Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (12 page)

“It may be,” said Andy Purdy, former senior staff counsel on the Assassinations Committee, “that Officer Tippit, by himself or with others, was involved in a conspiracy to silence Oswald. And when the attempt to kill Oswald by Tippit failed, then Jack Ruby
**
was a fallback.”

Long after the assassination, there would be claims—one of them from an associate of a Mafia boss suspected of involvement in the assassination—that Oswald had been on his way to a planned rendez-vous at the time
Tippit was shot. As this book will show, the alleged assassin was involved in a weird world of intrigue. He had blundered into a quicksand of intelligence agents, Cuban exile plotters, and thugs, and it may be that he was in over his head.
5

A Sphinx for Texas

“
Constitutional scrutiny of Intelligence services is largely an illusory concept. If they’re good, they fool the outsiders—and if they’re bad they fool themselves.”

—John le Carré

F
ifteen years on, standing in the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, Jesse Curry stared out over Dealey Plaza and remembered the oddest prisoner he ever had: “One would think Oswald had been trained in interrogation techniques and resisting interrogation techniques,” said the retired Dallas police chief. Curry’s puzzlement was echoed by Assistant District Attorney Alexander, who told the author, “I was amazed that a person so young would have had the self-control he had. It was almost as if he had been rehearsed, or programmed, to meet the situation that he found himself in.”

“Rehearsed? Rehearsed by whom?” I asked Alexander. He could only shake his head and murmur, “Who knows?”

Lee Oswald was an enigma, and not only for Texas law enforcement officials. In the summer of 1964, when the Warren Report was being drafted, the alleged assassin’s elder brother, Robert, received a call from a Commission lawyer holed up in a cabin in
Vermont, working on the chapter that would deal with the question of
why
Oswald might have killed President Kennedy. Robert Oswald was “flabbergasted,” he would recall, that the Commission had yet to find a motive for the man it had pegged as the lone assassin.

Motive is a basic ingredient that any investigator seeks in any crime, but the Commission never found one for Oswald. Its Report stated, “No one will ever know what passed through Oswald’s mind during the week before November 22, 1963,” and made do with guesses about “hostility to environment,” “hatred for American society,” and the like. There has never, moreover, been any evidence that the alleged assassin was insane.

In 1979, the Assassinations Committee could come up only with talk about Oswald’s “conception of political action, rooted in his twisted ideological view of himself and the world around him.” Were the same conclusion to be drawn about all young people of Oswald’s addled left-wing politics, we should expect presidents to be assassinated all the time. The Committee admitted that it picked on that explanation only “in the absence of other more compelling evidence”—a phrase perhaps suggesting that its section on motivation was written before the science and other evidence forced a finding that there had been more than one assassin.

Where the Committee identified likely sinister hands behind the assassination, they were those of Mafia bosses or anti-Castro activists. It avoided the question of how Oswald’s left-wing stance might fit into such scenarios, and dwelled hardly at all on the possibility that—
because
of that very stance—he may have seemed ripe for a setup. Whatever the truth about that, Oswald’s lack of motive has mitigated in his favor. In his police questioning, indeed, the alleged assassin gave his captors the impression that he had rather
liked
President Kennedy.

“I am not a malcontent; nothing irritated me about the President,”
Oswald replied mildly when asked after the assassination what he had thought of Kennedy. He said, too, “I have no views on the President. My wife and I like the President’s family. They are interesting people. I have my own views on the President’s national policy.” In this instance, Oswald’s version was corroborated almost unanimously by those who knew him. The accused’s wife, Marina, whose testimony was to damn him in so many other ways, told of Oswald’s enthusiasm for Kennedy. She said of her husband, “He always spoke very complimentary about the President. He was very happy when John Kennedy was elected… . Whatever he said about President Kennedy, it was only good, always.”

Kennedy was voted into office while the Oswalds were living in Russia, and Marina said of Lee, “He was very proud of the new President of his country.” She said Oswald called Kennedy “a good leader” and usually gave the impression that “he liked him very well.” Acquaintances and relatives told the official inquiry much the same thing, and Oswald’s attitude apparently remained consistent in the months before the assassination. In August, when the Oswalds were in New Orleans, the American press was full of the latest Kennedy family tragedy, when the President’s newborn son died two days after birth. Then, like many people in America, Oswald followed bulletins on the baby’s progress with concern. He hoped the child would survive, worried when its condition went downhill.

More dispassionate was the opinion of a policeman who interviewed Oswald at that very same period, following an incident on a New Orleans street between Oswald and anti-Castro exiles. Lieutenant Francis Martello also formed the impression that Oswald liked President Kennedy. Martello thought Oswald was: “Not in any way, shape or form violent… . [A]s far as ever dreaming or thinking that
Oswald would do what it is alleged that he has done, I would set my head on a chopping block that he wouldn’t do it.” In a conversation about civil rights a month before the assassination, Oswald said he thought Kennedy was doing “a real fine job, a real good job.”
1

It frequently occurs, of course, that people commit crimes that seem out of character. The night before the assassination, there had perhaps been a sign that something was brewing in Oswald regarding the President. When Marina brought up the subject of Kennedy’s impending visit, she was to say, her husband avoided talking about it. According to Marina, Oswald was preoccupied that night with personal worries, pressing Marina to live with him once again, talking a lot of making a fresh start by moving the family into an apartment together. It was hardly the talk of a man planning a crime that might, as it indeed turned out, spell his own imminent death.

In custody, aside from his “frantic” denials that he had murdered the President and his shout of “I’m just a patsy!” to the press, Oswald did drop a hint that he would have more to say. He would tell none of it, though, until he could get legal advice. When allowed a visit by the president of the Dallas Bar Association, Oswald spoke of wanting to find a lawyer “who believes in anything I believe in, and believes as I believe, and believes in my innocence as much as he can, I might let him represent me.”

According to a Secret Service agent present, Oswald “wanted to contact a Mr. Abt, a New York lawyer whom he did not know but who had defended the Smith Act ‘victims’ in 1949 or 1950 in connection with a conspiracy against the government.” An attorney known for his leftist activism—he had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s—Abt was away from home during the weekend of the assassination. Oswald, who never did reach him, also talked of asking the
American Civil Liberties Union to find him a lawyer. Nothing came of it. Oswald was a mystery, and he knew it.

When his brother, Robert, visited him in custody, Oswald warned him: “Do not form any opinion on this so-called evidence.” Robert wrote later in his diary: “… I searched his eyes for any sign of guilt or whatever you call it. There was nothing there—no guilt, no shame, no nothing. Lee finally [sic] aware of my looking into his eyes, he stated: ‘You will not find anything there.’ ” The years of endless investigation, of groping toward an understanding of Oswald’s real role, have given us no firm answers.

We now have fragments, however, of a picture of Oswald that was denied to the public in the wake of the assassination. Ironically, it was President Lyndon Johnson—the man who succeeded Kennedy and appointed the Warren Commission—who eventually dropped the heaviest official hint that Lee Oswald was more than he appeared to be. In a 1969 interview for CBS Television, Johnson remarked: “I don’t think that [the Warren Commission] or me or anyone else is always absolutely sure of everything that might have motivated Oswald or others that could have been involved. But he was quite a mysterious fellow, and he did have connections that bore examination.” That was an understatement, but the former president felt he had said too much. He asked CBS to withhold that section of his interview on grounds of “national security.” CBS obliged by suppressing Johnson’s remarks until 1975.

It was that word “security” again. As mentioned in the preface, Chief Justice Warren had used it in 1964 in answer to a question as to whether
Warren Commission documentation would be made public. “Yes,” he had replied, “there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security. This would be preserved but not made public.”

At the time, no one in the media raised objections about document withholdings that involved security—even if withholdings were a little difficult to square with the official verdict that the President had been killed by a single misguided young man acting alone. Oswald had previously lived in the Soviet Union, after all, and this was the height of the Cold War era. Withholdings justified by security seemed harder to accept, however, once the Assassinations Committee found that Oswald had probably
not
acted alone but as part of a plot involving the Mafia and anti-Castro operatives.

A perennial explanation, of course, has been that secret intelligence agencies have to protect their information-gathering systems and the identities of personnel. On its face, that is acceptable—but only if that is the genuine reason for withholding documents. The concern has been that U.S. Intelligence agencies have continued to use the “national security” excuse for retentions that are unjustified.

In 1977, when the FBI went through the motions of releasing a hundred thousand pages from its Kennedy assassination files, the U.S. media uttered an uncritical cheer. At the press conference to mark the event, reporters seemed uninterested or ill-equipped to ask probing questions. The author found himself virtually alone in pressing the FBI spokesman into an admission that “up to 10 percent of the [Kennedy] file will not be released.” One reason for retaining records, the spokesman said, was to protect individuals’ privacy. The other was the familiar one, “national
security.” Even after the passage of the JFK Records Act in 1992, which mandated the release of all Kennedy assassination material unless a real case could be made for retention, the FBI continued to resist full disclosure.

The Central Iintelligence Agency, for its part, over the years released assassination-related documents only when under intense pressure, at the insistence of congressional committees, or—in more recent years—when obliged to comply with the Records Act. Sometimes, “released” documents have turned out to be censored virtually out of existence.

The Warren Commission, scholars now know, did not see a multitude of documents that are today deemed assassination-related. Senior Assassinations Committee staff, empowered to investigate the President’s murder with the authority of the House of Representatives, ended their probe still stymied by CIA procrastination and evasiveness.

Much of this book will be given over to assembling the pieces we do have of the documentary jigsaw. Sometimes the emerging picture will seem to point to a sinister Communist conspiracy—a specter that President Johnson, just after the assassination, feared “could conceivably lead the country into a war which could cost forty million lives.” What was the truth about the many months Oswald the defector spent in the Soviet Union? What had his contacts been with Soviet Intelligence? Marina, the wife Oswald had brought home from Russia, remained something of a mystery in her own right. Even before the assassination, the CIA had pondered whether she might be a Soviet plant, sent to the United States with a phony identity. The Agency’s questions to the Russians about Marina failed to extract satisfactory answers.

In 1964, when the Warren Commission considered the possibility that Marina might be a Soviet agent, Senator Russell commented almost
casually, “That will blow the lid if she testifies to that.” She did not, of course, but there is little indication that the Commission were very keen to peer under the lid. Some leads, which raised questions not merely about the Soviets but about the activity of U.S. intelligence, were left unpursued.

One of Oswald’s Dallas acquaintances, Teofil Meller, told police after the assassination that—in 1962—he had taken precautions before continuing to associate with the recently returned defector. He had checked with the FBI, he said, and agents had said Oswald was “all right.” What did that mean?

Another Dallas resident, George de Mohrenschildt, befriended Oswald after his return from Russia. Like Meller, he later claimed he had felt the need to check up on Oswald, in his case by seeing J. Walton Moore, an agent with the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division. According to de Mohrenschildt, the agent replied without hesitation: “Yes, he is okay. He is just a harmless lunatic.” What would a CIA man in Dallas have known about Oswald, as early as 1962, to be able to give assurances without even checking CIA files? (The de Mohrenschildt connection will be discussed later.)

Long after the assassination, while researching a book about Jack Ruby, the Scripps-Howard correspondent Seth Kantor realized that a call he had made in the early evening of November 22 had intriguing potential significance. Kantor, who had covered the Kennedy visit to Dallas, looked again at notes of calls he had made in the afternoon and early evening of the day of the assassination. His managing editor, the notes reminded him, had urged him to phone the Florida number of Hal Hendrix, a journalist who also worked for the Scripps-Howard chain. Hendrix, the editor told Kantor, “had some background on Oswald” for him.

Kantor’s notes showed that—as early as 6:00 p.m. on the day of the assassination—
Hendrix supplied details of Oswald’s past, his defection to Russia, and his recent pro-Castro activities. Now, in retrospect, Kantor pondered the fact that Hendrix had seemed knowledgeable about the alleged assassin.

Hendrix was no run-of-the-mill journalist. Earlier in 1963, he had won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then he excelled himself again. In an article published on September 24, he cited observers saying that an “ouster” of the pro-Kennedy President Bosch of the Dominican Republic could occur “overnight.” Bosch was overthrown in a coup the very next day.