Patsy! : The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald

by Douglas Brode

  “Korea 1952,” appeared over the shot of Sinatra, playing Major Ben Marco, seated in the passenger seat of a military convoy truck beside Laurence Harvey. The cultivated English actor had been cast as Sgt. Raymond Shaw. Together, they pulled up to a brothel where troops partied inside. Looking dour—isn’t that the word so many people use to describe me?—Shaw left the vehicle and entered, assembling his squad for a combat mission.

  Clearly, these soldiers had one thing in common: To a man, they hated Raymond, considered him pompous. As to their insults, Raymond answered with a sneer.

  That’s me! Not educated and refined like him. Still ...

  Shortly, they were taken captive, subject to brainwashing. An ever-circling camera alternated between an image of the Reds observing these captives as this scene realistically played out, and the manner in which the Americans saw, in their minds, what took place: they guests as some American garden-club.

  I read an article somewhere, I think Saturday Review, that claimed movies will be different in the Sixties ... the old clichés will fall away. In their place, more ’daring’ films.

  What alternately appeared as a normal American lady and a cruel communist agent approached Raymond, instructing that he pick out a squad member he disliked the least and strangle him. Without hesitation, Raymond did. Later, Raymond was instructed to approach his friend Marco, borrow that man’s pistol, then shoot a boyish trooper between the eyes. Raymond did as told.

  As the Red leader explained, the notion that a man who has been brainwashed cannot be forced to commit an act that he finds morally repulsive is but a myth. Here was evidence. Two corpses lay on the stage, victims of Raymond’s brainwashing, proof that the process worked.

  All this has something to do with me! Let’s wait and see.

  After the surviving soldiers returned home, they shared a single opinion of their sergeant: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Whenever Raymond’s name came up, diverse characters would repeat that precise phrase as if by rote.

  My God! Could that be true of me? Like Sinatra and the others, without even knowing it? Perhaps I’ve been listening to George for so long, without argument, I’ve lost any ability to think for myself. Accepting point blank my “legend.”

  If so, is there anything left of Lee Harvey Oswald, the person I once was as compared to the persona that I play?

  *

  Initially, things went smoothly in New Orleans. When not out looking for work, Lee felt a compunction to make contact with his roots, as if aware on some level that the final chapter in the brief drama constituting his life had begun to unfold. On the final Sunday in April, four days after arriving, he headed out to Lakeview Cemetery. Here, his biological father lay buried.

  In all these years, Lee had never once visited the site. Marguerite hadn’t brought him here, claiming “let sleeping dogs lie.” As always, Mama spoke in annoyingly timeworn clichés.

  Had you lived, might everything have turned out different? I guess that’s one of those things I never will know ...

  The following Monday, Lee borrowed Lillian’s phone book and poured over the listings for everyone in New Orleans with the last name of ‘Oswald.’ One by one, he called each, politely introducing himself, asking if they might possibly be related.

  A few hung up; most were pleasant but said ‘no.’ A lady named Hazel answered: yes, indeed, she was the widow of his father’s brother. Lee took a bus to the outskirts of town and visited her. A simple, gentle woman, Hazel offered Lee tea and cookies, which he accepted in his most humble guise.

  “To think, after all these years, you would show up.”

  They spoke for hours about her memories of Lee’s dad, who came to life at last as a decent, hardworking fellow. As Lee was about to leave, Hazel recalled a framed photograph up in the attic.

  “I want you to have it, Lee. After all, it’s been sitting there gathering dust. Hopefully it’ll mean something to you.”

  Lee thanked her profusely. In the faded portrait, Lee's father smiled pleasantly. Lee set the framed image on the desk in his room. He fell asleep considering what might have been as compared to what was.

  A week and a half later, Lee found a perfunctory job. He would lubricate machines used to process coffee at the William B. Reily Company on Magazine Street. He took a furnished apartment several doors down, so there would be no need to waste money on bus fare. Though paid a mere $1.50 an hour, Lee gleefully phoned Marina at Ruth Paine’s house in Dallas.

  “It’s me. I’ve got a job and a room. Come, please?”

  “Papa nus lubet!” Marina cried, cradling baby June. Lee knew enough Russian to understand this meant “papa loves us!”

  For all he knew, Marina might still be in touch with the KGB. He, certainly, kept in daily touch with George. None of that mattered. No matter what happened in the world, it could not touch them now. Not after that sublime night in Dallas

  “Come quickly, Marina? I so ache to hold you and June.”

  Lee was to be disappointed. Though he offered to send Marina bus-fare, she allowed Ruth to drive them down and remain for several days. Lee tried to make the best of it, showing the women around his beloved Quarter, pointing out quirky facts as to the saints and sinners whose intrigues caused this town to be called The Big Easy. He could tell that Marina, at least while under Ruth’s influence, grew ever more uneasy.

  Yes, she appreciated the rich atmosphere. But the apartment was shabbier even than the worst they’d occupied in Dallas-Fort Worth. Here, there were cockroaches, something new to her.

  “Oh, God, Lee. When I stepped on one, it crunched.”

  Things improved slightly after Ruth headed home. Then Lee could take Marina out to enjoy the few delights he had known as a boy. Along Lake Pontchartrain, anybody could roll up their pants nearly to the knees, step into the shallows, and go crabbing. She, five months pregnant with their second child, laughed out loud as the green-backed creatures desperately tried to slip away sideways.

  “You did this as a child? With your friends?”

  She sensed at once that the question, however innocent, saddened him. “I didn’t have friends. I went with my mother.”

  At that moment, Lee noticed something that had eluded him. When Marina turned, her manner of movement recalled Marguerite, as she had appeared when they two crabbed here together.

  *

  As Raymond Shaw stepped off the plane from Korea, reporters anxious to speak with him instead found themselves interviewing his mother. Eleanor, played by Angela Lansbury, darted into the midst of the hero's homecoming, turning these proceedings, in Raymond’s words, into “a three ring circus.” Also, she affected an accent meant to suggest Southern gentility, coming across rather as vulgar.

  Marguerite. She might as well be playing Marguerite!

  Accompanying Eleanor was her second husband, Raymond’s stepfather, a right-wing senator from some unspecified state. “My two little boys,” Eleanor cackled, embracing them both.

  Perhaps this is why Raymond is so dislikeable, an upper-class version of myself. Marguerite was the one who made me the way I was then. Why? It played into her deep, desperate needs.

  “It’s a terrible thing to hate your mother,” Raymond Shaw confessed to Ben Marco. “But I didn’t always hate her. When I was a child, I only kind of disliked her.”

  Does everyone in the world experience what I do at the movies? Believe the words and images are personal?

  When Raymond mentioned that he was going to work for a liberal newspaper editor, mother screeched: “That communist?” Later, a moderate senator played by John McGiver says of Eleanor to Raymond: “One of your mother’s least endearing traits is to refer to anyone who doesn’t agree with her as ‘a communist.’” As for ‘Johnny,’ Eleanor’s right-wing spouse, he raises a worthless piece of paper in the air and absurdly announces: “I have here a list of 200 known communists working in the Defense Department.”


  He’s supposed to be McCarthy! This isn’t just one more thriller. This film’s about politics. And they’re making a clown out of the man who terrified everyone so back in the Fifties as today the fear of anything Red diminishes. That’s the way I’ve been thinking. Castro might have leaned toward democracy if we hadn’t out of mindless horror at the thought of ‘revolution’ pushed him into the enemy camp by trying to kill him.

  Who knows? With all the indignities we’ve heaped on the Beard, maybe it’s possible to win him back? If someone took it upon himself to head on down there, talk sense with the guy, maybe he’d be willing to let bygones be bygones ...

  All it takes is one man daring enough to give it a try.

  Raymond was trained to kill, the big Chinese guy with the huge mustache laughed, and not remember that he’d killed. Sent back to the U.S. to do the bidding of Manchuria and Moscow. All one of their agents need do was place a phone call, instruct the brainwashed youth to play solitaire; once Raymond turned over the Queen of Diamonds, his own self disappeared.

  The enemy agents had Raymond kill his old mentor at the paper so he, the bright assistant, could assume the duties.

  “There’s something phony going on,” Ben Marco, sweating at night with terrible dreams, told his military superiors. “With me, and Raymond Shaw, and the whole Medal of Honor.”

  Marco had seen to it that Raymond received the decoration for wiping out an entire enemy brigade. He had wiped out an entire enemy brigade. That never happened. Marco too was brainwashed. Other soldiers also experienced the nightmares in which the truth, as they knew it to be, attempted to work its way up from repression to a conscious level.

  I don’t necessarily believe George set out to brainwash me. All the same, he did create an identity I assumed. Until lately, when I’ve begun to harbor second thoughts. Just like Sinatra in his latest film.

  Unlike George, I now believe that a balance between the extremes of far right and far left allows for individual initiative while insuring community survival. This has existed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt and The New Deal.

  Kennedy? He stands for the same thing. The New Frontier: Ask not you’re your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. Best of all, his civil rights initiatives attempt to extend that “you” to black people at last.

  My kind of president. And they want me to shoot him?

  *

  George had remained in daily contact with Lee during those hot spring months leading up to this crisis. And, unwittingly, George set Lee’s then-vague attitudes in place with another of his tactics. George instructed Lee to write a letter, dated May 26, to Fair Play for Cuba Committee, headquartered in New York.

  This organization called for the U.S. to recognize Cuba and commence with a normalization of relations. Lee’s instructions were to request he be allowed to open a F.P.C.C. branch in New Orleans. George’s strategy: this would allow Lee to infiltrate the group and then help the CIA keep tabs on its members.

  From the start, however, when he began reading materials mailed to him, Lee sensed that their approach was more or less identical to the one developing in his mind. Again, he dared not mention this to George. For the time being following orders, Lee rented a small room in an office building at 544 Camp Street. This would allow him to initiate such an infiltration.

  Hardly by accident, this happened to be adjacent to where FBI agent Guy Bansila, along with George Ferrie and a local businessman, the ardent anti-communist Clay Shaw, orchestrated local anti-Castro activities. ‘George’ created this arrangement so Lee, upon receiving information, could walk across the way and turn it over to his confederates.

  But do I really want to do that? And since when is the CIA comfortable working with the FBI? Are they coming together now?

  *

  Marina experienced déjà vu as she woke in the night at the realization that Lee was sitting, rather than lying, beside her. For a moment she believed they were back in Dallas. Then she realized where she was, Lee lost in the throes of yet another of his nocturnal epiphanies. As in Texas, she rose up beside him.

  “What is it?” She kissed his cheek. “Tell me.”

  “I now know what I must do next. In a word? Cuba.”

  “You’ve been assigned to try and kill Castro again?”

  He gasped. “How did you know I once attempted to do that?”

  “I know everything. That’s not important now.”

  “You’re right. All that’s important—other than you and me and baby June—is what I’ve got to do. And it isn’t kill him. Marina, I must be the one who makes Fidel see that now there’s an opportunity to put the terrible past behind us ...”

  Lee had been considering several things JFK said in recent weeks. Clearly, Kennedy had turned against the CIA: “I don’t think the intelligence reports are all that hot. I get more out of the New York Times.” Several days later he also announced: “Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war, or corruption, or both.”

  The president must be referring to Cuba. Castro turned left as a reaction to Batista’s right-wing regime and the unannounced war the U.S. had unofficially declared. If such belligerence were to cease, might not Castro come around to a more democratic approach to government?

  “But, Lee,” she wept. “You have no official power—”

  “All the better. Any power I have comes from my will to do the right thing. This is about the great good a single person can achieve if only he believes in his own abilities to—”

  “You heard that in some old film. John Wayne or Errol Flynn said something like that, and it got stuck in your mind. Yes?”

  “Well? Shouldn’t we strive to be like those heroes? Robin Hood, Davy Crockett. Righting the world’s wrongs—”

  “Lee, darling. Don’t you understand? That’s only a movie!”

  “Shouldn’t life be more like the movies?”

  “Yes, But it isn’t! That’s the whole point. Why we go to movies. There, everything can work out wonderfully at the fade-out. This is reality. There are no happy endings.”

  “I can’t accept that.”

  “But how would you even get there? It’s illegal to travel from the U.S. to Cuba now.”

  He cradled her in his arms. “I’ve thought that through. Mexico! If I travel down there, I can pick up a Visa—”

  “What makes you believe the Cubans will approve it?”

  Now, Lee grew excited. “I’ve figured that out, too. George ordered me to create a new ‘legend’ in which I appear to be a pro-Castro activist so as to betray that cause? Well, I’m already ‘in.’ Only I won’t betray them. I’ll betray George.”

  “Lee,” Marina gasped. “He’d have you killed—”

  “Not if I outsmart him.”

  Thanks to a paper-thin beam of moonlight seeping in the window, Marina could see that Lee now grinned from ear to ear. As he did whenever he’d convinced himself he was the master.

  “Don’t underestimate George, Lee. He’ll—”

  He hadn’t even heard her warning. “As he wants me to do, I’ll attract as much attention as I can to myself with Fair Play, allowing George to believe this is all being done to bring them down. Instead, I’ll head to Mexico, bringing evidence of my work for pro-Cuban forces with me. Once the people at Castro’s embassy see that, they’ll let me into the country. I can argue for a pro-American, pro-Democracy, pro-Kennedy and anti-Russian, anti-communist, anti-Khrushchev Cuba.”

  “And you believe, you honestly believe, that you, acting on your own, with no back-up whatsoever, can achieve this?”

  He turned to face her, out of his private zone, back in the world of one man and one woman, together in one bed. “I don’t believe—I know! Marina, from when I was a child, I sensed there had to be a purpose to my life. I’ve found it! Show the world that democracy and socialism can co-exist in a new order.”

  “Who do you think you are: Jesus Christ?”

  That was a diffi
cult one to answer, but Lee did. “Yes. I guess I do. On some level, I always have.”

  “Well, they’ll crucify you, too, if you attempt this.”

  “If that’s the only way to bring The Word, so be it.”

  Marina sobbed. “And, me? June? The baby yet to come?”

  Lee kissed her head gently. “You must know I love you and our family more than anything else. But what I speak of reaches beyond that. A man must do what he must do.”

  “So be it, then,” she said, capitulating. “But I won’t watch you die. Tomorrow, I’ll pack and return to Dallas.”

  “Like me, you have to do what you consider best.”

  “I’ll always be waiting for you, Lee. I love you.”

  “How can you? I’m not lovable. I never have been.”

  *

  In The Manchurian Candidate, Raymond Shaw also discovered his one true love. Like Marina, a beautiful child-woman, half naive fawn, half Earth Mother. Joslyn. She was played by Leslie Parrish, a young blonde who looked amazingly like Marilyn Monroe back in the early 1950s, still fresh and giddy, with that open smile which in time gave way to hard, cynical laughter.

  “I’m not lovable,” Raymond wailed. “Yes, but I love you,” the blonde, insisted. At once innocent and experienced, however improbable that may sound, Joslyn reminded Lee of Marina.

  Joslyn’s father, a milk-toast liberal senator, finally found the courage to face off with Eleanor at a costume ball. She asked him to support her Johnny for the vice-presidential nomination; he railed at the terrible mischief these two caused for America in the name of right-wing causes.

  “I think if Johnny were a paid Soviet agent,” the senator concluded, “he could not do more harm to this nation than he is now!” What irony, Lee thought. This arch Right Winger achieves precisely what the communists most desire: Americans turning against each other as during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.

  “The Queen of Diamonds,” a psychiatrist told Marco about the symbol employed to set the brainwashed Shaw off on one of his missions, “is reminiscent of Raymond’s mother.”