Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Because Robert F. Kennedy, if possible, seemed to take JFK’s death even harder than the rest of the Kennedys, being emotionally numb, reclusive, and even incommunicative for hours on end, many have conjectured that the reason was his sense of guilt, that the obsession and personal involvement he had (even greater than that of his brother) in overthrowing Castro may have inadvertently, as writer Max Holland says, “motivated a politicized sociopath.”26

  In this regard, we know Oswald subscribed to the Militant,27 a leftist publication that regularly denounced U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba and reported Castro’s extreme displeasure with it. For example, the October 7, 1963, edition reported a September 28 speech by Castro in Havana. “Fidel Castro made it clear,” the paper said, “that Cuba would continue its policy of revolutionary opposition to U.S. efforts to crush his government. He said that while Cuba welcomed the current easing of world tensions, it could not accept a situation where at the very same time the U.S. was increasing its efforts to ‘tighten the noose’ around Cuba.”28 A remark Oswald once made to Michael Paine about the Worker (like the Militant, a Far Left political organ we know Oswald subscribed to) was perhaps forebodingly ominous and revealing. “He told me,” Paine testified before the Warren Commission, “if you knew how to read the thing [the Worker] and read between the lines a little bit you could see what they wanted you to do.”29 With that type of frazzled mentality, Oswald easily could have interpreted Castro’s words about the United States as meaning he (Castro) would be very happy with the demise of Kennedy.

  Moreover, we know from Marina and other sources that Oswald read the daily newspaper, and the previous month, on September 9, 1963, while he was still in New Orleans, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published (under a three-column headline, “Castro Blasts Raid on Cuba, Says U.S. Leaders Imperiled by Aid to Rebels”) an article by AP reporter Daniel Harker quoting Castro as saying, “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”30 Although there are reasons to believe that Castro didn’t quite say what Harker said he did (see conspiracy section on Cuba), Oswald would have had no way to know this. And any reference to Kennedy trying to kill Castro and Castro being agreeable to killing Kennedy could very well have had a combustible effect on a mind as flammable as Oswald’s.

  The CIA, for one, thought the Harker article could have had a connection to Oswald’s act of murder. In response to an April 15, 1975, inquiry from David W. Belin, the former Warren Commission assistant counsel who was then the executive director of the Rockefeller Commission on CIA activities, the agency wrote on May 30, 1975, that since Oswald was “an avid newspaper reader—which we know from the testimony of Marina Oswald and others—” the “assumption” was that Oswald had “read the Castro warning and threat” in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. And that if he indeed did, it “must be considered of great significance in light of the pathological evolution of Oswald’s passive-aggressive makeup after his attempt to kill [Castro hater] General [Edwin] Walker early in April 1963 and his identification with Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution, which is directly traceable as far back as his Marine Corps service in El Toro, California.”31

  More immediately, in a major foreign policy speech in Miami Beach, Florida, just five days before the assassination, Kennedy all but invited the Cuban people to overthrow Castro, promising prompt U.S. aid if they did. A front-page headline in the Dallas Times Herald (which Oswald most likely saw) the following day, November 19, 1963, said, “Kennedy Virtually Invites Cuban Coup.”32 Coupled with the Bay of Pigs invasion, one can logically assume that Oswald’s love for Cuba played at least a part in his ultimate act of violence. In his mind, he could have been striking a blow for Castro and Cuba. Although when Oswald was asked during his interrogation if he thought Cuba would be better off because of Kennedy’s death, he replied that he felt that “someone else will take his place, perhaps Vice-President Johnson, and his views will probably be largely the same as those of President Kennedy.”33 However, Oswald would have known that a contrary answer would have pointed in the direction of giving him a motive for the murder.

  There are those who say that after the Cuban consulate turned Oswald down, his ardor for Castro and Cuba had cooled, and they cite as evidence Marina’s testimony before the Warren Commission: “In New Orleans he used to talk to me endlessly about Cuba, but after we came back [she from New Orleans, he from New Orleans and Mexico City] he didn’t talk to me about it any longer.” But Marina added that the reason he didn’t was “because I was just sick and tired of this.”34 Although Marina said Oswald was obviously disappointed in not being able to go to Cuba, was fed up with the bureaucracy and red tape, and didn’t express any “great desire” to try to get there again,35 this is not the same as saying he had lost one iota of his love for Cuba, Castro, and the Marxist cause. There is no evidence of this. In fact, as late as November 1, 1963, just three weeks before the assassination, Oswald opened up P.O. Box 6225 in Dallas and listed the Fair Play for Cuba Committee as an organization authorized to receive mail at the box.36 Moreover, Oswald had two Fair Play for Cuba cards in his wallet at the time of his arrest.37 And a search of Oswald’s small room on Beckley Street just hours after the assassination revealed the presence of Fair Play for Cuba circulars.38 Indeed, during Oswald’s interrogation, Captain Will Fritz said that when he asked Oswald if he belonged to the Communist Party, “he said that he had never had a card, but repeated that he belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba organization.”39

  Another important factor the Warren Commission and HSCA cited as probably contributing to Oswald’s pulling the trigger was this: he clearly had, as the Warren Commission put it, a “capacity for violence.”40 Perhaps nearly all of us are capable of killing a fellow human being (e.g., in self-defense), but I have never believed that we are all capable of murder. This is why the percentage of murderers among us is an infinitesimal fraction of 1 percent. Oswald fell into this exclusive, as it were, class of humans. His attempt, just seven months earlier, to kill Major General Edwin A. Walker clearly showed his propensity for murder, at least where his target was political.

  Oswald biographer Jean Davison says that his attempt to murder Walker, a right-wing extremist whose politics Oswald loathed, “revealed,” like his defection to Russia, “Oswald’s extreme dedication to his political beliefs. All else was secondary to him—his family, even the question of whether he lived or died.”41 At a minimum, it clearly demonstrated that Oswald not only was willing but appeared to have the desire to commit murder for a political cause. As far back as late 1957 or early 1958, he told a friend of his in New Orleans, Palmer McBride, that he would “like to kill” President Eisenhower because he was exploiting the working class. Palmer told the Warren Commission, “This statement was not made in jest, and Oswald was in a serious frame of mind when this statement was made.”42 When we couple his capacity for violence with his deep hostility for people and institutions, there can be little question that Oswald was a ticking time bomb, and it was only a matter of time before something like the Kennedy assassination occurred.*

  Along with Oswald’s proven homicidal tendencies, both the Warren Commission and the HSCA noted, as contributing factors to his act, the fact that Oswald was a deeply disturbed and frustrated individual. He was “profoundly alienated from the world in which he lived,” the Warren Commission said.43 Marina went so far as to say that he would not have been happy anywhere, “only on the moon, perhaps.”44 Since his dreams were towering and incapable of fulfillment, he was “extremely bitter” and felt “exploited,” Michael Paine told the Warren Commission.45 “He was always speaking of the injustices which had been perpetrated against him,” his Marine Corps friend Kerry Thornley said.46

  Wherever Oswald turned or went, he found rejection and failure: The Soviets wouldn’t grant him citizenship, and the Cubans wouldn’t even let him in their country. He was r
idiculed for his political beliefs and mannerisms in the Marines and received an “undesirable” discharge from the Marine Corps Reserve. He was always short of money and was fired from several jobs. He was estranged from his own mother. At the end, living in a closet-like room and holding down another menial job, he wasn’t able to provide for his wife and two daughters, having to rely on the beneficence of another. Indeed, even his own wife confessed to him her infidelity during their marriage, spoke longingly of her past lover, and, the day before he killed Kennedy, rejected his entreaties to come back to him. “He had failed at almost everything he had ever tried to do*…Even though he had searched—in the Marine Corps, in his ideal of communism, in the Soviet Union and in his attempt to get to Cuba—he had never found anything to which he felt he could really belong,” the Warren Commission said.47

  Despair and frustration are the mother of madness, frequently bursting out into wildly aberrational behavior. It is unreasonable to assume that by this one cataclysmic act of killing Kennedy, Oswald, a loser trying to give meaning to his life, felt he would finally be doing something sublimely important, something that would free him from the dead end of his existence. As author John Clellon Holmes writes, “Oswald’s sinister calm before the Dallas police,…his perfectly blank-faced denials of any complicity in the assassination, suggest a man whose darker conflicts are at least temporarily at rest, a man at ominous peace” with himself.48 The terribly gruesome, destructive, but successful nature of the act put an end to all the frustration, rejection, and unhappiness forever roiling inside of him—at least for the moment.

  There may have also been a sense of self-appeasement for Oswald in firing a destructive, equalizing missile at someone Marina said he may have been jealous of, envied—someone who was everything he was not.

  As psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson and his two associates at the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction, Joy Boissevain and Clare Aukofer, summed it up, “Oswald found himself defeated in all his endeavors…He had failed as a Marine, a revolutionary, a husband, a provider, and a lover…In his mind, Oswald, in one bold stroke, would undo all his past humiliations and failures.”49

  Perhaps no one got to know Marina after the assassination as well as author Priscilla Johnson McMillan. In her book Marina and Lee, based mainly on her conversations with Marina, she writes about Marina’s impressions of Oswald when she visited him at the Dallas city jail the day after the assassination: “After the Walker affair, when he [Oswald] failed at what he had set out to do, he had remained keyed up and tense…Now he was altogether different. He had succeeded. The inner tension was gone. Marina sensed in him a glow of satisfaction that she had not seen there before.”50

  If there’s one thing about Oswald that stands out above everything else, it’s that he was a very angry human being. I mean, here’s someone who, at the early age of thirteen, told his school psychiatrist “I dislike everybody.”51 Priscilla Johnson, remarking about her impression of Oswald during her interview of him in Moscow, noted years later “the repeated marginal reminder to myself [in her notes] ‘He’s bitter.’”52 The Warren Commission said essentially the same thing when it reported, after saying it could not ascribe any one motive or group of motives to him, that “it is apparent, however, that Oswald was moved by an overriding hostility to his environment.”53 The inevitable question presents itself—why did Oswald have all this hostility?

  Though his relationship with his mother, Marguerite, was strained, it could not be characterized as terrible. Moreover, his brother Robert grew up with the same mother and in the same environment, and nothing in his testimony before the Warren Commission or in his book, Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald by His Brother, hints that he was a bitter person mad at the world. So why was Oswald the way he was? No one will ever know the answer to that question, and I don’t intend to be a park-bench psychologist, but his severe dyslexia could have contributed to his bitterness toward life and a feeling of frustration. Though there is no known reference to it in his grade-school records, for Oswald to be as dyslexic as he was in his writing as an adult, one can imagine how bad it was in the earlier years. And being severely handicapped by dyslexia, a disability a small percentage of children have, could be expected to give him a feeling of inadequacy among his peers and a sense of anger over the curse that had befallen him, an anger that could likewise be expected to stay with him and perhaps become intensified as the years went by.

  The Warren Commission hired Dr. Howard P. Rome, a psychiatrist for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to analyze Oswald’s writings and give his professional opinion. In a letter to Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler dated September 8, 1964, Rome concluded that Oswald was suffering from “constitutional dyslexia,” a “reading-spelling disability” that can exist, he said, “in the absence of intellectual defect or of defects of the sense organs.” He went on to say that the phenomenon is a “congenital, neurological deficiency” and that “difficulties in reading* are always accompanied by difficulties in writing and spelling.” Rome wrote that “the person with this kind of word-blindness does not see and retain the picture of the word as an entity. It is as if he grasps certain features and tries to guess the rest by filling in the blanks, as it were. If he attempts to circumvent this difficulty by an untutored phonetic approach, as the more intelligent do, he encounters a further obstacle in the form of the irregularities, inconsistencies and ambiguities which are characteristic of printed and written English.” Rome said it was obvious that Oswald attempted to spell phonetically and more often than not failed in the effort. Dyslexic people like Oswald, Rome said, “are prone to develop a range of alternative ways of coping with their disadvantaged state: apparent indifference, truculent resistance, and other displacement activities by which they hope to cover up their deficiency and appear in a more commendable light.”

  Rome concluded that “[Oswald’s] disability and its consequential effect upon him…amplifies the impressions from many sources about the nature of Oswald’s estrangement from people.” He said that dyslexia frequently gives rise to a “life-experience which [is] marked by repeated thwarting in almost every sphere of endeavor. For a bright person [which I think we can say Oswald was] to be handicapped in the use of language is an especially galling experience. It seems to be that in Oswald’s instance this frustration gave an added impetus to his need to prove to the world that he was an unrecognized great man.”54

  The Warren Commission was essentially dismissive of Oswald’s dyslexia, devoting only two sentences to it,55 and then only to explain his misspelling of words. The reason may have been that Rome’s letter to Liebeler was mailed on September 8, 1964, and by the time Liebeler wrote a memorandum56 to fellow Warren Commission assistant counsel Howard P. Willens on September 15 recommending a reference in the report to Rome’s belief that Oswald’s dyslexia may have been partially responsible for his frustration and need to prove he was a great man, the Warren Report had already gone to press, eventually being published on September 24, 1964.

  Although neither the Warren Commission nor the HSCA listed it as a contributing factor to Oswald’s decision to kill, there’s little question in my mind that to do what Oswald did, one would have to qualify as a first-class “nut.” His act could not have been more irrational. We know that Oswald was crazy enough to ask Marina to help him hijack a plane to Cuba.57 When Marina responded, “Of course I won’t help,” Oswald proceeded to start increasing his muscle strength by doing knee bends and arm exercises and tearing through their apartment at night in his undershorts to practice leaps, causing Marina to say to their little daughter, June, “Junie, our papa is out of his mind.” Oswald went as far as bringing home airline schedules and a large map of the world, telling Marina how he planned to hijack the plane. He would sit in the front row and at some point walk into the pilot’s cabin with a gun and order the pilot to turn the plane around.58

  Oswald was crazy enough to attempt to murder General Walker.
Indeed, the evidence that Oswald was a nut is best exemplified by his defection to the Soviet Union. Ever since Gorbachev made the cold war obsolete with his shredding of the Marxist catechism, Das Kapital, and gave the Russian people a taste of freedom for the first time, with the exception of a small handful of zanies, who in the hell ever defects to the Soviet Union? It’s just not done, Russia, by all accounts, being one of the bleakest countries on earth. And to do this before Gorbachev’s era, and then to try to commit suicide, as Oswald did, when his request for Soviet citizenship was turned down, further qualifies him for the booby hatch. I mean, how deranged does one’s conduct have to be for him to be characterized as a nut? Oswald was so obviously a nut that in an FBI memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover to his staff dictated just five hours after the assassination, when the FBI knew nothing more about Oswald than his defection to the Soviet Union and his apparent murder of Kennedy, he said, “Our agents view him as a nut.”59

  One of the most serious problems I had in preparing for the upcoming trial in London was not that I didn’t know for sure why Oswald killed Kennedy. As I indicated, I had dealt with that type of problem before in my career. The problem here—which I knew Spence would bring up—is that at least arguably Oswald had a motive not to kill Kennedy because he supposedly liked him. But I quickly discerned that the remarks made by the chief proponent of that view, Marina, could be broken down into two distinct time periods: the Warren Commission, in 1964, and the HSCA, almost fifteen years later, in 1978. The clear and explicit assertions of Oswald’s liking Kennedy were almost all made in 1978, when Marina, having been hounded and courted by the conspiracy theorists every single year after the assassination, was definitely moving away from her Warren Commission testimony that “I have no doubt in my mind that Lee Oswald killed President Kennedy”60 and closer to the view of the conspiracy theorists that Oswald was innocent and framed. Thus, testimony by her that “he always spoke very complimentary about the president” and whatever he said about President Kennedy, it was “always…something good,” “I do not recall ever hearing Lee talking badly about John Kennedy,” and “my impression was that he liked [Kennedy] very well” and “he was very proud of the new president of his country” when he heard over the radio in Russia that Kennedy had been elected occurred in 1978, a decade and a half after the assassination.61 When we look at her Warren Commission testimony, however, her remarks are a little more muted and ambiguous. Thus, although she said that in translating articles for her about Kennedy, her husband “always had something good to say” about Kennedy she also said the much less emphatic, “From Lee’s behavior I cannot conclude that he was against the president,”62 and at one point said, “I don’t think he ever expressed hatred toward President Kennedy, but perhaps he expressed jealousy, not only jealousy, but envy” over Kennedy’s wealth.63