by Jim Marrs
This incident was the beginning of Mrs. Oswald’s lifelong suspicion of federal authorities. To the end of her life, she maintained that Lee had been working as some sort of agent for the US government and that unnamed “high officials” were part of the plot to kill Kennedy and blame her son. After Watergate she told a local newspaper, “If you called in all the FBI men involved in Lee Harvey Oswald’s life and questioned them, one thing would lead to another and it would probably break the assassination case.”
Just after the assassination, Mrs. Oswald said, “They [the public] all turned their backs on me before [when Oswald appeared in Russia] and they will turn their backs on me again, but my faith will see me through.” And faith was truly about the only thing left for Mrs. Oswald.
With the exception of a couple of mysterious “benefactors” who kept her supplied with publications concerning the assassination, Marguerite Oswald was forced to live through the next two decades on less than $500 a month in Social Security payments. In the bicentennial summer of 1976, she was without a refrigerator for almost two months because she could not afford repairs. The loneliness and poverty of her life, however, failed to crush her fighting spirit. She continued to assail the official version of the assassination and to strike out at media presentations of the event.
In 1978, after viewing a CBS “docudrama” titled Ruby and Oswald, she told the local newspaper:
I have every right to be upset over that program as well as many other things because they are talking about my son and my family. They sit there and tell the gullible American public that their program is the truth and based on documentation. Well, I’m sitting here with things you’ve never heard of. I can tear that CBS program apart like I did the Warren Commission.
Her thoughts on the Warren Commission, whose conclusions were taken as gospel at the time but gradually lost the confidence of the majority of Americans, are summed up in a letter Mrs. Oswald wrote to several congressmen in 1973 at the height of the Watergate crisis:
On Nov. 29, 1963, the then President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, created a commission to evaluate all the facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin and to report its findings and conclusions to him. . . . President Johnson selected Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States, as its chairman. Because I was critical of the commission, I was asked, “Mrs. Oswald, are you implying that the Chief Justice would whitewash evidence or hide information so that the American people, as well as the whole world, would never learn the truth?” I answered, yes, in the name of security, men of integrity and who are the most esteemed, most respected and honored, who have the welfare of the country at heart, would be most likely to do what the White House wanted and thought necessary. The Watergate affair has followed this pattern. Those we believe are above reproach, those who have reached the pinnacle or are near it, those who are guiding our nation’s destiny are found to have manipulated events to accomplish certain things they think were for the good of the country. Those who have a deep sense of patriotism and loyalty are most likely to twist events to accomplish their purposes. . . . The Watergate affair only strengthens my convictions and proves my theory. [In 1963, the] suspect was my son and seven such respected men branded a dead man who was neither tried nor convicted, assassin.
Through the years, Mrs. Oswald, who always claimed to be a “mother in history,” was quick to point out that her defense of her son went beyond simple motherly love. She once told this author, “If he was truly guilty, I can accept that. But whether it’s my son or someone else’s son, I want the proof and the proof is just not there.”
In her last years, Mrs. Oswald was virtually a recluse in her modest but well-kept brick home on the west side of Fort Worth. An occasional visitor—usually a journalist—and her small dog, Fritz, were her only company.
Neither her other sons nor Lee’s wife, Marina, ever spoke to her again after November 1963. When money problems pressed too hard, she would sell a book or a letter from her mammoth collection of assassination materials. It was such money problems that helped create the belief that Mrs. Oswald would talk only for profit. However, as several Fort Worth news reporters can confirm, she never hesitated to pick up her telephone and call the media when a particular news item rankled her. She once explained the charge of talk-for-cash this way:
Well, here I am without money, wondering where my next meal is coming from and these writers come to my house wanting an interview. Then they go out and write some piece—some of them don’t even talk to me more than fifteen minutes or so—and they get all this money for their work. That’s not fair!
In January 1981, Mrs. Oswald quietly entered a Fort Worth hospital. Rumors circulated that she had cancer. By the end of that month, Marguerite Claverie Oswald was dead. Her memorial service was private. She was buried next to Lee in east Fort Worth’s Rose Hill Memorial Burial Park. But her cause lives on. In one of her last letters to this author she wrote but one simple sentence: “Again—The charges against my late son Lee Harvey Oswald are false.”
Oswald’s early life is shrouded in innuendo and misinformation, much of it stemming from the passionate attitudes following the assassination.
Anyone who had had any contact with Oswald was hunted down and interviewed by news reporters and many were deposed by the Warren Commission.
And no one, including some family members, had anything good to say about the man accused of killing one of this nation’s most popular presidents.
Some examples of misinformation include the Warren Commission’s statement that Marguerite placed Lee in an “orphan’s home.” While in one respect this is true, a closer look shows that Mrs. Oswald had to work to earn a living for their fatherless family. Keep in mind there were no daycare centers in 1942.
Mrs. Oswald explained to news reporters years later that she placed Robert and Lee in the Bethlehem Children’s Home, operated by the Lutheran Church. Admittedly it was also an orphanage, but more precisely, it was the forerunner of a daycare center. Relatives looked in on the boys and Marguerite saw them on weekends and holidays.
Lee’s oldest brother, John Pic, told the Warren Commission that Lee slept with his mother until almost eleven years old, thus supplying much fodder for later psychological speculation. Mrs. Oswald’s version sounds more mundane:
[While] I was married . . . Lee had his own bed, of course, all the while. After I divorced this man [Ekdahl], all I got from this divorce was $1,500 and I paid $1,000 down on a home. Well, I had to buy furniture. I bought used furniture, and one of the boys slept on an army cot, and the other on a twin bed, and, because of the circumstances, Lee slept with me; which was a short time because then his brother joined the service and when he did, Lee took his bed. But it just implies that all through his life he slept with his mother, which isn’t the case, you see. It’s quite a difference.
Robert Oswald supported his mother’s version of this issue by writing, “If this [sleeping arrangement] had a bad effect on Lee, I’m sure mother didn’t realize it. She was simply making use of all the space she had.”
Much was made of Oswald’s truancy in New York during 1953–1954, as well as the psychological testing resulting from this infraction.
In the summer of 1952, shortly before Lee’s thirteenth birthday, he and his mother had gone to live with his half-brother, John Pic, and his wife in New York City, where Pic was stationed with the Coast Guard. There were reports of fights and divisions within the family and by the start of the school year, Lee and his mother had moved into their own apartment in the Bronx.
This whole scenario is problematic, as there appears to have been a Lee Oswald attending school in both New York and New Orleans at this same time. The Lee in New York was teased in junior high school because he wore jeans and spoke with a Texas accent, so he began staying away. However, unlike most truants who ended up in pools halls or street gangs, Lee continued his education
on his own, frequenting the local library and the zoo. Finally caught, the youngster was handed over for psychiatric observation to an institution called Youth House. Here he stayed from April 16 until May 7, 1953. Mrs. Oswald said it was only after having both her gifts and her person searched for cigarettes and narcotics that she realized Youth House was one step short of jail. She said her son implored her, “Mother, I want to get out of here. There are children in here who have killed people and smoke. I want to get out.”
While under the care of the state, Oswald was given psychiatric tests. The results were essentially inconclusive. They showed him to be a bright and inquisitive young man who was somewhat tense, withdrawn, and hesitant to talk about himself or his feelings.
Even the Warren Report, which generally tried to depict Oswald in the worst possible light, conceded:
Contrary to reports that appeared after the assassination, the psychiatric examination did not indicate that Lee Oswald was a potential assassin, potentially dangerous, that “his outlook on life had strongly paranoid overtones,” or that he should be institutionalized.
Yet this innocuous event was used against Oswald in a widely publicized 1993 book by Gerald Posner titled Case Closed. Posner quoted Youth House staff psychiatrist Dr. Renatus Hartogs as declaring young Oswald “to have definite traits of dangerousness.” Posner said Hartogs “vividly remembered Oswald eleven years later when he testified to the Warren Commission.” However, Hartogs, who came to the United States from Germany just before World War II and became a citizen in 1945, actually told the Commission he only “vaguely” remembered Oswald but found him “polite” and “in full contact with reality.” When asked if he had any independent recollection of the Oswald interview, Hartogs replied, “I was able to reconstruct the picture of the boy.” Contradicting the Warren Report, Hartogs told Posner he recommended Oswald be institutionalized. But then he also failed to recall young Oswald until well after the assassination when a New York Times reporter came to him and asked if he had examined young Lee. “I said that I did not know for sure, but it is possible. . . . Then very soon the FBI came in here and said you were the doctor who examined Oswald and from then on I knew for sure that it was me.”
According to the official history, after his experience in Youth House there were no further truancy problems with young Lee. In January 1954, Lee and his mother returned to New Orleans, where he finished the ninth grade and began the tenth. Upon arriving in New Orleans, the Oswalds lived initially with Mrs. Oswald’s sister and her husband, Lillian and Charles “Dutz” Murret, before finding an apartment of their own.
Everyone who knew Oswald as a youth agrees that he was somewhat introverted and was what could be best described as a “bookworm.” His interests were varied, including animals, astronomy, classic literature, and eventually, politics. Reading comic books and listening to radio and TV were also among his favorite pastimes.
Robert Oswald later recalled:
One of his favorite [TV] programs was “I Led Three Lives,” the story of Herbert Philbrick, the FBI informant who posed as a communist spy. In the early 1950’s Lee watched that show every week without fail. When I left home to join the Marines, he was still watching the reruns.
There can be little doubt that the well-read but lonely young Oswald spent much of his time daydreaming, fantasizing about being an important person someday.
Oswald appears to have been drawn at an early age to the epic and intense ideological struggle between communism and democratic capitalism. He claimed his first contact with communist ideology came with a pamphlet handed to him on a New York street corner. In a Moscow interview shortly after arriving in Russia, Oswald told newspaper reporter Aline Mosby, “I’m a Marxist. . . . I became interested about the age of 15. From an ideological viewpoint. An old lady handed me a pamphlet about saving the Rosenbergs. . . . I looked at that paper and I still remember it for some reason, I don’t know why.”
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been convicted of passing atomic bomb secrets to the Russians in a celebrated—and still controversial—case beginning in 1950, when Oswald was only twelve. They were executed on June 19, 1953.
However, this story of early interest in communism must be taken with a large grain of salt. After all, this is simply what Oswald told a reporter at a time he was trying hard to prove he was a devout communist supporter so he would be accepted into Russia.
But this one obscure statement to one reporter on one occasion was turned into a realistic scene cemented in the public’s mind by celebrated author Don Delillo in his 1988 book Libra, a top contender for the National Book Award. It illustrates how an unsubstantiated fact can be impressed on the public, much like the many depictions of an Oswald character perched in the sixth-floor window with a rifle.
His brother Robert also expressed puzzlement over this story, writing:
If Lee was deeply interested in Marxism in the summer of 1955, he said nothing about it to me. During my brief visit with him in New Orleans, I never saw any books on the subject in the apartment on Exchange Place. Never, in my presence, did he read anything that I recognized as communist literature. I was totally surprised when the information about his interest in Marxism came out, at the time of his defection to Russia.
In New Orleans, Oswald’s study of communism intensified, according to the Warren Commission. Strangely enough, at the same time he made a patriotic move—joining the Civil Air Patrol (CAP).
Marguerite Oswald told this author about another fascinating incident. She said one day after junior high school, Lee arrived home in the company of a military officer who said Lee was a self-starter, an independent sort but bright—just the sort of young man the military was looking for. Could Oswald’s recruitment into military intelligence—or at least his becoming a person of interest to them—have begun that early in his life?
But it was in New Orleans that young Oswald made one of the most intriguing connections of his life. And it may have been in the Civil Air Patrol that his pro-communism posturing was truly born.
Oswald’s Library Card
It has been established that Oswald’s CAP leader was a mysterious character named David W. Ferrie. Ferrie, an airline pilot, private investigator, and outspoken right-winger, went on to have connections with reputed Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, anti-Castro Cuban groups, former FBI agent Guy Banister and his anti-Castro activities, and the CIA. For years, supporters of the lone-assassin theory argued fervently against any connection between Ferrie and Oswald despite the fact that the House Select Committee on Assassinations interviewed the former recruit instructor for Oswald’s Lakefront CAP unit, Jerry Paradis, who told them, “Oswald and Ferrie were in the unit together. I know they were there because I was there. . . . I’m not saying that they may have been together. I’m saying it is a certainty.”
This argument abruptly ended when a PBS documentary broadcast a photograph of the pair together at a CAP function. Ferrie will be discussed at length in other sections of this book.
Could Ferrie, who reportedly used his CAP position to establish homosexual contacts with young boys, have influenced the fifteen-year-old Oswald to begin making a procommunist “cover” for himself with an eye toward becoming a US agent?
Did Ferrie seek to take advantage of the impressionable young Oswald with stories of using his intelligence contacts to help Oswald enter the exciting world of espionage? Considering Ferrie’s known homosexuality and intelligence connections, this speculation is not far-fetched.
We may never know, however, since in 1967 Ferrie was found dead in his New Orleans apartment the day after being released from protective custody by District Attorney Jim Garrison, who named Ferrie as his chief suspect in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy and described him as “one of history’s most important individuals.”
One particularly puzzling incident involved David Ferrie’s library card, which provided tantalizing evidence that the connection between the two continued up to the assassination.
Within hours of Kennedy’s assassination, an employee of former FBI agent Guy Banister contacted New Orleans authorities and said both Banister and Ferrie had been in touch with Oswald. Oswald used the same address—554 Camp Street—as Banister’s office on some of his Fair Play for Cuba material. Banister also was a supporter of right-wing causes and had been assisting anti-Castro Cubans through his New Orleans private detective agency.
Authorities could not immediately locate Ferrie. Sometime later, Ferrie told New Orleans police he had driven to Texas the night of the assassination to go goose hunting. However, subsequent investigation of Ferrie’s companions revealed that they had decided not to hunt geese but, instead, had gone to a Houston skating rink where Ferrie spent two hours at a pay telephone making and receiving calls.
One of Ferrie’s friends told New Orleans police that shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, an attorney named C. Wray Gill had come to Ferrie’s home and mentioned that when Oswald was arrested in Dallas, he was carrying a library card with Ferrie’s name on it.
Gill, an attorney for Carlos Marcello, promised to act on Ferrie’s behalf upon his return to New Orleans. On the evening of the Sunday that Jack Ruby killed Oswald, Ferrie contacted Gill, who then accompanied Ferrie to the authorities the next day. Ferrie denied knowing anything about Oswald or the assassination and was released.
However, one of Oswald’s former neighbors in New Orleans, Doris Eames, and Ferrie’s former building manager, Mrs. Jesse Garner, later recalled Ferrie visiting them both after the assassination asking about a library card. And Oswald’s former landlady said Ferrie came to her asking about the library card just hours after the assassination and before the bizarre Texas trip. After all the furor over the library card, there is nothing in the official record indicating such a card was ever found in Oswald’s possession. Yet when they questioned Ferrie, the Secret Service reportedly asked if he had loaned his library card to Oswald.