Oswald's Tale (64 page)

MR. TOBIAS.
. . . I tried to talk to him several times and all I could get out of him was a grunt. He was the kind of a guy that wouldn’t talk to you at all . . .

MR. JENNER.
How did your other tenants feel toward Oswald?

MR. TOBIAS.
. . . They didn’t like the way he beat her all the time. [One tenant] told me, he said, “I think that man over there is going to kill that girl,” and I said, “I can’t do a darn thing about it.” I says, “That’s domestic troubles . . .”
¹⁰

Mrs. Tobias amplifies her mate’s comments:

MRS. TOBIAS.
. . . they always kept their blinds down, you know, the shades was always pulled.

MR. JENNER.
They were?

MRS. TOBIAS.
Oh, yes—day and night, you never seen any shades up over there, their shades was always down . . . they fought so much . . . and the tenants would come and tell my husband that they kept them awake and the baby cried so much and he could hear them falling down as if Mrs. Oswald was hitting the floor . . . and we had one tenant over him . . . and she came over and she said, “Mr. Tobias, I think he has made a new opening down there.” She said, “I think he’s put her right through there.” And he did break a window, my husband had to fix that . . . they knocked it out—I guess from fighting—we don’t know.

MR. JENNER.
You weren’t there?

MRS. TOBIAS.
No, [the tenants] said they could hear glass falling and evidently [Oswald] had put a baby blanket there—a baby blanket was over it, tacked down over the window . . . so my husband told them if they didn’t straighten up . . . other people had to rest too, that he was sorry, but they would have to find another place.

MR. JENNER.
And it was shortly after that that they left?

MRS. TOBIAS.
Yes; shortly after that they moved in over on Neely.
¹¹

The apartment on Neely Street, just three blocks away, is on the second floor, has several small rooms and a scabby old wooden balcony. It also contains a very small room that Oswald appropriates for himself as a closet-sized studio. In it, through the month of March, he will do the writing and complete the research that will accompany his now developing effort to terminate Edwin A. Walker on the General’s return to Dallas early in April.

8

Hunter of Fascists

McMillan:
. . . Lee devoted his first two evenings on Neely Street to fixing up the apartment. He was handy at carpentry, building window boxes for the balcony and painting them green. He also built shelves for his special room and moved in a chair and a table, creating his own tiny office . . . “Look,” he said to her . . . “I’ve never had my own room before. I’ll do all my work here, make a lab and do my photography . . . But you’re not to come in and clean. If I ever come in and find one single thing has been touched, I’ll beat you.”
¹

Having his own workplace seemed to be conducive to the sybaritic:

McMillan:
When he took a bath, he would ask her to wash him. First he stretched one leg in the air. When she had finished and was ready to do the other leg, he would say No, the right one wasn’t clean yet. He made her wash one leg four or five times before he would consent to raise the other. “Now I feel like a king,” he would say beatifically. But he cautioned her to be more gentle. “I have sensitive skin, while you have rough, Russian ways.”

Next, he would refuse to get out of the tub, his complaint being that the floor was cold, and he told her to put a towel down for him. When she had done as he asked, she would say, “Okay, prince, you can get out now.”
²

By March 10, he takes the equivalent of a deep breath and goes out on reconnaissance. He scouts the alley behind Walker’s home, which is a two-story house on 4011 Turtle Creek Boulevard, and with his Imperial Reflex camera he photographs the backyard and rear wall of the place, presumably to familiarize himself with its windows, then proceeds to take snapshots of some railroad tracks seven hundred yards away. His motive here would hardly be comprehensible if one does not assume that already he is planning to bury his weapon in some particular clump of bushes near the tracks and needs the photographs to orient himself. One more advantage of working at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall—he need be the only one who develops his negatives and prints.

Two days later, having estimated the possibilities, he comes to the conclusion that he needs a rifle, not a pistol, and so orders a Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5 mm carbine from Klein’s Sporting Goods Company in Chicago—can he have any idea that this will become the most notorious rifle in history? The gun costs a total of $22.95, with a four-power scope mounted, postage and handling included. A few days later, on March 15, he writes to his brother Robert, who has just been promoted and is going to buy a larger house: “It’s always better to take advantage of your chances as they come along, so I’m glad for you.”
³

It is the basic maxim of the man of action. He has been following it, sometimes well, sometimes badly, for a good part of his life. It certainly gives us one more understanding of his readiness to lie: Mistruths tilt the given and create openings—one can dart through them. “Take advantage of your chances as they come along . . .”

The second quality of the man of action—the ability to see his situation in the round—is sadly lacking. When it comes to assessing his own situation, Lee has tunnel vision. In the same letter to Robert he writes: “My work is very nice; I will get a rise in pay next month and I have become rather adept at my photographic work.”

MR. GRAEF.
. . . I was working at my own desk one time and I looked over and . . . Lee was reading a newspaper, and I could see it—it was . . . not a usual newspaper and I asked him what he was reading and he said, “A Russian newspaper.” . . . and I said, “Well, Lee, I wouldn’t bring anything like that down here again, because some people might not take kindly to your reading anything like that.” . . . of course, I know how people are and [him] causing suspicion and so forth, by having that newspaper or at least running around with it, flaunting it, we’ll say.
⁴

Meanwhile, at home, he is setting down in a blue-covered journal, a gift from George Bouhe in more generous times, the results of each reconnaissance he makes to Walker’s house. The timetables of various bus routes within a mile of his target are included with his photographs, and he also puts in his estimate of the distance to various rear windows and doors from various sites of aim in the back alley. His joy as a young adolescent in studying the Marine Corps manual is being exercised again. He has dedication to detail. If it takes a General to kill a General, there is going to be balance in this event. Needless to add, the other half of himself, the enlisted man who despised all officers, can be a populist now: It takes a Private to shoot a General! That kicks off more in the scheme of things. So, Private-General Oswald, serving as his own staff, elaborates his plans. On his nocturnal missions, he even takes a nine-power hand telescope that he has brought back with him from Russia to aid in his estimates of distance. Like any good General, he knows that the more you prepare, the more inevitable it becomes that you will actually go into battle and thereby commence that semi-unbelievable activity of killing your fellow man.

The Mannlicher-Carcano carbine arrives some two weeks after it has been ordered, and the Smith & Wesson revolver with the sawed-off barrel, delayed for nearly two months, also comes in on the same day, March 25. One is at the post office, the other at REA Express near Love Field. How can he not see it as a sign? Having arrived on the same day, perhaps they will be used on the same day. Perhaps they were.

A fellow employee, Jack Bowen, recalls that Oswald, having brought the rifle over to Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall after he picked it up at the post office, showed it to him.
⁵
Oswald is even acting like a man from Texas, which place, after all, is not one of the fifty states so much as a separate nation with specific customs: An offering of friendship is to show your neighbor the rifle you have just acquired.

Now came the cleaning of his weapon. To the degree that one sees one’s rifle as a loyal servant—if treated properly—cleaning one’s gun becomes a sacramental act. One is imbuing the wood of the stock and the metal of the barrel with nothing less than an infusion of one’s own dedication. The axiom is basic: The more one cleans a piece, the more accurately it will shoot; but then, every gun lover is a closet mystic. It is one reason that congressmen are terrified of the National Rifle Association. Not many politicians understand mystics, and not many politicians like what they do not understand.

From an FBI report:
MARINA
. . . said she can now recall that
OSWALD
cleaned his rifle on about four or five occasions during the short period of time which elapsed from the time he acquired the rifle in March, 1963, until his attempted assassination of General
WALKER.
[She also] said it would have been entirely possible for him to have practiced on any of the times he was away from the house ostensibly attending school and if he had practiced on such occasions, it would have been without her knowledge.
⁶

From April 1 on, Oswald attended no more typing classes, but did not inform Marina.
⁷

From an FBI report: . . .
He had his rifle wrapped in a raincoat and told
MARINA
he was going to practice firing with the rifle. She remonstrated with him. She said the police would get him. He replied he was going anyway and it was none of her business. He did not say where he was going to practice firing the rifle, other than he was going to a vacant spot . . .
⁸

To Marina, he looked so suspicious. Every time he took his rifle out of the house, he would wear a dark green military overcoat even if the weather in Dallas was unseasonably warm. That was because he could walk along carrying the rifle under his green coat.

At night he would call out in his sleep, and say things in English she could not understand; then he would mumble and seem frightened. He was certainly afraid of something. She never did know where and how he practiced. Afterward, people would say it had to be at the Trinity River, which had a levee thirty-five feet high that you could use as a backstop for bullets.

In fact, she tried to keep her distance from the rifle and never went near it when she cleaned. Who knew? It could go off!
⁹

On the last day in March, a Sunday, Lee had Marina photograph him in their backyard. He was dressed in a black shirt and black pants and dark cowboy boots. He held his rifle in his left hand, his pistol in a holster on his hip and he had
The Worker
and
The Militant
in his right hand. For years, those famous photographs Marina took on that day were under suspicion by Warren Commission critics. They looked to be doctored. His head sits at an odd angle to his neck, and the shadow under his nose is vertical while the shadow of his body slants away at an angle. These anomalies are so evident that in 1964, a good lawyer could have created real doubt in a jury’s mind whether the body of the man holding the gun belonged to Oswald. By now, simulated photographs taken at the same time of day and year in Dallas have been able to produce the identical discrepancies in the shadows. Even though only one of the original negatives was ever found, microscopic analysis of the grain in this negative shows that head and body belong to the same man. Moreover, grain analysis of the prints for which no negatives were found indicates that they were printed from the same roll that contained the negative that was found. The prevailing conclusion is, then, that the photographs are real, and Marina took them. The most novel supposition left to us now is that some instinct which had developed in Oswald from working all those months in an enlarging room at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall now told him to cant his neck at an odd angle. Who can know how much filigree he puts, consciously and/or unconsciously, into his scenarios?

Marina’s reactions, thirty years later, to this odd Sunday morning of taking photographs are still of interest. There was Lee! Dressed all in black—an idiot! When she was asked how many times she pressed her shutter, she said, “Three at least,” but then, when she was asked if it might have been five or six times, she added, “I don’t know.” After she took two pictures, he said, “Once again,” then he said, “Wait, it’s not finished yet,” and changed his position so that the outside stairs of their apartment would now be to his left. She asked him, “Why are you wearing that stupid outfit?” and he said, “For posterity.” She told him, “Yes, it will be very nice for children to remember all that, standing there with all those guns,” and he just mumbled some stupid excuse. His voice was embarrassed even, so obviously dumb.

Still, he’d been very careful to choose a good hour when they took pictures. He didn’t want any neighbors to see him standing in the backyard with a rifle and a pistol. So he listened and waited until their neighbors left for church—then he said, “Okay, let’s do it now before they return.”

It was probably on the Monday following this Sunday that he lost his job:

MR. GRAEF.
. . . I said, “Lee, come on back, I would like to talk to you.” So, we went back, and I said, “Lee, I think this is as good a time as any to cut it short.” I said, “Business is pretty slow at this time, but the point is that you haven’t been turning the work out like you should. There has been friction with other people,” and so on.

MR. JENNER.
What did he say when you said that?

MR. GRAEF.
Nothing. And I said, “This is, I think, the best time to just make a break of it.” I believe I gave him a few days . . .

And there was no outburst on his part. He took this the whole time looking at the floor, I believe, and after I was through, he said, “Well, thank you.” And he turned around and walked off.
¹⁰

He might even have seen it as one more favorable sign. Free of his job, he would have more time to prepare for Walker.

Graef’s best recollection is that Oswald was given this notice on Friday, March 29, or on April 1, a Monday, and Lee continued to work through Saturday, April 6, which is a perfect example of how essential chronology is to motive. For if Oswald was fired on March 29, he might well have reacted by asking Marina to take the photographs of himself with rifle and revolver on March 31, whereas if he was given notice on Monday, April 1, the two events are considerably less well connected, and all we can assume is that there was a glint in Oswald’s eye while he was listening to Graef: To hell with being fired—just let me get back to the darkroom and develop those negatives. In his last week at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, he still puts in overtime, but then, he probably wants to leave a little money for Marina if all goes wrong.

General Walker was also a romantic. He had called his five-week lecture tour Operation Midnight Ride. Since he was coming back to Dallas on Monday, April 8, Oswald, a day or two before the General’s return, took his rifle and went out to the area near Walker’s house on Turtle Creek Boulevard and, presumably, buried it close to some railroad tracks a half mile away. Scouting the Mormon church next to Walker’s house, he then saw a notice of services on Wednesday night and most probably concluded that the presence of a stranger on Turtle Creek Boulevard, or in the alley parallel to it, would seem less suspicious if he made his attempt on that same night, Wednesday, April 10.