Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Both Wulf and McBride soon lost track of Lee when the Oswalds moved in early July 1956 back to Fort Worth.255 Oswald was still only sixteen, but this was the seventeenth time he had moved in his gypsy-like existence.256 Marguerite had several reasons for the latest move. She told the Warren Commission that she knew Lee was intending to join the Marine Corps on his seventeenth birthday, coming up in October, and she thought that if they lived with Robert, he might be able to dissuade Lee from enlisting. She may equally have hoped that Robert would take over some of the burden of supporting his brother and herself. “I have always been broke, and I mean broke,” she told the Commission about her move back to Fort Worth. “About a month before rent time, we had it pretty hard in order to have that rent.” In any case, Marguerite rented an apartment at 4926 Collinswood Avenue for all three of them. Robert was less than thrilled. He had his own plans—he was going to marry Vada Marie Mercer in November and intended to find their own apartment. Nevertheless, he had agreed to move in with Marguerite and Lee and to help out with the bills until then.257

  Robert did indeed try to talk Lee out of joining the Marine Corps before finishing high school during their brief period together at Collinswood Avenue, but Lee, after giving his older brother’s advice some serious thought, was determined to join up when he turned seventeen. Marguerite quickly found a job in a Fort Worth shoe store, and the family, minus John, was temporarily back together again, Robert working and contributing to the household expenses.258

  In September, Lee enrolled in the tenth grade—again—at Arlington Heights High School, which his brothers had attended some years before, but his stay there was short-lived.259 One student recalled later that Lee had tried to interest him in Communism, but the temper of the times only caused the student to “shy away from him.”260 Lee also went out for the football team. When it came time to run the sprint at the end of practice, Oswald announced to the coach that “this is a free country, and I don’t have to do it.” The coach told him to hang up his cleats.261 This incident recalled Lee’s behavior at Youth House in New York City, where a social worker said he had been a “non-participant in any activity.” Robert had noted Lee’s difficulty in taking orders from other kids—if he couldn’t be the boss, he didn’t want to play at all—a characteristic Robert thought Lee had in common with their mother. “I’ve known her to lose a good job,” he wrote, “because she was too bossy and wanted to be the manager or a partner instead of just another employee. She always felt she was somebody special and people should recognize that fact.”262

  Before the month of September was out, and after receiving four Ds and a C on tests, Lee dropped out of Arlington altogether.263 A few days later, on October 3, 1956, he wrote to the Socialist Party of America in New York City:

  Dear Sirs:

  I am sixteen years of age and would like more information about your youth League, I would like to know if there is a branch in my area, how to join, ect., I am a Marxist, and have been studying socialist principles for well over fifteen months I am very interested in your Y.P.S.L. [Young People’s Socialist League]

  Sincerely

  Lee Oswald

  He enclosed an advertisement coupon that had three boxes for checking off items—one for a three-dollar subscription to the Socialist Call, another to get information about the Socialist Party, and another to join the party—but Lee checked only the box requesting information.264 Mostly, he was waiting to turn seventeen and realize the dream he had nurtured since he was twelve, to join the Marine Corps. Clearly, the young Lee never found—or perhaps never gave a thought to—the incompatibility between his nascent Communism, whose goal was to end capitalism, and the U.S. Marines, the corps whose gallantry on the battlefield was intended to preserve America’s way of life—capitalism.

  Lee’s brother Robert told the Warren Commission, “I believe that the reason Lee joined the United States Marine Corps was to follow in my footsteps in that same service,” adding he felt his younger brother was always closer to him than his mother or half-brother, and he “looked up to me” and wanted to emulate Robert not only in the Marine Corps but in other respects.265 Indeed, Oswald told reporter Aline Mosby in Moscow in 1959, “I joined the Marine Corps because I had a brother in the Marines.”266 In Robert’s book, however, he writes that “after John left for the Coast Guard and I decided to join the Marines, he [Lee] talked of nothing else. He had seen us escape from mother that way. To him, military service meant freedom [from Marguerite].”267 Lee’s other brother, John, agreed. While not addressing himself to the Marines as an issue, he simply said that Lee joined the service “for the same reasons that I did it and Robert did it, I assume, to get from out and under” the “yoke of oppression from my mother.”268

  Perhaps the even greater incongruity was someone like Oswald, who was fiercely independent and resisted any type of authority, joining an organization whose trademark and way of life was authority and regimentation. But what was probably more important to Lee, at least for the moment, was that consistent with his adventuresome nature, as manifested by his exploration, as a child, of the streets of New York, he was going to be exploring another world, and it couldn’t be worse than the very unhappy one he was leaving behind. Also, the young man who even his youthful peers noticed was in search of an identity had now found a brand-spanking new and impressive one, a marine, as discordant as it was with his Marxist ideology. But all that could be sorted out later.

  On the eighteenth of that month, October, Lee reached his seventeenth birthday, and on October 24 he enlisted for a six-year military obligation (three active duty, the remaining three in the reserve) and was now a marine. That same day he boarded a bus to Dallas, where he was given a physical examination and sworn in, then flown to San Diego for recruit training. For the first time in his life, he was on his own.269

  He arrived at the San Diego Recruit Depot on October 26, 1956, and was assigned to the Second Recruit Training Battalion. He had now grown to five feet eight inches tall, but still weighed 135 pounds, and had no physical defects. He scored above the Marine Corps average on tests for reading and vocabulary, below average on arithmetic and pattern analysis. His composite general classification score (GCT) for the battery of six tests was 105, two points below the corps average. He scored near the bottom of the lowest group on a radio code test and failed to qualify as a swimmer. He gave as his preference for duty “aircraft maintenance and repair”—his brother Robert’s specialty—and he was recommended for such training. He also managed to get a satisfactory—but not distinguished—score on a test of general educational development.270 His starting basic pay as a private was a grand spanking $78 per month, not a princely wage. On the other hand, he got free room and board.271 (By the time Oswald was discharged from the military in September of 1959, he was a private first class and his basic pay was $108 per month.)272

  Boot camp, ten grueling weeks starting at five every morning under a barking drill sergeant, is a living hell for all recruits—it is specifically designed to be—but Oswald somehow managed to survive it. The recruits were trained on the standard American military rifle of the period, the Garand M-1, a .30 caliber weapon with iron sights. Lee, per a fellow recruit, Sherman Cooley, had difficulty firing the M-1 accurately during training.273 However, on December 21, when his company fired for the record, Lee not only qualified, but managed a score of 212, two points above the threshold for a “sharpshooter,” the middle of three Marine Corps qualification classifications, twelve points better than “marksman,” and eight points below the level of “expert.”*

  His overall marks as a recruit were 4.4 for both conduct and proficiency—5.0 was the highest mark possible, and 4.0 was required for an honorable discharge.274

  After ten weeks of basic training, in January of 1957 Oswald was transferred to an Infantry Training Regiment at Camp Pendleton outside of San Diego, sort of an advanced boot camp that concentrated on the basic skills of combat and the amphibious techniques and methods a
ll marines must know.275 One of the men in Oswald’s squad, Allen R. Felde, mostly remembered Oswald’s mouth. Lee railed against the American intervention in Korea and blamed “one million” useless deaths on President Eisenhower—in spite of the fact that Truman was president for all but the last six months of that war. Felde said that such political talk did not endear Oswald to his fellow marines, who had little interest in politics at all, much less in Lee’s view of politics. Felde said he also wasn’t popular because he was very “argumentative,” seemingly taking an opposite side of an argument “just for the sake of a debate.” And although he would share a cab to Tijuana with his squad mates when they went on liberty, Lee would part from them when they arrived and rejoin them only back at Pendleton. The same thing happened when they went several times to Los Angeles—Oswald rode with them on the bus but went off on his own as soon as they got there. Felde, who considered Oswald a “good talker” with an “excellent vocabulary,” said that Oswald, whom he described as “left-winged,” expressed a dislike for people with wealth, championed the cause of the “workingman,” and spent much of his time reading in quarters or in the base library.276

  Lee completed the course at Pendleton with a 4.2 in conduct and 4.0 in proficiency, and on February 27 he went on leave for two weeks, visiting his mother and brother in Fort Worth.277

  The two brothers had a lot to talk about. Robert was married and anxious for Lee to get to know Vada, and he had a job at Condar, where he was testing and working on fuel component systems for the B-58 bomber. Lee was full of enthusiasm for the Marines and eagerly looking forward to his next training assignment. One weekend they went out to the dairy farm operated by Vada’s parents, where Lee got a very rough ride from a palomino mare that belonged to Vada’s brother and had a mind of its own. He managed to hang on and seemed proud of that fact, but he didn’t try any more rides. He had more success when the brothers went hunting. They found no squirrels at all, but Lee shot a strange animal they couldn’t identify, one with a sharp snout, a long, thin body, and a bushy tail like a coon. Vada’s father told them it was a ring-tailed cat—the first he had seen in fifteen or twenty years. Lee was delighted with his rare bag.278

  Although Lee was staying with his mother, he spent most of his time with Robert and Vada. Robert saw little of Marguerite. They had had a falling out over the fact that the young couple refused to live in a house with a garage apartment for Marguerite, but Robert knew that they would never have a life of their own with Marguerite nearby, and he was pleased to keep a safe distance from her.279

  On March 18, 1957, Lee reported to the Naval Air Technical Training Center at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida.280 His training detachment there was schooled in the work of the air wing of the Marine Corps, including courses in the security of classified matter, missions and systems, navy plotting symbols, basic theory of radar, air traffic control procedures, map reading, and weather and aircraft recognition.281 At the conclusion of the training on May 3, he was given clearance to deal with “confidential” materials—the lowest grade of security clearance but a necessary one for the next step of his training, one requiring a “careful records check.”282 He did fairly well at Jacksonville. Although he ranked forty-sixth in a class of fifty-four, his scores of 4.7 for conduct and 4.5 for proficiency were the highest he would ever attain.283 He was also promoted to private first class, effective back to May 1.284

  The same day the course ended, May 3, 1957, he was sent by train, along with five other marines, to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, to learn to be a ground radar operator responsible for locating and guiding aircraft aloft.285 One of the six marines who traveled to Keesler with Oswald and served with him there, Daniel Powers, thought that Lee might have been striving for a relationship with the others, but that his personality alienated the group, some of whom called him “Ozzie Rabbit,” undoubtedly because of the Walt Disney cartoon “Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit.” Powers even suspected Oswald of having homosexual tendencies, although he had little evidence for this other than saying “a lot of his mannerisms were closely related to other homosexuals that I had seen in my life up to that period of time.” Oswald kept to himself and didn’t play cards, work out in the gym, or go on liberty with the others.286 They had most of their weekends free, and Oswald usually spent them alone in nearby New Orleans, which he always considered his home more than Fort Worth, and where he still had the Murrets to visit.287

  Lee did well in his six-week school, finishing seventh in a class of thirty—and those thirty had already been selected for their aptitude.288 He also earned a 4.2 for conduct and a 4.5 for proficiency.289 On June 20 he went on ten days’ leave, again visiting his mother and Robert in Fort Worth.290 Robert remembered very little about that visit, except that it was “too hot to do anything we didn’t have to do.” One incident did stand out. Robert ran a red light to avoid getting rear-ended by a driver tailgating him and was promptly stopped by a police officer. Robert explained that he would have been hit had he stopped, and the policeman said, “But the other guy would have been at fault”—as he handed Robert the ticket. As they drove off, Lee looked back over his shoulder and said, “That dumb cop!” Robert forgot about it until November 1963, when witnesses reported that the man who gunned down Officer J. D. Tippit had muttered, “Dumb cop” or “Damn cop.”291

  On July 9, he reported to the Marine Air Corps Station at El Toro, California (close to Santa Ana), a base located between San Diego and Los Angeles, where he was classified as a “replacement trainee” and attached to the Fourth Replacement Battalion—in effect, he and his mates were simply waiting for their first real assignment in the fleet, although it was not until August 22 that they embarked on the USS Bexar for transport to Yokosuka, Japan, and eventual duty at nearby Atsugi Naval Air Station. On the ship Oswald taught Powers how to play chess, and they sometimes wiled away up to four hours a day. Powers got good enough to beat Oswald occasionally, and he noticed how much that irritated his mentor. Oswald was always very happy to win, “like,” Powers remembered, “he was accomplishing something in life.”292

  Powers was three years older than Oswald, had completed a year at the University of Minnesota, and was determined to finish his education when he mustered out of the Marines—he eventually became a teacher in Wisconsin. He was also married and had been promoted to corporal while they were still at Keesler. He felt “somewhat above” the boys like Lee, who he thought had enlisted largely because “there wasn’t anything better for him to do at [the] time…He was somewhat of a rolling stone.” Powers was nonetheless impressed by the quality of Oswald’s reading. There isn’t a lot to do on a troopship, and many of the men read a lot, but Oswald showed some taste. Powers thought Oswald might have read The Age of Reason and The Age of Enlightenment (from Will and Ariel Durant’s popular history of philosophy, then published in several paperback volumes), as well as some books about American presidents and democracy. The one book Powers was sure that Oswald read was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.293

  The Bexar docked at Yokosuka, a seaport on Tokyo Bay, on September 12, 1957, and Oswald, Powers, and their fellow marines were sent on to Marine Air Control Squadron No. 1 (MACS-1), then attached to Marine Air Group 11 of the First Marine Air Craft Wing based at Atsugi Naval Air Base, about thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo.294 Atsugi had been the main training base for Japanese kamikaze pilots (pilots on a suicide mission who flew planes laden with explosives into American ships) during World War II, and the hills were riddled with caves where the Japanese air force had stowed fighter planes to keep them safe from American strafing raids. Beyond the barbed wire lay rice fields. Hangars on the west side of the long main runway housed Marine fighter squadrons, while on the east were the facilities for the navy patrol and antisubmarine squadrons. One huge hangar in the northwest housed the U-2 spy planes, and there was a complex of about twenty buildings housing a “joint technical advisory group”—one of the CIA’s main bases in Asia. Eve
ryone who worked at or visited the base had to have at least a minimum security clearance. It was even rumored that nuclear weapons were stored there, in violation of U.S. treaties with Japan.295

  The still-mysterious U-2 plane was operated under conditions of the utmost secrecy—even its name, U-2, was a common navy designation for a “utility” aircraft, a sort of catchall for general-purpose planes with no distinct military role. The single seater had been conceived in 1954, built by Lockheed, and first flown in prototype in 1955. The U-2A production version was powered by a Pratt and Whitney J57-P-37A Turbojet engine with 11,200 pounds of static thrust. It had a range of 2,600 miles and an astounding initial climb rate of 7,500 feet—well over a mile—per minute. Called by the Soviets “the black lady of espionage,” it was capable of soaring to an altitude of about 75,000 feet, an altitude never before reached by a human, and remaining there for over nine hours at a time. The U-2 entered service with the U.S. Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1956, and it must have appeared in Atsugi not long after. It represented a dramatic advance in the capabilities of aerial reconnaissance. More a powered glider than a conventional jet plane, the U-2’s wingspan, at 80 feet, was more than twice the length of its slender body. It was fitted with an array of cameras and sensitive electronic equipment designed to record and monitor radio and radar transmissions, and before being shot down in 1960, “for four years [it] provided the United States with invaluable intelligence data on Russia’s nuclear testing, missile and space launches, and other war-making potentials.”296

  While the enlisted marines at Atsugi knew nothing about the U-2’s capabilities or mission, and were in fact ordered not to discuss it, it was impossible to ignore. The long silver or—after 1957—matte blue-black craft was hauled out to the strip by a tractor, its fragile, drooping wings supported by tiny wheels on the wingtips—pogos, the pilots called them.297 The pilot, in a rubber uniform, arrived by ambulance and climbed into the cockpit of the plane, whose ground crew had removed all identifying markings from the plane. The high whine of the Pratt and Whitney Turbojet engine was so distinctive that the marines often rushed outside to watch it take off. They were dazzled by its short take-off run and incredibly steep rate of climb. Landings were equally spectacular. The plane could not be flown into a landing. It had to be stalled just off the ground, and it landed not on the conventional tricycle landing gear, but on a nose and a tail wheel, more like a bicycle. It could be kept upright as long as it was moving, but as it slowed, it tipped over on one wingtip, the wingtip with its small wheels beneath often giving off a shower of sparks as it scraped the tarmac. Two jeeps covered with canvas held the wings up as the tractor towed the U-2 back to its hangar, which was guarded by men armed with submachine guns.298