"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (50 page)

Alternately, Lee read, transported into this land of long ago and far away, and slept. When he did, Lee dreamed, fiction by Dostoevsky mingling with facts of the contemporary world. His unconscious mind returned to “The Grand Inquisitor”: a Spanish nobleman who embodied Satan on earth, rejecting Jesus on his Second Coming, yet embraced, even kissed, by the innocent one.

What did this metaphoric episode finally mean? Should Lee too strive to love rather hate? If so, then he must reject the words George had passed on to him as a mantra, replaced by a code of his own:
Any enemy of my friend is my brother.

This is the person who had met with George, he unaware of the sea-change within Lee, shortly after arrival. Yesterday, Lee had been told he would have the honor of killing Kennedy.

This appears vaguely familiar ... I feel as if I've been here before ... Oh, wow! ... Yes, I do remember ...

Lee found himself on a side-street, standing in front of the same run-down theatre he'd entered in 1954. Could history repeat itself? Might he once more find himself at the movies?

Lee glanced up at the marquee, which read: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE starring Frank Sinatra.
Holy! Accident or destiny?

*

From the moment this film began, Lee sensed that he was watching something other than a conventional Hollywood movie, despite Sinatra's star-power and big-scale production values. For one thing, there were no opening credits, not even a logo to identify the studio.

“Korea 1952,” appeared over the shot of Sinatra, playing Major Ben Marco, seated in the passenger seat of a military convoy truck beside Laurence Harvey. The cultivated English actor had been cast as Sgt. Raymond Shaw. Together, they pulled up to a brothel where troops partied inside. Looking dour—
isn't that the word so many people use to describe me?
—Shaw left the vehicle and entered, assembling his squad for a combat mission.

Clearly, these soldiers had one thing in common: To a man, they hated Raymond, considered him pompous. As to their insults, Raymond answered with a sneer.

That's me! Not educated and refined like him. Still ...

Shortly, they were taken captive, subject to brainwashing. An ever-circling camera alternated between an image of the Reds observing these captives as this scene realistically played out, and the manner in which the Americans saw, in their minds, what took place: they guests as some American garden-club.

I read an article somewhere, I think
Saturday Review,
that claimed movies will be different in the Sixties ... the old clichés will fall away. In their place, more 'daring' films.

What alternately appeared as a normal American lady and a cruel communist agent approached Raymond, instructing that he pick out a squad member he disliked the least and strangle him. Without hesitation, Raymond did. Later, Raymond was instructed to approach his friend Marco, borrow that man's pistol, then shoot a boyish trooper between the eyes. Raymond did as told.

As the Red leader explained, the notion that a man who has been brainwashed cannot be forced to commit an act that he finds morally repulsive is but a myth. Here was evidence. Two corpses lay on the stage, victims of Raymond's brainwashing, proof that the process worked.

All this has something to do with me! Let's wait and see.

After the surviving soldiers returned home, they shared a single opinion of their sergeant: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.” Whenever Raymond's name came up, diverse characters would repeat that precise phrase as if by rote.

My God! Could that be true of me? Like Sinatra and the others, without even knowing it? Perhaps I've been listening to George for so long, without argument, I've lost any ability to think for myself. Accepting point blank my “legend.”

If so, is there anything left of Lee Harvey Oswald, the person I once was as compared to the persona that I play?

*

Initially, things went smoothly in New Orleans. When not out looking for work, Lee felt a compunction to make contact with his roots, as if aware on some level that the final chapter in the brief drama constituting his life had begun to unfold. On the final Sunday in April, four days after arriving, he headed out to Lakeview Cemetery. Here, his biological father lay buried.

In all these years, Lee had never once visited the site. Marguerite hadn't brought him here, claiming “let sleeping dogs lie.” As always, Mama spoke in annoyingly timeworn clichés.

Had you lived, might everything have turned out different? I guess that's one of those things I never will know ...

The following Monday, Lee borrowed Lillian's phone book and poured over the listings for everyone in New Orleans with the last name of ‘Oswald.' One by one, he called each, politely introducing himself, asking if they might possibly be related.

A few hung up; most were pleasant but said ‘no.' A lady named Hazel answered: yes, indeed, she was the widow of his father's brother. Lee took a bus to the outskirts of town and visited her. A simple, gentle woman, Hazel offered Lee tea and cookies, which he accepted in his most humble guise.

“To think, after all these years, you would show up.”

They spoke for hours about her memories of Lee's dad, who came to life at last as a decent, hardworking fellow. As Lee was about to leave, Hazel recalled a framed photograph up in the attic.

“I want you to have it, Lee. After all, it's been sitting there gathering dust. Hopefully it'll mean something to you.”

Lee thanked her profusely. In the faded portrait, Lee's father smiled pleasantly. Lee set the framed image on the desk in his room. He fell asleep considering what might have been as compared to what was.

A week and a half later, Lee found a perfunctory job. He would lubricate machines used to process coffee at the William B. Reily Company on Magazine Street. He took a furnished apartment several doors down, so there would be no need to waste money on bus fare. Though paid a mere $1.50 an hour, Lee gleefully phoned Marina at Ruth Paine's house in Dallas.

“It's me. I've got a job and a room. Come, please?”

“
Papa nus lubet
!” Marina cried, cradling baby June. Lee knew enough Russian to understand this meant “papa loves us!”

For all he knew, Marina might still be in touch with the KGB. He, certainly, kept in daily touch with George. None of that mattered. No matter what happened in the world, it could not touch them now. Not after that sublime night in Dallas

“Come quickly, Marina? I so ache to hold you and June.”

Lee was to be disappointed. Though he offered to send Marina bus-fare, she allowed Ruth to drive them down and remain for several days. Lee tried to make the best of it, showing the women around his beloved Quarter, pointing out quirky facts as to the saints and sinners whose intrigues caused this town to be called The Big Easy. He could tell that Marina, at least while under Ruth's influence, grew ever more uneasy.

Yes, she appreciated the rich atmosphere. But the apartment was shabbier even than the worst they'd occupied in Dallas-Fort Worth. Here, there were cockroaches, something new to her.

“Oh, God, Lee. When I stepped on one, it
crunched
.”

Things improved slightly after Ruth headed home. Then Lee could take Marina out to enjoy the few delights he had known as a boy. Along Lake Pontchartrain, anybody could roll up their pants nearly to the knees, step into the shallows, and go crabbing. She, five months pregnant with their second child, laughed out loud as the green-backed creatures desperately tried to slip away sideways.

“You did this as a child? With your friends?”

She sensed at once that the question, however innocent, saddened him. “I didn't have friends. I went with my mother.”

At that moment, Lee noticed something that had eluded him. When Marina turned, her manner of movement recalled Marguerite, as she had appeared when they two crabbed here together.

*

As Raymond Shaw stepped off the plane from Korea, reporters anxious to speak with him instead found themselves interviewing his mother. Eleanor, played by Angela Lansbury, darted into the midst of the hero's homecoming, turning these proceedings, in Raymond's words, into “a three ring circus.” Also, she affected an accent meant to suggest Southern gentility, coming across rather as vulgar.

Marguerite. She might as well be playing
Marguerite!

Accompanying Eleanor was her second husband, Raymond's stepfather, a right-wing senator from some unspecified state. “My two little boys,” Eleanor cackled, embracing them both.

Perhaps this is why Raymond is so dislikeable, an upper-class version of myself. Marguerite was the one who made me the way I was then. Why? It played into her deep, desperate needs.

“It's a terrible thing to hate your mother,” Raymond Shaw confessed to Ben Marco. “But I didn't always hate her. When I was a child, I only kind of disliked her.”

Does everyone in the world experience what I do at the movies? Believe the words and images are personal?

When Raymond mentioned that he was going to work for a liberal newspaper editor, mother screeched: “That communist?” Later, a moderate senator played by John McGiver says of Eleanor to Raymond: “One of your mother's least endearing traits is to refer to anyone who doesn't agree with her as ‘a communist.'” As for ‘Johnny,' Eleanor's right-wing spouse, he raises a worthless piece of paper in the air and absurdly announces: “I have here a list of 200 known communists working in the Defense Department.”

He's supposed to be McCarthy! This isn't just one more thriller. This film's about politics. And they're making a clown out of the man who terrified everyone so back in the Fifties as today the fear of anything Red diminishes. That's the way I've been thinking. Castro might have leaned toward democracy if we hadn't out of mindless horror at the thought of ‘revolution' pushed him into the enemy camp by trying to kill him.

Who knows? With all the indignities we've heaped on the Beard, maybe it's possible to win him back? If someone took it upon himself to head on down there, talk sense with the guy, maybe he'd be willing to let bygones be bygones ...

All it takes is one man daring enough to give it a try.

Raymond was trained to kill, the big Chinese guy with the huge mustache laughed, and not remember that he'd killed. Sent back to the U.S. to do the bidding of Manchuria and Moscow. All one of their agents need do was place a phone call, instruct the brainwashed youth to play solitaire; once Raymond turned over the Queen of Diamonds, his own self disappeared.

The enemy agents had Raymond kill his old mentor at the paper so he, the bright assistant, could assume the duties.

“There's something phony going on,” Ben Marco, sweating at night with terrible dreams, told his military superiors. “With me, and Raymond Shaw, and the whole Medal of Honor.”

Marco had seen to it that Raymond received the decoration for wiping out an entire enemy brigade. He had wiped out an entire enemy brigade. That never happened. Marco too was brainwashed. Other soldiers also experienced the nightmares in which the truth, as they knew it to be, attempted to work its way up from repression to a conscious level.

I don't necessarily believe George set out to brainwash me. All the same, he did create an identity I assumed. Until lately, when I've begun to harbor second thoughts. Just like Sinatra in his latest film.

Unlike George, I now believe that a balance between the extremes of far right and far left allows for individual initiative while insuring community survival. This has existed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt and The New Deal.

Kennedy? He stands for the same thing. The New Frontier: Ask not you're your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. Best of all, his civil rights initiatives attempt to extend that “you” to black people at last.

M
y
kind of president. And they want me to shoot him?

*

George had remained in daily contact with Lee during those hot spring months leading up to this crisis. And, unwittingly, George set Lee's then-vague attitudes in place with another of his tactics. George instructed Lee to write a letter, dated May 26, to Fair Play for Cuba Committee, headquartered in New York.

This organization called for the U.S. to recognize Cuba and commence with a normalization of relations. Lee's instructions were to request he be allowed to open a F.P.C.C. branch in New Orleans. George's strategy: this would allow Lee to infiltrate the group and then help the CIA keep tabs on its members.

From the start, however, when he began reading materials mailed to him, Lee sensed that their approach was more or less identical to the one developing in his mind. Again, he dared not mention this to George. For the time being following orders, Lee rented a small room in an office building at 544 Camp Street. This would allow him to initiate such an infiltration.

Hardly by accident, this happened to be adjacent to where FBI agent Guy Bansila, along with George Ferrie and a local businessman, the ardent anti-communist Clay Shaw, orchestrated local anti-Castro activities. ‘George' created this arrangement so Lee, upon receiving information, could walk across the way and turn it over to his confederates.

But do I really want to do that? And since when is the CIA comfortable working with the FBI? Are they coming together now?

*

Marina experienced déjà vu as she woke in the night at the realization that Lee was sitting, rather than lying, beside her. For a moment she believed they were back in Dallas. Then she realized where she was, Lee lost in the throes of yet another of his nocturnal epiphanies. As in Texas, she rose up beside him.