Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  The American Right took up the general as a cause celebre. Several senators put together a subcommittee of a Senate Arms Services subcommittee to investigate the Kennedy administration’s “muzzling” of military officers. But on September 6 and 7, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified that Walker’s activities had violated a federal criminal statute1043 in attempting to influence senatorial and congressional elections by indoctrinating his troops, as well as violating noncriminal provisions of the Hatch Act, which prohibit political activities by federal employees. However, McNamara also gave the subcommittee a copy of the army’s report on Walker, which called him eccentric but “a sincere, deeply religious, patriotic soldier” and a passionate anti-Communist. The report also confirmed that he was a member of the John Birch Society and that his indoctrination programs were “remarkably identical” to the tenets promulgated by that ultra-right-wing group.1044 On November 2, 1961, when Oswald was still struggling to leave the Soviet Union, Walker resigned from the army, a celebrated martyr among the nation’s right wing. He announced that he would “find other ways to serve my country in this time of her great need.”1045

  How much of this story Oswald knew before his return to the United States cannot be determined, but he certainly knew something. Among the notes he wrote aboard the Maasdam as it carried him and his family toward New York is this: “The case of Gen. Walker shows that the army, at least, is not fertail enough ground for a far right regime to go a very long way.”1046 He probably got the story in Russia from two articles that appeared in the Worker on November 12 and December 10, 1961: “Gen. Walker Bids for Fuhrer Role” and “Walker Defends American Nazis,” the former denouncing the general with the label “Fascist,” the latter citing Walker’s defense of George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party.1047 Marina told the Warren Commission that Lee read the English-language edition of the Worker while in Russia.1048

  General Walker continued to command headlines after his retirement to Dallas, where he rented a gray mansion high up from the street in the upscale Turtle Creek area, and promptly raised the American flag and the flag of the state of Texas on the front lawn. In the spring of 1962, the six-foot four-inch Walker ran against Governor John Connally in the Democratic primary for governor of Texas and finished last in a field of six, but he received 138,387 votes, which was a respectable 10.46 percent of the total. Connally, who won the primary, received 431,498 votes.1049 On September 14, 1962, by which time Lee and Marina were living on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth, the city’s Star-Telegram published a story about a speech Walker gave to Lampasas County ranchers protesting the army’s intention to hold maneuvers on their land. He told them, “If Fort Hood needs any maneuvering or training grounds, it should be training in Cuba now.” On September 28 he hit the headlines again: the previous day he had called for ten thousand civilian volunteers to go to Oxford, Mississippi, to oppose any federal troops trying to enforce the court-ordered admission of the black student James Meredith to the state university there.1050*

  On September 29, President Kennedy started massing hundreds of army troops and five hundred U.S. marshals at a large naval air station near Memphis, some twenty miles away, to be dispatched to Oxford to force Meredith’s admission, which was bitterly opposed by the state’s governor, Ross Barnett, a rabid segregationist. The next day, September 30, Kennedy called Mississippi’s National Guard into service and in the evening made an unprecedented plea on national television and radio for peace, but it was unavailing. Shortly thereafter, Walker, who heard the president’s speech on radio in an Oxford café and called it “nauseating,” was on the scene as rioting broke out that night when Meredith was admitted to the campus for enrollment the following day. Two people, one a French newsman, were killed and another severely wounded in a bloody riot in which over three thousand U.S. soldiers, federalized Mississippi guardsmen, and federal marshals fired rifles, threw tear gas grenades, and used clubs to overcome the bottle-and brick-hurling rioters. Soldiers, Negroes, and newsmen were beaten and homes and automobiles were damaged. The fifteen-hour rioting persisted through the night, and Governor Barnett eventually gave up the fight, saying he was “physically overpowered.” Two hundred rioters were arrested on various charges.

  The next morning, October 1, Meredith enrolled and started attending classes without further violence, although white students shouted racial epithets and threats at him as he was guarded by seventy-five U.S. marshals. Walker was arrested on several charges, including inciting insurrection, and conspiracy to commit sedition, and flown to the U.S. Medical Center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric observation. On October 6 he was released on a $50,000 bond and his agreement to submit to further psychiatric examinations in Dallas.1051

  A subplot had begun on the night of the Oxford rioting, though many miles away in Dallas, when police stopped a car driven by Ashland F. Burchell and found a .357 Magnum and three .22 caliber pistols, a rifle, three thousand rounds of ammunition, blankets, a change of clothes, two or three hundred card files, and a switchblade knife. Texans toting small arsenals were neither uncommon nor outside the law—only the switchblade knife was actually illegal—but Burchell, a twenty-two-year-old graduate of Walker’s “special warfare” unit in West Germany, was known to be one of the general’s disciples. He had come to Dallas that spring to work on Walker’s failed run for governor in the Democratic primary. He denied he was on his way to Oxford, said the guns were his hobby and the index cards belonged to a friend. In the end the story did not amount to much. Burchell quickly made bail and was later slapped on the wrist for possession of the switchblade, but that did not keep the October 21 issue of the Worker, to which Oswald was subscribing, from reading the utmost sinister significance into it all—“Oxford Campus Plot for Bloodbath Bared.” The paper asserted that “hundreds” of other cars “carrying arms and ammunition were stopped on the way to Oxford on Sunday night and Monday morning,” something that escaped the attention of other news-reporting agencies. Only the Burchell incident appeared in the October 2 edition of the Dallas Morning News.1052

  None of this, of course, could have escaped the attention of Oswald, who always followed the news. It is worth being reminded that on the same day, October 7, that General Walker returned to Dallas to a welcoming crowd of two hundred supporters waving signs, including those urging Walker to run for president in 1964,1053 Oswald announced to the small group of Russian emigrés at his Fort Worth apartment that he had decided, without giving them any explanation, to move to Dallas.

  Over the next three weeks, stories about Walker appeared almost daily, many on the front page, in the Dallas papers, as his attorneys denounced the government’s persecution of their client. There weren’t too many literate Americans that October who did not know anything about General Walker, but the Dallas newspapers, of course, gave the story much more play than it got nationally—Walker was, after all, a resident of the town. The friendship between George de Mohrenschildt and Lee was just beginning to flower during what George called Walker’s “big show-off” period, and the general was a hot topic of their conversations. George knew that Lee hated the man. Quite apart from the fact that Lee revered Castro and Walker reviled him, Lee was, per George, “ferociously” in favor of integration, and Walker was just as fanatically a segregationist.1054

  On January 21, 1963, an all-white federal grand jury in Oxford, Mississippi, declined to return an indictment against Walker on insurrection and other charges (including seditious conspiracy and assaulting, resisting, and impeding federal officers), and the federal U.S. attorney there had the federal District Court judge dismiss all charges against Walker. “I am glad to be vindicated,” Walker told the press. “Today my hopes returned to the [anti-Castro] Cubans…who long to return to their homes.” The dismissed charges against Walker made the front page in the January 22 edition of the Dallas Morning News.1055

  When Oswald ordered his revolver five days later, on January 27,
he started talking about sending Marina and June back to Russia. “I told him that…if he wanted me to go,” Marina would later tell the Warren Commission, “then that meant he didn’t love me.” But Lee “said he loved me but that it would be better for me if I went to Russia, and what he had in mind I don’t know.”1056 What Lee had in mind very likely was his plan to murder General Walker.

  Marina would tell Priscilla McMillan that the month of February in 1963 was the worst month of her married life. The beatings grew more frequent and more savage. Before that February he would slap her once or twice with the flat of his hand; now, Marina told McMillan, he began to hit her with his fist five or six times. “When he started to strike her, his face became red and his voice grew angry and loud. He wore a look of concentration, as if Marina were being paid back for every slight he had ever suffered by her, and he was bent on wiping her out, obliterating her completely. To Marina, it seemed that it was not even a human being he saw in front of him. Most horrifying of all was the gleam of pleasure in his eyes,” as he would say things like, “I’m not hitting you just for this, but because I’ll never forgive you for running off to your Russians. Oh, what humiliation you made me suffer. Always you go against me! You never, ever do what I want!”1057

  Marina, naturally, sought some affection from Lee during this period, and whenever she did he would say, “I know what you want,” referring to sex. But he himself made violent sexual attacks on her, insisting on having her when and where he wanted, pinning her down and forcing himself on her, even if she was crying. “You’re my property,” he told her, “and I’ll do with you as I please.”1058

  Perhaps even worse than the beatings, which Marina had almost accepted as a part of her life, was his talk about her returning to the Soviet Union. She had no way of guessing that this might be part of his plot to murder General Walker. If Lee survived the killing of Walker and got away, he might make his escape, perhaps to Cuba, and then find some way to send for Marina and June. This, of course, is speculation, but by this time he had already ordered the pistol, and he was staying out late in the evening, probably scouting Walker’s home on Turtle Creek Boulevard across town. He was also busy forging a couple of ID cards for the fictitious “A. Hidell” at Jaggers by photographing his own Marine Corps and Selective Service cards and other documents, blanking out the data, rephotographing the documents, and then typing the new false data directly on the resulting prints. The separate prints for the front and back of the cards were then glued together.1059 He would soon need such identification when he had to pick up “Hidell’s” pistol at the post office.

  On February 14, 1963, the Dallas Morning News ran a front-page story on General Walker’s cross-country speaking tour with the fire-and-brimstone right-wing evangelist Billy James Hargis* to warn against the dangers of Communism. Three days later, the Morning News carried another story on General Walker’s speaking tour, emphasizing the anti-Castro side of his “crusade.”1060

  Later that same day, February 17, Lee forced Marina to handwrite a letter to the Soviet embassy asking to return to the USSR:

  Dear Comrade Reznichenko!

  I beg your assistance to help me return to the Homeland in the USSR where I will again feel myself a full-fledged citizen. Please let me know what I should do for this, i.e., perhaps it will be necessary to fill out a special application form. Since I am not working at present (because of my lack of knowledge of the English language and a small child), I am requesting you to extend to me a possible material aid for the trip. My husband remains here, since he is an American by nationality. I beg you once more not to refuse my request.

  Respectfully

  Marina Oswald1061

  Marina told the Warren Commission that on her own she had never once considered returning to the Soviet Union, but that Lee insisted on it. “He handed me the paper, a pencil, and said, ‘Write’…What could I do if my husband didn’t want to live with me? At least that is what I thought.”1062

  Marina told Priscilla McMillan that the week after she wrote the letter to the Soviet embassy was the most violent of all. They had celebrated June’s first birthday on February 15, and the next day she confirmed she was pregnant again. “Very good,” Lee said. “Junie is one year old and Marina is cooking up a present. A baby brother. What better present could there be?” But after a day or two of exulting over the prospect of another child, Lee soon resumed showing no compassion for its mother. On one occasion he hit Marina so hard that she started bleeding from the nose. He seemed contrite and made Marina lie down, but his anger persisted. He stormed out and didn’t return for hours. Marina had locked both front and back doors, but Lee just broke the window in the back door, came in, and went to bed without even speaking to Marina. Even as he feigned regret for his violence, he contrived to lay the blame on her: “You see I’m in a bad mood, try not to make me mad. You know I can’t hold myself in very long now.”1063

  In mid-February the de Mohrenschildts invited Lee and Marina to dinner and a screening of the film on their walking trip through Mexico and Central America. Among the guests were the Dallas chemist Everett Glover and his roommate, Volkmar Schmidt—Glover was between marriages at the time. Lee had already seen the film and preferred to spend the time in earnest conversation with Schmidt, a young German geologist who had recently come to the United States to work at Magnolia Laboratory in Dallas, owned by Standard Oil of New York. Schmidt, who spoke English but little Russian, was interested in Lee’s story.1064 “Lee Harvey Oswald brought up in the conversation with me,” Schmidt told Frontline in 1993, “the fact that he really felt very angry about the support which the Kennedy administration gave to the Bay of Pigs invasion. It turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald really idealized [the] socialism of Cuba, while he was critical of the socialism in the Soviet Union. And he was just obsessed with his anger towards Kennedy.”1065

  The credibility of this statement has to be questioned. Although there is evidence of Oswald’s opposition to Kennedy’s support of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in all the literature on the Kennedy assassination this is the only reference to Oswald being obsessed with anger against Kennedy prior to the assassination. Much more importantly, when the FBI interviewed Schmidt thirty years earlier on November 29, 1963, the agents’ report said that Schmidt told them that “Oswald did not speak of President Kennedy or his politics. On one occasion, Schmidt praised Kennedy by stating that President Kennedy would improve the welfare of the working man in the United States. Oswald made no objection to this statement.”1066

  George drove the Oswalds home afterward and spoke Russian when he discussed the evening. Getting around to Schmidt—George called him “Messer Schmidt”—George said to Marina and Lee, “Just imagine, such a young man. Yet a fascist from his brains to his bones.”

  It was the first time Marina had heard George or Lee use that word—readily comprehensible even when they spoke English, since it is virtually the same word in Russian. It was news to her that there were fascists in America. George told her about the John Birch Society and said Schmidt’s ideas were like theirs, enough to “make your hair stand on end.”1067

  A few days later, on February 22, Glover invited some friends interested in the Russian language to his own apartment to meet the Oswalds. It was a chance for the Oswalds to shine, in spite of their shabby clothing, as they were the only ones there who had fresh knowledge of the Soviet Union. The de Mohrenschildts put in an appearance but left early. Among the guests was a tall, thin, freckle-faced young woman, an acquaintance of Glover’s who would come to play a very large and critical role in the Oswalds’ lives, Ruth Hyde Paine.1068

  Ruth Paine, thirty years old and a housewife at the time, would become, over the next nine months of Marina and Lee’s life, the single person closest to both of them, and for that reason she has attracted a great deal of attention from assassination conspiracy theorists. (Paine would become one of my star witnesses at the London trial.) At the Second National Conference of the Coalition on
Political Assassinations (COPA) in 1995, three researchers, Barbara LaMonica, Carol Hewett, and Steve Jones, who had been working together compiling information on Paine and her estranged husband Michael, each presented research papers based on “all the Paine files they could find, including FBI and Secret Service background reports, Warren Commission testimony, and CIA documents—over two thousand pages in all,” as well as “Ruth’s grand jury testimony in New Orleans [in the Clay Shaw case], Dallas police files, and reports of a Quaker activist who was with Ruth Paine in 1991.” They found mighty slim pickings, mostly things like the fact that Ruth’s father, William Avery Hyde, had been in the Office of Strategic Services, the Second World War forerunner of the CIA, became an insurance executive, and in 1965—well after the assassination—took leave from his company to work for a time for the Agency for International Development, “a mysterious agency about which not much is known,” in the words of assassination researcher Steve Jones. An FBI document also revealed that the CIA had approached Hyde about running an educational cooperative alliance in Vietnam in 1957, although the plan was dropped. He also “traveled abroad frequently.”1069 Ruth’s mother was a Unitarian minister who was still studying for her bachelor of divinity degree at Oberlin College in Ohio. An FBI report said that a confidential informant for “another U.S. Government Agency” advised back in 1952 that Mrs. Hyde had admitted to many neighbors in the past years that she was a “Communist.”