Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  When, in early fall of 1963, she heard that Yuri was going to be expelled from his Institute, a high retired KGB officer was called in, and a few days later told her, “Lidia Semenovna, don’t do anything with these doctors here. Go to Moscow.” And Yuri’s mother used a slang expression, motaite. “‘Skip town,’ they said. ‘It’s not advisable to deal with it here. Get out of town and take Yuri with you. Smativat—take off!’”

  So, from Minsk she made a reservation at the Akademicheskaya Hotel in Moscow, a room for her son and herself in a hotel where academicians of all republics go. She made her reservation from Minsk and, once in Moscow, took him to a proper hospital, where he stayed for four months. By then, this problem with Andreyev was solved by itself.

  YURI: Do you remember how I was living in Moscow?

  MOTHER: I lived with you in Akademicheskaya Hotel.

  YURI: Don’t do this, Mother. Once in your life be honest. I can’t stand it. I’ll leave.

  MOTHER: I told everything as it was.

  YURI: Yes, of course, long live the Communist Party.

  MOTHER: It has nothing to do with Stalin and the Party.

  YURI: Lidia Semenovna, have you read a simple thing, Gulag Archipelago?

  MOTHER: No, I didn’t . . .

  YURI: If you read an article about Gulag, you’ll know better about Soviet reality, [but] you don’t want to read it.

  MOTHER: No, I don’t want . . . Can’t you understand that my position forced them to make me join the Party? They had a special direction for me.

  YURI: Why does all the world hate Russians, Communist revolutionaries . . .

  MOTHER: Okay, you hate me. So what can I do?

  YURI: And you hate me. That’s why I am telling.

  MOTHER: Why would I hate you?

  YURI: No. I know that she hates me.

  MOTHER: You ought to be ashamed to say so! . . .

  She was old, and he was ill. At fifty years of age, still handsome, he was bent over and coughing, curled around his glass of vodka like a leaf seared by heat. And she was in her seventies. Together they fought. Bitterly, and with the rage that only a mother and son can feel at the control each has the power to exercise on the other.

  The interviewers could wonder if Yuri would ever forgive his mother for revealing that he was a liar on a prodigious scale and so virtually all of what he had told them about Marina and himself was doubtless not true. Ambiguous—since it seemed as if he had seen her to some little degree—but probably not true. Experience bore the same relation to his memory as facts to high romance.

  3

  The Most Degrading Moment in Her Life

  If we are to take the reminiscences of Russians we have known about the state of their feelings in the aftermath of Jack Kennedy’s death, can there be an ending to Volume One more appropriate than to inquire into Marina’s state of mind?

  She would say that the most humiliating thing that she ever experienced was on her walk from the police car to the police station after they told her that Lee had been arrested.

  The police brought her out of the car, and she had to walk—she didn’t know how far; it looked forever. Maybe it was some short distance; she does not recall. But, such shame—the most degrading, humiliating moment ever in her life. Just by going from car to building. Reporters were shouting, and it was nothing she could understand. She wished some earth would swallow her. She even believed that Lee had committed this crime, because she believed all American authorities. She blindly believed them. They had made an arrest, so what else could there be? She was from Russia—when that black wagon comes (voron, they called it in Russia—black crow), you are guilty. Automatically guilty. Voron is here! Then she walked through a tunnel filled with reporters. Jammed. She couldn’t believe it. This nightmare had herself in it. Leading role! She was playing a sleepwalker.

  All of a sudden, someone shouted to her in Russian: “Mrs. Oswald, did your husband kill America’s President?” That Russian voice kind of woke her up. Fortunately. She was feeling as if she could have drifted out of everything forever. She was abandoned—wife of an assassin who had killed the President.

  VOLUME TWO

  OSWALD IN AMERICA

  PART I

  EARLY YEARS, SOLDIER YEARS

  1

  On Becoming an Usher

  One stimulus to the writing of this book was an offer from the Belarus KGB to allow a look into their files on Oswald. While the materials proved to be less comprehensive than promised, it was still the equivalent of an Oklahoma land-grab for an author to be able to move into a large and hitherto unrecorded part of Oswald’s life. Moreover, the end of the Cold War encouraged Russian and Byelorussian acquaintances of Oswald to loosen habits of discretion formed under Stalin and preserved by Brezhnev. So, we were able to conduct interviews that gave us a reasonable portrait of Alik and Marina and their friends and detractors in Moscow and Minsk.

  Then, an old hunger came alive. One wished to come to the end of an ongoing question: Did Oswald kill President Kennedy? And, if so, did he do it on his own or as part of a conspiracy? The only answer Minsk had provided was that one could not tell as yet—much too much of Oswald’s life back in America still had to be explored. Moreover, no one in Minsk knew anything about his past.

  Of course, the task in Russia had not been to look for such an answer. We are dealing, after all, with the greatest mountain of mystery in the twentieth century, a metaphor first employed when approaching KGB officers for interviews. Why are you here, they would ask; what do you expect to find in my country? And for reply one could only say that this was not a search for a smoking gun; no, it was more one’s aim to come close enough to this period of Oswald’s life to be able to set up a base camp on the slopes of such a mystery. To the degree that one could obtain a portrait of Oswald as he lived in Russia—a sense of him as seen through Russian eyes—one might be contributing to a future attempt by others to attain the summit. So, our venture might prove of real use. Oswald was forever being put on a bed of Procrustes to fit the dimensions of a plot; he had been portrayed as everything from a patsy to a CIA agent or a KGB agent. Our ability to stay afloat in such scenarios might be improved by coming to know Oswald a little better; we could then, at least, avoid plots he did not fit. Before we can understand a murderer—if he is one—we must discover his motive. But to find the motive, we do well to encounter the man. In Oswald’s case, that could be no simple task. How many young men are as timid and bold as Lee Harvey Oswald?

  If this metaphor of a base camp served to explain our presence to those KGB officers who did not look upon us with the bemused suspicion that we were representatives of some new exotic venture of the CIA, it also proved useful to us, first as a figure of speech and then as a metaphor that became real. Few who build a base camp have no ambitions to reach the summit.

  The book concerning Oswald in Minsk is done, but questions remain. In perusing the first twelve volumes of the House Select Committee on Assassinations Hearings and the full twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, one’s own interpretations began to assert themselves; one began to feel that one could do better than know Oswald, one might even understand him. To know a man, after all, is to do no more than predict what he will do next, even if you do not have a clue as to why he does it; but to understand a person is to comprehend his reasons for action. The conceit arose that one understood Oswald.

  Hence this second volume. If it grew out of the first one, it will nonetheless be different in tone. “Oswald in Minsk” depended upon the integrity of the interviews, and they revealed a simple if surprising phenomenon—the memories of most of our subjects were clear even though thirty years had passed. After the assassination, they had been instructed by the KGB not to speak about Oswald or Marina, and indeed, they did not. So, their recall was often pristine; it had not been exposed to time so much as sealed against it.

  In America, however, the key witnesses had been interviewed and, in turn, had
read the testimonies of others, as well as endless newspaper accounts of the event, and they had discussed the assassination with friends, and witnessed elaborate reconstructions on television that sometimes involved their own evidence or ran counter to it. Now, at this late date, to interview hundreds of such over-saturated witnesses would produce results that could hardly be trustworthy. How would the witness distinguish between what had been experienced then and what served his or her small personal legend now? That gap of three decades which had been an asset in Minsk would prove a liability in America.

  One came to the reluctant conclusion that the Warren Commission Hearings, in 1964, offered the best opportunity for studying Oswald’s character. It is a point to underline. The Hearings are a resource when it comes to understanding our protagonist even if they are of little or no help in determining whether he was part of a conspiracy. Of course, it should also be said that these same twenty-six volumes are a much maligned and misunderstood manifest of a prodigious work, compendious enough to bear comparison to the Encyclopedia Brittanica (had the Brittanica been devoted to only one subject). On the other hand, the Hearings and Exhibits are also—which is why the Commission is so despised—a singularly bland, slow-moving, even limp set of polite inquiries that fail to pursue a thousand promising trails.

  This is, however, to mistake the avowed purpose of the Warren Commission for its actual achievement. It was so pedestrian an investigation, so benignly void of the inquiring spark, that the good motives of the Commissioners have long been under suspicion. For if the seven august men who presided were not trying to blur every possibility but one—that Oswald was a twisted and lonely killer—then one has to assume the opposite: These most accomplished judges, lawyers, and high government officials really did not know how to conduct an inquiry of this sort. As inquiry, the Warren Commission’s work resembles a dead whale decomposing on a beach.

  Yet, one does not have to view the work in this fashion. For two generations of Americans, the Warren Commission’s twenty-six volumes of Hearings and Exhibits have become a species of Talmudic text begging for commentary and further elucidation. To the novelists and historians who may be writing on this subject a hundred years from now, the twenty-six volumes will also be a Comstock Lode of novelistic material, not of much use in solving a mystery—so little is followed through to the end!—but certainly to be honored for its short stories, historical vignettes, and vast cast of characters, plus its methodical presentation of bureaucratic inquiries and reports that do make some attempt to cut tracks through the wilderness surrounding Oswald’s motives.

  So, let us give due regard to the Warren Commission’s twenty-six volumes. The work is rarely to be applauded for its acumen, but what a treasure trove it provides of American life in the midst of our century, what an air it insinuates of the workings of the American establishment under the stress of wishing both to reveal and to conceal the answer to a most momentous matter.

  For that reason, perhaps, the Hearings, at their best, do provide passing insights into Oswald that accumulate in value. It is startling to discover, as one pans these government volumes for bits of gold, how much does gleam in the sludge. One could even make a career as a minimalist writer (of the second rank) by laying out many of the testimonies in two- and three-page narratives.

  An attempt to come to grips with the full twenty-four years of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life seems in order, then. We have an advantage, after all! What was previously the dry material of the Warren Commission Hearings takes on more life because of our knowledge of Oswald’s behavior in Minsk. We have come to know him well enough to be able now to picture him in American scenes and situations that were formerly meaningless. He has changed from a name on the page to a man who quarrels with his wife in much the manner that one can quarrel with one’s own mate. He is nearer to us. The situation is now not without its analogy to seeing an old acquaintance across the room at a party. By the expression on his face, we can have a good idea of what he is feeling. As we follow Oswald through our American sources, he is no longer Oswald-the-cipher but, to the contrary, Oswald-from-Minsk, that fellow we got to know a little, and how interesting it is to hear about him in a new environment. So it is that many of the transcripts have now become revealing because we have a better idea of whom we are observing. Indeed, there are a number of chapters in this second volume when there will be no more demand on the author than to serve as a literary usher who is there to guide each transcript to its proper placement on the page.

  That will hardly prove to be the limit of his task. The second volume is also, as advertised, replete with speculation. How else can one deal with the leading actor? After all, Oswald was a secret agent. There is no doubt about that. The only matter unsettled is whether he was working for any service larger than the power centers in the privacy of his mind. At the least, we can be certain he was spying on the world in order to report to himself. For, by his own measure, he is one of the principalities of the universe. We may envision the proportions of Oswald’s psychology better if we are ready to compare the human ego to architecture. If most egos are analogous to a peasant’s hut, a trailer home, or a ranch house, a few resemble such separate and immense edifices as Mont-Saint-Michel, the Pentagon, or the World Trade Center. It helps our understanding of Oswald if we look for comprehension of his sense of certainty (as well as his mother’s) in the ego-kingdom of mansions, palaces, and consummately ugly high-rises. To approach Oswald, we must deal with metaphor as often as with fact.

  Let me propose, then, that a mystery of the immense dimensions of Oswald’s case will, in the writing, create a form of its own somewhere between fiction and non-fiction. Technically, this book fits into the latter category—it is most certainly not fiction. The author did his best to make up no dialogue himself and attribute no private motives to his real characters unless he was careful to label all such as speculation. Still, it is a peculiar form of non-fiction, since not only interviews, documents, newspaper accounts, intelligence files, recorded dialogues, and letters are employed, but speculations as well. The author’s musings become some of the operative instruments. Of course, speculation is often an invaluable resource of the novelist. The result can be seen, therefore, as a special species of non-fiction that can be put under the rubric of mystery. That is because all means of inquiry have to be available when one is steering one’s way through a cloud—especially if there are arguments about the accuracy of the navigating instruments, which in this case are the facts. Because our facts will often be fogged in, let us at least look to agree on this much—that we, author and reader, are in collaboration to explore a mystery, our own largest American mystery, and move forward on that understanding into the excerpts, the transcripts, and the speculations of Volume Two. If we obtain nothing else, we can count on gaining a greater understanding of the dominant state of our political existence in these decades of the Cold War, for Oswald, willy-nilly, became one of the leading actors in this tragicomedy of superpowers who, with limited comprehension, lived in dread of each other.

  2

  Mama’s Boy

  Taking up service as a literary usher, the first guest to escort to her place has to be the mother of our protagonist:

  MARGUERITE OSWALD. . . . Chief Justice Warren, I will start with Lee as a baby . . .

  Lee was born October 18, 1939, in New Orleans, Louisiana . . . His father’s name was Robert Edward Lee; he was named after General Lee . . .

  Lee was born 2 months after the death of his father, who died from a heart attack, coronary thrombosis.

  Lee was a very happy baby.

  I stayed home with the children as long as I could, because I believe that a mother should be home with her children.

  I don’t want to get into my story, though.

  Lee had a normal life as far as I, his mother, is concerned. He had a bicycle, he had everything that other children had.

  Lee has wisdom without education. From a very small child—I have said this befo
re, sir, and I have publicly stated this in 1959—Lee seemed to know the answers to things without schooling. That type child, in a way, is bored with schooling because he is a little advanced.

  Lee used to climb on top of the roof with binoculars, looking at the stars. He was reading astrology. Lee knew about any and every animal there was. He studied animals. All of their feeding habits, sleeping habits . . . that is why he was at the Bronx Zoo when he was picked up for truancy—he loved animals.

  Lee played Monopoly. Lee played chess . . . Lee read history books, books too deep for a child his age. At age 9 he was always instructed not to contact me at work unless it was an emergency, because my work came first—he called me at work and said, “Mother, Queen Elizabeth’s baby has been born.”

  He broke the rule to let me know that Queen Elizabeth’s baby had been born. Nine years old. That was important to him. He liked things of that sort . . . 1

  Robert E. Lee Oswald was Marguerite Claverie Oswald’s second husband. Her first had been Edward John Pic, who lived with Marguerite in New Orleans long enough to father a child, Lee’s half-brother, John Pic, who would join the Coast Guard in 1948, when Lee was nine years old.