The Kennedy Half-Century (33 page)

8
11/22/63: Questions, Answers, Mysteries

Hugh Aynesworth, a journalist who covered the Kennedy assassination for the
Dallas Morning News
and has followed the attendant controversies for decades, is unable to reconcile all the disparate accounts of the chaotic assassination scene, yet he’s skeptical that they add up to a conspiracy. “There’s never been a homicide investigated to this extent in the history of the world,” Aynesworth remarked. “There are people who believe this, believe that, want to believe it, need to believe it. But it isn’t there.” Like many, Aynesworth initially thought that the Russians might have been behind 11/22.
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But today he is convinced that Oswald acted alone, and he suspects that a domestic argument between Oswald and his wife could have been the tipping point that sent him over the edge.
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“She [Marina] ridiculed him constantly,” says Aynesworth. “And rightfully so, I would say. Here’s a guy that would spend money on having things printed up for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and would run around here, there, and everywhere spending money that he didn’t have, living off neighbors, living in wretched places, not eating well. I would have been pissed at him, too.” Aynesworth is astonished that his fellow Americans continue to believe in an 11/22 conspiracy. “It’s just weird,” he says.
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Maybe Hugh Aynesworth and others who believe as he does are right; maybe there was no conspiracy. Maybe Oswald committed the crime of the century without any help. But fifty years later, some things still do not add up, and it is unlikely this murder will ever be solved to the satisfaction of many, if not most, Americans. I do not presume to know for certain what happened on November 22, 1963, and we are long past the point when all the mysteries can be cleared up. But what is still possible after the passage of fifty years is to present the evidence most acknowledge to be true, and from there to offer the most reasonable explanations that can be mustered—and also eliminate the least plausible hypotheses. Naturally, not all the questions in this untidy murder can be answered fully. There are leftover paradoxes galore.

An understanding of Lee Harvey Oswald is essential to unraveling the events that unfolded on November 22. He was born on October 18, 1939, in New Orleans and endured a tumultuous childhood. He never knew his father, Robert Oswald, Sr., who had died of a heart attack before Lee was born. As Lee’s brother Robert once commented, their mother made it quite clear on numerous occasions that her children were a burden to her.
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At one point, Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, decided that she could no longer work and rear children at the same time, and so she placed Lee and his two brothers in an orphanage. One sibling was Lee’s half brother from Marguerite’s first unsuccessful marriage, in the mid-1930s. In 1944 she moved the family to Dallas and married for a third time the next year, to Edwin Ekdahl. The marriage quickly fell apart, however, and Marguerite returned to New Orleans. A few years later, she took Lee to New York City.

As the Warren Commission noted, “The ensuing year and one-half in New York was marked by Lee’s refusals to attend school and by emotional and psychological problems of a seemingly serious nature.” He was sent to Youth House, a public treatment facility for juvenile delinquents. A social worker there described Lee as an “emotionally starved, affectionless youngster” who liked to keep to himself. When he continued to get in trouble at school, a New York court recommended that he receive additional psychotherapy. But before that could happen, Marguerite abruptly moved the family back to New Orleans in 1954. Oswald soon dropped out of school and worked a series of odd jobs. “It was during this period that he started to read Communist literature,” reported the Warren Commission. “Occasionally, in conversations with others, he praised Communism and expressed to his fellow employees a desire to join the Communist Party. At about this time, when he was not yet seventeen, he wrote to the Socialist Party of America, professing his belief in Marxism.” Oswald briefly returned to school when his mother moved to Fort Worth, but he left for good and joined the Marine Corps in October 1956.
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Oswald had a checkered career in the Marines. Two months after he enlisted, he shot a score of 212 with an M-1 rifle, a full “two points over the score required for a ‘sharpshooter’ qualification, the second highest in the Marine Corps.”
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In 1957 he received radar and aircraft surveillance training before receiving a transfer to a Marine air base in Atsugi, Japan (close to Tokyo). At the time, Atsugi served as an operational base for the U-2 spy plane, America’s most sophisticated military aircraft. The U-2 could take pictures, jam enemy radar, and avoid missiles by flying at an eye-popping altitude of 90,000 feet. Oswald worked in a radar unit that kept track of U-2 flights, though he did not have direct access to the plane itself. He had barely gotten settled in Japan when he learned that he was being sent to the Philippines for additional training. Upset by the news, Oswald shot himself in the arm with a .22-caliber
pistol. He was sent to the Philippines anyway and court-martialed for possession of an illegal firearm. The military fined Oswald and sentenced him to twenty days of hard labor.

Oswald’s military career went further downhill after that. In June 1958 he poured a drink over the head of a sergeant whom he blamed for assigning him extra kitchen duties. This led to a second court martial and twenty-eight days in the brig at hard labor. Oswald was then transferred to a Marine base located near El Toro, California. All the while, he was growing more and more interested in Communism. At the El Toro base, Oswald immersed himself in the Russian language by reading Russian books and blaring Russian records—much to the chagrin of his fellow Marines. He also tried and failed to pass a Marine proficiency exam in spoken and written Russian. He preached the merits of socialism so often that some of his acquaintances began referring to him as “Comrade Oswaldskovich,” a nickname that Oswald relished. He and another Marine, Nelson Delgado, spoke in glowing terms about the revolution in Cuba and toyed with the idea of traveling to Havana to join the fight.
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Delgado advised Oswald to write to the Cuban embassy in Washington, and Oswald would later say that he got in touch with Cuban diplomats. Delgado began noticing letters addressed to Oswald that were affixed with the Cuban official seal and heard his friend say that he had visited the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles. One night, Delgado saw Oswald at the front gates of the El Toro base talking to a stranger, possibly Cuban (in Delgado’s estimation), wearing an overcoat. Delgado also claimed that Oswald asked him to put a duffel bag in a locker at the Los Angeles bus station. Intrigued by his friend’s request, Delgado rummaged through the duffel bag and found pictures of U.S. fighter jets, raising the question of whether Oswald was spying for the Cuban government.
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Why the U.S. Marine Corps allowed Oswald to promulgate Communist propaganda among its soldiers at the height of the Cold War, when anticommunist witch hunts were all the rage, is puzzling to say the least. A captain named Robert Block seems to be the only one who confronted Oswald about his leftist leanings after Block found out that the private was reading magazines such as
The Worker
. Oswald told Block that he was simply trying to learn more about the enemy, a flimsy excuse the captain reluctantly accepted. In August 1959 Oswald applied for a hardship discharge, claiming that his mother had injured herself at work and needed his support; in reality, Marguerite was fine. At the same time, he applied for a passport, listing Switzerland, Finland, England, France, Germany, Russia, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic as the places he intended to visit. Both applications were approved. Oswald told the passport office that he planned on attending Albert Schweitzer
College in Switzerland and Turku University in Finland. Oswald’s application to Schweitzer shows his manipulative character. In the “remarks” section, he wrote, “Please inform me of the amount of the deposit (if required) so I can forward it and confirm my reservation, and show my sincerity of purpose. Thank you.” Oswald could not have been more insincere. He had no intention of enrolling at Schweitzer. This was his way of getting to Europe so that he could defect to the Soviet Union.
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In September 1959, Oswald took a bus to Forth Worth to visit his mother. Marguerite was surprised when her son told her that he was leaving to sail to Europe in order to take a job with an import-export business. She did not know that her son had decided to defect. By appearances, at least, Oswald was convinced that Communism was the wave of the future and that the Soviets might recognize his talents and put him in charge of something important. On September 20, 1959, Oswald boarded a freighter bound for France. From there he traveled to England and then to Helsinki, Finland, where he rented rooms in two pricey hotels, the Torni and the Klaus Kurki. On October 12, Oswald applied for a tourist visa at the local Soviet consulate. His application was approved two days later and he left for Moscow. At the time, friends said Oswald was careful with his money. It seems strange that he could have afforded meals, first-class hotels, and airfare on a Marine private’s salary, suggesting either that he had saved up the cash or someone else was covering his expenses.
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The CIA claims that it first became aware of Oswald when he tried to renounce his citizenship at the U.S. embassy in Moscow on October 31, 1959. “I’ve thought this thing over very carefully and I know what I’m doing,” he told the consul. “I was just discharged from the Marine Corps on September eleventh and I have been planning to do this for two years.” Oswald went on to explain that he had been a radar operator for the Marines and that he planned on sharing what he knew with Soviet officials. When the consul informed the ex-Marine that he needed to wait a few days before he could fill out the necessary paperwork, Oswald left in a huff and never went back. Embassy staff immediately cabled the CIA at Langley about the incident.
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The news didn’t stay confidential for long. The following day, the
Washington Post
ran a story entitled “Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship,” which quoted Oswald as saying that he would “never return to the United States for any reason.” The paper also reported that Oswald was the “third American to have sought to renounce his citizenship and stay in Russia in recent months.” The other two defectors were Nichols Petrulli, a sheet metal worker from Valley Stream, New York, and Robert Webster, a plastics expert from Cleveland, Ohio, who had gone to Moscow in connection with the American National Exhibition—the site where Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier
Nikita Khrushchev engaged in their famous “kitchen debate” during a Nixon trip to the USSR.
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The article did not mention that Oswald’s request for Soviet citizenship had already been denied—or that Oswald had melodramatically attempted suicide shortly after receiving the news. On October 21, 1959, Oswald wrote in his diary, “I am shocked!! My dreams!… I have waited for 2 year[s] to be accepted. My fondes[t] dreams are shattered because of a petty [Soviet] official … I decide to end it. Soak fist in cold water to numb the pain, Th[e]n slash my left wrist. Th[e]n plaug [plunge] wrist into bathtub of hot water … Somewhere, a violin plays, as I watch my life whirl away. I think to myself ‘How easy to Die’ and ‘A Sweet Death, (to violins)…” This had all the markings of a genuine try at suicide, which lends credence to those who say Oswald was not put up to the defection by the U.S. government. (The CIA might have wanted to plant an agent who could provide the Soviets with misinformation about the U-2 spy plane.) Oswald could have succeeded in killing himself had an Intourist guide (basically, a Soviet minder) not found him lying in a pool of his own blood. He was rushed to nearby Botkinskaya Hospital, where he received blood transfusions and a psychiatric evaluation. According to a Soviet official who defected to the United States, Yuri Nosenko, two Russian psychiatrists diagnosed Oswald as “mentally unstable.” Nosenko supposedly handled Oswald’s case for the KGB.
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Nosenko claimed that the KGB dismissed Oswald as disturbed and deranged and then left him alone after the diagnosis, but this explanation is dubious. Why the authorities would willingly take on a problem like Oswald—an individual they had diagnosed as unstable—when they could easily have had him delivered to the U.S. embassy begs an answer. As it developed, Oswald did not formally defect, since he never filled out the paperwork to renounce his American citizenship; instead, he was granted temporary residence in the USSR, with guaranteed employment and housing.
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However, if he was worth the trouble to accept and settle in the Soviet Union, the KGB would hardly have ignored a Marine who had worked with U-2 planes. The Nosenko story seems even less plausible when the events of May 1, 1960, are taken into account. On that day, the Soviets shot down a U-2 flying over their airspace and captured a U.S. Air Force pilot, Francis Gary Powers. At first, the United States pretended that Powers had been collecting weather data. But when Khrushchev produced damning evidence that showed otherwise, President Eisenhower admitted that the government had lied and the U-2 had been sent to spy on the Russians.

Oswald was living in the Soviet Union at the time, and he could have provided the Soviets with information that helped them target the plane. Gary Powers certainly thought he had. In his later years, Powers theorized that intelligence
provided by Oswald had helped the Soviets figure out how to use their missiles at higher altitudes. Powers’s son, Gary Powers, Jr., has continued his father’s quest for an answer: “It makes sense Oswald … would have given the Soviets information on the U-2. He was privy to the altitudes the U-2s were flying. And it’s interesting that he defected in 1959. Dad was shot down in May of 1960. The Soviets were starting to improve their SA-1 and SA-2 missiles during that time frame.” Powers’s plane was downed by an SA-2, also known as an S-75 Dvina.
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