Oswald's Tale (87 page)

When Fritz asked him why he had his pistol with him while seeing a movie, Oswald replied, “‘Well, you know about a pistol. I just carried it.’”
¹⁵

MR. BALL.
Before you questioned Oswald the first time, did you warn him?

MR. FRITZ.
Yes, sir . . . I told him that any evidence that he gave me would be used against him . . .

MR. BALL.
Did he reply to that?

MR. FRITZ.
He told me that he didn’t want a lawyer and he told me once or twice that he didn’t want to answer any questions at all . . . and I told him each time he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to. So later he sometimes would start talking to me again.
¹⁶

After a while, given the impatience created by the number of people in the room, some of the questions had to get downright personal:

MR. BALL.
Did you ask him if he shot Tippit?

MR. FRITZ.
Oh, yes.

MR. BALL.
What did he say?

MR. FRITZ.
He denied it . . . “The only law I violated was in the [movie] show; I hit the officer in the show; he hit me in the eye and I guess I deserved it.” He said, “That is the only law I violated.” He said, “That is the only thing I have done wrong.”
¹⁷

MR. BALL.
Did you ever ask him if he had kept a rifle in the garage at Irving?

MR. FRITZ.
Yes, sir; I did. I asked him, and I asked him if he had brought one from New Orleans. He said he didn’t.

MR. BALL.
He did not.

MR. FRITZ.
That is right.

I told him the people at the Paine residence said he did have a rifle out there, and he kept it out there and he kept it wrapped in a blanket and he said that wasn’t true.
¹⁸

Oswald was not about to open any door. So long as he didn’t admit to having a rifle, he could claim that others were framing him.

All the same, his vanity keeps him from staying silent for too long. If it is a battle of wits, he wants to best his interrogators. When the cost of this indulgence mounts, he becomes cautious again. But he is on a high, and full of combat insanity.

They show him the photograph where he is holding the rifle, and he disavows it:

MR. FRITZ.
. . . he said that wasn’t his picture. “ . . . that is my face and [somebody] put a different body on it.” He said, “I know all about photography, I worked with photography for a long time. That is a picture that someone else has made. I never saw that picture in my life.”
¹⁹

On occasion, he was coy. And sometimes he was so cynical that his answer sounded sacrilegious.

MR. FRITZ.
. . . I told him, I said, “You know, you have killed the President and this is a very serious charge.”

He denied it and said he hadn’t killed the President.

I said he had been killed. He said people will forget that in a few days and there will be another President . . .
²⁰

MR. DULLES.
What was Oswald’s attitude toward the police and police authority?

MR. FRITZ.
You know, I didn’t have any trouble with him. If we would just talk to him quietly like we are talking right now, we talked all right until I asked him a question that meant something, that would produce evidence, he immediately told me he wouldn’t tell me about it and he seemed to anticipate what I was going to ask. In fact, he got so good at it one time, I asked him if he had had any training, if he hadn’t been questioned before.

MR. DULLES.
Questioned before?
²¹

It is Allen Dulles who is asking the question: Questioned by whom? At this point, Allen Dulles may have come wide awake!

MR. FRITZ.
[He said] the FBI had questioned him when he came back from Russia for a long time and they tried different methods. He said they tried the buddy boy method, and the thorough method, and let me see some other method he told me and he said, “I understand that.”
²²

There had been one verbal fracas, however. Not too long after serious questioning began, a call had come in from Gordon Shanklin, the FBI Special Agent in Charge for Dallas:

MR. FRITZ.
. . . Mr. Shanklin asked that Mr. Hosty be in on that questioning, he said he wanted him in there because of Mr. Hosty knowing these people . . .
²³

. . . and [Shanklin] said some other things that I don’t want to repeat, about what to do if [my assistant] didn’t do it right quick. So I . . . walked out there and called [Hosty] in.
²⁴

We have to recall the note that Oswald had left for Hosty at FBI headquarters. Shanklin may, by now, have become aware of the existence of that piece of paper.

As soon as Hosty came into the interrogation room and Oswald heard his name, everything changed:

MR. FRITZ.
. . . Mr. Hosty spoke up and asked him . . . if he had been to Russia, and he asked him if he had been to Mexico City, and this irritated Oswald a great deal and he beat on the desk and he went into kind of a tantrum [and] he said he had not been. He did say he had been to Russia, he was in Russia, I believe he said, for some time . . .

MR. BALL.
Was there anything said about Oswald’s wife?

MR. FRITZ.
Yes, sir. He said, he told Hosty, he said, “I know you.” He said, “You accosted my wife on two occasions,” and he was getting pretty irritable and so I wanted to quiet him down a little bit because I noticed if I talked to him in a calm, easy manner it wasn’t very hard to get him to settle down, and I asked him what he meant by accosting, I thought maybe he meant some physical abuse or something and he said, “Well, he threatened her.” And he said, “He practically told her she would have to go back to Russia.” And he said, “He accosted her on two different occasions.”
²⁵

Oswald beat the table again. Since his wrists were handcuffed in front of him, the impact must have resounded through the room. In effect, Oswald has succeeded in confusing his interrogators by the intimacy of his attack on the FBI man. Nor are Special Agent Hosty’s troubles due to cease quickly.

McMillan:
. . . on his return from interviewing Oswald in the Dallas County Jail, Hosty was confronted at the FBI office by Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin with the note which Oswald had left several days earlier. Shanklin, who appeared “agitated and upset,” asked Hosty about the circumstances in which he had received the note and about his visits to Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald. On Shanklin’s orders, Hosty dictated a two- to four-page memorandum setting forth all he knew and he gave the memorandum, in duplicate, to Shanklin.
²⁶

Following this episode, there are breaks in the interrogation on Friday afternoon for line-ups (or, as they called it in Dallas, showups). The taxicab driver, William Whaley, was one of the people asked to look at Oswald. The means were conventional. Whaley sat behind a one-way window and stared out at the group assembled for him:

MR. WHALEY.
. . . six men, young teenagers, and they were all handcuffed together. Well, they wanted me to pick out my passenger.

At that time he had on a pair of black pants and a white T-shirt, that is all he had on. But you could have picked him out without identifying him by just listening to him because he was bawling out the policemen, telling them it wasn’t right to put him in line with these teenagers and all of that . . .

MR. BALL.
They had him in line with men much younger?

MR. WHALEY.
With five others . . . young kids, they might have got them in jail.

MR. BALL.
Did he look older than those other boys?

MR. WHALEY.
Yes.

MR. BALL.
And he was talking, was he?

MR. WHALEY.
He showed no respect for the policemen [running the show-up], he told them what he thought about them . . . they were trying to railroad him and he wanted his lawyer.

MR. BALL.
Did that aid you in the identification of the man?

MR. WHALEY.
. . . anybody who wasn’t sure could have picked out the right one just for that. It didn’t aid me because I knew he was the right one as soon as I saw him . . . When you drive a taxi that long, you learn to judge people and what I actually thought of the man when he got in was that he was a wino who had been off his bottle for about two days, that is the way he looked, sir, that was my opinion of him . . .
²⁷

At 7:10 on Friday evening Oswald was arraigned for the murder of Officer Tippit. Then, he was brought back to interrogation again. Later that night he would be taken out once more through the cables and the TV lights to another showup, with Howard Brennan, the eyewitness who had seen a rifleman on the sixth floor. Brennan, however, refused to make an absolute identification that night.

MR. BALL.
. . . there were two officers of the vice squad and an officer and a clerk from the jail that were in the showup with Oswald?

MR. FRITZ.
That is true. I borrowed those officers. I was a little bit afraid some prisoner might hurt him, there was a lot of . . . feeling right about that time, [and] we didn’t have an officer in my office the right size to show with him so I asked two of the special service officers if they would help me and they said they would be glad to, so they took off their coats and neckties and fixed themselves where they would look like prisoners and they were good enough to stand on each side of him in the showup, and we used a man who works in the jail office, a civilian employee, as a third man.

MR. BALL.
Now, were they dressed a little better than Oswald, do you think, these three people?

MR. FRITZ.
Well, I don’t think there was a great deal of difference. They had on their regular working clothes and after they opened their shirts and took off their ties, why, they looked very much like anyone else.
²⁸

Of course, Oswald was the only one who had bruises on his face. On the other hand, Brennan had his own reasons for not picking Oswald out:

MR. BRENNAN.
I believe at that time, and I still believe it was a Communist activity, and I felt like there hadn’t been more than one eyewitness, [myself], and if it got to be a known fact that I was an eyewitness, my family or I, either one, might not be safe.

MR. BELIN.
Well, if you wouldn’t have identified him, mightn’t he have been released by the police? . . .

MR. BRENNAN.
No. [A] greater contributing factor than my personal reasons was that I already knew they had the man for murder and I knew he would not be released.

MR. BELIN.
The murder of whom?

MR. BRENNAN.
Of Officer Tippit.

MR. BELIN.
Well, what happened in between to change your mind . . . ?

MR. BRENNAN.
After Oswald was killed, I was relieved quite a bit . . . there was no longer that immediate danger.
²⁹

After Brennan refused to identify him that night, Oswald was put back into interrogation. On they went through half of the night.

It is worth hearing the reaction of a police officer who was present with Captain Fritz while Oswald was being questioned by the Dallas police, the Secret Service, and the FBI.

MR. BOYD.
I tell you, I’ve never saw another man just exactly like him.

MR. STERN.
In what way?

MR. BOYD.
Well, you know, he acted like he was intelligent; just as soon as you would ask him a question, he would just give you the answer right back—he didn’t hesitate . . . I never saw a man that could answer questions like he did . . .

MR. STERN.
Of course, this was a long day for everybody—did he seem by the end of the day still to be in command of himself, or did he appear tired or particularly worn out?

MR. BOYD.
Well, he didn’t appear to be tired . . . I imagine he could have been [but] he didn’t show it.

MR. STERN.
This is quite unnatural—really rather exceptional; this is, of course, why you say somewhat unusual, a man accused of killing two people, one of them the President of the United States, and at the end of the day he is pretty well in command?
³⁰

Yes, Mr. Stern really has a good question.

MR. BOYD.
Yes, sir; I’ll tell you—Oswald, he answered his questions until [he finally] got up and said, “What started out to be a short interrogation turned out to be rather lengthy,” and he said, “I believe I have answered all the questions I have cared to answer, and I don’t care to say anything else.”

And sat back down.
³¹

They even returned him to his jail cell for a time. Then they brought him out to be arraigned for the murder of President Kennedy. A justice of the peace, David Johnston, conducted the proceedings in a small room filled with file cabinets. On the bottom of the form that the judge filled out was written: “No Bond—Capital Offense.”

So ended the longest day of that year, Friday, November 22, 1963, which only came to its conclusion early Saturday morning. Later on that Saturday, in the afternoon, Lee would get to see his brother Robert, and Marina, and Marguerite.

8

A Black Pullover Sweater with Jagged Holes in It

Since
Life
magazine had agreed to pay for their rooms at the Adolphus, the move was made from Ruth Paine’s house in Irving early next day.

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
We arrived at the Adolphus Hotel between 9:30 and 10:00.

MR. RANKIN.
This was what day?

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
. . . the morning of Saturday, November 23.

While we were there, an FBI agent, Mr. Hart Odum, entered the room with another agent and wanted Marina to accompany him to be questioned . . . And I said, “No, we are going to see Lee.” We were all eating breakfast when he came in . . .

So, he said, “Well, will you tell Mrs. Oswald, please”—to the interpreter, “I would like to question her . . .”

I said, “It is no good. You don’t need to tell the interpreter that because my daughter-in-law is not going with you . . . any further statements that Marina will make will be through counsel.”

Mr. Odum said to the interpreter . . . “Will you tell Mrs. Oswald to decide what she would like to do and not listen to her mother-in-law.” . . .

Just then my son Robert entered the room and Mr. Odum said, “Robert, we would like to take Marina and question her.”

He said, “No, I am sorry, we are going to try and get lawyers for both she and Lee.”

So he left.

We went to the courthouse and we sat and sat, and while at the courthouse my son, Robert, was being interviewed by—I don’t know whether it was Secret Service or FBI agents—in a glass enclosure . . . So we waited quite a while . . . in the afternoon before we got to see Lee.

MR. RANKIN.
Was anyone else present . . . ?

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
No. Marina and I were escorted back [to] where they had an enclosure and telephones. So Marina got on the telephone and talked to Lee in Russian. That is my handicap. I don’t know what was said. And Lee seemed very severely composed and assured. He was well-beaten up. He had black eyes, and his face was all bruised, and everything. But he was very calm. He smiled with his wife, and talked with her, and then I got on the phone and I said, “Honey, you are so bruised up, your face. What are they doing?”

He said, “Mother, don’t worry. I got that in a scuffle.” . . . So I talked and said, “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

He said, “No, Mother, everything is fine. I know my rights and I will have an attorney . . . Don’t worry about a thing.” . . . That was my entire conversation to him.

Gentlemen, you must realize this. I had heard over the television my son say, “I did not do it. I did not do it.” . . . I think by now you know my temperament, gentlemen. I would not insult my son and ask him if he had shot at President Kennedy. Why? Because I myself heard him say, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it.”

So, that was enough for me. I would not ask that question.
¹

Marina’s conversation with Lee is almost as brief:

MR. RANKIN.
. . . did you ask him if he had killed President Kennedy? . . .

MARINA OSWALD.
No. I said, “I don’t believe you did that, and everything will turn out well.”

After all, I couldn’t accuse him—after all, he was my husband.

MR. RANKIN.
And what did he say to that?

MARINA OSWALD.
He said that I should not worry . . . But I could see by his eyes that he was guilty. Rather he tried to appear to be brave. However, by his eyes I could tell that he was afraid.

This was just a feeling. It is hard to describe.

MR. RANKIN.
Would you help us a little bit by telling us what you saw in his eyes that caused you to think that?

MARINA OSWALD.
He said goodbye to me with his eyes. I knew that. He said that everything would turn out well but he did not believe it himself.
²

Marguerite Oswald has an ability to get a good deal out of the given when it comes to defending Lee:

MR. RANKIN.
About how long did you and Marina spend with your son?

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
I would say I spent about 3 or 4 minutes on the telephone, and then Marina came back to the telephone and talked with Lee [and after that] we left . . . So Marina started crying. Marina says, “Mama, I tell Lee I love Lee and Lee says he love me very much. And Lee tell me to make sure I buy shoes for June.”

Now, here is a man who is accused of the murder of a President. This is the next day, or let’s say about 24 hours that he has been questioned. His composure is good. And he is thinking about his young daughter wearing shoes.

Now June was wearing shoes belonging to Mrs. Paine’s little girl, Marina told me—they were little red tennis shoes and the top was worn [and] the boy is concerned about shoes for the baby, [even if] he is in this awful predicament. So he must feel innocent, or sure that everything is going to be all right, as he told me.
³

Then it is Robert’s turn to visit with Lee. It is a year since they have been together at Thanksgiving, but they are brothers, and so their conversation has a tendency to stay inside brotherly parameters. What follows is from Robert Oswald’s book,
Lee.

After a little more talk about the baby and Marina, I finally asked him bluntly, “Lee, what the Sam Hill is going on?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know? Look, they’ve got your pistol, they’ve got your rifle, they’ve got you charged with shooting the President and a police officer. And you tell me you don’t know. Now, I want to know just what’s going on.”

He stiffened and straightened up, his facial expression was suddenly very tight.

“I just don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said very firmly and deliberately. “Don’t believe all this so-called evidence.”

I was studying his face closely, trying to find the answer to my question in his eyes or his expression. He realized that, and as I stared into his eyes, he said to me quietly, “Brother, you won’t find anything there.”
⁴

Robert is not about to give up that easily. He asks about the attorney in New York whom Lee has tried to contact. Lee sloughs the question by suggesting that he is no more than the man Lee desires to have for representation. He is not about to tell Robert that his choice, John Abt, was the lawyer who had defended the leaders of the Communist Party, Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis, against charges of conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. It would provoke a quarrel stronger than the bonds of their brotherhood.

Robert, however, knows Lee well enough to sense that something large is amiss. He says:

“I’ll get you an attorney down here.”

“No,” he said, “you stay out of it.”

“Stay out of it? It looks like I’ve been dragged into it.”

“I’m not going to have anybody from down here,” he said very firmly. “I want this one.”

“Well, all right.”
⁵

The gift Southerners receive with their mother’s milk is not to push a family disagreement too far. They are all aware of old family histories of relatives who brooded on a minor insult for twenty years and then came to their cousin’s door with a loaded shotgun and blew his head off.

McMillan:
. . . just after his visit with Marina, Oswald tried to reach Abt. He succeeded in obtaining Abt’s home and office numbers from the New York operator, but he failed to find him at either place . . .

Fritz later asked whether Oswald had succeeded in reaching Abt. He answered that he had not, then courteously thanked Fritz for allowing him to use the prison phone.
⁶

We can picture the consternation of the Communist Party in New York when Oswald’s desire to retain Abt is announced in the newspapers. If Oswald had been working for COINTELPRO, it would seem he has not yet resigned!

Or, perhaps, he is being doggedly simple. Abt will know how to give him a political defense and dramatize his trial. The Communist Party will have to pay a heavy price for that, but by Oswald’s balance sheet, the personal plus will more than compensate for the Party’s gaping minus.

MRS. PAINE.
Then about 3:30 or 4 [in the afternoon] I got a telephone call . . .

MR. JENNER.
Did you recognize the voice? . . .

MRS. PAINE.
The voice said, “This is Lee.”

MR. JENNER.
Give your best recollection of everything you said and, if you can, please, of everything he said, and exactly what you said.

MRS. PAINE.
I said, “Well, hi.”
⁷

Lee instructed her to call Abt as soon as the long-distance rates went down that evening. “Ruth was stunned—stunned by his gall . . . [but] appalled and angry as she was, Ruth did try to reach Abt and . . . failed.”
⁸
The lawyer was in a cabin in Connecticut and not reachable.

MR. BALL.
You asked him about the gun again, didn’t you?

MR. FRITZ.
I asked him about a lot of things that [Saturday] morning, I sure did . . .

MR. BALL.
And you asked him the size and shape of the [paper] sack, didn’t you?

MR. FRITZ.
He never admitted bringing the sack . . . He said his lunch was all he brought . . .
⁹

The lie has been Oswald’s tool all his life. But now it is different. Where once he could muster five quick lies to confuse one person, now five practical experts in the study of mendacity are examining each one of his lies. His cutting tool is being called upon to work against the most obdurate human materials.

MR. FRITZ.
I asked him [again] about the photograph and he said . . . It wasn’t his picture at all . . .

MR. BALL.
. . . the picture was made by somebody superimposing his face?

MR. FRITZ.
That is right; yes.
¹⁰

McMillan:
Shortly after 5:00
P.M.
on Saturday, Louis H. Nichols, president of the Dallas Bar Association, [was led] to Oswald’s maximum security cell on the fifth floor. Oswald was at the center of three cells with no one on either side. He was lying on his cot. He stood up to greet Nichols and the two men talked on a pair of bunks 3 or 4 feet apart. Nichols explained that he had come to see if he wanted an attorney.

Did he, Oswald asked, know a lawyer in New York City named John Abt?

Nichols said that he did not.

Well, Oswald said, that was the man he would like to have represent him. Failing that, Oswald said he belonged to the A.C.L.U. and would like someone from that organization to represent him. But if that should fall through, he added, “and I can find a lawyer here [in Dallas] who believes in anything I believe in, and believes as I believe, and believes in my innocence”—here Oswald hesitated—“as much as he can, I might let him represent me.”
¹¹

About an hour later, at six on Saturday evening, Marina and Marguerite and June and Rachel were moved by Secret Service men from the Hotel Adolphus (where there were too many people around for good security) over to the Executive Inn near Love Field. By the time they had settled into the new rooms, they had also come to the decision to burn the photograph of Lee that showed his pistol in his belt and his rifle in his upraised hand.

MR. RANKIN.
Had you said anything to her about burning it before that?

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
No, sir. The last time I had seen the picture was . . . when she was trying to tell me the picture was in her shoe. I state here now that . . . she tore up the picture and struck a match to it. Then I took it and flushed it down the toilet . . .

MR. RANKIN.
What day?

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
On Saturday, November 23. Now, I flushed the torn bits and the half-burned thing down the commode. And nothing was said. There was nothing said.
¹²

They did not know that the picture they were destroying was not crucial evidence but merely one more print of material already in the hands of the police who had found other copies of those same photographs among Oswald’s effects in the Paines’ garage.
¹³

Marguerite, however, awoke on Sunday morning with an attack of anxiety. It was as if one more trouble, still unfocused, was close at hand to meet all her other troubles, which were many. Where were she and Marina going to live, and how were they going to pay for it? They were two women alone and in need of assistance. They also needed to be able to speak to one another in greater privacy without some official translator from the FBI or the Secret Service hovering between them.

It was not long that morning before she thought of a possible Russian translator. That would be Peter Paul Gregory, the man who gave language lessons in his native tongue at the Fort Worth Library; yes, that must be meant to be because Marguerite had taken language lessons with Peter Paul Gregory earlier in this year of 1963 with the idea that when Lee was in the mood to see her again, she would be able to converse with her granddaughter in Russian. It had been a dream. She gave up after two lessons. Mr. Gregory had given no sign at all that her name was familiar to him, and besides, Russian was very difficult to learn.