Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (7 page)

As police cars raced to join the hunt for the killer of a fellow officer, two more citizens decided they had something to report. On hearing police sirens wailing, shoe-shop manager Johnny Brewer had looked up to see a young man walk into the entranceway of his shop. “His hair was sort of messed up,” Brewer would recall, “looked like he’d been running.” When the police cars went away, so did the young man.

Brewer left the shop and walked a few doors away to speak to the ticket seller at a movie house, the Texas Theater. The mysterious young man, they figured, had entered the theater without buying a ticket. They telephoned the police, and fifteen officers arrived within minutes. Patrolman Nick McDonald, who was one of the officers, went around to the theater’s rear entrance.

When the lights came up in the auditorium, shoe-shop manager Brewer pointed to a man sitting near the back. McDonald advanced cautiously through the almost-empty theater, checked a couple of other customers on the way, but kept an eye on the man at the back. When he reached the fellow, a nervous-looking young man, he ordered him to his feet. The man started to rise, brought his hands half up and punched McDonald between the eyes. Then, McDonald told the author, the suspect went for a pistol in his waistband. During a brief scuffle, the gun misfired. Then more officers arrived, and the Dallas police had their prisoner.

A slim young man of twenty-four, he was hustled out of the theater, through a hostile crowd, and into a police car destined for headquarters. Minutes earlier, during the scuffle with McDonald, he had cried, “Well, it’s all over now.”

In so many ways, as America knows to its cost, it was by no means all over. The prisoner was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Did Oswald Do It?

“He
didn’t think there would be any more work done that day.”

—Oswald’s ostensible reason for leaving the scene
of the crime, quoted by Captain Will Fritz,
Dallas Chief of Homicide

T
he suspected assassin was to be questioned by the Dallas police, the FBI, and the Secret Service for nearly two days—two days in which he steadfastly denied any part in the murder of either President Kennedy or Officer Tippit. As to learning the detail of what he said, the Warren inquiry would rely on retrospective reports written by the chief of the Homicide Bureau, Captain Will Fritz, and the other officers who talked to Oswald.
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Oswald was quite open about his basic background, the outline of a life now well known around the world. He had been born in 1939 in New Orleans, joined the U.S. Marine Corps at the age of seventeen, and then, in 1959, traveled to the Soviet Union.

Behaving like a defector who wanted to become a Soviet citizen, Oswald had stayed in Russia for two and a half years. After marriage to a Soviet wife and the birth of a baby daughter, Oswald
returned to the United States and to Texas, where his mother lived.

During 1963, Oswald told the police, he spent several months in New Orleans, where he began to take an active interest in Cuban politics. He admitted having demonstrated in favor of Fidel Castro, and—for his part in an ensuing street incident—having been arrested by New Orleans police. This, said Oswald, was the only time he had been in trouble with the police, and a check proved him right.

The interrogators asked Oswald if he was a Communist, and he replied that he was a Marxist but not a Marxist-Leninist. That was a little too sophisticated for Dallas law-enforcement officers, and Oswald said that would take too long to explain. Of his recent activity, Oswald described how he had looked for work in Dallas and eventually taken a laboring job at the Texas School Book Depository.

On several occasions, as he was escorted around the police station, Oswald faced a barrage of questions from the world’s press. Radio and television microphones recorded his strenuous denial of any involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Asked point-blank, “Did you kill the President?” Oswald replied, “I didn’t shoot anybody, no, sir.” He told the press this more than once. On the last occasion, as he was being dragged away through the seething crowd of reporters, Oswald said, “No, they’re taking me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union.” As he was hustled away, he almost shrieked, “I’m a patsy!”

If Oswald really was just a fall guy, he had been bewilderingly well framed. Even before his arrest, police were finding evidence that was to prove damning, evidence black enough and copious enough to give any prosecutor a good case. Consider now the facts that
would have been used against Oswald if he had come to trial.

Half an hour after the assassination, near the famous sixth-floor Depository window, a sheriff’s deputy had noticed a stack of book cartons. They were stacked high enough to hide a crouching man should a casual observer approach from behind him. There, on the floor, in the narrow space between the boxes and the window, were three empty cartridge cases. A rifle was found soon afterward, by two other officers searching the other end of the sixth floor. From the prosecutor’s point of view, it was to provide the clinching evidence against Oswald.

The gun was a bolt-action rifle with a sling and telescopic sight and was stamped with the serial number C-2766. It was a 6.5-mm Mannlicher-Carcano, a hitherto undistinguished Italian rifle of World War II vintage. There was a live round in the breech ready for firing. The weapon was examined for fingerprints at Dallas police headquarters, then flown to FBI headquarters in Washington. Experts there found some traces of fingerprints on the metal near the trigger, but they were reportedly too incomplete to be identified. Then, four days later, Lieutenant Day of the Dallas police sent the FBI a palm print, which, he said, he had “lifted” from the barrel of the rifle before sending it to Washington, DC. The palm print was firmly identified as that of the right hand of Lee Harvey Oswald.

At dawn on November 23, as Oswald ended his first night in custody, came a discovery that incriminated him even further. In Chicago, the staff of Klein’s Sporting Goods Company, searching through their files at the request of the FBI, came upon the records for the rifle with serial number C-2766. Klein’s, who did a large mail-order business, had sent such a gun on March 20—eight months before the assassination—to a customer called A. Hidell, at P.O. Box 2915, Dallas, Texas. The order form, which
Klein’s had received a week earlier, was signed “A. Hidell,” in handwriting.

For the early investigators, the case now seemed effectively broken. The serial number at Klein’s matched the number on the gun found at the Depository, and that gun had borne Oswald’s palm print. The signature “A. Hidell” and the hand-printed part of the order form were firmly identified by government document examiners as Oswald’s handwriting. Dallas police said that Oswald, when arrested, had been carrying a forged identity card, as well as documents in his own name. The forged card bore the name “Alek J. Hidell,” yet the photograph attached was Oswald’s. Dallas P.O. Box 2915 turned out to belong to Lee Oswald.

Nor was that all. In a crevice on the butt of the rifle was a tuft of cotton fibers. These were examined microscopically at the FBI laboratory, which judged them compatible with fibers in the shirt Oswald was wearing when arrested.

Oswald’s wife, Marina, was to testify months later that her husband had owned a rifle. She had seen it, she was to say, in late September, at the house near Dallas where she was then staying. Oswald and his wife were living apart, seeing each other only occasionally, in the months before the assassination. Marina, with her two children, was staying at the house of a friend named Ruth Paine. Many of Oswald’s possessions had been stored in the Paine garage, and it was there that Marina said she had last seen the rifle, wrapped in a blanket. Police saw the blanket during a search of the garage after the assassination. By then there was no rifle, but an FBI examination suggested the blanket had been stretched by hard, protruding objects.

The evidence that the rifle had been stored in the Paine garage, however, was thin. “The fact is,” wrote Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler in a memo requesting changes to the draft of the Warren
Commission Report, “that not one person alive ever saw that rifle in the … garage in such a way that it could be identified as that rifle.” He was ignored.

On the eve of the assassination, Oswald had asked a fellow employee, Buell Frazier, to drive him to Mrs. Paine’s house. Frazier quoted him as saying, “I’m going home to get some curtain rods … to put in an apartment.” Oswald had then stayed the night with his wife and left the next morning before she was up, at 7:15 a.m. He then walked over to Frazier’s house, just a few doors away, to get a lift to work. Frazier’s sister noticed that Oswald was now carrying a heavy brown bag, and Frazier asked about it as the two men drove into the city. Oswald said something about “curtain rods,” and Frazier remembered he had mentioned rods the night before. At the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald walked ahead into the building, holding the package tucked under his right armpit.

After the assassination, during their search of the sixth floor, police found a brown paper bag large enough to have contained the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. It appeared to be homemade. The FBI later found a palm print and fingerprint on the bag, and these matched Oswald’s right palm and his left index finger. Fibers found on the paper were very similar to fibers on the blanket in the Paine garage.

The day after the assassination, again in the garage, police made further dramatic finds. They came up with two photographs, both of Oswald apparently holding a rifle in one hand, two left-wing newspapers in the other, and with a pistol on his hip (see Photo 16). The Warren Commission was to decide that the photograph was authentic. Oswald’s wife, indeed, was to say that she had photographed her husband in this odd pose the previous spring. The background in the pictures was the backyard of the house
where the couple had lived at that time. An FBI photographic expert determined that the photographs had been taken with an Imperial Reflex camera believed to have belonged to Oswald. On top of all that, there was the ballistics evidence.

As we have already seen, expert opinion was that the “magic bullet,” found on the afternoon of the assassination at Parkland Hospital, was fired in the Mannlicher-Carcano to the exclusion of all other weapons. The three cartridge cases found at the Depository were also firmly linked with the rifle. The ballistics evidence involved in the policeman’s shooting seemed damning, too. Cases found near the scene of the killing had been fired in the pistol that Oswald had with him when arrested.

Long before this catalog of evidence had been prepared, the Dallas authorities expressed great confidence in the case against Oswald. At 7:10 p.m. on the evening of the assassination, Oswald was charged with the killing of Police Officer Tippit. Later that night, Assistant District Attorney William Alexander and Captain Fritz of Homicide decided there were also grounds to charge Oswald with the President’s murder. In 1978, Alexander told the author that Oswald’s departure from the Depository after the assassination, coupled with the “curtain rods” story and the communist literature found among Oswald’s effects, was enough to justify the second charge. According to Police Chief Curry, Oswald was brought from his cell sometime after 1:30 a.m. and charged by Judge David Johnson that he “did voluntarily and with malice aforethought kill John F. Kennedy by shooting him with a gun.”
2

The former police chief, the late Jesse Curry, commented that Oswald’s reaction was “typical.” He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s the idea of this? What are you
doing this for?” Judge Johnston said, “Oswald was very conceited. He said sarcastically, ‘I guess this is the trial,’ and denied everything.”

All of Oswald’s denials were later to be dismissed as outright lies, and some of them certainly were. Yet wholesale rejection of Oswald’s statements may be ill judged. A reexamination of what he said may provide clues to his real role in the assassination story.

Oswald and the Mannlicher-Carcano Rifle

From the start, Oswald told his interrogators that he had never possessed a rifle of his own. In later interviews, after the FBI had traced the order for the rifle at the mail-order firm in Chicago, and asked Oswald directly whether he had bought the weapon, he denied it outright. He volunteered the fact, however, that he had indeed rented Dallas P.O. Box 2915, and had been using it at the time the rifle was allegedly sent to that box number. It was never established that it was he who picked up the package containing the rifle at the post office.
3

Oswald did admit to having used the name “Hidell”—the name in which the rifle had been ordered—saying he “had picked up that name in New Orleans while working in the Fair Play for Cuba organization.” At one stage, though, Oswald seemed to contradict himself, saying that he “had never used the name, didn’t know anybody by this name, and had never heard of the name before.” This, though, was probably truculent weariness, for he then snapped, “I’ve told you all I’m going to about that card. You took notes, just read them for yourself if you want to refresh your memory.” Why exactly was Oswald reluctant to discuss the fake I.D. card? As it turns out, his use of the name
Hidell is intriguing.

The Warren Report contained a statement on the subject that was untrue. It declared, “Investigations were conducted with regard to persons using the name ‘Hidell’ or names similar to it… . Diligent search has failed to reveal any person in Dallas or New Orleans by that name.” In fact, the Commission’s own files contain a statement by a John Rene Heindel. He said, “While in the Marine Corps, I was often referred to as ‘Hidell’—pronounced so as to rhyme with ‘Rydell.’ … This was a nickname and not merely a mispronunciation.” Heindel revealed, moreover, that he had served in the U.S. Marines with the alleged assassin. They had both been stationed at Atsugi Base in Japan. Finally, Heindel lived in New Orleans, where Oswald was born, spent part of his youth, and lived during the summer of 1963. All this, for the investigator, has potential significance.

Any serious study of the Kennedy case must consider the possibility—many would say the probability—that Oswald had some connection with either the CIA or some other branch of U.S. Intelligence. If there was such a connection, it could perhaps have begun at Atsugi, where Oswald and Heindel both served and which was an operational base for the CIA. This period will be covered at length later in this book. We shall also see that, if Oswald was drawn into an assassination conspiracy by others—or framed—the process probably began during his New Orleans stay in 1963. These factors make it all the more disturbing that the Warren Report omitted altogether to mention that there was a real “Hidell”—and even untruthfully stated the contrary.

None of the thousands of Warren Commission documents reflects serious inquiry into whether or not there was any
Heindel-Oswald association after the Japan period. Heindel himself was never called to testify before the Warren Commission. The evidence gathered by the House Assassinations Committee, as published in 1979, shows no investigation of Heindel. This is the more remarkable given the role played by U.S. Army Intelligence on the day of the assassination, and specifically concerning the Hidell alias.

There were, from the start, curiosities about the way the name Hidell emerged after the assassination. According to later police testimony, a U.S. Army draft card in Hidell’s name was found in Oswald’s wallet immediately after his arrest. One of the first two detectives to question Oswald reported that Oswald actually pretended his name was Hidell at first. Yet, although the immediate rash of police press statements on the case included a mass of incriminating detail, the name Hidell did not come up publicly until the next afternoon, following the discovery of a mail order in that name for the rifle.
4
The name “O. H. Lee,” an inversion of Oswald’s real name, in which he was registered at his Dallas rooming house, was provided to reporters within hours of the assassination. Hidell was not. Behind the scenes, however, official communication lines hummed with references to the name within a few hours of the assassination. It now appears that the police and the FBI were only fully alerted to the Hidell alias after contact with a third force—part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.