Oswald's Game

by Davison, Jean

  Sometime after returning to New Orleans Oswald was beaten up by a gang of white boys for sitting in the black section of a city bus. Marguerite and Lillian assumed he must have forgotten the buses were segregated while he was in New York, and the Warren Report says he probably acted “out of ignorance.” But Marilyn Murret thought it was possible he had acted “defiantly.”

  After a falling-out with Myrtle Evans in the spring of 1955, Marguerite moved to an apartment in the French Quarter. There Oswald spent time playing pool and darts with a junior high classmate named Edward Voebel, but made no other friends. In Voebel’s opinion, “people just didn’t interest him generally” because he was “living in his own world.”

  One day Oswald shocked Voebel by showing him a plastic gun and glass cutter and outlining a plan to steal a pistol from a store on Rampart Street. When Oswald went to reconnoiter the store, Voebel tagged along and pointed out a burglar alarm wire running through the shop’s plate glass window. Afterward Oswald said no more about his idea. Since there had recently been several jewel robberies on Canal Street in which store windows were cut, it occurred to Voebel that Lee wanted to “look big among the guys” by doing something similar.

  Had he gone ahead with this scheme, it would have been what policemen call a copycat crime. Voebel’s testimony thus provides a revealing glimpse of young Oswald’s thinking. At age 15 one of his fantasies was to imitate a daring crime described in the local press.

  In June Oswald filled out a personal history form at school, listing his plans after high school as “military service” and “undecided.” That summer he joined the Civil Air Patrol and attended several meetings at which one of the leaders was an eccentric pilot named David Ferrie. Ferrie would become a central figure in many conspiracy theories.

  It was during this period, when Oswald was evidently looking for excitement, that he began to think of himself as a Marxist. In Moscow he would tell Aline Mosby:

  Then we moved to New Orleans and I discovered one book in the library, “Das Kapital.” It was what I’d been looking for.

  It was like a very religious man opening the Bible for the first time.

  I read the “Manifesto.” It got me interested. I found some dusty back shelves in the New Orleans library, you know, I had to remove some front books to get at the books.

  I started to study Marxist economic theories. I could see the impoverishment of the masses before my own eyes in my own mother, and I could see the capitalists. I thought the worker’s life could be better.

  I continued to indoctrinate myself for five years. My mother knew I was reading books but she didn’t know what they were about.

  (In fact, Marguerite did know, but said nothing to him about it.) At this point Oswald’s only work experience consisted of about ten Saturdays as a stock boy in a shoe store where his mother worked.

  In the fall of 1955 Lee entered ioth grade at Warren Easton High School, but dropped out after his birthday a month later. He wrote a letter to school authorities to which he signed his mother’s name:

  To whom it may concern,

  Because we are moving to San Diego in the middle of this month Lee must quit school now. Also, please send by him any papers such as his birth certificate that you may have. Thank you.

  Sincerely,

  Mrs. M. Oswald

  As he often did, Oswald had woven a part of the truth into a deception. He was planning to join the Marines and go to their training center in San Diego. Since he was just 16, Marguerite signed a false affidavit saying he was a year older. But the recruiting officer must have seen through the ruse, for Oswald had to wait another year to get out on his own.

  Early in 1956 Oswald went to work for the Pfisterer Dental Laboratory making deliveries around town with an 18-year-old named Palmer McBride. The two young men shared an interest in classical music and astronomy and would visit one another after work. McBride soon learned that Lee Oswald “was very serious about the virtues of Communism, and discussed these virtues at every opportunity.” Oswald’s “central theme seemed to be that the workers in the world would one day rise up and throw off their chains.” Oswald showed McBride the library copies of Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto he kept in his room, and McBride thought he “seemed quite proud to have them.” On another occasion, after they began discussing President Eisenhower, McBride recalled, “He then made a statement to the effect that he would like to kill President Eisenhower because he was exploiting the working class.” McBride added, “This statement was not made in jest.”

  In April 1956 Senator James Eastland of Mississippi held lengthy subcommittee hearings in New Orleans to investigate alleged Communist activity in the area. The hearings were covered by the local press, especially after a defense attorney was ejected from one of the sessions. Eastland told a television interviewer that there were, or had been, Communist cells in Louisiana.

  It was apparently about this time that McBride and Oswald got to know William Wulf, a history major and president of an astronomy club they were interested in joining. During a visit to Wulf’s home Oswald, who had been looking at some of the books in Wulf’s library, started talking about communism. McBride recalled that Oswald began telling Wulf “about the glories of the Worker’s State and saying that the United States Government was not telling the truth about Soviet Russia.” As Wulf remembered it, Oswald

  started expounding the Communist doctrine and saying that he was highly interested in communism, that communism was the only way of life for the worker, et cetera, and then came out with a statement that he was looking for a Communist cell in town to join but he couldn’t find any. He was a little dismayed at this, and said that he couldn’t find [one] that would show any interest in him as a Communist.

  According to Wulf, Oswald “was actually militant on the idea, and I can repeat that he expressed his belief that he could be a good Communist, he could help the Communist Party out, if he could find the … Party [and] join it.” At this point,

  we were kind of arguing back and forth about the situation, and my father came in the room, heard what we were arguing on communism, [saw] that this boy was loudmouthed, boisterous, and asked him to leave … and that is the last I have seen or spoken with Oswald.

  Wulf concluded that Oswald was “looking for something to belong to.”

  On another occasion Oswald had tried to talk McBride into joining the Communist party with him.1 At a time when most adolescent males were thinking about cars and girls, Oswald’s fantasy life involved a pistol and an unrequited romance with the Communist party. As a child, one of his favorite TV shows had been “I Led Three Lives,” an anti-Communist program that stressed the supposedly clandestine and subversive nature of Party work. This kind of life—being an outsider and secretly fighting the authorities—would likely have appealed to him.

  The patterns laid down during adolescence shaped Oswald’s later behavior. Evidently, he had already begun to identify more closely with the political world than with his immediate environment. One might wonder why this should be so. Psychiatrist and author Edwin Weinstein believes that many potential assassins take up a political cause to give themselves a sense of identity. Several other American assassins have identified strongly with a political group—John Wilkes Booth with the Confederacy, Sirhan Sirhan with the Palestinians, and so on. This identification may take the place of close relationships with relatives and friends—in effect, the cause becomes the assassin’s family or “pseudo-community.” More important, however, the typical assassin often has a grandiose self-image that allows him to see himself as a player on the world political stage. For most people, President Eisenhower was a remote figure somewhere above them; Oswald projected himself onto Eisenhower’s level, as someone who wanted to punish what he saw as an abuse of power.

  And yet, classifying Oswald as a typical assassin doesn’t go very far toward explaining him. There is another model that may throw more light on his character, or at least one side of it. The episod
e Voebel recounted about the pistol foreshadowed the fact that Oswald ended his life as someone accused of committing two murders with firearms. In 1978 there was a brief stir in the press about a three-volume work entitled The Criminal Personality by psychiatrist Samuel Yochelson and his associate, psychologist Stanton Samenow. The work was the result of a study Yochelson had instituted at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., a federal psychiatric hospital where felons judged to be criminally insane are treated. (John Hinckley, Reagan’s attacker, is now confined there.) Yochelson and Samenow examined 250 young men who were habitual felons, having them record their thoughts daily on tape and interviewing both the inmates and their relatives. The Criminal Personality presents their provocative conclusions, which I’ll attempt to summarize.

  Yochelson and Samenow contend that all habitual criminals, of whatever category, share many specific character traits from early childhood. In their view, the typical felon is unusually self-centered and secretive. At an early age the criminal-to-be “wraps himself in a mantle of secrecy,” as Samenow puts it, and “sees himself as unique.” He conceals his ideas and activities from his family because he doesn’t want to be interfered with. He is chronically restless, dissatisfied, and angry. He often gets into trouble for school truancy. Violation becomes a means of getting excitement; normal life seems boring. Listening to the tapes, the authors discovered that their subjects spent a good deal of time fantasizing about potential crimes they would never commit—merely thinking about a crime was itself exciting.

  Whatever crimes they did commit, Yochelson and Samenow’s subjects saw themselves as good, decent people. An inmate would usually justify his behavior by describing himself as a victim of his environment. He sees himself as superior to others, capable of great things. He wants to be Number One, to come out on top, but he expects instant success and considers schoolwork and most jobs beneath him. If he joins a sports team, he wants to be the captain and run the show. (The authors describe a prison football team as consisting of eleven quarterbacks.)

  Highly manipulative, the criminal described here sees other people as pawns. Even as a child, he rejects close personal relationships. He is basically a loner, because his view of reality is totally egocentric. He feels he owns the world. The world must conform to his demands, not the other way around. Lying comes as naturally as breathing. “If he goes to a grocery store,” says Samenow, “he will say it’s the Safeway even if he intends to go to Grand Union.” He feels he is right, and others must see things on his terms. As one inmate wryly put it, paraphrasing Descartes, “I think; therefore, it is.”

  When held accountable, “the criminal believes he has been wronged, that he has been obstructed in the exercise of his rights and privileges.”

  Although he has broken the law, the law now must be inviolate when invoked in his behalf. The breaker of laws becomes a constitutionalist. There is no inconsistency in this, from the criminal’s viewpoint. In breaking the law, he exercised the freedom to do as he wanted. He will now use the law to achieve the same freedom, which is being denied him [emphasis in the original].

  Assuming that this unflattering portrait is accurate, how did the St. Elizabeths inmates get this way? Yochelson and Samenow could find no cause. Although they had expected to find the root cause in family or social influences, they discovered that their subjects came from all kinds of backgrounds and, in many cases, had siblings who were “straight.” These authors concluded that the criminal freely chooses his way of life in his unending quest for power, control, and excitement. They noted that some people with this type of personality were attracted to radical political movements of the left or the right—in their view, for the same reasons they were drawn to crime. “Although he may forcefully present himself as a spokesman for the oppressed, he is using his cause as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement… For those who take direct action, the excitement of the event outweighs the merit of the cause.”

  The St. Elizabeths study is highly controversial and its findings have been rejected by many criminologists. One suspects there is something more than “free choice” involved in the criminal lifestyle. But the personality profile outlined above appears to describe Lee Oswald remarkably well. For one thing, this model at least provides a framework for looking again at Oswald’s breathtaking arrogance—for instance, the manner in which he threatened to give away military secrets at the U.S. Embassy and then loudly complained that the embassy had acted illegally in refusing to let him sign away his citizenship. Oswald expected his adversaries to abide by the letter of the law, whereas he did as he pleased.

  However, despite the foregoing analysis, it ought to be remembered that Oswald was an individual, not a type. Throughout his life, none of his acquaintances saw him as dangerous or as a criminal. For the most part, his teenage years were mundane—he often rode a bike in the park or went to museums. Even McBride remained friendly, despite Lee’s hangup on Marxism. The cumulative details of his life reveal more about him than any category we might use to explain him.

  In July 1956 Marguerite took Lee to live in Fort Worth with Robert, who had just gotten out of the Marines. That fall he entered the 10th grade for the second time, and a classmate recalled that Oswald tried to get him interested in Marxism, too. Oswald went out for the B football team, but was kicked off the squad for refusing to run laps with the other players. (Robert later commented, “He usually wanted to be ‘the boss’ or not play at all. He was like Mother in this respect.”) Soon he dropped out of school again.

  On October 3, 1956, young Oswald wrote the Socialist Party of America:

  Dear Sirs;

  I am sixteen years of age and would like more information about your youth League, I would like to know if there is a branch in my area, how to join, etc. I am a Marxist, and have been studying socialist principles for well over fifteen months. I am very interested in your Y.P.S.L.2

  Later that month, after his seventeenth birthday, he enlisted in the Marines.

  4 … The Marxist Marine

  SOME critics of the Warren Report have found it strange indeed that an avowed Marxist should want to join the U.S. Marine Corps. Robert thought his brother saw “an escape from the drabness of school, a chance to lead his own life, and an opportunity to impress the world.… To him, military service meant freedom.” John Pic was blunter. He thought his half-brother joined up largely to get out from under “the yoke of oppression from my mother.” Oswald himself once said that he enlisted not because he was a patriot but because he wanted “to get away from the drudgery” and see the world.

  Whatever his reasons for enlisting, Oswald’s career in the Marines would show a development of the same pattern of behavior we’ve already seen—problems with authority, a good deal of secretive scheming, and dramatic incidents in which he tried to manipulate or outwit the system.

  On aptitude tests during basic training Oswald scored significantly above the Corps average in reading and vocabulary, and significantly below in arithmetic and pattern analysis. In a six-week course on aviation fundamentals, he finished forty-sixth in a class of fifty-four. As usual, he kept to himself, doing a lot of serious reading. During combat training in early 1957 Oswald shared a tent with Allen R. Felde, who recalled that Oswald constantly talked about politics. He said that Oswald espoused “the cause of the working-man” and believed the American intervention in Korea had resulted in one million needless deaths for which he held Presidents Truman and Eisenhower responsible.

  After being trained as a radar controller, Oswald was shipped overseas to Japan in September. At the Atsugi base twenty miles west of Tokyo he began work in the radar room, where he often plotted the course of America’s U-2 planes. The U-2 was an extremely light jet that could achieve altitudes close to 100,000 feet. U-2S were then operating at American bases in Europe and the Far East, ostensibly to collect weather information. Their principal purpose, however, was to gather military intelligence. Lone U-2S began “straying” over Communist territory in 195
6—at the touch of a button seven cameras, mounted under the plane, took continuous, high-resolution pictures of the ground below. They were doing the work eventually taken over by spy satellites. Several of Oswald’s co-workers later remembered seeing these strange-looking glider-like planes take off and land. In their briefings, Oswald and the other men were told that the U-2 was a top-secret reconnaissance project which they were not to discuss with anyone outside their unit.

  Oswald seemed to take pride in his work and would bristle whenever a young officer tried to second-guess or correct him. Being resentful of authority was almost second nature among the enlisted men, but Daniel Patrick Powers, who had been with Oswald since their technical training, thought Oswald wasn’t resentful of authority per se: “he was resentful of the position of authority that he could not command.”

  Oswald began gathering with his fellow Marines in some of the cheap bars near the base and apparently had his first sexual experience with a Japanese bar girl. Then he started dating a beautiful young Japanese woman who was a hostess at a Tokyo bar. When the time approached for his unit to be shipped out to the Philippines in November 1957, Oswald grazed his left arm with a .22 caliber bullet from a derringer he had kept in his locker. A barracks-mate, George Wilkens, heard the shot and rushed in to find Oswald sitting quietly on a bunk holding the gun. Wilkens had seen the gun a few weeks before when Oswald showed it to him and said he had bought it from a mail-order company in the United States. Others rushed in, and Wilkens left.

  At the hospital Oswald claimed his minor wound had been caused accidentally when he dropped his government-issue .45. But the .22 bullet was found, and the incident was reported as a breach of regulations concerning private firearms. The scuttlebutt afterward was that Oswald had deliberately shot himself to avoid leaving Japan to go on maneuvers. If that was his plan, it failed—he was shipped out to the Philippines five days after he was released from the hospital.