his outfit was getting ready to ship out from Japan and the legal proceedings were put on hold. As soon as Oswald was discharged from the hospital, he was put on mess duty as an interim punishment. His outfit (MACS-1—Marine Air Control Squadron-1) left Atsugi on November 20, 1957, to embark on an old World War II LST that would wallow past Okinawa toward the Philippine archipelago. While their mission was as yet undetermined, the Marines heard talk of military intervention, possibly in Borneo. Meanwhile, MACS-1 never saw a coastline for a month. It was hot and monumentally boring in the South China Sea as they moved in convoy with thirty or more ships of the Seventh Fleet. Finally, after a hot and dreary Christmas at sea near the equator, they made camp at a place called Cubi Point off Subic Bay, set up a radar tent, and stood guard duty in the awareness that many of the Filipinos in the area might be hostile to them and friendly to the Hukbalahap—Communist guerrillas.

The football season now over, and the Far East Armed Services bowl games having all been played, his friend from early Marine training, Daniel Powers, rejoined MACS-1.

MR. JENNER.
Now, was the same group . . . still together at Cubi Point when you rejoined the squadron?

MR. POWERS.
[Of] the people in my particular group that originated in Jacksonville, the only [ones] left were Schrand, Oswald, and myself . . .

MR. JENNER.
And did an incident occur with respect to Mr. Schrand?

MR. POWERS.
[Schrand] was on guard duty one evening and he was shot to death. Now, I have never seen the official report or anything, but the scuttlebutt at that time was that he was shot underneath the right arm and it came up from underneath the left neck, and it was by a shotgun which we were authorized to carry while we were on guard duty . . . he was either leaning against the shotgun or was fooling with it, but he was shot anyway . . . we could never realize how a guy could have shot himself there other than he was leaning on it this way [indicating], and “boom,” it went off.
⁹