"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (46 page)

“We have to take our country back before it's too late,” he howled. A small minority of Americans agreed with him.

When JFK announced that the army would be deployed to Mississippi in September, 1962, to assure an African-American, James Meredith, be admitted as student at the state university, Walker decried JFK represented an even more clear and present danger than Ike. This, despite JFK's secretive leadership in the attempt to overthrow Castro during the CIA led Bay of Pigs, and the president's upcoming face-off with Khrushchev over Russia's deployment of missiles in Cuba. Working from classified data referred to him by the CIA, these military secrets had been uncovered by a top agent working out of Dallas, Texas.

What did George say so long ago now? ‘Keep this in mind, Lee: John Fitzgerald Kennedy will become the most important person in your life ...'

To a moral monster like Walker, none of this mattered. A common belief that all Americans ought to be equal, regardless of skin color, qualified Ike and JFK as part of the problem in Walker's patently racist mind.

“I only wish someone would shoot him,” Walker confided to his closest friends about JFK. He dare not say something like this in public for fear of being branded a traitor ...

To Lee Harvey Oswald, a fervent supporter of Eisenhower's 1957 effort at desegregation and JFK's 1962 follow-up, such statements qualified Gen. Walker as an enemy of the people. If America were ever to move forward, become the great land it had the potential to be, such a fascist must be silenced.

Gradually, Lee had come to believe that this was the job he had been born for. Save JFK; save America. Kill Walker.

Without George or the CIA knowing anything. They likely wrote Walker off as a nut-case appealing only to extremists.

But that's how Hitler got started. Early on, no one took
him
seriously. Then, when they finally did, it was too late. All those innocent lives lost! I know what people say: ‘It
can't happen here.' Well, I know better. It can, unless we stop it.

Or, more correctly, unless
I
stop it!

*

On January 28, Lee—employing the alias ‘A.J. Hidell'-—put in an order with Seaport Traders, in Los Angeles, for a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, the cost $29.95 plus postage and handling. Nine days later, the gun was delivered to his Elsbeth Street apartment.

In mid-March, a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, complete with state of the art telescopic sight, arrived for Lee, now living on West Neely, addressed to his alias.

“Lee? Are you going to take up hunting again?”

“In a manner of speaking, Marina.”

Lee took to slipping out of the house late at night with his Imperial Reflex camera. When he arrived for work at the photographic lab the following day he carried along with him undeveloped rolls of film. In the evening, he returned with blow-ups of an alley behind some stately house in the Turtle Creek section of Dallas.

Marina begged to know what was going on. Lee insisted that he trusted her completely now. They truly were man and wife. Now and forever. But she was safer not knowing.

“If what you say is true, I ought to know everything.”

“I can't and won't endanger you.”

On March 31 Lee, dressed entirely in black. He cradled his new rifle, the pistol worn on his hip as a Western cowboy might position it, holding in his free hand copies of Red newspapers,
The Worker
and
Militant
. Lee instructed Marina to take his camera from the kitchen table and requested that she accompany him into their narrow back-yard. There, Lee raised the rifle and, offering his signature sneer, insisted that Marina snap pictures.

“What for?” she dared ask.

“Posterity.”

On April 5, while General Walker traveled on a fund-raising tour to fund his anti-equality-for-ethnics political campaigns, Lee took his rifle, positioned himself in the alley behind the general's mansion-like home, and stared through the telescopic sight into Walker's office. There he general often sat alone.

“Where are you going?” Marina whispered as he left.

“Target practice,” Lee laughingly replied.

When he returned, the gun was gone. Marina so wanted to believe Lee had abandoned it. More likely, he hid the piece for future use. She couldn't sleep, thought about calling the police for Lee's own good. If she did that, he would never forgive her.

He demands total loyalty. I cannot deny him this.

On April 10, Marina headed over to the home of one Ruth Paine, another Russian émigrés, living in Irving, for a visit. As the two conversed, Marina burst into tears and threw herself into the stunned woman's arms. When Ruth asked if Lee were abusing her again, Marina offered a surprising retort: “I only wish it were that!” When Ruth attempted to learn more, Marina refused to continue, though she wept uncontrollably.

When at last the tears subsided, Ruth suggested that Marina leave Lee and move in with her. Marina agreed to consider that. She also mentioned that she had been thinking about a return to Russia for herself and baby June.

“And ... Lee?”

“That is yet to be determined.”

Marina truly did love Lee now. But she had to put her baby first, all dreams of romantic adventures in espionage long gone. As an acceptable holding pattern she'd remain in Irving, thereby removing herself from Lee's immediate presence without actually deserting him. That was the best Marina could do for now.

“Yes, Ruth. June and I will move in with you at once.”

This explains why Marina was not at home when Lee returned from work Wednesday, April 10. Confused, he scrawled:

 

If I am apprehended by the police tonight, or killed by them, or am forced to flee without seeing you and the baby one last time, send any information as to what happens to me to the Soviet embassy in Washington. Newspaper clippings, any hard-copy that you can locate. As you know, The Red Cross in Russia serves the secret police. They can help you!

 

At nine p.m. precisely, General Walker, having returned home the previous day, sat at his desk before the half-open window, preparing his income taxes. A bullet tore through the glass, past his left ear, into the rear wall. The plaster there exploded, shards flying over Walker, leaving the general whitewashed. He, utterly unaware of the irony here, sat motionless, not believing this had happened.

Seconds later, he regrouped, leaped up, and called the police. They arrived shortly and thoroughly searched the area but the would-be assassin was long gone, and without a trace.

I had him in my sights. Even a lousy shot such as I could not miss at that range, not with a telescopic site. So how did it happen? Blame Dostoevsky, the existential issues he raised in
Crime and Punishment
. Does any person have the right to take another man's life, even for the good of humanity?

While I don't necessarily accept that such a thing is wrong I'm not altogether certain I can live with it. Something in my subterranean self rose in opposition against my conscious intent and caused me to blink. Alright, that's over and done with.

I can't change the past. But if push ever comes to shove again—if I ever have to kill a man I consider evil to do good for humanity—then Dostoevsky be damned, I will shoot true!

One of the many films Lee had watched on TV in his youth was titled
Man Hunt
. Released to theatres in 1941, after America entered the war, it was written and filmed before that occurred. The story concerned a rogue male, played by Walter Pidgeon, who sets out alone with his rifle, planning to assassinate Hitler.

Tripped up in his effort by unforeseen circumstances, he fails to accomplish his task. There are no regrets as to the attempt. “Millions of lives would be saved!” he insists.

“Millions of lives would be saved!” Lee told Marina when she returned home to pick up clothing and bid him farewell. He shivered with fear, answering her hesitant question about what he'd been up to by admitting that only a little more than an hour earlier he had attempted to assassinate General Walker.

Unable to respond, she packed her bags, grabbed the baby, called a taxi and headed off the home of Ruth Paine.

“It is not that I love you less, Lee,” she said while on her way out the door. “Only that I love our child more.”

*

“Lee,” De Mohrenschildt asked when he came to visit the following day, after the news reported an anonymous person had attempted to take Walker's life. “How did you miss?”

“First, how did you know it was me?”

“Who else?” De Mohrenschildt asked, extending his arms.

“In truth,” Lee laughed, “I'm trying to understand that.”

Lee never saw or spoke to De Mohrenschildt again. Nor did Lee have an opportunity to take a second shot at Walker. That night, George called him at home, obviously considering the situation too important to wait for the secret phone contact.

“Have you gone freakin'
crazy?
”

“Maybe I've finally come to my senses.”

A long pause. “Do you want to continue as an agent?”

“More than anything in the world.”

“Alright, then. I cannot allow you to remain in Dallas if I believe you may be planning another attempt. Tomorrow, board a bus to New Orleans. There's work that needs to be done there.”

“Is that an order?”

“Yes. Listen, Lee. I hate racism, too. We all of us do. But that's not our primary concern at the moment.”

“It's
every
decent man's primary concern.
Always
!”

“Yes, yes. But we have another big job coming up and you are the one to handle it. See you in the Big Easy.”

Alone, missing his wife and baby daughter, Lee spent his last night in Dallas sipping beer and crying over old Sinatra records. One song, called “The House I Live In,” referred to the U.S. itself, those many wonderful ‘rooms' open to its citizens, each some aspect of our abundance of riches. Lee appreciated the final line: “Most of all,
the people
, that's America to me!”

Me, too! As always, you speak directly to me.

In its purest form, that's what Marxism is all about. Trying to achieve the most good for the largest amount of ordinary, everyday people. I hear you, Frankie. I get it.

This led Lee to reconsider the current president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, if for no other reason than that Sinatra had campaigned for JFK. For the longest time, Lee had taken George's word on anything and everything at face value. That included JFK. Up until Bay of Pigs, JFK was considered to be a wild card; no one in the CIA seemed certain as to what this new president might do next. Initially they supported him, as JFK did appear to clearly favor them over the FBI.

Then came the Bay of Pigs, a turning point in the relationship between the president and the Company.

That's when everything swiftly headed south, for JFK and the CIA figuratively. Now, for Lee Harvey Oswald. Literally.

“No good deed ever goes unpunished.”

—Clare Booth Luce

 

A man of quiet confidence, yet one who well understood that things can always go wrong, Richard M. Bissell, Jr. spent most of that mid-April weekend in 1961 seated in his office, waiting for the phone to ring. Knowing that when it did and he received reports from the front line of combat in an undeclared (and, if Bissell‘s plan worked, invisible) war he'd ring up JFK and share the news, good or bad. Considering Dick Bissell's mixed feelings about JFK, he hoped and prayed all had gone well.

Also, Bissell would stay in touch with Adlai Stevenson in New York. Our ambassador to the United Nations had in Bissell's mind been one of the thornier elements in this affair. From day one Bissell, feared that what he condescendingly referred to as The Egghead Factor could prove the loose screw in an otherwise perfectly functioning machine that he had carefully constructed.

In anticipation of this, and following full authorization from his boss, CIA director Allen W. Dulles, who had spoken of this briefly with JFK, Bissell sent a top Outfit representative, Tracy Barnes, flying off for an unannounced visit to Stevenson's office along Manhattan's East River. This occurred a week and a half before the Bay of Pigs invasion began. Barnes knew what Bissell had told him, which was what Dulles had said to Bissell; JFK, to Dulles: Get Stevenson behind this. We need him!

“Make certain Stevenson grasps that what he says or does not say will likely determine the manner in which the world perceives America for the remainder of the 20th century.”

However much of a liberal, however huge Stevenson's moral conscience, however sincere his desire to be the most honest man in politics since Abe Lincoln, this came down to what was best not for Adlai but his country. Would he swallow hard and agree?

“He's a Democrat. He ought to be loyal to his party and the sitting president.”

“Stevenson is loyal to America first, to his own sense of democracy second, and to his integrity third. Here's what you need to consider to understand him. Adlai once claimed that communism is a corruption of our human dream for justice. He understands that democracy, American style, with all its flaws, offers our best hope. He's a realist, not an idealist.”

“That quote will serve as a key to my unlocking him.”

“Yes? Well here's another. Though Adlai may be a registered Democrat, deep down he wishes that he could have remained as an independent. As he has claimed, that's someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.”

“If JFK is the career politician personified, then Adlai rates as a true statesman.”