Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  It should be noted that Ferrie could have been the most striking figure Oswald had met up to that time. Strange in appearance, in later years he suffered from alopecia, a disease that left him hairless, and thus wore mohair for false eyebrows (which has left Ferrie as a comic figure in assassination mythology); he was, at the time Oswald first knew him in 1955, an airplane pilot of legendary skills (he could bring a light plane down on a postage stamp of a clearing in the jungle) as well as a serious hypnotist, a cancer researcher assertive enough to believe he would find a cure, a self-appointed Catholic bishop in a theology that he had evolved himself, and to keep his options open, was also private pilot to the godfather of New Orleans, Carlos Marcello. All in all, Ferrie was enough of a local genius to have attracted a young bruised Marine like Oswald looking for a weekend away from the base.

  Ferrie and Banister were associated with one another by way of Carlos Marcello, since Banister did a good deal of investigative work for G. Wray Gill, a leading attorney for the Don. All those who believe in guilt by association had a rich time with the possibility that Banister and Ferrie could be the link among the CIA, the FBI, and the Mafia. Oswald is then connected, if tenuously, to all of them, but there is, unfortunately, no sighting of any sort. No one has come forward who even glimpsed Ferrie and Oswald together in New Orleans during the summer of 1963.

  There is, however, the famous morning in September when, ninety miles north of New Orleans, a big black limousine drove into a modest-sized town, Clinton, Louisiana, and parked ostentatiously near the registrar’s office. On that morning, a long line of blacks were waiting to be registered as voters, an action organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). A young man came out of the limousine, leaving a driver and another passenger behind, and joined the black people on line. This young man was later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald, and the passenger as David Ferrie. The District Attorney in New Orleans, Jim Garrison, who brought Clay Shaw to trial for conspiracy in the assassination of JFK, had the driver pegged as the same Clay Shaw. Subsequently, after Garrison lost much of his credibility, some conspiracy theorists would decide that the driver, generally described as a good-looking middle-aged man with gray hair, was Guy Banister.

  Anthony Summers decided that the story never did make a great deal of sense with Shaw as a principal, and indeed, why would one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in New Orleans drive ninety miles out of the city to sit in a car all day and watch blacks register to vote? Banister made more sense. He saw CORE as a left-wing organization ready to befoul and disrupt everything in the South as part of a larger Communist strategy set up to destroy the United States. Indeed, the CORE organizer who was in Clinton that day assumed the car was there to suggest an unfriendly FBI presence. CORE had been withstanding many attempts to intimidate them that summer.

  The young white man who stepped out of the car and joined the blacks on line had to wait three hours before he reached the desk of the registrar of voters, Henry Palmer. At that point, he “pulled out a U.S. Navy I.D. card [and] . . . the name on it . . . was Lee H. Oswald with a New Orleans address.”3

  Summers: According to Palmer, Oswald’s story was that he wanted a job at the nearby East Louisiana State Hospital [and] had more chance of getting it if he registered [in Clinton]. To Palmer it was an odd request, out of context with the black registration drive. He finally told Oswald he had not been in the area long enough to qualify for registration. Oswald thanked him and departed.4

  This Clinton episode seems to tie Oswald to David Ferrie, who by then had alopecia, and with his red wig, mohair eyebrows, and extremely white skin, was identified as one of the three men in the limousine. The story, therefore, had to be disproved by Gerald Posner if he was to prove his case that Oswald was a lone killer, since, from Posner’s point of view, a connection between Ferrie and Oswald was a most unattractive loose end; but then, he had a few other enigmas to dispose of as well.

  Posner: The first problem arises over the time of the purported visit. Summers says the episode took place “in early September.” It is imperative that the alleged visit not have taken place later because Oswald permanently left New Orleans and Louisiana on September 24 . . . [But] Reeves Morgan, the state representative for the parish, said Oswald visited him at his home to inquire about obtaining the hospital job. There was a chill in the air, and Morgan recalled lighting the fireplace. Review of U.S. Weather Bureau records for the period through September 24 show daily temperatures above 90 degrees, with only a few days dipping into the eighties, with high humidity. There was certainly no day that was “cool” or required a burning fireplace. The registrar of voters, Henry Palmer, felt very strongly that the visit was the “first week of October, possibly around the 6th or 7th.” Oswald was in Dallas then.5

  Let us not give up on September too easily, however. Posner speaks of daily temperatures above 90 degrees, “with only a few days dipping into the eighties . . .” Of course, such temperatures are given for the high point of the day. It so happens that on September 23 and September 24, the two days when Oswald was alone in New Orleans after Marina left with Ruth Paine, the weather report shows the low temperatures to be, respectively, 62 degrees and 56 degrees.6 Certainly, for older people used to living in 90-degree temperatures, early morning or evening might offer the kind of chill one does light a fire for. Even if one came by at 10:00 A.M., there might be enough of that early-morning cold left in the old house and the old bones to keep a few coals alive.

  Posner also had to deal with the House Select Committee on Assassination’s conclusion in 1979 that the six witnesses they interviewed who had been in Clinton that day in 1963 offered “credible and significant testimony.”7 Posner, however, managed somehow to obtain access to the files of Edward Wagmann, one of Clay Shaw’s defense lawyers. That, indubitably, was a feat. Lawyers for rich men in the South are not generally in a hurry to give privileged material to investigators from the North, not unless they come very well recommended. In any event, Posner did obtain the original reactions of the witnesses in Clinton, materials that had been submitted in the beginning to Jim Garrison, and Posner set out to demolish the possibility that Oswald, Ferrie, and Banister (and/or Shaw) were in that car and made that visit together to Clinton, Louisiana. He was certainly able to demonstrate how very much the original statements of the witnesses diverge from the later ones submitted to the HSCA. One person saw only a woman and a man in the car and they had a baby in a bassinet. Other witnesses saw four men, or two men, or one man. The only trouble with all this is that Oswald, as pointed out by James DiEugenio in the newsletter Back Channels, September 1994, was in Jackson, Louisiana, about fifteen miles from Clinton, the night before, and Posner is combining testimony from witnesses in two towns and mixing them together as one.

  So, his strongest remaining card (although he did not see that it could eventually prove to be his weakest) was his insistence that the event could not have taken place in September because it was not cool enough. Of course, if the visit had taken place in October, then the young man who presented an I.D. card to the registrar, Henry Palmer, was not Oswald. But in that case, who were the people who had come to Clinton in October, and why had they gone to the trouble of obtaining false credentials for Oswald? The difficulty with closing the case on Oswald is that every time one shuts the door, a crack opens in the wall.

  It would be a great relief to terminate the case on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but one has to be certain the job is actually being accomplished. For example, Posner is too positive that Oswald and Ferrie never met at all:

  Posner: Ferrie was interviewed by the FBI on November 27, 1963, and denied ever knowing Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol. CAP records show that while Ferrie was a member through 1954, he was disciplined because he gave unauthorized political lectures to the cadets. When he submitted his 1955 renewal, he was rejected. Ferrie was not reinstated until December 1958. He was not even in the Civil Air Patrol when Oswald was a member in 1955.8<
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  In November 1993, however, the TV program Frontline showed a group photograph taken in 1955 of some sixteen men and boys on a picnic. Since Ferrie and Oswald are visible at opposite ends of the group, the most that Posner can now claim is that Ferrie may have believed he was telling the truth when he said that they never met.

  In fact, the odds are great that, at the least, they were introduced to each other on the occasion. Since the pilot was having many sexual relations with teenagers in that period, he might (in the manner that a heterosexual who makes love to many women will often have difficulty bringing to mind every encounter) have had no recollection of sleeping with Oswald. Of course, if Ferrie did recall such an event, he would have denied it after the assassination. Posner, trying to seal everything, writes: “ . . . he told the truth.” A very large assumption.

  This executive tendency to chop off nuances as if they are profitless distractions can be seen at its most dramatic in Posner’s treatment of Sylvia Odio, whom we will encounter in the next chapter. First, however, we have to deal with how Oswald gets out of the Big Easy. No literary vice is more damnable in a writer than needlessly irritating the reader, yet not even Lee Harvey’s departure from New Orleans is free of complications.

  3

  An Inexplicable Visit

  After Marina left New Orleans to go to live in Irving, Texas, with Ruth Paine, Lee may or may not have remained at the apartment on Magazine Street for the next couple of days. Neighbors did see him, but their testimonies do not agree. He could have left on Monday or Tuesday evening. Come Wednesday, when Mrs. Garner looked into the apartment, Lee was gone.

  By Wednesday morning, his $33 unemployment compensation check had been cashed at the Winn-Dixie store on Magazine Street, but it is possible some unknown person endorsed the check for him since the FBI could not authenticate the signature. Nor was anyone found who observed Oswald getting on any bus that left New Orleans on Wednesday for Houston—which was the most logical stop on the way to Mexico City, where he hoped to obtain a visa for Cuba.

  We cannot be certain of his whereabouts until 2:35 A.M. on Thursday. There, in the shank of the early morning hours, he did get on Continental Trailways bus no. 5133, which departed from Houston for Nuevo Laredo, then traveled south through Mexico all day Thursday, and by ten on Friday morning, September 27, he was in Mexico City, a bus trip of thirty-one and a half hours.

  Still, the question poses itself: Did Oswald on Wednesday go directly from New Orleans to Houston? Or, did he leave New Orleans with one or two unidentified associates and drive with them all the way to Dallas, where he would become one of the three men who, about 9:00 P.M. on Wednesday night, would knock on the door of an attractive Cuban lady named Sylvia Odio?

  According to Sylvia Odio’s testimony, she was at that time getting dressed to go out on a date. Since, as she declares, she felt highly suspicious of her visitors, she kept her door on the latch. She had cause. Her father, once the trucking tycoon of Cuba, was now in jail on the Isle of Pines, imprisoned as a conspirator in a plot to kill Fidel Castro. Sylvia Odio had suffered the trauma of his arrest, then a divorce from her husband in Puerto Rico, and now she was under the care of a psychiatrist. Small surprise if her travails had left her naturally distrustful of strangers. The spokesman for these three men told her, however, that they were members of JURE ( Junta Revolucionaria), an anti-Castro group formed in part by her father.

  The stranger who did most of the talking was tall and thin and called himself Leopoldo. The second man was squat and “greasy”—and by her description, both were “kind of low Cubans,” although the short one could have been Mexican. The third man was American and he “said just a few little words in Spanish, trying to be cute.”1

  MR. LIEBELER. Was the chain [on your door] fastened?

  MRS. ODIO. No; I unfastened it after a little while when they told me they were members of JURE, and . . . one of them said, “We are very good friends of your father.” This struck me, because I didn’t think my father would have such kind of friends unless he knew them from anti-Castro activities. He [Leopoldo] gave me so many details about where he saw my father and what kind of activities he was in. I mean, they gave me almost incredible details about things that [only] somebody . . . informed well knows . . . And he said, “We wanted you to meet this American. His name is Leon Oswald.” He repeated it twice. Then my sister Annie by that time was standing near the door. She had come [back] to see what was going on . . . And [Leopoldo] said, “We have just come from New Orleans and we have been trying to get this movement organized down there, and . . . we think we could do some kind of work.” This was all talked very fast, not slow as I am saying it now. You know how fast Cubans talk . . . And then I think I asked something to the American, trying to be nice, “Have you ever been to Cuba?” And he said, “No, I have never been to Cuba.”

  And I said, “Are you interested in our movement?” And he said, “Yes.”

  . . . I said, “If you will excuse me, I have to leave,” and I repeated, “I am going to write to my father and tell him you have come to visit me.” . . . And I think that was the extent of the conversation. They left, and I saw them through the window leaving in a car. I don’t recall the car. I have been trying to.

  MR. LIEBELER. Do you know which one of the men was driving?

  MRS. ODIO. The tall one, Leopoldo.

  MR. LIEBELER. Leopoldo?

  MRS. ODIO. Yes; oh, excuse me, I forgot something very important. They kept mentioning that they had to come to visit me at such a time of night, it was almost 9 o’clock, because they were leaving on a trip. And two or three times they said the same thing . . . The next day Leopoldo called me. I had gotten home from work, so I imagine it might have been Friday. And they had come on Thursday. I have been trying to establish that. He was trying to get fresh with me that [second time]. He was trying to be too nice, telling me that I was pretty . . . That is the way he started the conversation. Then he said, “What do you think of the American?” And I said, “I didn’t think anything.”

  And he said, “You know, our idea is to introduce him to the underground in Cuba because he is great, he is kind of nuts.” . . . [Leon] told us [that we] don’t have any guts . . . because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and . . . I started getting a little upset with the conversation.

  And [Leopoldo] repeated again that they were leaving for a trip and they would very much like to see me on their return to Dallas. Then he mentioned something more about Oswald. [Leopoldo] said he had been a Marine and he was so interested in helping the Cubans, and he was terrific. That is the words [Leopoldo] more or less used in Spanish, that he was terrific . . . Three days later I wrote to my father after they came, and mentioned the fact that two men had called themselves friends of his. And later in December, because the letter takes a long time to get here, he writes me back, “I do not know any of these men. Do not get involved with any of them . . .”2

  At the end of the interview, Sylvia Odio is asked:

  MR. LIEBELER. Well, do you have any doubts in your mind after looking at these pictures that the man that was in your apartment was the same man as Lee Harvey Oswald?

  MRS. ODIO. I don’t have any doubts.3

  Sylvia Odio thinks the visit of those three men could have come no earlier than 9:00 P.M., Thursday, September 26, but by that hour Oswald had already been on his Mexico City bus for hours. There are any number of witnesses to testify to that. So, Sylvia Odio either misremembered a visit on Wednesday night and substituted Thursday or, once again, the American, whoever he was, was not Oswald. Indeed, he could have been Oswald only if he had been driven all the way (possibly by Leopoldo) from New Orleans on Wednesday to the Odio apartment in Dallas (which is at least a ten-hour drive). From there, either someone drove him south to catch a bus leaving Houston in the early morning, 2:35 A.M., Thursday, September 26 (which would arrive in Laredo, Texas, in time for an early-afternoon departure for Mexico City, twenty hou
rs further down the road), or else he caught an 11:00 P.M. bus in Dallas on Wednesday night that connected with the bus from Houston to Laredo in Alice, Texas, at 10:25 the following morning. The likelihood is that he was driven to Houston, since an English couple from Liverpool, Mr. and Mrs. McFarland, recollect seeing him on the trip from Houston to Laredo:

  A:

  We changed buses at Houston, Texas at 2:00 A.M. September 26th and it was probably about 6:00 A.M. after it became light that we first saw him [and] the last we saw of him was waiting at the luggage check-out place obviously to collect some luggage [in Mexico City].

  Q:

  When did it first occur to you that Lee Harvey Oswald was the man you had met on the bus?

  A:

  When we saw his pictures in the newspapers.4

  If Sylvia Odio was mistaken in her dates, then Oswald could have been at her door on Wednesday night at 9:00 P.M. But if it was Thursday or Friday night, then the American who Leopoldo said was ready to fire at Castro or at Kennedy had to be an impostor familiar with Oswald’s name after Lee’s radio appearances on Stuckey’s show in New Orleans that summer. In which case, why was Sylvia Odio insisting the man was Oswald unless the resemblance was so close that Lee Harvey might indeed be some kind of patsy?

  Odio was first interviewed on December 18, 1963, by FBI men James P. Hosty and Bardwell D. Odum, and they hardly had to have it underlined for them that her testimony, if verified, would seriously injure the unspoken Warren-Hoover-Dulles concordat that Oswald had done the job all by himself. The Warren Commission’s energies would then have to be directed toward exploring who Oswald’s associates were on this occasion—which was equal to investigating the pro-Castro and anti-Castro underground in Miami, New Orleans, Houston, and Dallas. The unspoken anxiety of the elders was that by the end of such an exploration, there would be sheer hell to pay for all the attendant discoveries: COINTELPRO, Giancana, Rosselli, and the numerous attempts to assassinate Castro.