Oswald's Game

by Davison, Jean

  Thus, Comer Clark’s story contained a rich subtext that neither Clark nor Castro could have known about. It doesn’t seem likely that Clark could have fabricated this story with its myriad of reflections of Oswald’s character and background. But after his free-lance account of Castro’s revelation was published in the National Enquirer, it sank without a trace until it was brought to light by Daniel Schorr in 1977.

  By 1978 the situation had changed. The Garrison investigation had long since collapsed into a fiasco, and the recent revelations about CIA plots to murder Castro had given impetus to a new theory—that Kennedy’s death had been a Cuban retaliation for the murder plots. Early that year the House Assassinations Committee sent a delegation to Havana to meet with Castro. The congressmen and staff members wanted to ask him about two incidents in particular: the warning he had given to Daniel Harker about assassination plots in September 1963, and Comer Clark’s report.

  When the delegation finally got to see him, Castro appeared to be cooperative. Concerning the 1963 impromptu interview with Harker, Castro insisted he had been misunderstood: “I did not mean to threaten by that.… but rather, like a warning that we knew; that we had news about it; and that to set those precedents of plotting the assassination of leaders of other countries would be a very bad precedent.… I didn’t say it as a threat. I did not mean by that that we were going to take measures—similar measures—like a retaliation for that.… For 3 years, we had known there were plots against us. So the conversation came about very casually, you know; but I would say that all these plots or attempts were part of the everyday life.” He added, “We were constantly arresting people trained by the CIA … with explosives, with telescopic target rifles.”

  Castro again made the reasonable argument that it would have been madness for the Cubans to have plotted Kennedy’s death, saying, “That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years, in every possible sense”—an argument that was also implied in a comment Clark quoted him as having made: “It could have been an excuse for another invasion try.” In addition, Mankiewicz and Jones had quoted him as saying “That would have been material for a provocation.” The Committee had no trouble accepting this. A Cuban plot would have indeed been a reckless adventure, and its discovery would probably have destroyed Cuba. Had Castro been planning a retaliation in September 1963, he would hardly have talked about it ahead of time to an American reporter.

  But Castro’s response to their second question took the delegation by surprise. When he was asked about Oswald’s reported threat against President Kennedy at the embassy, Castro said, “This is absurd. I didn’t say that. It has been invented from beginning until the end.” Castro denied that the interview ever took place. He suggested that the journalist’s reputation should be investigated. (Clark had by this time died.) Castro argued that Clark’s story was implausible because, had the threat occurred, “it would have been our moral duty to inform the United States.”

  The Committee disagreed that Cuba would have been obligated to report such a threat. Furthermore, it had access to “a highly confidential, but reliable source” that disputed Castro’s testimony. The source reported that Oswald had “vowed in the presence of Cuban Consulate officials to assassinate the President.” Nevertheless the Committee ultimately accepted Castro’s denial. It decided “on balance” that Oswald didn’t voice a threat to Cuban officials. Its reasoning was somewhat peculiar. The Committee argued in its report that Castro probably would not have lied to American congressmen, because being caught in a lie would have raised sinister implications of direct Cuban involvement.

  Castro may have figured the odds differently. For if he had admitted that the Clark interview was authentic he would have been lending support to Schorr’s theory that his own warning about assassination plots may have inspired Oswald. Thus, while it would have been in Cuba’s interest to reveal Oswald’s threat at the time Jim Garrison was arguing that the CIA had sent Oswald to Mexico City, it was now in Cuba’s interest to deny it.

  Maurice Halperin has written of Fidel Castro, “Like all successful political leaders.… he has been a disciple of Machiavelli, capable of inconsistency, opportunism, and deceit but not for their own sake and always weighing anticipated profits against costs in any political operation.” Halperin also noted that Fidel often said, “We are not afraid of danger. As a matter of fact, we thrive on it. And besides, everyone has to die sooner or later.”

  Had the Cuban premier been an ordinary witness, the Committee might have checked his story more carefully. To back up his argument that the Clark interview never took place, Castro contended that it wasn’t easy to get an interview with him, that even a well-known reporter like Bill Moyers had had difficulty arranging a meeting. While this may well have been true of formal interviews, lengthy impromptu conversations were something else again, as the Daniel Harker and Laura Bergquist interviews demonstrate. (As a matter of fact, it is odd that Castro should have made this argument during the same meeting at which he explained that the warning Harker reported was part of a conversation that “came about very casually.”)

  Second, to refute Comer Clark’s claim that he had spoken with him at a Havana pizzeria, Castro told the Committee delegation that he never went to public restaurants. Whether or not this was true when he said it in 1978, it was certainly not true in earlier years. In 1974 Castro took the visiting writers Mankiewicz and Jones to an Arab restaurant “in the middle of nowhere” and table-hopped to greet all the patrons. And in Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, published in 1967, Lee Lockwood described how Castro drove around a Havana suburb after midnight until he found an “all-night pizzeria” where Castro, Lockwood, and the Swiss ambassador talked for an hour and a half.

  Mankiewicz and Jones later wrote, “Fidel is a former trial lawyer and he shows it. All his arguments follow a carefully structured presentation. By the time he has built his case, if you do not watch out, he has you convinced of things you do not believe.”

  13 … October 1963—Reading between the Lines

  ONE can only guess at Oswald’s thoughts on the long bus ride back to Dallas. It seems clear that he was genuinely disappointed and angry about the red tape he had run into at the Mexican embassies.

  Oswald’s life was a constant circling over the same ground. His quarrel with Azcue might have reminded him of the trouble he’d had getting the Russians to accept him—or of the angry scene at the American Embassy when he tried to give up his citizenship. Bureaucrats were always blocking his path, and whenever he was thwarted he usually reacted with outrage or with some kind of dramatic manipulation. But apparently nothing he tried in Mexico worked.

  When his first defection hadn’t given him what he wanted he came back, much the same as he was, and tried again. One might expect a similar reaction to this latest setback. Oswald seldom gave up on an idea. Faced with an obstacle he maneuvered around it, but he had never reversed his direction.

  But first, there were other matters to attend to. The Warren Commission calculated that Oswald had about $129 left when he returned from Mexico. As soon as he arrived in Dallas on October 3, he filed a claim for his last unemployment check. He spent the night at the Y, and the next day began looking for work. He applied for a job with the Padgett Printing Corporation, and only afterward did he call Marina and hitchhike out to the Paine house in Irving. When they were alone he told Marina about his recent disappointment at the Cuban Embassy: “Ah, they’re such terrible bureaucrats that nothing came of it after all.” He gave her the impression he’d changed his mind about going to Cuba and sending her to Russia.

  It was agreed that Marina would stay on at Ruth’s until after the baby was born while Oswald took a room in Oak Cliff. The Padgett company job fell through when one of the owners of Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall recommended against him, saying he was a troublemaker with “Communist tendencies,” and several other applications brought no o
ffers. At the end of his first week at the rooming house, Oswald’s landlady decided she didn’t want to rent to him any longer. (“I didn’t like his attitude. He was just kind of like this, you know, just big shot.… Just didn’t want him around me.”) When Oswald moved into another rooming house, he signed the register as O.H. Lee.

  In a letter to her mother on October 14, Ruth mentioned that Lee was looking for work in Dallas.

  … He spent last weekend & the one before with us here and was a happy addition to our expanded family. He played with Chris [Ruth’s son], watched football on TV, planed down the doors that wouldn’t close, and generally added a needed masculine flavor. From a poor first impression I have come to like him….

  If Lee can just find work that will help so much. Meantime, I started giving him driving lessons last Sunday (yesterday). If he can drive this will open up more job possibilities & more locations.

  I feel committed to seeing Marina & Lee through this difficult period in their lives. This may mean (tho’ I think it somewhat unlikely) having her & the babies here until spring if Lee has to go East or somewhere looking for work.

  What I would like most is Marina to stay through Christmas (which she has never celebrated—at least American style) then have you in Feb.

  Later that day she and Marina had coffee at a neighbor’s house, and one of the women there, hearing that Lee needed a job, suggested he might try the place where her brother, Wesley Frazier, worked—the Texas School Book Depository. When Oswald telephoned that evening, Ruth told him about this possibility, and he applied the next day. The superintendent, Roy S. Truly, later said, “He looked like a nice young fellow to me—he was quiet and well mannered. He used the word ‘sir,’ you know, which a lot of them don’t do at this time.” Truly told him he could start work the following day as temporary help, filling book orders at $1.25 an hour.

  In the days ahead Oswald would often read a local newspaper during his break in the Depository lunchroom. One of his co-workers once noticed him reading something about politics. On the weekends he got a ride to Ruth’s house with Wesley Frazier, and he would read newspapers there, as well. There was a good deal going on that might have interested him. On October 8 President Kennedy signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. Cuba immediately denounced the treaty, contending that while the U.S. was making an agreement with the Soviet Union, it was increasing its acts of sabotage against Cuba. Kennedy was meanwhile trying to prod the Russians into getting their troops out of Cuba. There were also several newspaper reports on pro-Castro terrorist attacks going on in Venezuela. In South Vietnam the political situation was deteriorating. For some time the American government had been attempting to get Premier Ngo Dinh Diem to make peace with his Buddhist opponents and get on with the real war against the Communists.

  During the weekends Oswald spent at Ruth’s he sometimes talked with Michael Paine, who, although separated from his wife, spent part of his weekends there. Michael didn’t notice any change in Oswald’s political views since he last saw him in April. Oswald’s major theme remained the exploitation of man by man, which he called an unforgivable moral sin. Not only did Oswald feel that American workers were exploited, Paine said, but “he also thought they were brainwashed … that churches were all alike, all the religious sects were the same and they were all apparatus of the power structure to maintain itself in power.” When Paine pointed out that his church was financed by people like himself, Oswald merely shrugged. Paine said, “… his views still stood and it also permitted him, I think, gave him the moral ground to dismiss my arguments because I was here just a product of my environment … and therefore I was just spouting the line that was fed me by the power structure.”

  Despite Lee’s pious concern for the working man, Michael observed that, with the exception of his daughter June, “people were like cardboard” to him. People were either stupid or malicious—the exploited or the exploiters. As for the president, he got the impression that Oswald “didn’t like anybody,” but that he disliked Kennedy less than the politicians to the right of Kennedy. (After one of their conversations, Oswald told Marina that Michael didn’t understand anything about politics. Michael had religion, he said, but he had no philosophy.)

  Like de Mohrenschildt, Paine saw Oswald as a revolutionary—someone who assumed that “the church and the power structure and our education was all the same vile system and therefore there would have to be an overthrow of the whole thing.” Michael thought Oswald had “unreasonable and unrealistic and pervasive” feelings of hostility toward American society in general. He testified, “I thought that he was of the mind that something small or evolutionary changes were never going to have any effect. It had to be, though he never revealed to me what kind of actions or policies he would have advocated or did advocate … it had to be of a rather drastic nature, where kindness or good feelings should not stand in the way of those actions.” When Paine felt moved to say that his own values were diminished in a situation of violence, Oswald, in obvious disagreement, remained silent.

  Michael also noticed that Oswald sometimes got “hot under the collar” but exerted self-control as though he had had considerable practice in holding his position firmly and not getting ruffled. It reminded him of the movie about Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence held a match while it burned down to his fingers and said that “you just learn how to stand the pain.”

  Despite the theoretical talk about violence and revolution, neither Michael nor Ruth had any idea that Oswald was capable of acting on these beliefs. They had no idea he had once tried to assassinate Walker—or that the weapon he used now lay disassembled and wrapped in a blanket among other belongings of the Oswalds in their garage. Michael had moved the bundle out of his way a couple of times and imagined that it contained camping equipment.

  When Oswald left New Orleans he had given Ruth’s address to the post office as his forwarding address, where he continued to receive his copies of The Worker and The Militant as well as the Russian magazines he subscribed to, and Time. The Commission asked Michael Paine if he had ever discussed these publications with Oswald.

  A. Yes, we talked with regard to the … Worker. He said that … you could tell what they wanted you to do by reading between the lines, reading the thing and doing a little reading between the lines. He then gave me an issue to look and see.

  Michael took the paper and glanced over it, thinking to himself, “Here is a person who is pretty, well, out of it again if this is the way he gets his communications from headquarters.” It suggested to him that Oswald “wanted to be a party to something or a part of a group that had objectives.” This conversation happened “fairly soon after his coming back, so let’s say the middle of October.” He didn’t remember which issue of The Worker it was.

  The Commission questioned him further about the incident.

  Q. Did you draw any inference at the time as a result of this conversation with Oswald?

  A. Well, it made me realize that he would like to be active in some kind of—activist. It made me also feel that he wasn’t very well connected with a group or he wouldn’t have such a tenuous way of communication, and I thought it was rather childish … to think that this was his bona fide way of being a member of this Communist cause or something.

  This was the situation Oswald was in—the situation he had been in since he tried to join the Communist cause in New Orleans when he was sixteen. He had recently failed to reach “headquarters” in Cuba. Operating on his own, he had to obtain his ideas by reading between the lines of The Worker and other newspapers. Not that he saw these ideas as literal messages to him—Paine did not think he was irrational. Oswald simply thought he was smart enough to deduce what was going on in the world and decide what to do about it. But Oswald’s statement about The Worker suggests that he believed the newspaper’s call to political action had given him a sanction of some kind to act against Walker.

  The call to revolutionary violence was not entirely in
Oswald’s imagination. An October 1963 issue of The Militant contained a major speech by Castro entitled “What Is Our Line? The Line of Consistent Anti-Imperialism.” Speaking just after the failure of a leftist coup attempt in Santo Domingo, Castro pointed to “a great lesson for the Dominican people and for all the peoples, that there is only one way, there is only one remedy: to liquidate the militarists, to fight the militarists, to defeat the militarists and shoot their leaders.… We must know how imperialism is trying to tighten the knot, when the imperialists are launching a counter-revolutionary offensive. They do not impress us. We are already veterans in this struggle.… But we must know what our duties are in the struggle against the counterrevolutionary offensive of imperialism and in the struggle for the economy. With the rifle and the work-tool, the work-tool and the rifle, with these, with both, we must bring our victory.”

  Friday, October 18, was Oswald’s twenty-fourth birthday, and when he arrived in Irving, Marina and Ruth surprised him with a cake and wine. He seemed touched and self-conscious. Lee and Marina were getting along well. Michael noticed that she sometimes sat in his lap and whispered “sweet nothings” in his ear. On the day following his birthday they went into the living room after supper to watch television together. Marina lay with her head in his lap, half-asleep, while he watched two old movies. Occasionally she felt him sit up straight and strain toward the television set, greatly excited.

  What was he watching that caused this unusual reaction? By an eerie coincidence, the double feature he had chosen echoed the theme of Castro’s public warning: murder plots against Cuban leaders could lead to a retaliation.

  The first movie was Suddenly, in which Frank Sinatra played an ex-GI who planned to shoot an American president. Sinatra’s character took over a house overlooking a railroad station. Holding a rifle, he waited at a window for the president’s train to arrive. But at the end, the train passed by without stopping and Sinatra was killed. The second movie, We Were Strangers, was based on the overthrow of Cuba’s Machado regime in 1933. John Garfield played an American who had gone to Cuba to help a group of rebels assassinate the Cuban dictator by digging a tunnel and planting explosives.