When the landlady asked me, I told her that I was from Russia, not knowing what Lee had told her. In this way a misunderstanding arose. I did not understand why Lee was hiding the fact that he was married to a Russian.… He got angry with me, said that I did not understand anything, and that I was not supporting him. I answered that it was hard to understand such stupidity, and that he was simply stupid. He told me that if I didn’t like it I could go where I wanted. I was terribly hurt. I had no one there close to me except him and if this man rejected me, why should I stand in his way. I took June and left Lee to go to my Russian acquaintances.
Taking only her child, a few diapers, a shirt, and a baby bottle, Marina took a taxi to the Mellers’ home. This time when the émigrés got together and agreed to look after her, it was with a condition. George Bouhe told her he didn’t think Oswald would ever treat her as he should and, “If you leave him, of course we’ll help. But if you say one thing now and then go back, next time no one will help.” Marina assured him she would never go back “to that hell.”
Bouhe took her to stay at the home of Katya and Declan Ford. Oswald found out where she was living and called asking her to come home. He had been invited to his brother Robert’s for Thanksgiving and wanted her with him—it would be humiliating if he had to go alone. Marina was curt with him at first but soon began to relent. A few days later Valentina Ray offered to let Marina live with her until she could learn enough English to find a job. Marina agreed, but she told her husband where she was, and when he telephoned her there, she consented to see him.
At the Rays’ home they went into a bedroom to talk, and Marina reported that only after he begged her to return did she give in: “We talked alone in the room, and I saw him cry for the first time. What woman’s heart can resist this, especially if she is in love? Lee begged me to come back, asked my forgiveness, and promised that he would try to improve.… Knowing Lee’s character, I can say that this is perhaps the first time in his life that he had to go and ask someone a favor, and what is more, show his tears…. Lee was not particularly open with me about his feelings, but always wore a mask.”
Whether the scene represented his true feelings or was just another manipulation to get what he wanted, he recovered his composure very quickly. What Valentina Ray remembered from that day was Oswald arguing politics with her husband. He offered to drive the reconciled couple home, and the political lecture continued en route. Valentina said her husband came home “huffing, puffing, said he never met anybody dumber in his life, doesn’t understand simple economics or how anything works in this country.”
After Marina moved back, most of the émigrés threw up their hands. Only the de Mohrenschildts remained friendly, exchanging visits and taking them to a few parties. For a short while, the Oswald household was peaceful. Marina said of this period, “He used to bring home dozens of books from the library and just swallowed them down.… Sometimes it seemed to me that he was living in another world which he had constructed for himself, and that he came down to earth only to go to work, to earn money for his family, to eat, and to sleep.”
In early December 1962 Oswald began making use of the Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall facilities and materials for his own purposes when he was working overtime. Using the photographic techniques he’d learned, he made some advertising posters for the Socialist Workers party and The Worker, as well as the Hall-Davis Defense Committee. (The Worker’s poster said, “READ THE WORKER / If you want to know about / PEACE / DEMOCRACY / UNEMPLOYMENT / ECONOMIC TRENDS.”) Along with the blowups, he sent letters offering to do further photographic work at no charge. Each organization wrote a polite letter of acknowledgment, and Oswald carefully saved these replies—he would find a use for them in the months ahead.
In mid-December he took out a subscription to The Militant, the Socialist Workers’ newspaper. Like The Worker, it was critical of General Walker and of Kennedy’s policies on Cuba and the civil rights struggle. One of the first issues he would have received in January commented on the speech President Kennedy gave in the Miami Orange Bowl on December 29. Before a crowd of 40,000 Cuban exiles, Kennedy greeted a group of Bay of Pigs veterans who had just been ransomed from their imprisonment in Cuba. When the president was presented with the Cuban brigade’s battle flag, he spontaneously declared, “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana”—a prediction that drew tumultuous cheers from the audience. The Militant called it “the most barefaced and disgusting display of immorality, ignorance and bad taste ever put on by a U.S. President.” In its January 21 issue, The Militant published Castro’s response to Kennedy’s Miami appearance, a speech headlined, “We Will Not Stop Being Revolutionists.” Castro said Kennedy had “conducted himself like a pirate.” After citing the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban citizens who had been killed in exile raids and in internal counter-revolutionary attacks, he declared, “Mr. Kennedy, too much blood has flowed between you and us.”
At the beginning of 1963 Oswald began making specific plans to assassinate General Walker. The final decision apparently came after January 21, when a federal grand jury in Mississippi released Walker after declining to indict him. The next day, the Dallas Morning News quoted Walker: “I am glad to be vindicated.… Today my hopes returned to the Cubans and millions of others who long to return to their homes.…” On January 27, Oswald ordered a Smith & Wesson .38 snub-nosed revolver from a Los Angeles mail-order firm, using “A. J. Hidell” as an alias.
This was his first known use of the Alek James Hidell alias. “Alek” had been his nickname in Russia. “Hidell” was probably an altered “Fidel,” embraced by two of his own initials. The “James” is less certain but may have come from a fictional character he was known to have admired—James Bond.
It was apparently around this time that he printed up a phony ID in the name of Alek James Hidell—perhaps he thought he might need identification to pick up the gun at the post office. He also began studying a city map and a bus schedule to lay out an escape route from Walker’s home on Turtle Creek Boulevard. And he began putting pressure on Marina to return to the Soviet Union with June. The Warren Commission evidently never realized why Oswald wanted to send his family to Russia. Marina testified, “Lee wanted me to go to Russia … and I told him that if he wanted me to go then that meant he didn’t love me and … in that case what was the idea of coming to the United States in the first place. Lee would say that it would be better for me to go to Russia. I did not know why. I did not know what he had in mind. He said he loved me but it would be better for me if I went to Russia.”
Q. Did he have a job then?
A. Yes.
Q. Did you feel that you were getting along on what he was making?
A. Of course.…
Q. Did you understand when he suggested you return to Russia that he was proposing to break up your marriage?
A. I told him that I would go to Russia if he gave me a divorce, but he did not want to give me a divorce.
Q. Did he say why?
A. He said that if he were to give me a divorce that would break everything between us, which he didn’t want. That he wanted to keep me as his wife.
When she was asked if she now understood why Oswald wanted her to return to the Soviet Union, she said, “Yes … I think I know why[;] he had in mind to start his foolish activity which could harm me, but, of course, at that time he didn’t tell me the reason.… At that time when I would ask him he would get angry because he couldn’t tell me.”
While he was waiting for the pistol to arrive, something happened to delay his plans. On February 14 the Morning News announced that Walker would be going out of town on a nationwide tour, dubbed “Operation Midnight Ride,” from February 27 to April 3 to make speeches warning about the dangers of Castro and communism. Three days later Oswald forced the reluctant Marina, who wanted to stay in America, to sit down and write the following letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington:
I beg your assistance to
help me to return to the homeland in the USSR where I will again feel myself a full-fledged citizen. Please let me know what I should do for this, i.e., perhaps it will be necessary to fill out a special application form. Since I am not working at present (because of my lack of knowledge of the English language and a small child), I am requesting you to extend to me a possible material aid for the trip. My husband remains here, since he is an American by nationality. I beg you once more not to refuse my request.
It is not too difficult to see Oswald’s hand in this, especially in the phrase “full-fledged citizen” and in the request for “material aid.” Since he couldn’t afford to send his family to Russia, he expected the Russians to take care of it.
On February 22 Lee and Marina went to a party given by Everett Glover, a friend of de Mohrenschildt’s. One of the guests was Ruth Paine, a Quaker who had recently separated from her husband Michael and who was studying the Russian language. Ruth was eager to meet someone who spoke modern Russian because she hoped to be able to learn the language well enough to teach it. She and Marina began a friendship that evening which Oswald encouraged for his own reasons. Marina said later that “from the moment he met Ruth, Lee [thought] only how to use her.”
Marina would remember February 1963 as by far the worst month of their marriage. Oswald often flew into a rage and beat her whenever she seemed to go against his wishes. Their landlady noticed that Marina was always quiet around Oswald and that he never seemed to want her to be out of his sight when he was home. She thought Marina seemed “very lonely.” During this period Oswald sometimes wouldn’t come home until seven o’clock or later, and Marina never knew where he was. On one such night in late February, Mrs. Tobias testified that Marina came knocking on her door:
… and wanted to know if she could use the phone. She said, “I don’t know where my husband is.”… I said to her, “Mrs. Oswald, Marina, can you read English?” She said “Yes”—and I went and got a tablet of paper.… took a pencil and wrote “When he gets home give him a good kick in the shin.” And she started laughing … and she said she would.
Marina then called several numbers and spoke in Russian but, said Mrs. Tobias, “She never did find him.” One of Marina’s calls was to George de Mohrenschildt, who telephoned Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall for her and found out Lee wasn’t there. Oswald, of course, was angry when he discovered she’d been checking up on him. Later that week their fighting got so noisy the owner of the building told Oswald he would have to stop fighting or move. Oswald decided to move.
On March 3 they carried their belongings to another furnished apartment several blocks away at 214 West Neely Street, using June’s stroller as a carrier. Mrs. Tobias watched them go: “They moved away in that stroller…. They didn’t have very much—all he had was books and what little dishes they had, and that wasn’t very many, and the baby bed.” The new apartment had a small room Oswald appropriated for a study—it had an interior door that could be locked and another door leading to the outside. Now he could come and go without Marina’s knowledge, and he could have privacy while he worked out his plans.
At least some of Oswald’s mysterious activities undoubtedly had to do with General Walker. He may have rehearsed his route by riding the buses he intended to use to and from Walker’s home. At any rate, it is certain that after Walker left town, Oswald undertook a reconnaissance. On the weekend of March 9–10 he used his Imperial Reflex camera to photograph the alley behind Walker’s house and an area near a railroad where he would hide the weapon. (The pictures, found among Oswald’s possessions, could be dated because of some construction work going on in the background.) He recorded a detailed description of the house and its surroundings in a notebook he kept in his study.
Evidently his survey of Walker’s property changed his mind about the appropriate weapon, for on March 12 he ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago, again using the Hidell alias. By coincidence both weapons were shipped on March 20 and arrived about five days later. When Walker returned to Dallas, he’d be ready.
It was during this month that the FBI took a renewed interest in the Oswalds. It was FBI practice to interview immigrants from the Soviet bloc countries on a selective basis, and Marina was one of those selected. When John Fain retired he left her case marked pending inactive. On March 4 Fain’s successor, James P. Hosty, Jr., obtained Marina’s Elsbeth Street address from the Immigration and Naturalization Service records. On the 11th, the day before Oswald ordered his rifle, Hosty drove over and spoke to Mrs. Tobias, who told him that they had moved. Hosty obtained the Oswalds’ new address. But having learned of their frequent quarrels from Mrs. Tobias, he decided to allow them a certain “cooling off period,” as required by FBI regulations, before he talked to Marina. (Even though he was going by the book, this decision would ultimately earn him a reprimand and the eternal wrath of J. Edgar Hoover.) Hosty checked Lee Oswald’s file and found that he was on The Worker’s mailing list. At Hosty’s request, Oswald’s case was reopened on March 26. But when he finally went to the Neely Street apartment in late May they had moved without leaving a forwarding address.
Would it have made a difference if agent Hosty had caught up with Oswald before he attacked Walker? Probably not. Oswald already knew the FBI was interested in him, and the watchful eye of the authorities had never stopped him in the past.
On Sunday, March 31, Oswald had Marina take several pictures of him in their backyard. Dressed in black, he wore a pistol on his belt, holding the rifle in one hand and a recent copy of both The Militant and The Worker in the other. He told her he wanted photographs to send to The Militant. Oswald was clearly proud of what he was about to do. He inscribed one of the prints “For Junie from Papa” and gave it to Marina as a keepsake for their daughter, so that “maybe someday June will remember me.” Marina put this print and one like it in June’s baby book.
Oswald obviously believed that The Militant would applaud his attack on Walker. He undoubtedly got this idea from the general editorial line of the newspaper, which advocated revolutionary violence where necessary. In the February 25 issue there was a review of a book by Robert F. Williams that called for blacks to arm themselves. The review noted, “John Brown and the Abolitionists did not fight slavery with prayers but with armed struggle against the evil system. Williams thus stands in the American tradition of struggle for freedom, the best of our heritage and legacy. [Martin Luther] King’s Gandhiism runs counter to this spirit.…[and] is racist in its outlook.” The review spoke of the “inadequacy of narrowly conceived tactics of non-violence.”
On April 2 Ruth Paine invited the Oswalds to dinner and had her husband Michael pick them up at their apartment. An engineer with Bell Helicopter, Michael was an intelligent and well-educated man whose father had been a Trotskyite after leaving the Communist party in the 1940s. Michael could remember being taken to Party meetings as a child and being bored by them. Like Ruth, he was tolerant of political dissidents even when he disagreed with them. That night one of the few things he and Oswald could agree on was their opinion of General Walker—they both criticized the Far Right. Naturally Oswald said nothing about his secret plan. At the Oswalds’ Neely Street apartment, Paine was shocked by Oswald’s rudeness to his wife. At Ruth’s, he became annoyed when he tried to include Marina in their conversation and Oswald seemed to resent having to translate for her. But Oswald was pleased with the evening, for he saw once more how Ruth’s interest in Marina could serve his purposes. The Russian visas hadn’t come through, and if he went ahead with his plan to kill Walker, Marina might need a friend who spoke Russian. During the week Oswald practiced with the rifle.
On April 6 he lost his job. He never held any job for very long, mostly due to his attitude. He resented his employers—any employers. As he had said in Moscow, if he lived in the United States he would face the choice of being an exploiter or one of the exploited, and rather than assume either role he would end up being one of the unemployed. Os
wald appeared to like his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, but eventually began to show his resentment by reading Russian magazines at work—it was reminiscent of the way he had openly read Russian newspapers in the Marines. His employer noticed it, and he also noticed that Oswald’s work often had to be redone. Around the first week of April he informed Oswald he would have to let him go.
To help Oswald find another job, de Mohrenschildt referred him to a friend, Sam Ballen, a native of New York who served on the boards of several Dallas corporations. During a two-hour interview with Ballen, Oswald didn’t mention his recent employment and instead claimed to have learned reproduction work in Russia and New Orleans. Inevitably the conversation drifted into Oswald’s politics: his opposition to racial prejudice and what Ballen later called his “compassion for mankind generally.” Oswald complained that he too was the victim of prejudice because of his stay in the Soviet Union. Although sympathetic, Ballen decided that this young man wouldn’t fit into a team operation—he was “too hard-headed, too independent.” Ballen considered Oswald to be “a truth-seeking decent individual with a bit of Schweitzerian self-sacrifice in him—so much so that I didn’t want him working for me.” For his part, Oswald seemed uninterested in a position that required conformity. He told Ballen, “Don’t worry about me.”
Sometime in early April—the exact time isn’t certain—Oswald staged his first pro-Castro demonstration. With a placard saying “Hands Off Cuba! Viva Fidel!” hanging on his chest, he handed out Fair Play for Cuba literature briefly on a downtown street. Two policemen later reported seeing the demonstration. According to a passerby, when Oswald spotted them coming toward him he muttered, “Oh hell, here come the cops,” and ducked into a nearby store. He wrote the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York to report his demonstration (omitting the appearance of the police) and asked the group to send him “40 or 50 more” of their pamphlets.
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