When we reached there, they brought us to the chief of police’s home. And there were cars all around.
As soon as the car stopped, the Secret Service agent said, “Lee has been shot.”
And I said, “How badly?”
He said, “In the shoulder.” . . .
I cried, and said, “Marina, Lee has been shot.”
So Marina went into the chief of police’s home at Irving, to call Mrs. Paine to get the diapers and things ready . . .
So I am sitting in the car with the agent. Marina is in the home now . . .
So something comes over the mike and the Secret Service agent says, “Do not repeat. Do not repeat.”
I said, “My son is gone, isn’t he?”
And he didn’t answer.
I said, “Answer me. I want to know. If my son is gone, I want to meditate.”
He said, “Yes, Mrs. Oswald, your son has just expired.” . . .
As a matter of fact, when I got the news, I went into the home and I said, “Marina, our boy is gone.”
We both cried. And they were all watching the sequence on television. The television was turned to the back, where Marina and I could not see it. They sat us on the sofa and his wife gave us coffee. And the back of the television was to us. And the men and all, a lot of men were looking at the television. It probably just happened, because the man said, “Do not repeat.” And I insisted.
They gave us coffee . . . 2
Later on that Sunday, the Secret Service decided to move Marina and Marguerite and June and Rachel to the Inn of the Six Flags, a motel between Dallas and Fort Worth that would be just about empty now in November, but first there was the question of whether the wife and mother would be allowed to see Lee’s body.
MARGUERITE OSWALD. . . . Immediately I said, “I want to see Lee.” And Marina said, “I want to see Lee, too.”
And the chief of police and Mr. Gregory said, “Well, it would be better to wait until he was at the funeral home and fixed up.”
I said, “No, I want to see Lee now.”
Marina said, “Me too, me want to see Lee.” . . .
They didn’t want us to . . . from the ugliness of it, evidently. But I insisted, and so did Marina . . .
On the way to the car they are trying to get us to change our minds. And he said, Mr. Mike Howard—he was driving the car—“Mrs. Oswald, for security reasons it would be much better if you would wait until later on to see Lee . . .”
I said, “For security reasons, I want you to know I am an American citizen, and even though I am poor I have as much right as any other human being, and Mrs. Kennedy was escorted to the hospital to see her husband. And I insist upon being escorted, and enough security to take me to the hospital to see my son.”
Gentlemen, I require the same privilege.
So Mr. Mike Howard said . . . “I want you to know when we get there we will not be able to protect you. Our security measures end right there. The police will then have you under protection . . .”
I said, “That is fine. If I am to die, I will die that way. But I am going to see my son.”
Mr. Gregory says—and in the most awful tone of voice, I will always remember this—remember, gentlemen, my son has been accused, I have just lost a son.
He said, “Mrs. Oswald, you are being so selfish. You are endangering this girl’s life and the lives of these two children.”
I want to elaborate on this. He is not thinking about me. He is thinking about the Russian girl. I am going to bring this up over and over—that these Russian people are always considering this Russian girl. He snapped at me.
I said, “Mr. Gregory, I am not speaking for my daughter-in-law. She can do what she wants. I am saying I want to see my son.”
And so they brought us to the hospital . . .
MR. RANKIN. And then what happened?
MARGUERITE OSWALD. Then Mr. Perry, the doctor, came down . . . And he said, “Now, I will do whatever you ladies wish . . . However, I will say this. It will not be pleasant. All the blood has been drained from him and it would be much better if you would see him after he was fixed up.”
I said, “I am a nurse. I have seen death before. I want to see my son now.”
[Marina] said, “I want to see Lee too.” So she knew what the doctor was saying.
We were escorted upstairs into a room. They said it was a morgue, but it wasn’t. Lee’s body was on a hospital . . . table like you take into an operating room. And there were a lot of policemen standing around, guarding the body. And, of course, his face was showing. And Marina went first. She opened his eyelids. Now, to me—I am a nurse, and I don’t think I could have done that. This is a very, very strong girl, that she can open a dead man’s eyelids. And she says, “He cry. He eye wet.” To the doctor. And the doctor says, “Yes.”
Well, I know that the fluid leaves, and you do have moisture. So I didn’t even touch Lee. I just wanted to . . . make sure it was my son.
So while leaving the room I said to the police—“I think some day you will hang your heads in shame.”
I said, “I happen to know, and know some facts, that maybe this is the unsung hero of this episode . . .”
And with that, I left the room.
Then we were . . . introduced to the chaplain . . . at Parkland Hospital [and I] told him that I thought my son was an agent [and] I wanted my son buried in the Arlington Cemetery.
Now, gentlemen, I didn’t know that President Kennedy was going to be buried [there]. All I know is that my son is an agent, and that he deserves to be buried in Arlington Cemetery. So I talked to the chaplain about this [and] I asked him if he would talk to Robert because . . . as soon as I started to say something, he would say, “Oh, Mother, forget it.” . . . 3
From the hospital they are driven to the Inn of the Six Flags. Robert comments that “within an hour after our arrival, the inn was like an armed camp”:
Robert Oswald: “All we need is to have one more of you killed or injured and we’re in real trouble,” one of the agents said to me.
We felt completely cut off from the outside world. We were not allowed to see newspapers, listen to the radio, or watch television that Sunday afternoon or Sunday night.4
Robert was busy all evening trying to make arrangements for Lee’s funeral on Monday. The first step was to hire an undertaker (known even thirty years ago in the Dallas–Fort Worth area as a funeral director).
Robert Oswald: The funeral director began telephoning various cemeteries to prepare the way for me to buy a burial plot for Lee. One cemetery after another refused even to discuss the possibility of accepting Lee’s body . . .
While the funeral director was kind enough to continue to search, I began telephoning various ministers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to request that they officiate at the burial services [and] I was astonished by the reactions . . . . The first one, the second one, the third one, and the fourth one flatly refused even to consider my request.
One of the ministers, a prominent member of the Greater Dallas Council of Churches, listened impatiently . . . and then said sharply, “No, we just can’t do that.”
“Why not?” I asked.
. . . “Your brother was a sinner.”
I hung up. The question of who would officiate at Lee’s funeral was still unsettled when I went to bed Sunday night, although the time of the funeral had been set for four o’clock Monday afternoon.5
It would hang over him all of Monday morning. His stress is painful to contemplate. Robert is on his way to becoming a successful corporate executive. Yet, like many another straight arrow, he assumes that he must restrain all personal deviations from the approved pattern and to hell with the psychic cost. That psychic cost can be measured by the intensity of the plots one sees everywhere. Robert now exhibits a share of his mother’s gift for strong scenarios. He has, for instance, needed but one look on meeting Ruth and Michael Paine early Friday afternoon in the company of Marina and the police to decide that the Paine
couple are highly suspicious and could be linked conceivably in some plot with the Russians. Perhaps it was their faintly patrician air. Robert, after all, must have seen a good deal of Alger Hiss in the early days of TV.
He is also more than alert to the growing friction between Secret Service and FBI. He hears the Secret Service agents talking:
Robert Oswald: As early as Friday night I had heard some speculation about the possibility of a conspiracy behind the assassination of the President, and . . . I had wondered if Marina herself might be a part of such a conspiracy. On Saturday and Sunday there were rumors in Dallas that the “conspiracy” might involve some government agency. By Sunday night I realized that the agency under greatest suspicion was the FBI.6
Given the covert existence of COINTELPRO in the early Sixties, there may have been reason for suspicion—we shall eventually get an inkling of how distrustful J. Edgar Hoover was of his own people—but in this setting, the rumors had probably been started by police gossip after Oswald’s tirade on encountering Hosty in Captain Fritz’s office. Of course, it is quintessentially American to love situations that raise suspicions, and who are more American than the Dallas police?
Still, to say that Americans are somewhat enamored of paranoia requires at least this much explanation: Our country was built on the expansive imaginations of people who kept dreaming about the lands to the west—many Americans moved into the wild with no more personal wealth than the strength of their imaginations. When the frontier was finally closed, imagination inevitably turned into paranoia (which can be described, after all, as the enforced enclosure of imagination—its artistic form is a scenario) and, lo, there where the westward expansion stopped on the shores of the Pacific grew Hollywood. It would send its reels of film back to the rest of America, where imagination, now landlocked, had need of scenarios. By the late Fifties and early Sixties, a good many of these scenarios had chosen anti-Communism for their theme—the American imagination saw a Red menace under every bed including Marina Oswald’s.
Now, in addition to Robert Oswald’s grief over the death of his brother, the horror of the assassination, and his own fear that Lee did it, he could include his suspicions of Marina and the Paines, plus his new look askance at the FBI, only to be faced at the end of all these scenarios with the recognition that it would have been easier to arrange a funeral for a leper than for his brother Lee Harvey Oswald.
Robert Oswald: Finally, two Lutheran ministers who seemed sympathetic appeared at the Inn of the Six Flags about eleven o’clock Monday morning. One stayed in the lobby, but the other came back to see us. The National Council of Churches office in Dallas had asked the ministers to come out and offer to serve at the funeral service, which was now scheduled for 4 P.M. that day at the Rose Hill Cemetery.
The minister did not seem at all eager to officiate, but he did say, rather reluctantly, that he would be at the cemetery at four.7
Why were all these ministers being so un-Christian? Well, in Dallas–Fort Worth, it might cost a minister his future assignment to a more prestigious church if he officiated at Oswald’s last rites. Soon enough, word arrived that the Lutheran minister who had given his assent to conduct the service had now rescinded it.
While these unhappy negotiations continue, Marguerite finally convinced one of the Secret Service agents to record her on tape—she wanted to set down for posterity why Lee, in her opinion, should, by all rights, be interred in Arlington; but before she had been speaking for long, Robert came out of the bedroom and he was crying and so Marguerite said to the tape recorder, “I’m sorry, but my thoughts have left me because my son is crying.”
MARGUERITE OSWALD. . . . I thought for a moment that Robert was crying because of what I was saying, and he was sorry he had not listened to me before, because I tried to tell him about the defection and my trip to Washington. But Robert was crying because he received a telephone call that we could not get a minister at my son’s grave.8
Recalling this blow, she informs the Warren Commission of her personal credo, which she is proud to deliver:
MARGUERITE OSWALD. . . . I have no church affiliation. I have learned since my trouble that my heart is my church. [In that sense] I go to church all day long, I meditate. [Besides] I am working on Sunday most of the time, taking care of the sick, and the people that go to church that I work for, . . . have never once said, “Well, I will stay home and take care of my mother and let you go to church, Mrs. Oswald, today.”
You see, I am expected to work on a Sunday.
So that is why—I have my own church. And sometimes I think it is better than a wooden structure . . . 9
It is a credo for lonely people: My heart is my church.
Meanwhile, the complications continue. At some point, another minister appears:
MARGUERITE OSWALD. . . . Well, a Reverend French from Dallas came out to Six Flags and we sat on the sofa. [Robert] was crying bitterly and talking to Reverend French and trying to get him to let Lee’s body go to church. And he was quoting why he could not.
So then I intervened and said, “Well, if Lee is a lost sheep and that is why you don’t want him to go to church, he is [exactly] the one that should go into church . . .”
And that agent [who up until now] had the decency to stay at the far end of the room . . . said, “Mrs. Oswald, be quiet. You are making matters worse.”
Now, the nerve of him—[and then] Reverend French [told us] that he could not take the body into the church. And we compromised for chapel services.10
The agent who had told Marguerite that she was making matters worse soon reappears in her narrative:
MARGUERITE OSWALD. . . . He was very, very rude to me. Anything that I said, he snapped. At this particular time, they showed the gun on television. I said, “How can they say Lee shot the President? Even though they would prove it is his gun doesn’t mean he used it—nobody saw him use it.”
He snapped back and he said, “Mrs. Oswald, we know that he shot the President.”
I then walked over to Mr. Mike Howard and I said, “What’s wrong with that agent? That agent is about to crack. All he has done is taunt me ever since he has been here.”
He said, “Mrs. Oswald, he was the personal bodyguard to Mrs. Kennedy for 30 months and maybe he has a little opinion against you.”
I said, “Let him keep his personal opinions to himself. He is on a job.”11
When it comes to circling the wagons around her ego, she is the equal of any FBI or Secret Service man.
Her complaints at the unfeeling deportment of everyone around her will not abate. It is difficult for Marguerite to grieve because she must first pass through the round of her discontents, and they are numerous enough to seal her off from her sorrow:
MARGUERITE OSWALD. Marina was very unhappy with the dress—they brought her two dresses. “Mama, too long.” “Mama, no fit.” And it looked lovely on her. You can see I know how to dress properly. I am in the business world as merchandise manager. And the dress looked lovely on Marina. But she was not happy with it.
I said, “Oh, honey, put your coat on. We are going to Lee’s funeral. It will be all right.”
And we had one hour in order to get ready for the funeral.
I said, “We will never make it. Marina is so slow.”
She said, “I no slow. I have things to do.”12
While Marina was complaining about her dress, my little grandbaby, two years old—she is a very precious little baby, they are good children—was standing by her mother. And Marina was very nervous by this time. She was not happy with the dress. And Marina was combing her hair. She took the comb and she hit June on the head. I said, “Marina, don’t do that.” And this agent—I wish I knew his name—snapped at me and said, “Mrs. Oswald, you let her alone.” I said, “Don’t tell me what to say to my daughter-in-law when she was hitting my grandbaby on the head with a comb.” . . .
Now, why did this man do these things?
MR. RANKIN. Are you saying that th
e agent did anything improper, as far as Marina was concerned? . . .
MARGUERITE OSWALD. No. I am saying—and I am going to say it as strongly as I can—and I have stated this from the beginning—that I think our trouble in this is in our own Government. And I suspect these two agents of conspiracy with my daughter-in-law in this plot . . .
MR. RANKIN. What kind of a conspiracy are you describing that these men were engaged in?
MARGUERITE OSWALD. The assassination of President Kennedy.
MR. RANKIN. You think that two Secret Service agents and Marina and Mrs. Paine were involved in the conspiracy?
MARGUERITE OSWALD. Yes, I do. Besides another high official.13
Grief, fear, rage, woe, and growing detestation of Marguerite are a few of the emotions circulating in the car that goes out to the cemetery that has agreed to accept Lee’s body. There, the last rites will be held:
Robert Oswald: Marina, Mother and the children went into the chapel first. I followed, accompanied by Mike Howard and Charlie Kunkel.
The chapel was completely empty. I saw no sign of any preparation for the funeral service.
“I don’t understand,” I said to Mike and Charlie, and they were obviously puzzled too. They said they would try to find out what had happened.
Two or three minutes later, one of them came back into the chapel, where I had been waiting.
“Well, we were a few minutes late,” he said. “There’s been some misunderstanding, and they’ve already carried the casket down to the grave site. We’ll have a graveside service down there.”14
To which Marguerite adds in her testimony, “Robert cried bitterly.”15 She had to know how much he would detest these numerous descriptions of him in tears that she freely offers to the Warren Commission.
Every few yards along the cemetery fence, uniformed officers were on guard.
Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery Page 79