Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  Over six months at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, Oswald became acquainted with sophisticated camera techniques. He also acquired items of photographic equipment that seemed unlikely possessions for a youngster living on a pittance. When police seized Oswald’s effects after the assassination, they were to say, they found a Minox camera—the sort usually referred to as a “spy camera.”6 The police also seized three other cameras, a 15-power telescope, two pairs of field glasses, a compass, even a pedometer. The total cost of all this equipment must have been substantial.

  Oswald’s address book, also confiscated after the assassination, contained the words micro dots, written alongside the entry for the Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall company.7 The microdot technique is a system of photographic reduction that conceals a mass of written material in a minute spot the size of a punctuation mark—a technique that has little use outside espionage. Taken together, Oswald’s activities, possessions, and associations jar with his public image of a hard-up workingman.

  In the weeks before Christmas 1962, Lee and Marina lurched from crisis to crisis in their married life. The Russian exile colony buzzed with rumors that Oswald was physically abusing his wife. Oswald, for his part, complained that Marina had her faults—including gossiping to others about their sex life. Many local Russians backed away from the marital strife, but George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt continued to spend time with the couple. As the year 1963 began, Oswald moved into a new phase of his short life—the phase that would end with his arrest as the alleged assassin of President Kennedy.

  Hunter of the fascists

  The New Year’s card for 1963 arrived early at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, wishing the employees “health, success, and all the best” and signed “Marina and Lee Oswald.” Oswald the Marxist was at it again—in truth, he had never really stopped. In spite of his expressed disappointment about life in the Soviet Union, Oswald had been sending off for socialist literature since soon after his return to the United States. He subscribed to The Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party, and to The Militant, a news sheet produced by the Socialist Workers’ Party. Those who knew him would remember him reading Marx and Lenin, and in the first weeks of 1963, he fired off more letters asking for leftist propaganda. At the same time, he also read H. G. Wells, biographies of Hitler and Nikita Khrushchev—and a book on President Kennedy—and subscribed to that capitalist publication Time magazine.

  Around this time, according to Marina, her husband came up with his idea of a solution to their marital problems, suggesting she and their child return to the Soviet Union. Marina even wrote to the Soviet Embassy asking for assistance in returning to Russia. Then she became pregnant again, news that delighted Oswald and apparently ended talk of his wife soon going back to Russia. It was at this point, the documentary record shows, that Oswald started buying guns.

  In March 1963, mail-order forms and company records establish, a Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5-mm rifle and a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver were shipped to Dallas. The rifle was the weapon that would be found in the Texas School Book Depository after President Kennedy’s murder, and the revolver would be linked to the shooting of Officer Tippit, allegedly killed by Oswald after the assassination. The rifle cost only $21.45, including postage, the revolver $29.95. The weapons were sent to Oswald’s post-office box in Dallas, and document examiners identified the handwriting on the order forms as his (see Photos 13, 14).

  There is, though, a puzzle. The weapons were ordered in the name of “Hidell,” the nickname given to one of Oswald’s former comrades in the Marine Corps. Oswald is not known to have used the name as an alias at any time other than when purchasing the guns. Yet, as we have seen, a senior U.S. Army Intelligence officer was to say his unit had a “Hidell” file before the assassination—before the guns were of any known interest—because, the officer said, it was an Oswald alias. Why would Army Intelligence have become aware of the gun purchases at the time Oswald made them?

  Oswald would first use the rifle seven weeks before the President’s assassination, official reports were to conclude, in a failed attempt to kill a prominent former U.S. Army officer living in Dallas, Major General Edwin Walker. The House Assassinations Committee would find that the evidence strongly suggested Oswald was involved. Whether or not that was so, the attempt on the general is an important and neglected part of the saga.

  By the time the attempt on his life occurred, General Walker was notorious as leader of the ultraconservative right, opposed to accommodation with the Soviet Union, opposed to racial desegregation, opposed to anything that smacked remotely of liberalism. Two years earlier, as commander of the U.S. Army’s 24th Division in West Germany, he had been relieved of his command for foisting political propaganda on his troops. In high dudgeon, he resigned from the Army and launched himself into politics on an extreme right platform.

  In late 1962, General Walker played a leading role in an episode that led to a Mob trying to prevent a black man from enrolling as a student at the University of Mississippi. The episode led to two deaths and many injuries, and the General was temporarily confined to a mental institution. By early 1963, however, he was back in Dallas, stirring up more trouble as a leading light of the local John Birch Society. For the “Marxist and liberal idealist” Oswald, living in Dallas as he was, General Walker was an obvious political bogeyman.

  General Walker came up in both Oswald’s conversations with George de Mohrenschildt, who himself fulminated about General “Fokker” Walker and—at a de Mohrenschildt dinner party in early 1963—with oilman Volkmar Schmidt, who compared Walker to Adolf Hitler. Oswald, for his part, said he thought America was “moving toward fascism.” For what happened next, the Warren Report would rely on the testimony of Marina, and on persuasive evidence found among Oswald’s effects.

  At a new and larger apartment the couple took, Oswald turned one room into a study where he could write and work on his photographic hobby—a hobby with an apparently murderous purpose. Months later, the police would seize five photographs, taken with a camera they linked to Oswald, that showed the rear of General Walker’s home and nearby railway tracks. Details in one photograph indicated it had been taken on March 10, two days before the mail order went off to purchase the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. The weapon was shipped to Dallas on March 20.

  Shortly afterward, according to Marina’s testimony, Oswald had the rifle and said he was going to use it for hunting. Marina’s statements as to what she knew of her husband’s use of the gun, however, were to be ludicrously inconsistent. She would tell the FBI two weeks after the assassination that she “had never seen Oswald practice with his rifle or any other firearm and he had never told her he was going to practice.” She would repeat that on four further occasions. Then months later, she would refer to a day in January 1963 when she had seen her husband cleaning the rifle after practicing with it—this two months before, as the order forms establish, the gun had even been purchased! By 1978, when Marina testified to the Assassinations Committee, she would say Oswald often went out to practice and cleaned the gun each week.

  If Oswald cleaned the Mannlicher-Carcano, he had to have rifle maintenance equipment—pull-through cord, oil, and the like. Just as no ammunition was to be found among Oswald’s effects, however, no such cleaning equipment would be found after the assassination.

  At the end of March, allegedly, Oswald had his wife take photographs of him, revolver on hip, holding the rifle in one hand and two leftist newspapers in the other. While the author believes these are probably genuine photographs, some have claimed—as discussed earlier—that they were faked (see Chapter 5).

  In the first week of April, Oswald stopped working at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. He began spending entire days away from home, Marina was to say, never fully explaining what he was doing with the time. On April 12, when according to Marina he stayed out very late, someone tried to shoot General Walker.

  At 9:00 p.m. that even
ing, General Walker would say, he was working at a desk in a downstairs room opposite an un-curtained window. He was seated there when, after a single loud bang, a bullet smashed into the wall of the room. It missed his head by inches. The police were summoned, but no one was ever caught. The case remained unsolved until after the assassination of President Kennedy, when the Warren Commission was to decide that Oswald—and Oswald alone—had been the culprit.

  The ballistics evidence in the Walker shooting is unclear. The bullet recovered from General Walker’s home had been severely distorted by the impact on a window frame and the wall, and a firearms panel could not say whether it had been fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano. A contemporary police report described the bullet as “steel-jacketed, of unknown caliber,” and press reports after the shooting quoted the police as identifying the bullet not as 6.5 but 30.06 caliber.8 If the bullet evidence was inconclusive, however, other evidence indicated that Oswald was at least involved.

  When he went out on the night of the attack on General Walker, Marina was to say, he left her a note—a note she thought she remembered finding before he got home. Ten days after the assassination of the President, a note that was to be identified as being in Oswald’s handwriting did turn up inside a book among Oswald’s effects. It told Marina how to get to the city jail “if I am alive and taken prisoner,” and asked her to tell “the Embassy”—the Soviet Embassy?—what had happened.

  According to Marina, Oswald had rushed home in a panic at 11:30 p.m., blurting out that he had fired his rifle at General Walker but did not know whether he had killed him. He showed her notes he had made and photographs he had taken while planning the shooting. He had buried his rifle near the General’s house, he said, and would go back days later to retrieve it. He promised he would never do such a thing again. Marina told no one of the incident at the time, she said, because the murder attempt had failed.

  The weekend after the incident, when George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt visited the Oswalds, something truly remarkable occurred. According to Jeanne, she saw Oswald’s rifle in a cupboard during the visit and mentioned it to her husband, prompting George, “with his sense of humor,” to say jokingly to Oswald, “How is it that you missed General Walker?” This was just a jest, Jeanne said, made not out of knowledge but because the attempt on Walker was in the news and because George recalled the conversations he and Oswald had had about the General. According to George, Oswald’s reaction to the intended joke was that he “sort of shriveled … made a peculiar face … became almost speechless.” Someone changed the subject, and no more was said.

  Told like that, the story sounds conclusive. Like so much else about the case, however, it is shot through with contradiction. Marina’s statements suggested that Jeanne de Mohrenschildt saw the rifle in a cupboard at the apartment days before the attempt on General Walker. Is it probable, though, that after the attempt on Walker, when she and her husband were supposedly striving to cover up Oswald’s role, Marina would have readily opened a cupboard door and allowed Jeanne to see the rifle?

  On the matter of when the rifle was seen, the de Mohrenschildts’ accounts were also skewed. After the assassination, in an interview with officials, the couple was to say Jeanne had spotted the gun as early as the autumn of the previous year. Another Jeanne account would suggest she saw the weapon on a day that, according to Marina, it was still buried near General Walker’s house. Had the Walker case ever come to court, a defense counsel would have played up such flaws in the testimony, and a slew of other oddities.

  In 1967, more than three years after the Kennedy assassination, George de Mohrenschildt would say he had come upon fresh and “very interesting information.” While sorting luggage retrieved from storage, he said, he had come across another copy of the by then famous photograph of Oswald holding his guns and leftist magazines. On the back of this copy of the photograph there were two inscriptions. One, which Assassinations Committee examiners found to be in Oswald’s handwriting, read, “To my friend George from Lee Oswald,” along with a date—“5/IV/63.” Given the time frame involved, this must refer to 5 April 1963, though it is written not in the order Americans write the date—month/day/year—but day first, European-style. Nor would Americans use the Roman numeral IV for the numeral 4. A check of the dozens of letters and documents written by Oswald produces not one example of a date written like the one on the back of the photograph.

  The second inscription, which is written in Russian Cyrillic script, translates as “Hunter of fascists ha-ha-ha!!!” (see Photo 17). Expert testimony to the Assassinations Committee was that the ironic slogan—clearly directed at Oswald—had been written and then rewritten in pencil—but not, document examiners said, by either Oswald, Marina, or George de Mohrenschildt. Nor, by implication, by Jeanne—whose parents had been Russian—since the experts said it was written by someone unfamiliar with Cyrillic script. Wise here, perhaps, to note that document examiners are not infallible, as they themselves readily admit.9 The writer was most likely one of the Oswalds or one of the de Mohrenschildts. Which of them it was remains another unsolved riddle.

  On the subject of the rifle, the rifle that was to be a key item of evidence after the President’s assassination, there is yet another puzzle. How had Oswald come by the money to buy the Mannlicher-Carcano—and indeed his handgun? His finances for the period were meager at best—all who knew him said he was living at poverty level, scraping by—and his known income has been carefully documented. Two large sums he owed following his return from the USSR—large, for the ordinary worker, by 1962 standards—were $200 to his brother and $435 to the State Department, for their contribution to his travel costs. He at first repaid the money, as one might expect, in dribs and drabs, ten dollars at a time. Then, all of a sudden, within less than seven weeks, he was able to pay off what remained of the State Department debt of $396.10 This in a period during which he earned only $490.

  How did Oswald pay the rent and keep his family for those seven weeks on a balance of just $94? The rent alone took $68, ostensibly leaving Oswald the princely sum of less than four dollars a week to provide for his family and pay the bills. Nonsense, clearly. Yet on March 12, within days of paying off his State Department loan, a money order form for $21.45 was sent off to buy the Mannlicher-Carcano.11 On the known evidence, it seems possible that Oswald received an influx of funds, funds that enabled him to pay off his debts and purchase the rifle, from a source that was never identified.

  As for the shot fired at General Walker, there was from the beginning testimony that suggested more than one person was involved, testimony the House Assassinations Committee took seriously. For General Walker was not the only person startled by the loud report of the shot that almost killed him. Walter Coleman, a fourteen-year-old boy, heard the shot while standing in a doorway of a nearby house—and at once peered over the fence to see what was going on. What he saw, he said, was a suspicious scene involving not one but at least two men.

  Young Coleman, the Assassinations Committee noted, “saw some men speeding down the alley in a light green or light blue Ford, either a 1959 or 1960 model. He said he also saw another car, a 1958 Chevrolet, black with white down the side, in a church parking lot adjacent to General Walker’s house. The car door was open, and a man was bending over the backseat as though he was placing something on the floor of the car.”12

  When the Walker case was reopened following the President’s assassination, Coleman said he had gotten a look at the men he had seen drive away. Neither of them had resembled Oswald. Oswald did not own a car and only began learning to drive many months later.

  General Walker had known he might be in danger. Aides accompanied him everywhere he went and acted as security guards at his house. Four nights before the shooting incident one aide, Robert Surrey, had spotted two men prowling around the house, “peeking in windows and so forth.” General Walker had deemed the information serious enough to report to the police t
he next morning. Several days before the shooting, said Max Claunch, another aide, he several times noticed a “Cuban or dark-complected man in a 1957 Chevrolet” drive slowly around the General’s house.

  The Assassinations Committee would report that it had conducted only a “limited,” abortive investigation into the evidence that suggests more than one person was involved in the Walker shooting. It was a regrettable omission. The Committee, though committed to the belief that Oswald took part in the assassination, stated that it was “not necessary to believe all of what Marina said about the [Walker] incident, nor to believe that Oswald told her all there was to know, since either of them might have been concealing the involvement of others … it is possible that associates of Oswald in the Kennedy assassination had been involved with him in earlier activities… . If it could be shown that Oswald had associates in the attempt on General Walker, they would be likely candidates as the grassy-knoll gunman.”

  In one of the coincidences that run through this case, a 1957 Chevrolet—a description similar to that of one of the suspicious cars seen near General Walker’s home—would be sought by Dallas police on the day of the Kennedy assassination. Police radio transcripts show that two hours after the President had been killed, when Oswald was already in custody, headquarters put out a description of a 1957 Chevrolet sedan suspected of carrying weapons. The car had last been seen near the scene of the shooting of Officer Tippit, the Dallas policeman killed after the President’s assassination.

  A detail in the report of a 1957 model Chevrolet in the vicinity of General Walker’s house may conceivably have offered a clue—the statement by one of the General’s aides that the cruising vehicle was driven by a “Cuban or dark-complected man.” Cuba and Cuban politics were of importance to both General Walker and Lee Oswald.