Oswald's Game

by Davison, Jean

  He told her that after his brothers went into the service, his mother decided to move to New York “to be near John.” His story of their stay with the Pics was similar to his mother’s, but he didn’t tell her why they left.

  Questioning revealed that while Lee felt John was glad to see them, his sister-in-law … was unhappy about their sharing the apartment until they could find a place of their own and she made them feel unwelcome. Lee had to sleep in the living room during this period although there were five rooms in the apartment and he admitted that this made him feel as he always did feel with grownups—that there was no room for him.

  After they relocated, the report continued, “He withdrew into a completely solitary and detached existence where he did as he wanted and he didn’t have to live by any rules or come into contact with people.”

  When questioned about his mother’s reaction to this he said she told him to go to school, “but she never did anything about it.” When he was asked if he wished that she would do something he nodded and finally emerged with the fact that he … felt his mother “never gave a damn” for him.… When Lee and his mother are home together, he is not uncomfortable with her, but they never have anything to say to each other. She never punishes him because she is the kind of person who just lets things ride. It was hard for him to say whether she acted the same way towards his brothers, because he never noticed. Although his brothers were not as detached as his mother was, he experienced rejection from them, too, and they always pushed him away when he tried to accompany them. They never met any of his needs. He said he had to be “my own father” because there was never any one there for him.

  When Miss Strickman expressed her understanding of his lonely situation, he denied he really felt lonely, and she noted, “Questioning elicited the information that he feels almost as if there is a veil between him and other people through which they cannot reach him, but he prefers this veil to remain intact.” When this revelation prompted her to inquire about his fantasy life, he responded by pointing out “this is my own business.”

  He agreed to answer questions if he wanted to, rejecting those which upset him and acknowledged fantasies about being powerful, and sometimes hurting or killing people, but refused to elaborate on this. None of these fantasies involved his mother, incidentally. He also acknowledged dreaming but refused to talk about the dreams other than to admit that they sometimes contained violence, but he insisted that they were pleasant.

  Asked about his future, he told her he wanted to return home, and assured her that he would run away if he were placed in a boarding school as an alternative. He admitted that home “offered him very little,” but he said that’s how he wanted it. Being away from home meant “a loss of his freedom and privacy.” Miss Strickman wrote, “If he could have his own way, he would like to be on his own and join the Service. While he feels that living that close to other people and following a routine would be distasteful he would ‘steel’ himself to do it.”

  Miss Strickman also interviewed Marguerite—she described her as a “smartly dressed, gray-haired woman, very self-possessed and alert and superficially affable,” but essentially a “defensive, rigid, self-involved person” who had almost no understanding of Lee’s behavior and of the “protective shell” he had drawn around himself. She wrote, “I honestly don’t think that she sees him as a person at all but simply as an extension of herself.” When she remarked to Marguerite “that it must have been difficult for her to be both parents as well as the breadwinner, proudly she said she had never found it so. She felt she was a very independent, self-reliant person, who never needed help from anyone, and who pulled herself up by her own bootstraps. Her mother died when she was only two, and her father raised six children with the help of housekeepers in a very poor section of New Orleans of mixed racial groups. She always had ‘high-falutin’ ideas and managed to make something of herself.”

  Marguerite made it clear she believed her son Lee had been treated unjustly:

  Mrs. O. railed and railed against NYC laws which she felt in a large measure were responsible for the way Lee acted. She said that when he first began to truant, the truant officer picked him up in a police car and took him back to school and she thought that was just atrocious.… She said she felt Lee could be stubborn and defiant… as she would be if someone kept stressing with him the way the truant officer had with Lee that he had to go to school because the NYC law said so.

  When it came time to write her recommendation, Evelyn Strickman faced a dilemma. She felt that if he returned home and got counseling, his mother’s “attitude about social workers, probation, etc., would inevitably communicate itself to the boy” and that if he started showing improvement in therapy she was “one of these mothers who would have to break it up.” On the other hand, Lee was so strongly against placement she doubted much could be accomplished by sending him away, either. She noticed that he had become totally withdrawn at Youth House: “I have spent some time watching him with other boys and he doesn’t participate or mingle in any way but keeps himself completely aloof.”

  The following day Oswald was seen by the chief psychiatrist, Renatus Hartogs, who had gathered the reports on his desk and whose task it was to put a label on Oswald’s behavior and decide what to do with him. Hartogs found him to be a tense and evasive boy who disliked talking about himself and his feelings. Lee repeated to Hartogs his belief that his mother and brothers showed little interest in him, and he remarked, “I dislike everybody.” In Hartogs’ view, Lee Oswald was quite disturbed emotionally—but definitely not psychotic: “He was in full contact with reality,” and there was “no indication of psychotic mental changes.” Lee’s problem, he believed, came from the impact of his “emotional isolation and deprivation.” The psychiatrist’s diagnosis was “a personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies.” As he later explained,

  The “schizoid features” were apparent in his extreme withdrawal and the depth to which he seemed to live in fantasy. “Passive-aggressive tendencies” is a term used to describe an apparently compliant manner which hides, however, deep anger.

  Hartogs recommended that Oswald be allowed to go home on the condition that both he and his mother seek help from a child guidance clinic. If that didn’t work out, placement in a juvenile home for further treatment could come later.

  Released from Youth House on May 7, 1953, Oswald appeared in court again and was put on parole with the understanding that he would return to school and attend regularly. Mrs. Oswald was told that the case had been referred to a family agency for counseling, and Lee’s probation officer recorded, “Both mother and boy promised to cooperate.”

  The Save the Rosenbergs pamphlet probably fell into Oswald’s hands three days later—ironically, on Mother’s Day.

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were on death row in upstate New York. Their execution was set for June 19. During May and June, supporters of The Worker, the Communist party daily, were canvassing neighborhoods all over the city in a subscription drive. They gave away copies in a housing project in the Bronx and simultaneously tried to enlist help in the Rosenberg campaign. On Mother’s Day, May 10, women who had been recruited through an ad in The Worker passed out leaflets for the New York Committee for Clemency for the Rosenbergs on city street corners. (This was the only instance I could find, in back copies of the New York Times and The Worker, of city-wide distribution of leaflets on the streets—there may have been others. But the fact that women volunteers were specifically recruited for this one suggests, at least, that this may have been the day the “old lady” handed him a pamphlet. Possibly Oswald was on his way to the Bronx Zoo or the library or the subway station that Sunday—the entrance to any of those places would probably have been a good spot for a demonstration.)

  It isn’t known exactly what was in the pamphlet, but the campaign for clemency had only two themes. The first was that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of an unjust court. In T
he Worker they were described as martyrs who were being lynched by a hanging judge and by President Eisenhower, who refused to commute their sentences. The other theme was implicit in the choice of women for a Mother’s Day demonstration—implicit, too, whenever the names of the Rosenbergs’ sons Michael and Robert were mentioned. Michael was 10; Robert was four years younger. Their parents were going to be executed, leaving them orphans. It’s unlikely that a campaign could have been designed any better to strike Oswald’s nature and circumstances. “I looked at that paper,” he told Aline Mosby six years later, “and I still remember it for some reason, I don’t know why.”

  It wasn’t that he had compassion for the Rosenbergs. Oswald never had a talent for empathy. An acquaintance of his in Dallas, an intelligent and sensitive man, believed that Oswald saw people as cardboard figures, with the single exception of his daughter June. There is evidence for this in the Youth House records. He had no curiosity about his dead father. He didn’t know how his mother treated his brothers because he never noticed. If Robert and John, five and eight years older, respectively, didn’t always want a kid brother tagging along, they were rejecting him. They “never met any of his needs.” Whether through force of example or inherited disposition, Lee Oswald had acquired an egocentricity resembling his mother’s. What made the Rosenberg pamphlet memorable to him, surely, was that he saw himself in it—the “innocent victim” of a New York court. He held in his hand a message that said to him: Here are allies you can identify with. Here are people who feel as you do about the legal system.

  The more one takes this period of his life into account, the more plausible the story he told in Moscow becomes. The pamphlet got him started reading socialist literature, he said, and he saw that the description it gave of capitalist society matched his own observations. When he talked about “watching the treatment of workers in New York and observing the fact that they are exploited,” we may assume he was speaking primarily about Marguerite. During the year and a half they lived there, she resigned or was fired from at least three different jobs. When Evelyn Strickman saw him at Youth House, his resentment was aimed at his mother. She was always busy selling insurance and when she came home she didn’t even make him a decent supper. She never gave a damn for him. By the time he spoke with Priscilla Johnson, his view of Marguerite had changed, and his explanation of why he became a Marxist shifted the blame to her employers: “At 15 I was looking for something that would give me the key to my environment. My mother has been a worker all her life. All her life she had to produce profit for the capitalists. She is a good example of what happens to workers in the United States.” It was as though new battle lines had been drawn. The uncaring mother had become a “good example” of what capitalism does to people. It followed that if he could see her as the victim of a political system, he now had a more secure emotional footing—and a way to fight back. Thus, Oswald’s anger and resentment were easily subsumed by a radical political outlook.

  Oswald would always be reluctant to talk about himself and his feelings, but he would become articulate and combative about politics. In his second letter to Robert from Moscow, he rejected not only capitalism but his family as well, vowing to kill any American who fought against Russia. The glaring ideology of that letter initially hides the person who wrote it, but using his past as a filter, we see the detached 13-year-old who resented his mother’s financial struggle, who felt without reason that his brothers had neglected him, who admitted having fantasies about being powerful and sometimes hurting and killing people. He would insist the Rosenberg pamphlet got him interested in Marxism from “an ideological viewpoint.” He would protest that his decision to defect was unemotional, that it was motivated by ideology alone, not by personal hardship. This was a sore point with him. But if this reconstruction is correct, his turn toward politics could hardly have been more firmly entangled in his emotional life.

  That is not to say that he was insincere when he said he defected for political reasons, or that he wasn’t actually committed to Marxism, as he understood it. On the contrary, one of his Marine Corps buddies, Kerry Thornley, said he thought Oswald had an “irrevocable conviction” when it came to his political beliefs:

  I think you could sit down and argue with him for a number of years … and I don’t think you could have changed his mind … unless you knew why he believed it in the first place. I certainly don’t. I don’t think with any kind of formal argument you could have shaken that conviction. And that is why I say [it was] irrevocable.

  Oswald’s chance encounter with the Rosenberg pamphlet just after he got out of juvenile court is the sort of coincidence any decent novelist would scorn as being too melodramatic, too pat. Evidently, history doesn’t make that type of editorial judgment. When I was doing some background reading on the Rosenberg case, I ran across another coincidence, another one of history’s whims—Julius Rosenberg’s account of his own introduction to politics, at age 15 in New York:

  I stopped to listen to a speaker at a street corner meeting… His topic was to win freedom for Tom Mooney, [a] labor leader who was imprisoned on a frame-up.

  That night I was reading a pamphlet I bought from the speaker giving the facts of this case and the next day I went and contributed 50 cents. Then I began to distribute the pamphlets and collect signatures on a Mooney petition from school friends and neighbors.

  In The Implosion Conspiracy, Louis Nizer quoted the passage above and remarked, “It is curious how a purely accidental incident can change the course of a person’s life. If Julius Rosenberg had not stopped to listen to the Mooney orator, he may not have been seated in a defendant’s chair in the courtroom eighteen years later.”

  We return now to the summer of 1953, to pick up Oswald’s trail. In July Robert Oswald came to New York City on a ten-day furlough to visit his family, and Lee showed him around. After taking him by subway from the Bronx to Times Square, Lee guided him to the top of the Empire State Building and mapped a tour for him from Wall Street to the Museum of Natural History. Typically, Lee didn’t open up to him about his recent troubles. Nobody else in the family mentioned Lee’s confinement or his clash with Mrs. Pic to Robert, either. (As far as one can tell from the Warren records, Oswald never talked about his court appearances and his stay at Youth House with anyone, ever. As he wrote Robert from Moscow, “You really don’t know anything about me.”) Robert noticed some tension between John and their mother, but that was nothing unusual, no different from their past relationship.

  Earlier that year, Marguerite had told John that the school authorities suggested Oswald be seen by a psychiatrist but that she couldn’t get him to go. She said he refused to see a “nut doctor or head shrinker.” John advised her to just take him, but he never heard any more about it.

  In September 1953 Lee Oswald entered the eighth grade in the Bronx. The following month one of his teachers reported:

  During the past 2 weeks practically every subject teacher has complained to me about the boy’s behavior. He had consistently refused to salute the flag during early morning exercises.… He spends most of his time sailing paper planes around the room. When we spoke to him about his behavior, his attitude was belligerent. [When] I offered to help him, he brushed out with, “I don’t need anybody’s help!”

  Another court hearing was scheduled on October 29, but Marguerite telephoned the probation officer to say she couldn’t make it. (The hearing had already been postponed once for the same reason, and the Warren Report notes that she was apparently afraid that Lee might be “retained in some sort of custody” if he showed up.) Justice Sicher continued his parole and suggested a referral to the Berkshire Industrial Farm or Children’s Village. At about the same time, Marguerite went to talk to school authorities about Lee, and subsequently his classroom behavior improved.

  On January 4, 1954, a representative of the Big Brothers organization came to the Oswald apartment to offer its help. He reported that Mrs. Oswald was cordial but informed him that Lee
was doing fine, going to the Y every Saturday, and needed no further counseling. She told him she was considering returning South, and he reminded her she would have to get the court’s consent before leaving its jurisdiction. Several days later, Marguerite packed and left with her son for New Orleans.

  3 … Dropping Out, Joining Up

  ON arriving in New Orleans that January, Marguerite and 14-year-old Lee moved in with her sister, Lillian, until they found another place to live—an apartment managed by Marguerite’s old friend Myrtle Evans. To Marguerite’s way of thinking, bringing Lee back to the South had averted a tragedy. The anger he had revealed in New York receded from view. To his relatives and Evans, Oswald seemed quiet and studious, often going off into his bedroom to read or listen to the radio. His cousin Marilyn Murret, who was 25, recalled seeing him read encyclopedias “like somebody else would read a novel.” He returned to school, and the disciplinary problems didn’t reappear.

  But Lillian noticed a strange aloofness. The Murrets were Catholic, and on Fridays he came over to have seafood, which he liked. Then on Saturdays he came back, and Mrs. Murret would give him money to rent a bike even though he could have borrowed one from her children. “My children had a bike, but it seemed like he wanted to go up in the park rather than ride their bicycles, and sometimes I would have to … give him more money so that he could keep his bike another hour.” She bought him some school clothes “so he would look presentable to go to school, you know, whatever a boy needs, and when we gave them to him, he said, ‘Well, why are you all doing this for me?’ And we said, ‘Well, Lee, for one thing, we love you, and another thing we want you to look nice when you go to school, like the other children.’” But he offered no thanks, and later on he told her, “I don’t need anything from anybody.” Another time he told her he didn’t want to go to school anymore because he already knew everything they had to teach him. Like his mother, Lillian thought—Marguerite “didn’t think she needed anybody either.”