Reclaiming History (167 page)

Sometime the following day, Saturday, April 13, which was the day before Easter, Lee went out and retrieved his rifle from its hiding place and brought it back to his apartment. That evening brought a surprise visit: George de Mohrenschildt, just back from a trip to New York, came bouncing in with Jeanne. They had come to visit Lee and Marina with a “big pink rabbit for the baby” for Easter. Lee and Marina went downstairs to greet and open the door for the de Mohrenschildts. George was in high spirits.

“Hey, Lee!” he bawled as soon as he walked in the door. “How is it possible that you missed?”

Lee and Marina, following their guests up the stairs, looked at each other, stunned. How on earth did the de Mohrenschildts know that Lee had taken the shot at Walker? Lee, of course, thought that Marina must have told them; Marina thought it must have been Lee. They were speechless. Actually, George was just being George, not truly serious, but since what he said was so true, Lee and Marina were convinced he knew. Lee managed to change the subject.
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“Shhh,” Lee said to everyone, “Junie’s sleeping.”

Jeanne spoke to her husband. “You always forget the baby. Let’s go out on the balcony.”

The Oswalds readily agreed to that—it was dark out there and no one could see their faces. Lee scurried about getting them all chairs, making coffee, and trying to avoid getting into a conversation with George about the Walker shooting. When George started talking about it, Lee never said a word, finally dismissing the subject with an offhand, “Oh, yes, wouldn’t it be fascinating to know who did it and why and how?”
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George, in any case, had a more interesting topic of conversation—himself. While Marina and Jeanne left so Marina could show Jeanne the apartment, George proceeded to tell Lee how really excited he was about the business deal he had finally clinched during his trip to New York. The complicated venture would take him to Haiti within a few weeks and possibly make him the fortune that had been as elusive as mercury to him all of his life. He had been working on the deal ever since the Oswalds first met him and even before. In some ways his interest in Haiti started in 1947 when he first visited the country as a tourist, and was reanimated in 1956 when he worked there on an oil exploration project that eventually fell through. He had devoted the past two years to the organization of his present project, which involved a $300,000 two-year contract between his company and the government of Haiti to carry out a magnetic survey of oil and other mineral deposits on the island.
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When Marina opened the door to a room of the apartment (Lee’s office) that looked more like a “closet” to Jeanne, Jeanne immediately saw Lee’s rifle in full view standing against the wall. Surprised, she asked Marina “what on earth” Lee was doing with a rifle, and Marina, at a loss for words, came up with a story about Lee going to the park and shooting at the leaves.
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Jeanne called out to George, “Look, George, they have a gun here.” George didn’t enter the small room (with Marina and Jeanne already in the closet-sized room, from my recollection it would have been difficult for him to do so even if he had tried), but heard Marina say, “That crazy idiot is target shooting all the time.” When George asked Lee why he did that, Lee merely parroted Marina, “I go out and do target shooting. I like target shooting.”
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Enough had happened for both couples to be uncomfortable and the de Mohrenschildts left very soon thereafter.
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As soon as they were gone, Lee rounded on Marina, “Did you telephone them and tell them it was me?”

“Of course not,” Marina said, “I thought you did.”

“You’re out of your mind,” he said. “But isn’t it amazing how he guessed? It’s a lucky thing he couldn’t see my face. I was hardly able to speak. Maybe he was only kidding, but he sure hit the nail on the head.”
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That night Lee again had some sort of anxiety attack in his sleep. This time he broke out in violent trembling from head to toe fours times at half-hour intervals, although he never woke up. He was still frightened the following day, and that night he again slept the sleep of the damned, shaking all over.
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Although no one could know it at the time, it would be the last the two couples would ever see each other. A few days later the de Mohrenschildts left on a trip to New York, Washington, and Philadelphia. They did not return until six weeks later, at the end of May, by which time the Oswalds had already moved to New Orleans. The de Mohrenschildts were preoccupied by the necessity of shipping some of their belongings to Haiti and putting the rest in storage in Dallas. Jeanne recalled getting a card from New Orleans with the Oswalds’ new address, but she misplaced it. A larger package that Lee sent escaped their notice altogether. It just got dumped into storage with everything else.
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Four years later, after the de Mohrenschildts returned from Haiti to Dallas and recovered the things they had put into storage, they found the package, which contained some English language records they had lent to Marina and a photograph neither recalled having seen before. It was one of the famous backyard snapshots taken by Marina showing Lee with pistol and carbine, brandishing copies of the
Militant
and the
Worker
. On the back were the words, written in Russian and in apparently two different handwritings, “Hunter of Fascists, ha, ha, ha” and “To my friend George from Lee Oswald.” It was dated “5/IV/63” a typical Russian way of designating April 5, 1963.
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Only the words “To my friend George from Lee Oswald” were proved to be written by Oswald.
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I
n the week following Easter, Marina and Lee had begun to talk about moving to New Orleans, where Lee still had family, the Murrets. Marina, fearing that Lee, despite his word to her, would try to shoot Walker again, had pleaded with him to get rid of the rifle, but he had not done so.
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So now she encouraged Lee to move to New Orleans. If she couldn’t get the rifle away from Lee, she might at least be able to get Lee away from the target. There seemed to be no jobs in Dallas anyway, and his luck might be better in the city of his birth. She told him she wanted to see his hometown.
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Sometime in that week Lee received a letter from the Texas Employment Commission denying his claim for unemployment benefits on the grounds that he had insufficient employment credits. That was a mistake—the Commission had credited him only for his work at Leslie Welding because Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall had been reporting his income under an incorrect Social Security number—but the time it would take to set that right made Lee’s predicament worse.
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Another letter brought more bad news—for Lee if not for Marina. The Russian embassy replied to her letter of March 17 by telling her that “it would be desirable” if she could visit the consulate section in person. “If it is difficult for you to come to Washington at the present time,” wrote Comrade Reznichenko, “we request you to give us [the] reasons which made you start proceedings for permission to enter the Soviet Union for permanent residence.”
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Marina’s government was not going to allow her to return as easily as Lee had hoped.

On Friday, April 19, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York sent fifty more copies of Corliss Lamont’s pamphlet
The Crime against Cuba
to Lee’s Dallas post office box.
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On Saturday, Ruth Paine brought her kids into Dallas for a picnic with the Oswalds in the small park near Neely Street, where Lee spent the whole time fishing in its tiny lake. Ruth was struck by his absolute refusal to be sociable—the best he could manage was to come to eat when it was time—but Ruth knew it was not a happy period for the Oswalds.
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T
he next day, Sunday, April 21, 1963, Lee set out, at least ostensibly, to murder former vice president Richard M. Nixon.

That Sunday morning, Lee’s copy of the
Dallas Morning News
carried a front-page banner headline: “Nixon Calls for a Decision to Force Reds out of Cuba.” The subheadline read, “Open U.S. Support of Rebels Urged.” The story reported Nixon’s speech in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he had flayed Kennedy for curbing the Cuban exile raids against Cuba and also declared, to thundering applause, “The United States cannot tolerate the continued existence of a Soviet military and subversive base 90 miles from our shores.”
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Shortly after reading the Sunday paper, Lee dressed in a suit and started to go out. His pistol was at his waist. Marina asked him where he was going.

“Nixon is coming,” he said. “I want to go and have a look.”

Marina did not know who Nixon was but that was irrelevant to her. “I know how you look,” she said sarcastically, adding that he had promised her never to go out and repeat what he had done with General Walker, but Lee merely said, “I’m going to go out and find out if there will be an appropriate opportunity and if there is I will use the pistol.”
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Furious, Marina was determined to stop him. Thinking quickly, she went into the bathroom and told Lee to come in there with her, which he did. Once both were inside, she immediately jumped outside the door, closing it as she left. The door could only be locked from the inside, but Marina used all the frantic power she could muster to keep him inside, bracing her feet against the nearby opposite wall, as he pushed from the inside to get out.

“Let me out,” Lee yelled. “Open the door.”

But Marina kept pushing against the door, crying out that he had gone back on his word to her and all of this could cause her to lose their baby, and he would have thus killed his own child.
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Marina told the Warren Commission, “I remember that I held him. We actually struggled for several minutes and then he quieted down. I remember that I told him that if he goes out it would be better for him to kill me than go out.” Warren Commission counsel wondered how the five-foot two-inch, hundred-pound Marina would be strong enough to keep her husband inside the bathroom. She had an answer. Number one, she said, Lee “is not strong.” (George de Mohrenschildt told the Commission, “He was small, you know, and he was a rather puny individual.” Oswald was five feet nine inches tall, and weighed around 140 to 150 pounds.) Secondly, she said—I’m sure to the obvious delight of her questioner, Allen Dulles—“When I want to and when I collect all my forces and want to do something very badly I am stronger than he is.” Dulles asked her if she meant “mentally or physically,” and Marina eventually had to acknowledge that “I don’t think it was physically, physical prevention because if he—I couldn’t keep him from going out if he really wanted to
*
…Possibly he didn’t want to go out at all but was just doing this all as a sort of joke, not really as a joke but rather to wound me, to make me feel bad…My husband had a sadistic streak in him and he got pleasure out of harming people.”
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In any event, when Lee gave up the struggle, Marina, trembling all over, demanded Lee’s gun, which he gave her, and then instructed him to take off all his clothes, which he also did, down to his T-shirt and shorts. “If you’re going to keep me here all day,” he said, “at least give me something to read.” She fetched one of his books for him and he sat on the toilet seat for two or three hours before he came out, neither exchanging a word with each other until supper.
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The purpose of this Oswaldian Theater of the Absurd cannot be known for sure, but Marina may have been correct in deducing that it possibly was staged entirely for her benefit. The FBI checked all editions of the
Dallas Morning News
and
Dallas Times Herald
between March 16 and May 15, 1963, and neither paper mentioned any visit or proposed visit by Nixon between these times.
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Also, Nixon himself said the only time he came to Dallas in 1963 was in November,
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and Lee told Marina the next day that Nixon had not come to Dallas.
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So Nixon was not in Dallas on Sunday, April 21, 1963.

Another vice president did visit the city, though, two days later, on Tuesday, April 23—Lyndon Baines Johnson. That visit had been well publicized all through April.
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The FBI suggested that Marina had confused Nixon with Johnson, but she was sure that “in this incident it was a question of Mr. Nixon.” She told the Warren Commission, “I remember distinctly the name Nixon.”
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Marina’s interpretation of the incident—that he was only trying to hurt her—is supported by the fact that even if, because of his dyslexia, it was he, not she, who confused Nixon with Johnson (not overly difficult to imagine since Johnson was the “vice president” and Nixon was the former “vice president”), as indicated, Johnson’s scheduled visit was listed for April 23, not April 21. So why was Oswald going out the door on April 21? And Marina also noted that it “was rather unusual” for Lee to have given up so quickly with her.
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O
n Wednesday, April 24, Ruth Paine dropped in for a prearranged visit with Marina and was surprised to find Lee preparing to leave for New Orleans. In fact, he was fully packed and evidently waiting for Ruth—he asked her if she would take all of his suitcases to the bus station. Marina rode with them to the station, where Lee bought a ticket not only for himself but for Marina too, which she was to use as soon as she heard from him that he found a job. Ruth had a better idea: if Marina and June came to stay with her, instead of waiting at Neely Street, Lee could reach Marina more quickly by phone (the Oswalds had no phone at Neely), and then Ruth would drive Marina and June down to New Orleans in her car. Ruth knew that a twelve-or thirteen-hour bus trip with a baby in the gathering heat and humidity of May, and having to transport all the baby’s gear and more, would not be a pleasant experience for a four-month-pregnant woman.