"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (55 page)

“Marina doesn't want to speak with you, Lee.”

“Ruth, this is important. Everything will be different—”

“How many times have you told the poor girl that?”

“This time, I mean it.
Forever.”

A long silence. Then: “I'll check with her. That's all I can do.” Lee thanked Ruth profusely and waited. Five minutes later, she came back. “I tried. Marina can‘t take any more.”

“Tell her Lee said ‘everything will be the way she wants it. Not the way I think she wants it. I'm a changed man.'”

Yet when he arrived in Dallas, Lee did not immediately make the trip to Irving. Though he would have been welcome to stay overnight at the Paines' house, Lee checked in to a YMCA. The following morning he searched for an apartment, locating a room at a house on North Marsalis, in Oak Cliff. That afternoon he lined up at the Texas Employment Commission in hopes of scoring a job. Lee applied for a position as a typesetter, failing to mention his dyslexia, which might well have disqualified him.

Then he stepped alongside the highway, stuck out a thumb, and hitched up to Irving. When he appeared at the screen door Marina happened to be passing by. Lee's presence, so unexpected, this coupled with her even then thinking about him, caused Marina to gasp. Ruth and her estranged husband Michael, hearing voices, approached, saw them together, then made some flimsy excuse to go out for an evening drive. Marina hesitantly let Lee in.

“First, I want to see June.”

“Later. She's sleeping.”

“Alright, then. Let's you and I have it out.”

“We said it all in New Orleans.”

“Everything's different now. This is ‘the new Lee.'”

“Oh? What happened to Jesus Christ, off to save the world?”

“Never again. I have only one mission, now and forever.”

“And what, may I ask, is that?”

“To be the best husband I can to you. The best father to baby June. And our child yet to be born.”

“From the Second Coming, then, to Norman Normal?”

“Marina, I think that deep down that's what I've always wanted most. Now, I truly believe I can have it.”

Lee then proceeded to explain. He had left her believing he'd found his great purpose in life and traveled to Mexico City, despite Marina's objections, to achieve his mission. While there, and on the bus trip back, he came to understand that all he'd ever believed to be frivolous turned out to be what really mattered. Conversely, all Lee had held important? Utterly worthless.

“Make me believe you. Lee, I so want to.”

*

“United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders,” Castro said, “they themselves will not be safe.” Lee gasped at the words, spoken over a worldwide radio connection from Havana. When asked what might be his response, Castro growled: any such attempts would be “answered in kind.” Still in New Orleans, already convinced he must personally do something to diffuse the heightening tension in the world, Lee took this as Castro's direct threat to JFK.

Not the CIA, who had for years employed operatives like Lee himself to try and debilitate, then murder Castro. Kennedy!

I must get down there at once. Somehow reach Fidel. Explain that Kennedy and the Company are now entirely at odds.

Me! I'll help Kennedy and Castro set the past aside.

Castro's ultimatum hadn't received a direct response from the White House, JFK not wishing to dignify it. Nonetheless, JFK had Bobby and Gen. Maxwell Taylor call together a committee of a special group within the National Security Council. They convened at the Department of State on September 12, at 2:30 P.M., to initiate future positions on Cuba and the Company.

“We must reach a conclusion and do so today,” Bobby began.

Were the CIA to attempt even once more to take Castro's life, there existed “a strong likelihood that Castro would retaliate in some way.” Most likely this would constitute only a “low level” response. Still, it would be unwise to assume that something considerably bigger couldn't possibly occur.

“So what do we do?” Taylor asked. “I for one don't believe that we can simply sit back and let events take their course.”

“Most certainly not,” Bobby answered. “Here's one thought. Some time ago in Florida, I met an extremely dedicated agent. He was with the CIA at the time, but appears, from our sources, to have experienced an alteration of position not unlike the one we here today are mutually expressing.”

“Might he make the connection with Castro for us?”

“Possibly. Though we can't sneak him into Cuba without arousing suspicions. The man would have to, if this were to work, proceed to Mexico, there to legally enter Cuba.”

“At every turn, the CIA would create resistance.”

“Yes. While, I'd guess, trying to convince this agent that they are doing all they could to help him.”

“Do you believe such an approach could succeed?”

“I believe the odds are against it. Formidably! Also, that we have absolutely nothing to lose in trying.”

“Except, possibly, the agent's life.”

*

On September 25 Lee had boarded a Continental Trailways bus at Nuevo Laredo, crossing over into Mexico. He happened to be seated next to a surgeon from England, John Bryan McFarland. That man innocently asked Oswald why he was heading south.

“Actually, to try and arrange travel to Cuba.”

“Oh,” McFarland responded. “Why go there?”

“To see Castro,” Oswald said, flashing his signature sneer.

Lee disembarked at the main Mexico City bus terminal at ten a.m., September 27. He walked to the nearby Hotel Comercial, a dump at which he could pick up a room for slightly more than a dollar a day. After washing and shaving, he hurried over to the Cuban Embassy. There Lee explained his desire to visit Cuba (if not his specific plan) to a hostess. She arranged a meeting with the consul, Silvia Tirado de Duran. Lee presented that surprised official with a brochure of newspaper clippings about his heady involvement with Fair Play, introducing himself as one of those “righteous” and “enlightened” U.S. citizens.

Nobody's fool, de Duran put two and two together, guessing that this grinning character had some sort of a hidden agenda.

“I will try and hurry this through at once,” she lied.

“Thank you for that,” Lee sincerely replied.

As he supposedly hoped to travel to Cuba so that there he could make plans to relocate himself and his wife and children in Russia, she told Lee to have photographs of himself taken.

“When you return with them, the process can begin.”

Lee shuffled off whistling, assuming things were going his way. Senora Duran reached for her phone and began placing high level phone calls, the first to her contact at the Mexico City Soviet consulate, explaining the situation. That consul in turn placed calls to Russia while she did the same to Cuba.

An hour later they spoke again.

“It is possible that Oswald is what he claims to be,” the Soviet consul said. “More likely, he's a double or even triple agent, with an agenda so complex it defies description.”

“In that case, my strategy will be: stall, stall, stall.”

Everyone treated Lee with the utmost politeness. But other than extending sweetly insincere smiles and offering their best wishes, Lee quickly realized he had run into a
brick wall that he could not crash through. When he returned, in great spirits, at the Cuban Embassy with the photos, de Duran explained she had contacted the local Soviets in hopes of speeding things along.

The embassy there had informed her that as Lee didn't already have an entry visa to Russia, achieving one that would allow him to travel from Cuba to that country might take months.

“That's alright,” he, gathering his wits, replied. “I'll go to Cuba and wait there.” That was, after all, his chief plan. Returning to Minsk was back-up for him, Marina, and the children.

“But, as it turns out,” she continued, pursing her lips, “that too will be more involved than I originally believed.”

She then began to list a series of small, ridiculous issues that the woman spoke as if by rote. As she did, Lee felt one of his rages overcoming mind and body. He insisted that she stop talking and bring him to her superior. She led Lee down one more of those lengthy couriers he had spent so many minutes of his life passing through on his way to confront people of importance.

The chief consul, Eusebio Azque, formally accepted Lee into his office. Despite (perhaps because of) the tirade to follow, he insisted that while Lee certainly had the right to request a visa, and that he and Senora Duran would be “willing” (he did not say ”happy,” Lee noted) to initiate the process, nothing in the New Orleans portfolio warranted any “special consideration” for a speeded-up visa. Nor could he assure this panicky-looking man that he would receive a visa to Cuba, much less Russia.

“In addition to your own portfolio,” E. Azque concluded, retrieving a manila folder from his drawer and shoving it across the desk toward Oswald, “we have to consider these.”

Knowing what was coming, Lee inspected the contents. Here he found one after another report about his activities in the anti-Castro movement, including evidence that Oswald had been one of three CIA agents who in 1961 attempted to kill Castro.

“Yes, yes,” Lee sighed, pushing them back across the desk. “But I've undergone a radical change. Now—”

“Perhaps, Mr. Oswald, you like a pendulum shift back and forth so often that no one can ever know your true position?”

Unable to form coherent words, Lee shouted something about Azque being a narrow-minded fool. He roared out of the building, hurrying back to his sordid hotel room, collapsing in confusion on the stale-smelling bed.

On a visit to the Soviet Embassy Lee fared no better. For three days he lay on the rumpled sheets of his cot-like bed, sweating, waiting, thinking. He'd brought a book along, Kafka's
The Trial
, which he'd attempted to read when Johnny Rosselli had handed him a James Bond book at the resort-like 'hospital.'

That feels like a lifetime ago now! How appropriate Ian Fleming had been for reading material there. Apparently I've come full circle. Kafka's right on target today, particularly the tale of poor K., put on trial in some surreal version of our world for a supposed crime no one will even reveal to him.

That's me. Not James Bond. I'm the underground man. I started that way. I'll end that way. A face in the crowd.

Still, the phone did not ring. On the fourth day, at his wits end, Lee barged back into the Cuban embassy. He confronted Duran again, with no success. At her suggestion he ran back across the way to the Soviet embassy where he fared no better.

I'm trying to save the world and no one will help. George would of course know my every move. He may be working against me. Putting up road-blocks at every corner I reach. Forcing me back to Dallas to do his dirty work: kill Kennedy.

Alright, then. Two can play that game. But I'll checkmate him. Go to Dallas but not see the assassination through.

*

Having finished
The Trial
, and with no time to pick up anything else to read, Lee spent the return bus trip rolling over the situation in his mind. He was certainly not going to kill JFK for the CIA, the Mob, whoever else might be in on that deal now. Nor had he been able to create the Kennedy-Castro link he had a week earlier believed himself born for.

What now, then?

Marina. I see her face so clearly. Recall the things she said when I let her leave New Orleans. All she wanted was a normal life. With me! Our little girl and the child to be.

Let's follow that trail. Go back, back, back to time long before I ever came to believe I might be worthy of greatness.

What was it I most wanted then?

To be ... normal. The very thing I'd been denied. They didn't let me in the scouts. I didn't have a girlfriend in junior high, not even a homely one, much less a pretty girl.

Now? I've got everything I want. The package. How could I not have seen it? Perhaps as it was so close before my eyes.

“One more chance,” Lee begged Marina.

“The little boy no longer wants to play hero?”

“Please don't be sarcastic.”

“How else can I respond? All your grandiose dreams—”

“Turned to dust.”

“So now you are a man without a purpose in life?”

Weeping, Lee approached her. “But I do have a purpose. You and the babies. Being the best husband and father I can be.”

She allowed him to gently press his hand against her tummy, feeling the life readying to burst forth. “Someday the call will come again from George. When it does, you will—”

“No! I swear. George seems a great Satan to me now.”

Now it was Marina's turn to cry. “I wish I could believe you.” She gripped him tightly, both her hands clawing at Lee's shoulders. “I want so little today, as compared to the brat who was too beautiful for her own good.”

He cradled her, firmly but gently. “You, me, and the kids. That's all. But ... That's everything! When you've been denied normalcy all your life, it turns out to be what you want the most. We can have that. One more chance, Marina?”

“Of course, Alik. I cannot say no.”

He breathed in deeply. “Not Alik, though. Ozzie.”

“Your Marine nickname?”

“Yes. But also ‘Ozzie' on TV. You've seen
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
since living in America?”

“Yes, of course. Everyone watches it.”

“When I was a child, I hated it. Because I thought that was only an absurd dream of the way things are supposed to be.”

“And now?”