Reclaiming History (221 page)

Though his relationship with his mother, Marguerite, was strained, it could not be characterized as terrible. Moreover, his brother Robert grew up with the same mother and in the same environment, and nothing in his testimony before the Warren Commission or in his book,
Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald by His Brother
, hints that he was a bitter person mad at the world. So why was Oswald the way he was? No one will ever know the answer to that question, and I don’t intend to be a park-bench psychologist, but his severe dyslexia could have contributed to his bitterness toward life and a feeling of frustration. Though there is no known reference to it in his grade-school records, for Oswald to be as dyslexic as he was in his writing as an adult, one can imagine how bad it was in the earlier years. And being severely handicapped by dyslexia, a disability a small percentage of children have, could be expected to give him a feeling of inadequacy among his peers and a sense of anger over the curse that had befallen him, an anger that could likewise be expected to stay with him and perhaps become intensified as the years went by.

The Warren Commission hired Dr. Howard P. Rome, a psychiatrist for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to analyze Oswald’s writings and give his professional opinion. In a letter to Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler dated September 8, 1964, Rome concluded that Oswald was suffering from “constitutional dyslexia,” a “reading-spelling disability” that can exist, he said, “in the absence of intellectual defect or of defects of the sense organs.” He went on to say that the phenomenon is a “congenital, neurological deficiency” and that “difficulties in reading
*
are always accompanied by difficulties in writing and spelling.” Rome wrote that “the person with this kind of word-blindness does not see and retain the picture of the word as an entity. It is as if he grasps certain features and tries to guess the rest by filling in the blanks, as it were. If he attempts to circumvent this difficulty by an untutored phonetic approach, as the more intelligent do, he encounters a further obstacle in the form of the irregularities, inconsistencies and ambiguities which are characteristic of printed and written English.” Rome said it was obvious that Oswald attempted to spell phonetically and more often than not failed in the effort. Dyslexic people like Oswald, Rome said, “are prone to develop a range of alternative ways of coping with their disadvantaged state: apparent indifference, truculent resistance, and other displacement activities by which they hope to cover up their deficiency and appear in a more commendable light.”

Rome concluded that “[Oswald’s] disability and its consequential effect upon him…amplifies the impressions from many sources about the nature of Oswald’s estrangement from people.” He said that dyslexia frequently gives rise to a “life-experience which [is] marked by repeated thwarting in almost every sphere of endeavor. For a bright person [which I think we can say Oswald was] to be handicapped in the use of language is an especially galling experience. It seems to be that in Oswald’s instance this frustration gave an added impetus to his need to prove to the world that he was an unrecognized great man.”
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The Warren Commission was essentially dismissive of Oswald’s dyslexia, devoting only two sentences to it,
⁵⁵
and then only to explain his misspelling of words. The reason may have been that Rome’s letter to Liebeler was mailed on September 8, 1964, and by the time Liebeler wrote a memorandum
⁵⁶
to fellow Warren Commission assistant counsel Howard P. Willens on September 15 recommending a reference in the report to Rome’s belief that Oswald’s dyslexia may have been partially responsible for his frustration and need to prove he was a great man, the Warren Report had already gone to press, eventually being published on September 24, 1964.

A
lthough neither the Warren Commission nor the HSCA listed it as a contributing factor to Oswald’s decision to kill, there’s little question in my mind that to do what Oswald did, one would have to qualify as a first-class “nut.” His act could not have been more irrational. We know that Oswald was crazy enough to ask Marina to help him hijack a plane to Cuba.
⁵⁷
When Marina responded, “Of course I won’t help,” Oswald proceeded to start increasing his muscle strength by doing knee bends and arm exercises and tearing through their apartment at night in his undershorts to practice leaps, causing Marina to say to their little daughter, June, “Junie, our papa is out of his mind.” Oswald went as far as bringing home airline schedules and a large map of the world, telling Marina how he planned to hijack the plane. He would sit in the front row and at some point walk into the pilot’s cabin with a gun and order the pilot to turn the plane around.
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Oswald was crazy enough to attempt to murder General Walker. Indeed, the evidence that Oswald was a nut is best exemplified by his defection to the Soviet Union. Ever since Gorbachev made the cold war obsolete with his shredding of the Marxist catechism,
Das Kapital
, and gave the Russian people a taste of freedom for the first time, with the exception of a small handful of zanies, who in the hell ever defects to the Soviet Union? It’s just not done, Russia, by all accounts, being one of the bleakest countries on earth. And to do this
before
Gorbachev’s era, and then to try to commit suicide, as Oswald did, when his request for Soviet citizenship was turned down, further qualifies him for the booby hatch. I mean, how deranged does one’s conduct have to be for him to be characterized as a nut? Oswald was so obviously a nut that in an FBI memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover to his staff dictated just five hours after the assassination, when the FBI knew nothing more about Oswald than his defection to the Soviet Union and his apparent murder of Kennedy, he said, “Our agents view him as a nut.”
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O
ne of the most serious problems I had in preparing for the upcoming trial in London was not that I didn’t know for sure why Oswald killed Kennedy. As I indicated, I had dealt with that type of problem before in my career. The problem here—which I knew Spence would bring up—is that at least arguably Oswald had a motive not to kill Kennedy because he supposedly liked him. But I quickly discerned that the remarks made by the chief proponent of that view, Marina, could be broken down into two distinct time periods: the Warren Commission, in 1964, and the HSCA, almost fifteen years later, in 1978. The clear and explicit assertions of Oswald’s liking Kennedy were almost all made in 1978, when Marina, having been hounded and courted by the conspiracy theorists every single year after the assassination, was definitely moving away from her Warren Commission testimony that “I have no doubt in my mind that Lee Oswald killed President Kennedy”
⁶⁰
and closer to the view of the conspiracy theorists that Oswald was innocent and framed. Thus, testimony by her that “he always spoke very complimentary about the president” and whatever he said about President Kennedy, it was “always…something good,” “I do not recall ever hearing Lee talking badly about John Kennedy,” and “my impression was that he liked [Kennedy] very well” and “he was very proud of the new president of his country” when he heard over the radio in Russia that Kennedy had been elected occurred in 1978, a decade and a half after the assassination.
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When we look at her Warren Commission testimony, however, her remarks are a little more muted and ambiguous. Thus, although she said that in translating articles for her about Kennedy, her husband “always had something good to say” about Kennedy she also said the much less emphatic, “From Lee’s behavior I cannot conclude that he was against the president,”
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and at one point said, “I don’t think he ever expressed hatred toward President Kennedy, but perhaps he expressed jealousy, not only jealousy, but envy” over Kennedy’s wealth.
⁶³

This ambiguity in Oswald’s feelings toward Kennedy
*
was also reflected in the observations of other people who testified before the Warren Commission. Raymond Franklin Krystinik, who attended an ACLU meeting in Dallas with Oswald the month before the assassination, said Oswald felt Kennedy was doing “a real good job” in the area of civil rights. “That was the only comment that was made [by Oswald] in reference to President Kennedy,” Krystinik testified, clearly not a blanket endorsement of the Kennedy administration.
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Lieutenant Francis Martello of the New Orleans Police Department, who interviewed Oswald after his arrest resulting from his activities in connection with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, told the Warren Commission that all of Oswald’s thoughts “seemed to go in the direction of the socialist or Russian way of life, but he showed in his manner of speaking that he liked the president…or, if he didn’t like him, of the two [Khrushchev and Kennedy] he disliked the President the least.”
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Though the record was somewhat mixed, if anything Oswald had a positive feeling for Kennedy. As late as the summer of 1963 he said something in praise of the president and his wife in a casual conversation at the home of Lillian and Dutz Murret.
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In any event, at the London trial I knew I would be asking a jury to believe that someone who did not, apparently, dislike Kennedy had in fact killed him. But quite apart from Oswald’s personal feelings, although his trying to kill General Walker made some sense in that it was the Far Left (Oswald) shooting at the Far Right (Walker), why would someone on the political left like Oswald shoot at someone in the middle, or if anything, left of center, like Kennedy?
*

I knew I’d have to closely scrutinize the official record to at least find something I could give the jury that went in the direction of Oswald’s opposition to Kennedy. I already had one built-in argument. Even if we assume Oswald liked Kennedy, he clearly revered Castro, and Kennedy was Castro’s sworn enemy. I also found a nugget, as small as it was, in Captain Fritz’s interrogation of Oswald. “I have no views on the president,” he told Fritz. “My wife and I like the president’s
family
. They are interesting people.” And then he added the cryptic, “I have my own views on the president’s national policy.”
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Certainly not a ringing declaration of affection by Oswald for Kennedy. But I needed something more.
†

I got a little help in the testimony of William Kirk Stuckey, who interviewed Oswald on his New Orleans radio show on the evening of August 17, 1963, following Oswald’s altercation with anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Oswald’s Marxist rantings on the show are covered elsewhere in this book, but the points of his interview that went to the issue of motive were his telling Stuckey that “Hands off Cuba” was the main slogan of his Fair Play for Cuba Committee. “In other words, keeping your hands off a foreign state,” which Oswald said our U.S. Constitution dictated. “Castro,” he went on, “is an independent leader of an independent country…He is…a person who is trying to find the best way for his country…We cannot exploit that system and say it is a bad one…and then go out and try to destroy it.”
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Oswald gave Stuckey two speeches by Castro to read, a pamphlet by French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and a pamphlet titled
The Crime against Cuba
. Also, and more importantly, he gave him a pamphlet with a sketch on the cover whose message was clear: Kennedy was at the head of the line, leading the military, the intelligentsia, the media, and the people in the unconstitutional and criminal war against Cuba.
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Whatever else Oswald may have thought of Kennedy’s policies—for instance, in the area of civil rights—one thing was very clear: he very strongly opposed Kennedy’s belligerent and militaristic (Bay of Pigs) policy toward Cuba.

I certainly would be able to use this to my advantage before the London jury, but I was still looking for a clearer example of hatred by Oswald toward Kennedy. Murder, after all, is an act of passion, and the London trial was a trial for murder, plain and simple. In the Stuckey interview and in the pamphlets Oswald had given Stuckey, the passion against Kennedy, if any, had to be inferred. I wanted (not needed, since motive, as indicated earlier, is not an element of murder that I had to prove) something more direct.

I finally found words of Oswald’s which, though not as direct as I had hoped for, I was willing to settle for. In reading Oswald’s 1959 Historic Diary, I found two similar entries that literally leaped off the page for me, meaning more to me than perhaps the average person. As the prosecutor of Charles Manson, I knew he didn’t know the people he ordered his followers to murder. They were simply representatives of the white establishment he hated, and he was using his minions to vent his spleen on society for him. In other words, the murders were
representative
, symbolic murders. In the first of the two diary entries I came across, Oswald wrote, “To a person knowing both systems [capitalist and communist]…there can be no mediation between the systems as they exist today. He must be opposed to their basic foundations
and representatives
.”
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Although Oswald’s being opposed to the representatives of a system he hated is certainly logical and necessarily follows, I nonetheless felt that to go off on a tributary, as Oswald did, and specifically mention the “representatives” of the systems was not what one would normally do in the context in which he was writing—an abstract discussion of the systems themselves. I may be wrong, but to me it showed that Oswald had consciously focused in on the representatives themselves, that it was unlikely the word was just a gratuitous addendum. This inference I drew was fortified in a much stronger later entry by Oswald, in which he wrote, “I have lived under both systems…I
despise the representatives
of both systems.”
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From the moment I saw these two entries—particularly the word
despise
, which certainly connotes passion—I knew that in addition to arguing the motives set forth by the Warren Commission and the HSCA, I would offer for the London jury’s consideration an additional possible motive for the murder that, if not necessarily transcendent, was at least working in confluence with the others at the fateful moment Oswald decided to murder Kennedy. To counter Gerry Spence’s anticipated argument that his client (Spence referred to him as “Lee” at the trial) would never have killed Kennedy because he liked him, I would use words to the effect that although Oswald may not have hated Kennedy personally, Kennedy, being the president, was the ultimate, quintessential
representative
of a society for which he had a grinding contempt. (“The United States,” he wrote to his brother Robert from Russia, “is a country I hate”;
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he told New Orleans police lieutenant Francis Martello that he “hated America” and that he would not permit his wife to learn the English language because he did not want his family to “become Americanized.”
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)
And therefore, when he fired at Kennedy, in his addled mind he was firing at the United States of America
. And even assuming, just for the sake of argument, that he had positive feelings about Kennedy, those would have been subsumed by his enmity for America. Speaking of Oswald’s revolutionary thoughts, Michael Paine said that he “had frequently had the impression” that they were “of a rather drastic nature, where kindness or good feelings should not stand in the way of those actions.”
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