Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  We didn’t mention Mother, either . . . 29

  4

  Christmas and Red Caviar

  We do well to keep reminding ourselves: Everything that De Mohrenschildt tells the Warren Commission has a subtext. To maintain his profitable situation in Haiti depends on George convincing Papa Doc Duvalier that he was never seriously associated with any alleged Marxist assassin. De Mohrenschildt could ingratiate himself with Duvalier if he were ready to explain that he did a debriefing on Oswald for the CIA, but even one hint of that would be anathema to the Agency.

  MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. You know, this affair actually is hurting me quite a lot, particularly right now in Haiti, because President Duvalier—I have a contract with the government.

  MR. JENNER. Yes; I want to inquire on that.

  MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. They got wind I am called by the Warren Committee. Nobody knows how it happened. And now he associates me, being very scared of assassination, with a staff of international assassins, and I am about to be expelled from [his] country. My contract may be broken.1

  We know, therefore, why he and Jeanne speak of Lee and Marina in pejorative terms. Yet it is a delicate game. Being an old hand, George comprehends that it is not safe to toady too much to professionals in intelligence, for then they will demand more and more of you. Rather, it is better to suggest that one is not without one’s own strengths if pushed. So we do get contradictory bits of testimony:

  MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. Unless a man is . . . proven to be guilty by the court, I will not be his judge, and there will always be a doubt in my mind, and throughout my testimony I explained sufficiently why I have those doubts. And mainly because he did not have any permanent animosity for President Kennedy. That is why I have the doubts.2

  It is a way of serving notice on the CIA: De Mohrenschildt, who is a study in self-interest, is not likely to defend Oswald without a motive, and here it is to keep alive for the CIA his awareness that they need Oswald to be seen as a lone demented killer without any connection to them. In effect, De Mohrenschildt is saying: I can help you or hurt you on this point.

  For the most part, however, George maintained his covert CIA stance: Oswald was insignificant; he felt sorry for him; he saw very little of him. Only in the last year of De Mohrenschildt’s life (troubled by intermittent spells of insanity, haunted by hideous visions—De Mohrenschildt may be worthy of an opera bearing his name) did George write I’m a Patsy. It was as if, coming closer to eternity, he had to redress the balance. When free of these bouts of madness, he was, in his last year, still sane, shrewd, and practical. So, he calculated that the American reading public by 1977 was looking for a sympathetic portrait of Oswald, and in his manuscript, he not only gives us his agreeable picture of Lee but reveals how much he was actually seeing of the Oswalds after their reconciliation.

  One day we visited them in their apartment on Elsbeth Street in Oak Cliff . . . the atmosphere of the house and the neighborhood conducive to suicide. The living room was dark and smelly, the bedroom and kitchen facing bleak walls. But Lee was proud of his own place and showed me his books and magazines as well as some letters from Russia which we read together. The place was spruced up by lovely photographs of the Russian countryside taken by Lee and later enlarged by him. Trees and fields, charming peasant huts and cloudy skies contrasted strangely with the dreary walls and the lugubrious atmosphere. Some pictures were framed by Lee, others unframed were carefully assembled in an album . . . “Look at these churches, look at these statues,” he exclaimed proudly. Indeed, almost all his pictures had a professional touch, he was justly proud of them.3

  The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas may be the closest that the Oswalds will come to a peaceful time together.

  From Marina’s narrative: When we were not quarreling, I was very happy with my Lee. He helped me with the housework and . . . devoted a great deal of time to June. He also . . . used to bring home dozens of books from the library and just swallowed them down, even reading at night. Sometimes it seemed to me that he was living in another world and [would only go] to work to earn money for his family, to eat and to sleep. Perhaps this is not true, but in my opinion he had two lives, spending most of his time in his own separate life. Previously, in Russia, I had not noticed this, since he was not so withdrawn.4

  On the other hand, Lee was also becoming quite a housekeeper, for he would vacuum the apartment, dispose of the garbage, even turn down the bedcovers at night. Priscilla Johnson McMillan describes “periods when he would follow Marina around all day. At such times, she said, he literally ‘wore me out with his kisses.’”5

  He also allowed her to sleep in the morning, and would make his own breakfast and leave coffee for her to be warmed. On weekends, this paragon would even serve Marina breakfast in bed.

  McMillan: . . . most evenings, it was he who gave the baby her bath. He did not trust Marina and was afraid she would drown the child. He drew the water and tested its temperature with great care . . . Then, to Marina’s horror, he would step in himself, utterly naked, with the exception of a washcloth over his private parts. Then he would splash June and play with her as if he longed to be a little child himself.

  “Mama,” he would shout to Marina, “we got water on the floor.” Marina would tell him to mop it up himself. “I can’t,” he would shout back to her. “I’m in the bathtub with Junie.”

  “Mama,” he would call out again, “bring us our toys.” And she would bring them.

  “Mama,” came the call a third time, “you forgot our rubber ball.” And, to the baby’s delight, he would splash the rubber ball in the water.

  “Mama,” he would call out one last time, “bring us a towel, quick. We have water on our ear.”6

  Has he entered the warm, welcoming territory of the infantile return? We all do it. The unspoken notion seems to be that if you can get yourself into a state of pre-verbal sentience where in effect your breath, yourself, and the universe are no longer whole categories apart but instead are languorously related, then something lovely occurs. You have gone back far enough into your early years to remake your personality, or commence to. You can feel as if you are not necessarily doomed to drive down some pre-ordained road to dull, slow extinction. The trouble is that most routes back to an infantile state are judged harshly by others. You can, for instance, get very drunk, or loll like a couch potato in front of the TV, space out on pot, play solitaire, sleep endlessly, or linger for hours in a rocking chair; but there is a bad name for each of these activities—alcoholic, slug, druggie, solitaire-player, slug-a-bed, or too old to do anything—so one’s ego suffers, even as one’s infantile return brings its touch of beatitude. Oswald would have been slammed and damned by our prescriptive culture—child seducer, he would have been called for taking a bath with his baby when all he was trying to accomplish was to become a baby himself, and so be able to substitute Marina for Marguerite as a mommy in that old fold of the psyche where some of the trouble was stored.

  Yet, how close husband and wife were for a little while:

  McMillan: Around this time, Marina lost a purse containing $10 he had given her for groceries and she expected to be scolded or even beaten. When he hardly responded at all, Marina broke into tears. Lee tried to cheer her up by talking baby talk and then talking like a Japanese. He played games on the way to the grocery store, where he bought her red caviar, smoked herring, and other treats.7

  Marina has no recollection of Lee buying her red caviar, but then, she will admit that her memory now bears resemblance to a city under siege for years. So much has been flattened.

  No matter. Red caviar or no, there were happy days through Christmas. One evening, since Lee was not prepared to lay out money for a Christmas tree, Marina took care of that:

  McMillan: . . . [She] slipped out on the street, found an evergreen branch, propped it up on their bureau in front of the mirror, and spread cotton around it for snow. The next day she gathered up 19 cents which Lee had left lying about and
. . . bought colored paper and miniature decorations. She shredded the colored paper into tinsel; the decorations went on the branch. Lee was proud and surprised. “I never thought you could make a Christmas tree for only nineteen cents,” he said.8

  They are not fated to put their trust in happiness, however. Disruption comes with a Christmas party. De Mohrenschildt bears down on Katya Ford to invite the Oswalds to a post-Christmas gathering. That De Mohrenschildt may have more in mind than merely catering to his client can be deduced from the extra strides he takes after Marina declines the invitation because she can hardly bring June with them.

  Not at all, De Mohrenschildt assures her; he will take care of that as well—a nice lady who speaks Russian is lined up to be a baby-sitter at the De Mohrenschildt apartment. So off they went, Oswalds and De Mohrenschildts, to the party. The Fords lived in a large modern house with a large stone fireplace offering its full blaze on this festive evening. Lots of lights. The other guests, needless to say, were all but shocked at the sight of the Oswalds.

  MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. There were quite a lot of people from the Russian colony and among them was a little Japanese girl . . . I don’t remember her last name because we always called her Yaeko . . . She is supposed to be from a very fine Japanese family. She was wealthy . . . she did some work with Neiman Marcus . . . Then she was a musician . . . playing with the Dallas Symphony,9 . . . To tell you frankly, I never trusted Yaeko. I thought there was something fishy, maybe because I was brought up with the Japanese, you know, and I know what treachery is, you know. [She was] very strange to me that way, she was floating around, you know, and everything. There is another strange thing happened, too, with that Yaeko.

  MR. JENNER. Involving the Oswalds?

  MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes . . . That was very funny because [Yaeko and Lee] practically spent all evening together at that party, and Marina was furious, of course, about it. And the party that brought Yaeko to the party was furious about it, too, and I don’t blame him for it. And from what I understand, Marina told me that Oswald saw Yaeko after, which was very unusual, because I don’t think Oswald wanted to see anyone, let’s put it that way . . .

  MR. JENNER. How, otherwise, did Oswald act at this Christmas party?

  MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes; what did they talk about, I don’t have the slightest idea. But everybody remarked and we were laughing about it. We were teasing Marina how he had a little Japanese girl now, you know. That was just as fun, of course, you know. But evidently they not only talked because she said he saw her later and he liked her. That is what she told me. He really liked Yaeko.10

  Priscilla Johnson McMillan lets us know what they were talking about:

  . . . Japanese and American customs, and about Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, which Miss Okui was certified to teach. But Marina noticed that [Yaeko] spoke Russian and was drinking only Coca-Cola, nothing stronger. It occurred to her that Miss Okui might work for American Intelligence. During an interval in the kitchen, she cautioned Lee against talking politics and especially against praising Khrushchev. “Watch out,” she said. “That girl is pretty and very charming. Only, she may be a spy. Don’t be too frank with her.” Never before, and never again, was she to feel prompted to warn her secretive husband to keep his mouth shut.

  One other person reacted to Miss Okui exactly as she did—George de Mohrenschildt. To all appearances he was busy chasing a couple of girls, but his antennae were out and he remarked to Marina: “That Japanese girl—I don’t trust her. I think she works for some government or other, but which one, I don’t know.”11

  We can take it for granted that De Mohrenschildt, in the course of debriefing Oswald, would have had many conversations with him about sex and would have known of his considerable regard for Japanese women. In Legend, Edward Epstein explores the matter further:

  George De Mohrenschildt subsequently testified that . . . [Oswald] had made some “contacts with Communists in Japan” and that these “contacts” had induced him to go to the Soviet Union. At least this was what Oswald had confided to him. Now, as he watched them talk across the room, he wondered whether [Yaeko] might be trying to find out about this earlier period in Oswald’s life. In any case, [George] didn’t trust her.

  Yaeko herself never fully divulged the contents of this long conversation with Oswald . . . She would later say when questioned by the FBI in 1964 that she and Oswald had discussed “flower arrangements.”

  At about midnight, De Mohrenschildt suggested to Oswald that they leave . . . Oswald wrote down a number that Yaeko gave him, as Marina observed; then he followed De Mohrenschildt out the door.12

  As happens over and over in attempting to find a credible route through Oswald’s adventures, the trail forks, then divides again: 1) It is all as it seems on the surface; Oswald has found an attractive girl who likes him. 2) De Mohrenschildt is not, in fact, prepared for Miss Okui, since she is working for Japanese intelligence. 3) As Marina believes, Yaeko Okui is connected to the CIA, only it is for a section that is not connected to George’s operation. Or, 4) De Mohrenschildt has been given instructions, and the meeting with the young lady has been arranged in advance—Miss Okui is there to become friends with Oswald and debrief him in depth to see whether deeper use can be made of him. Indeed, Miss Okui is exactly the reason that George brought the Oswalds to the party; he and Jeanne are only pretending to be distrustful.

  5

  Grubs for the Organism

  If one would ask why the CIA would now be interested to this degree in Lee Harvey Oswald, it may be worth offering one insight on the complex nature of the Agency. Of all government bureaucracies, the CIA probably bears the greatest resemblance to an organism: that is, its analogical stomach, mind, lungs, and limbs, while capable of communicating with each other, often need to do so no more than minimally—large parts of the CIA function almost entirely out of communication with other large parts. To assume that the CIA as a whole was interested in Oswald is to alienate oneself from understanding more likely possibilities. It is safer to suppose that word-of-mouth concerning Oswald, as it slowly seeped through certain parts of the CIA, made him a figure of interest to particular operatives in a few enclaves of the Agency who, by December 1962, were no longer welcome in the Director’s office.

  It will not come as shocking information to most readers that through the Bay of Pigs, and then for the year and a half that followed, there had been a working agreement between the CIA and the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro. It had been perhaps the most important and secret aspect of a large effort, called Operation Mongoose, that worked out of the most powerful CIA base in the world, JM/WAVE, stationed in Miami and southern Florida for the purpose of harassing Cuba through a variety of raids, bombings, and other means of sabotage. Following the missile crisis of October 1962, however, an agreement was worked out with Khrushchev to avert further nuclear confrontation, and as a byproduct of that endeavor, Kennedy gave orders to cut down on Operation Mongoose. Soon after, the FBI began to disarm various anti-Castro Cuban groups that had until then been in special training in covert camps along the Gulf of Mexico from Texas to Florida.

  This shift in Kennedy’s direction opened a schism in the CIA. Small groups of officers, feeling betrayed by the President’s new policy, began to function in concealed enclaves. To them, Oswald could certainly have been of interest. Of course, his real sympathies had to be plumbed, his character estimated, and his willingness to take risks measured. Since Mongoose had been downgraded, the full resources of the CIA were hardly to be brought to bear, but it is possible that De Mohrenschildt, in his debriefings on Oswald, had passed along a favorable verdict: “This fellow is essentially desperate enough to pull off quite a few things.”

  Naturally, no evidence of any of this was reported by the CIA to the Warren Commission, but the House Select Committee on Assassinations did succeed in obtaining the 144-volume Agency file on Oswald and was able to interview some of the CIA personnel involved, amon
g them J. Walton Moore. Epstein’s researches are more than pithy here:

  . . . although Moore had previously “recalled” meeting De Mohrenschildt only twice in his life—once in 1958 and once in 1961—the documents found in De Mohrenschildt’s CIA file showed that there was far “more contact between Moore and De Mohrenschildt than was stated.” In fact, they revealed that Moore had interviewed him numerous times over a course of years and prepared reports based on this information. Moore himself testified that he had “periodic” contact with De Mohrenschildt for “debriefing purposes” and, although maintaining he could not recall any discussion about Oswald, acknowledged that these contacts may have extended to 1962.1

  Given such meetings, there would have been contact reports passing from Dallas to the CIA in Langley.

  Epstein: Since the committee’s investigators found no trace of [such contact reports], they would have had to have been systematically purged from the files. But why would the CIA, which in those days legally debriefed some twenty-five thousand U.S. citizens a year through its Domestic Contacts Service, go to such dangerous lengths to conceal this debriefing?2

  Epstein has opened a velvet-lined gun case. If he has not come upon a smoking gun, he has certainly succeeded in pointing out the hollow impression left in the velvet by the removal of that gun. When he asks, Why are they going to such lengths, we are pointed toward an assassination attempt on a prominent right-wing figure in the John Birch Society named General Walker. It will take place in Dallas in April 1963, but J. Walton Moore, having confessed belatedly to “periodic” meetings with De Mohrenschildt, will not acknowledge that any could have taken place as late as April of 1963. That would be a line he could not have crossed; it might have been equal to testifying sooner or later that he and De Mohrenschildt had conversations about Oswald and Walker, which would have opened disclosures the CIA could never afford. It was better to make an error on the date, and claim that he had not seen De Mohrenschildt since 1962. They can’t hang you for mixing up your dates.