Oswald's Game

by Davison, Jean

  Q. And did you ask him what he was looking for?

  A. A Utopia. I knew what he was looking for—Utopia.

  A manuscript found among Oswald’s belongings shows that he did, indeed, have visions of forming a party and was constructing his own Marxist doctrine. In a long, rambling discussion on politics, he wrote:

  It is readily foreseeable that a coming economic, political or military crisis, internal or external, will bring about the final destruction of the capitalist system; assuming this, we can see how preparation in a special party could safeguard an independent course of action after the debacle.

  He proposed a new system of pure communism controlled at the local level, with civil liberties, heavy taxes on profits but none on individuals, an abolition of fascist organizations and racial discrimination, and strict gun controls. His idealistic goals were teamed with a grandiose fanaticism that de Mohrenschildt apparently never detected:

  Resourcefulness and patient working towards the aforesaid goals are preferred rather than loud and useless manifestations of protest. Silent observance of our principles is of primary importance. But these preferred tactics now, may prove to be too limited in the near future, they should not be confused with slowness, indecision or fear, only the intellectually fearless could even be remotely attracted to our doctrine, and yet this doctrine requires the utmost restraint, a state of being in itself majestic in power.… Membership in this organization implies adherence to the principle of simple distribution of information about this movement to others and acceptance of the idea of stoical readiness in regards to practical measures once instituted in the crisis.

  Years later, de Mohrenschildt wrote a manuscript about Oswald that was published in the House Assassinations Committee hearings. In it he said, “What I liked about him was that he was a seeker for justice—that he had highly developed social instincts. And I was disappointed in my own children for the lack of such instincts.” His manuscript described many of their conversations, as de Mohrenschildt remembered them. Although his account may not be entirely reliable—de Mohrenschildt was known to exaggerate—it may still provide some revealing insights into Oswald’s thinking.

  De Mohrenschildt wrote that Oswald had been disappointed by his reception as a defector because he had naively expected “to be treated as a special person, a prominent refugee, and nothing happened.” Oswald admitted that living conditions in Russia were poor. “But what does it matter,” he said, “if everyone is in the same boat, if everyone suffers.” At least there were no rich exploiters there, Oswald said, and no great contrasts between the rich and the poor. He said he got out of Russia “because all bureaucrats, all over the world, are stupid.” Here, in de Mohrenschildt’s words, are Oswald’s statements on other subjects:

  On integration: Lee’s faith, his strongest belief was—racial integration. He told me on many occasions, “it hurts me that the blacks do not have the same privileges and rights as white Americans.” “Segregation in any form, racial, social or economic, is one of the most repulsive facts of American life.… I would be willing any time to fight these fascistic segregationists—and to die for my black brothers.” Because of his poor, miserable childhood, he probably compared himself to the blacks.

  On world politics: “Under dictatorship people are enslaved but they know it. Here the politicians constantly lie to people and they become immune to these lies because they have the privilege of voting. But voting is rigged and democracy here is a gigantic profusion of lies and clever brainwashing.… Free people should not remain mere pawns in the world game of chess played by the rulers.”

  On J. Edgar Hoover: Also he said something about the FBI which did not strike me at the time as very clever, but history proved his judgment correct. “Knowledge is a great power, especially if you know it about very important people.” Obviously J. Edgar Hoover’s files must come to your mind.

  On death: “I have had enough time in this short existence of mine. What shall I do with eternity? When a rich man dies, he is loaded with his possessions like a prisoner with chains. I will die free, death will be easy for me.”

  On Marina: “I never wanted a middle-class wife, mediocre, obscure, money loving.…”

  George seemed to agree with this opinion of Marina. He wrote that he found no “substance” in her: “She was amusing sometimes, witty, naive mostly, like some Russian peasants, yet with a great deal of shrewdness underneath. My wife used to call her affectionately ‘that rascal Marina’—and that description fitted her perfectly.”

  According to de Mohrenschildt, Oswald “thought that someday there would be a ‘coup d’etat’ in this country organized by the Pentagon and that the country would become a militaristic, nazi-type dictatorship.”

  Concerning President Kennedy, de Mohrenschildt wrote, “Lee actually admired President Kennedy in his own reserved way.” He recalled Oswald praising a picture of Kennedy on the cover of Time and remarking on how different he looked from “the other ratty politicos.” He said that Oswald hoped Kennedy would accept coexistence with the Communist world after the Bay of Pigs.

  De Mohrenschildt said he told Oswald, “If you want to be a revolutionary, you have to be a fool or to have an inspiration. And your actions will be judged by the success or failure of your life”—and Oswald agreed. But he also claimed that he urged Oswald to be more flexible, saying, “Live pleasantly and keep your own ideology to yourself.” And to that Lee replied, “You are right. But this society we live in, it’s so disgusting and degrading. How can you stand it?”

  The approving audience Lee Oswald received from this eccentric but sophisticated man was undoubtedly encouraging to him. During this time, de Mohrenschildt spoke highly of Oswald to at least one acquaintance, who testified, “According to George,… he had great intellectual powers; he was a very clever person… and very well-read.… He told me on several occasions that ‘… he’s just an idealistic Marxist.’”

  In September 1962 a black student named James Meredith tried to enroll in the all-white University of Mississippi at Oxford. On the evening of September 30, a mob of segregationists rioted against the federal marshalls who were protecting Meredith on campus. Two people were killed, and after President Kennedy called out the National Guard, former Major General Edwin A. Walker, who was believed to have instigated the riot, was arrested for insurrection. This latest violence in the struggle for civil rights in the South made headlines around the world.

  Walker had resigned from his army command in West Germany in 1961 after being reprimanded for trying to indoctrinate his troops with the rightist philosophy of the John Birch Society. Since then he had become a national political figure speaking against integration and Castro’s Cuba. His home base was Dallas. Oswald was aware of Walker’s history. At some point, when Oswald wrote up his theory that a military coup was possible in America, he argued that the army had too many conscripts and bases to lead a coup, and that “The case of General Walker shows that the Army … is not fertile enough ground for a far-right regime to go a very long way.” He contended that the coup might come instead from the smaller Marine Corps—“a rightwing-infiltrated organization of dire potential consequences to the freedom of the United States.” He concluded, “I agree with former President Truman when he said that ‘The Marine Corps should be abolished.’”

  After Walker’s arrest, the news media followed him closely. He was released on $50,000 bond on October 7 and arrived at Love Field, where he was greeted by two hundred supporters. During the next few months, Walker would repeatedly make headlines as he prepared to stand trial in Mississippi.

  As it happened, a group of the émigrés came to Oswald’s apartment on the same Sunday Walker returned, and Oswald announced that he had been laid off from his job. (This was, in fact, untrue. His employer was satisfied with his performance. Oswald was simply planning to quit.) Feeling sorry for Marina and the baby, the émigrés offered to help. It was settled that Marina and June would move in with de Mohrenschild
t’s daughter Alexandra and her husband Gary Taylor for a few days, and then go to live with Elena Hall while Oswald went to Dallas to look for another job.

  There were evidently several reasons behind his decision to move to Dallas. He probably wanted to live in a city where the FBI didn’t know his address. And he wanted to get away from Marguerite, who had been visiting his family despite his strong objections. He didn’t tell her where he was going and didn’t see her again until after the assassination. And, just possibly, he may have already turned his attention to the right-wing leader, General Walker.

  On arriving in Dallas the following Tuesday, Oswald rented a box at the main post office. A few days later he got a job at a graphic arts firm, Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, as a trainee in photographic reproduction. Making no reference to Fort Worth, he told his new boss he had recently gotten out of the Marines.

  Oswald began receiving his copies of The Worker at the post office. In the October 2 edition there was an appeal for support for two Communist party officials who were being prosecuted after failing to register under the McCarren Act. The article spoke of the work being done by the Gus Hall-Ben Davis Defense Committee with John Abt as chief counsel. The committee’s address was given with the comment that it needed and invited financial support. After Oswald began working at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, he made up some poster-like blowups of an anti-McCarren Act slogan and sent them to the defense committee as a contribution. On the front page of the same issue, big headlines proclaimed: “Gen. Walker Arrested for Insurrection” and, alongside:

  Nation Supports the President’s Action

  Punish the Guilty!

  Gov. Barnett Gen. Walker

  White Citizens Council

  One year ago on Nov. 12, 1961 The Worker exposed the fascist character of Gen. Edwin A. Walker and warned the Kennedy administration and the American people of the need for action against him and his allies. A front-page article asserted:

  “The general thus becomes the first open candidate for leadership of the mass movement which the military-monopolist-pro-fascist plotters are now hoping to organize throughout the nation.…

  Critical of the “indecisiveness of the Kennedy administration in this situation,” The Worker insisted last November that “firmness is essential” to defeat the ultra-Rights.…

  In the October 7 issue another front-page story, headlined “Gen. Walker Bids for Fuehrer Role,” again warned “the Kennedy Administration and the American people of the need for action against him and his allies.” Two weeks later an article, headlined “Oxford Campus Plot for Bloodbath Bared,” contained the assertion that “a coded file, arms and other materials” found in a car driven by one of Walker’s cronies would reveal that “financial backers of extreme right wing groups” were “seeking the violent overthrow of the government.”

  Oswald probably read, and agreed with, a good deal of this. But nothing in The Worker’s call for political action advocated violence. Many other American newspaper editorials were saying much the same thing about Walker. Oswald already had his own ideas about the former army general. In his view, the man must have had three strikes against him—he opposed fair play for black Americans, he opposed Castro to the extent of calling for an invasion of Cuba, and he was a potential leader of a right-wing coup.

  8 … Taking Action

  FOR most of October and part of November 1962, when Oswald was living alone in Dallas, Marina and June were dependent on the charity of the Taylors and the Halls. From this time onward his family would stay almost a third of the time with other people. When Oswald came to visit Marina at the Taylors, their relationship seemed so impersonal to Gary that he thought it was “like two friends meeting.” Oswald would play with his daughter but never attempted to be alone with his wife. Taylor decided Marina’s feelings simply weren’t important to him.

  In fact, the Oswald marriage had been strained ever since the couple arrived in the United States. In Fort Worth, Oswald had struck his wife, giving her a black eye, for allowing Bouhe to teach her some English. This was only one of the ways in which he tried to exert his control over her. He was often rude and overbearing to his wife in front of other people, ordering her around in a domineering voice. As a teenager, he had yelled orders at his mother in the same manner.

  Most of their quarreling reflected their differences over his obsession with politics. Although Marina agreed with some of his views—she admired Castro, too—she felt the family should come first. To Oswald. such mundane concerns were bourgeois and stupid. She thought he had—as a later friend of Marina’s would put it—“an overblown opinion of himself, and of what he could and should achieve in the world.” He in turn complained about her lack of interest in politics. One of the émigrés, Katya Ford, was questioned about the Oswalds’ relationship:

  Q. Did she tell you whether or not they discussed politics?

  A. She said she was arguing with him about that. Certainly, in fact, [as] he called her, she was a typical American girl,… not interested at all in politics…. She said she wanted a house and family and he said “All the American girls think that way”.…

  For the rest of their life together, Marina would continually wonder whether Lee loved her or not and would continue to hope he would give up this rival, politics, and settle down.

  Occasionally Oswald would get into some friendly political arguments with the Taylors. He talked about the ideal society he had written about. Alexandra said, “He believed in the perfect government, free of want and need, and free of taxation, free of discrimination, free of any police force … total and complete freedom in everything.” She felt he was “extremely devoted” to his ideas and “very, very rigid.” And she found him persuasive: “He could almost make anybody believe what he was saying.” But her overall opinion was negative. She thought he expected things to be given to him on a silver platter.

  Gary Taylor was a Democrat who often expressed a strong disapproval of the John Birch Society, but there was little else he and Oswald could agree on. He gathered that Marina’s husband was pro-Communist but anti-Russian, and that Oswald was disappointed when the Russians assigned him to a factory job instead of giving him “something important to do.”

  Max Clark, a Fort Worth attorney and friend of George de Mohrenschildt, met Oswald at about this time and got a similar impression about Oswald’s ambitions and his reasons for leaving the Soviet Union. Oswald told him he had been unhappy about his work assignment in Minsk and had finally made up his mind that the Russian system was not “true communism” and that he would “never be able to get ahead or make his mark” in the Soviet Union. Clark told the Warren Commission that Oswald “seemed to have the idea that he was made for something other than what he was doing.”

  In October 1962 a serious international crisis developed over the introduction of Soviet nuclear missiles into Cuba. In a dramatic television appearance President Kennedy announced that he had ordered a naval blockade to prevent Soviet ships carrying more missiles from entering Cuban waters. After almost two weeks of worldwide fear of a nuclear war the confrontation ended on October 28, when the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw the missiles—over the strong protest of Fidel Castro.

  We have only a glimpse of Lee Harvey Oswald’s reaction to this crisis. According to one man who met him at a party the following February, after citing the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis as examples of imperialist interventions, Oswald suggested that Kennedy’s actions had set the stage for a nuclear holocaust. He added that even after the missiles had been withdrawn, American-sponsored acts of terrorism and sabotage against Cuba were continuing. This was presumably a reference to the sporadic paramilitary raids conducted by Cuban exile groups. (This account was, incidentally, the only report of Oswald’s saying anything critical about President Kennedy before late September 1963.)

  A day or two after the missile crisis ended, Oswald clipped a coupon from a pamphlet the Socialist Workers party had sent him, checked the box “I would like to
join the Socialist Workers Party,” and sent it via airmail to the New York headquarters. Writer Albert H. Newman has suggested that this action may be read as a sign of Oswald’s feelings about the missile crisis. A Trotskyist group, the Socialist Workers party vehemently supported Castro and often criticized the Soviet Union for being too soft on Western imperialism. Since there were no chapters of the organization in Texas at that time, Oswald was unable to join. On the back of the coupon, now a Warren Commission exhibit, a portion of the party’s message can be seen, and its tone suggests another reason Oswald may have been attracted to this group:

  … that you are helping in the greatest cause ever undertaken, and that your weight really counts.

  Socialism is the only road leading away from poverty, inflation, unemployment, imperialist war, totalitarianism—all the world-wide scourges of decaying capitalism. Socialism can save us from capitalist barbarism and open up a new world for humanity. The most courageous workers, those capable of the greatest sacrifices, those intelligent enough to see the task and endowed with the will to carry it out, must take the lead. That is our historic.…

  In November Oswald finally rented an inexpensive apartment for his family on Elsbeth Street in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. His landlady, Mrs. Mahlon Tobias, remembered that when he looked the place over, he particularly wanted to be shown the back entrance. Weeks later, when she rang his doorbell, Oswald came out the back and around the side of the building to see who it was. The Taylors helped the Oswalds move in on November 4, and for once Oswald thanked them. “Very briefly, thank you, and that was all,” Alexandra said.

  Before a week had passed the Oswalds were quarreling again. It had started over a trifle—or so Marina thought. Perhaps because he wanted no more visits from the FBI, Oswald had told Mrs. Tobias that his wife was from Czechoslovakia. Marina later wrote: