Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  The solution to a crime and the evidence to prosecute the perpetrator are often at odds. The laws of evidence are strict, and full of pitfalls. An improper question by the policeman conducting the investigation can result in the inadmissibility of the answer as evidence or even in a reversal on appeal.

  Rigid procedures in questioning get, however, in the way of the interrogator. He is seeking to find rapport with a suspect, looking to relax him, even carry him companionably into a confession. That is at odds with a district attorney’s approach. A prosecutor looks to keep the evidence pristine.

  Whether an interrogator is more interested in the solution of a crime or in gathering enough evidence to make a conviction stick, the need in both cases is, however, not to have a tape recorder. The machine, after all, will reveal every step in the questioning that might be in arguable violation of the prisoner’s rights: Given the tricks, threats, and traps through which an interrogation progresses, a transcript is a breeding ground for appeals.

  In Russia, KGB officers found it impossible to believe that the police department of a city as large as Dallas would function without a tape recorder, but then, the KGB had never had to contend with Miranda (or with its precursors before 1966) and so did not understand that one mistake in phrasing, visible there in a transcript, could overturn a conviction.

  Captain Fritz might have paid lip service to the department’s need for a recording instrument, but odds are he had no use for one until this exceptional weekend in November, when there was not only Lee Harvey Oswald to deal with, but the gathering suspicion of the world community that the police in Dallas had been up to no good with this man Oswald.

  By now, it is possible to believe that Fritz, under the circumstances, was simply doing his best, or so it appears.

  In any event, he began with quiet, relatively easy questions:

  MR. FRITZ. I asked Oswald about why he was registered under that other name . . . of O. H. Lee. He said, well, the lady didn’t understand him, she put it down there and he just left it that way.14

  When Fritz asked him why he had his pistol with him while seeing a movie, Oswald replied, “‘Well, you know about a pistol. I just carried it.’”15

  MR. BALL. Before you questioned Oswald the first time, did you warn him?

  MR. FRITZ. Yes, sir . . . I told him that any evidence that he gave me would be used against him . . .

  MR. BALL. Did he reply to that?

  MR. FRITZ. He told me that he didn’t want a lawyer and he told me once or twice that he didn’t want to answer any questions at all . . . and I told him each time he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to. So later he sometimes would start talking to me again.16

  After a while, given the impatience created by the number of people in the room, some of the questions had to get downright personal:

  MR. BALL. Did you ask him if he shot Tippit?

  MR. FRITZ. Oh, yes.

  MR. BALL. What did he say?

  MR. FRITZ. He denied it . . . “The only law I violated was in the [movie] show; I hit the officer in the show; he hit me in the eye and I guess I deserved it.” He said, “That is the only law I violated.” He said, “That is the only thing I have done wrong.”17

  MR. BALL. Did you ever ask him if he had kept a rifle in the garage at Irving?

  MR. FRITZ. Yes, sir; I did. I asked him, and I asked him if he had brought one from New Orleans. He said he didn’t.

  MR. BALL. He did not.

  MR. FRITZ. That is right.

  I told him the people at the Paine residence said he did have a rifle out there, and he kept it out there and he kept it wrapped in a blanket and he said that wasn’t true.18

  Oswald was not about to open any door. So long as he didn’t admit to having a rifle, he could claim that others were framing him.

  All the same, his vanity keeps him from staying silent for too long. If it is a battle of wits, he wants to best his interrogators. When the cost of this indulgence mounts, he becomes cautious again. But he is on a high, and full of combat insanity.

  They show him the photograph where he is holding the rifle, and he disavows it:

  MR. FRITZ. . . . he said that wasn’t his picture. “ . . . that is my face and [somebody] put a different body on it.” He said, “I know all about photography, I worked with photography for a long time. That is a picture that someone else has made. I never saw that picture in my life.”19

  On occasion, he was coy. And sometimes he was so cynical that his answer sounded sacrilegious.

  MR. FRITZ. . . . I told him, I said, “You know, you have killed the President and this is a very serious charge.”

  He denied it and said he hadn’t killed the President.

  I said he had been killed. He said people will forget that in a few days and there will be another President . . . 20

  MR. DULLES. What was Oswald’s attitude toward the police and police authority?

  MR. FRITZ. You know, I didn’t have any trouble with him. If we would just talk to him quietly like we are talking right now, we talked all right until I asked him a question that meant something, that would produce evidence, he immediately told me he wouldn’t tell me about it and he seemed to anticipate what I was going to ask. In fact, he got so good at it one time, I asked him if he had had any training, if he hadn’t been questioned before.

  MR. DULLES. Questioned before?21

  It is Allen Dulles who is asking the question: Questioned by whom? At this point, Allen Dulles may have come wide awake!

  MR. FRITZ. [He said] the FBI had questioned him when he came back from Russia for a long time and they tried different methods. He said they tried the buddy boy method, and the thorough method, and let me see some other method he told me and he said, “I understand that.”22

  There had been one verbal fracas, however. Not too long after serious questioning began, a call had come in from Gordon Shanklin, the FBI Special Agent in Charge for Dallas:

  MR. FRITZ. . . . Mr. Shanklin asked that Mr. Hosty be in on that questioning, he said he wanted him in there because of Mr. Hosty knowing these people . . . 23

  . . . and [Shanklin] said some other things that I don’t want to repeat, about what to do if [my assistant] didn’t do it right quick. So I . . . walked out there and called [Hosty] in.24

  We have to recall the note that Oswald had left for Hosty at FBI headquarters. Shanklin may, by now, have become aware of the existence of that piece of paper.

  As soon as Hosty came into the interrogation room and Oswald heard his name, everything changed:

  MR. FRITZ. . . . Mr. Hosty spoke up and asked him . . . if he had been to Russia, and he asked him if he had been to Mexico City, and this irritated Oswald a great deal and he beat on the desk and he went into kind of a tantrum [and] he said he had not been. He did say he had been to Russia, he was in Russia, I believe he said, for some time . . .

  MR. BALL. Was there anything said about Oswald’s wife?

  MR. FRITZ. Yes, sir. He said, he told Hosty, he said, “I know you.” He said, “You accosted my wife on two occasions,” and he was getting pretty irritable and so I wanted to quiet him down a little bit because I noticed if I talked to him in a calm, easy manner it wasn’t very hard to get him to settle down, and I asked him what he meant by accosting, I thought maybe he meant some physical abuse or something and he said, “Well, he threatened her.” And he said, “He practically told her she would have to go back to Russia.” And he said, “He accosted her on two different occasions.”25

  Oswald beat the table again. Since his wrists were handcuffed in front of him, the impact must have resounded through the room. In effect, Oswald has succeeded in confusing his interrogators by the intimacy of his attack on the FBI man. Nor are Special Agent Hosty’s troubles due to cease quickly.

  McMillan: . . . on his return from interviewing Oswald in the Dallas County Jail, Hosty was confronted at the FBI office by Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin with the note which Oswald had left several days earlie
r. Shanklin, who appeared “agitated and upset,” asked Hosty about the circumstances in which he had received the note and about his visits to Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald. On Shanklin’s orders, Hosty dictated a two- to four-page memorandum setting forth all he knew and he gave the memorandum, in duplicate, to Shanklin.26

  Following this episode, there are breaks in the interrogation on Friday afternoon for line-ups (or, as they called it in Dallas, showups). The taxicab driver, William Whaley, was one of the people asked to look at Oswald. The means were conventional. Whaley sat behind a one-way window and stared out at the group assembled for him:

  MR. WHALEY. . . . six men, young teenagers, and they were all handcuffed together. Well, they wanted me to pick out my passenger.

  At that time he had on a pair of black pants and a white T-shirt, that is all he had on. But you could have picked him out without identifying him by just listening to him because he was bawling out the policemen, telling them it wasn’t right to put him in line with these teenagers and all of that . . .

  MR. BALL. They had him in line with men much younger?

  MR. WHALEY. With five others . . . young kids, they might have got them in jail.

  MR. BALL. Did he look older than those other boys?

  MR. WHALEY. Yes.

  MR. BALL. And he was talking, was he?

  MR. WHALEY. He showed no respect for the policemen [running the show-up], he told them what he thought about them . . . they were trying to railroad him and he wanted his lawyer.

  MR. BALL. Did that aid you in the identification of the man?

  MR. WHALEY. . . . anybody who wasn’t sure could have picked out the right one just for that. It didn’t aid me because I knew he was the right one as soon as I saw him . . . When you drive a taxi that long, you learn to judge people and what I actually thought of the man when he got in was that he was a wino who had been off his bottle for about two days, that is the way he looked, sir, that was my opinion of him . . . 27

  At 7:10 on Friday evening Oswald was arraigned for the murder of Officer Tippit. Then, he was brought back to interrogation again. Later that night he would be taken out once more through the cables and the TV lights to another showup, with Howard Brennan, the eyewitness who had seen a rifleman on the sixth floor. Brennan, however, refused to make an absolute identification that night.

  MR. BALL. . . . there were two officers of the vice squad and an officer and a clerk from the jail that were in the showup with Oswald?

  MR. FRITZ. That is true. I borrowed those officers. I was a little bit afraid some prisoner might hurt him, there was a lot of . . . feeling right about that time, [and] we didn’t have an officer in my office the right size to show with him so I asked two of the special service officers if they would help me and they said they would be glad to, so they took off their coats and neckties and fixed themselves where they would look like prisoners and they were good enough to stand on each side of him in the showup, and we used a man who works in the jail office, a civilian employee, as a third man.

  MR. BALL. Now, were they dressed a little better than Oswald, do you think, these three people?

  MR. FRITZ. Well, I don’t think there was a great deal of difference. They had on their regular working clothes and after they opened their shirts and took off their ties, why, they looked very much like anyone else.28

  Of course, Oswald was the only one who had bruises on his face. On the other hand, Brennan had his own reasons for not picking Oswald out:

  MR. BRENNAN. I believe at that time, and I still believe it was a Communist activity, and I felt like there hadn’t been more than one eyewitness, [myself], and if it got to be a known fact that I was an eyewitness, my family or I, either one, might not be safe.

  MR. BELIN. Well, if you wouldn’t have identified him, mightn’t he have been released by the police? . . .

  MR. BRENNAN. No. [A] greater contributing factor than my personal reasons was that I already knew they had the man for murder and I knew he would not be released.

  MR. BELIN. The murder of whom?

  MR. BRENNAN. Of Officer Tippit.

  MR. BELIN. Well, what happened in between to change your mind . . . ?

  MR. BRENNAN. After Oswald was killed, I was relieved quite a bit . . . there was no longer that immediate danger.29

  After Brennan refused to identify him that night, Oswald was put back into interrogation. On they went through half of the night.

  It is worth hearing the reaction of a police officer who was present with Captain Fritz while Oswald was being questioned by the Dallas police, the Secret Service, and the FBI.

  MR. BOYD. I tell you, I’ve never saw another man just exactly like him.

  MR. STERN. In what way?

  MR. BOYD. Well, you know, he acted like he was intelligent; just as soon as you would ask him a question, he would just give you the answer right back—he didn’t hesitate . . . I never saw a man that could answer questions like he did . . .

  MR. STERN. Of course, this was a long day for everybody—did he seem by the end of the day still to be in command of himself, or did he appear tired or particularly worn out?

  MR. BOYD. Well, he didn’t appear to be tired . . . I imagine he could have been [but] he didn’t show it.

  MR. STERN. This is quite unnatural—really rather exceptional; this is, of course, why you say somewhat unusual, a man accused of killing two people, one of them the President of the United States, and at the end of the day he is pretty well in command?30

  Yes, Mr. Stern really has a good question.

  MR. BOYD. Yes, sir; I’ll tell you—Oswald, he answered his questions until [he finally] got up and said, “What started out to be a short interrogation turned out to be rather lengthy,” and he said, “I believe I have answered all the questions I have cared to answer, and I don’t care to say anything else.”

  And sat back down.31

  They even returned him to his jail cell for a time. Then they brought him out to be arraigned for the murder of President Kennedy. A justice of the peace, David Johnston, conducted the proceedings in a small room filled with file cabinets. On the bottom of the form that the judge filled out was written: “No Bond—Capital Offense.”

  So ended the longest day of that year, Friday, November 22, 1963, which only came to its conclusion early Saturday morning. Later on that Saturday, in the afternoon, Lee would get to see his brother Robert, and Marina, and Marguerite.

  8

  A Black Pullover Sweater with Jagged Holes in It

  Since Life magazine had agreed to pay for their rooms at the Adolphus, the move was made from Ruth Paine’s house in Irving early next day.

  MARGUERITE OSWALD. We arrived at the Adolphus Hotel between 9:30 and 10:00.

  MR. RANKIN. This was what day?

  MARGUERITE OSWALD. . . . the morning of Saturday, November 23.

  While we were there, an FBI agent, Mr. Hart Odum, entered the room with another agent and wanted Marina to accompany him to be questioned . . . And I said, “No, we are going to see Lee.” We were all eating breakfast when he came in . . .

  So, he said, “Well, will you tell Mrs. Oswald, please”—to the interpreter, “I would like to question her . . .”

  I said, “It is no good. You don’t need to tell the interpreter that because my daughter-in-law is not going with you . . . any further statements that Marina will make will be through counsel.”

  Mr. Odum said to the interpreter . . . “Will you tell Mrs. Oswald to decide what she would like to do and not listen to her mother-in-law.” . . .

  Just then my son Robert entered the room and Mr. Odum said, “Robert, we would like to take Marina and question her.”

  He said, “No, I am sorry, we are going to try and get lawyers for both she and Lee.”

  So he left.

  We went to the courthouse and we sat and sat, and while at the courthouse my son, Robert, was being interviewed by—I don’t know whether it was Secret Service or FBI agents—in a glass enclosure . . . S
o we waited quite a while . . . in the afternoon before we got to see Lee.

  MR. RANKIN. Was anyone else present . . . ?

  MARGUERITE OSWALD. No. Marina and I were escorted back [to] where they had an enclosure and telephones. So Marina got on the telephone and talked to Lee in Russian. That is my handicap. I don’t know what was said. And Lee seemed very severely composed and assured. He was well-beaten up. He had black eyes, and his face was all bruised, and everything. But he was very calm. He smiled with his wife, and talked with her, and then I got on the phone and I said, “Honey, you are so bruised up, your face. What are they doing?”

  He said, “Mother, don’t worry. I got that in a scuffle.” . . . So I talked and said, “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  He said, “No, Mother, everything is fine. I know my rights and I will have an attorney . . . Don’t worry about a thing.” . . . That was my entire conversation to him.

  Gentlemen, you must realize this. I had heard over the television my son say, “I did not do it. I did not do it.” . . . I think by now you know my temperament, gentlemen. I would not insult my son and ask him if he had shot at President Kennedy. Why? Because I myself heard him say, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it.”

  So, that was enough for me. I would not ask that question.1

  Marina’s conversation with Lee is almost as brief:

  MR. RANKIN. . . . did you ask him if he had killed President Kennedy? . . .