Michael Paine was at work. Someone turned on a radio, and when he heard the Book Depository mentioned, his heart jumped. Frank Krystinik asked, “Isn’t that where Lee Oswald works?” Krystinik thought Paine should call the FBI, but Michael resisted. He didn’t want to accuse Oswald unjustly. Even so, when he went back to his job, his hands trembled so badly he was unable to assemble a vibration meter he’d been working on. Then an eyewitness who had seen the assassin in the window came on the radio. He said that the rifleman fired “coolly,” that he took “his jolly good time,” and then drew his rifle back “just as unconcerned as could be.” Paine thought it sounded like Oswald.
Oswald was arrested at the Texas Theater in Oak Cliff at 1:40 P.M. After a struggle, an officer took from his hand the Smith & Wesson with which he had shot Patrolman Tippit. As he was hauled through the lobby, Oswald was heard to shout, “I protest this police brutality,” and “I am not resisting arrest.” A large crowd of people had gathered outside the theater, and when they saw the policemen emerge with Oswald in tow some of them yelled, “Kill the s.o.b.” and “Let us have him.” The lawmen hustled him into a patrol car and drove away.
Oswald wasn’t visibly shaken. When one of the men in the car asked him if he had killed Tippit because he was afraid of being arrested, Oswald said he wasn’t afraid of anything, and asked, “Do I look like I am scared now?” As they drove into the police department basement, Oswald was asked if he wanted to conceal his face from the photographers. “Why should I cover my face?” he asked. “I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.”
From the written reports and testimony of the police detectives, FBI agents, and Secret Service agents who questioned Oswald at the police station, we have the following account.
His chief interrogator was homicide captain Will Fritz. Fritz recalled that Oswald would talk to him readily “until I asked him a question that meant something, that would produce evidence,” and then Oswald would immediately tell him he wouldn’t answer. Fritz thought he seemed to anticipate what he was going to ask. Others who were there also got the impression that Oswald was quick with his answers and that he appeared to have planned what he was going to say. The one thing Oswald discussed willingly was his political beliefs—he said he was a Marxist and gave his views on civil rights. He said he supported the Cuban revolution.
On Friday afternoon Fritz apprised Oswald of his rights—his immediate response was to say he didn’t need a lawyer. Fritz had just begun asking some general questions about his background when FBI agents Hosty and James Bookhout came in. When Hosty introduced himself Oswald reacted angrily and said, “Oh, so you are Hosty. I’ve heard about you.” He accused Hosty of “accosting” his wife and called the FBI a gestapo. According to one report he added, “I am going to fix you FBI.” During this scene Hosty became 100 percent certain that the unsigned note in his workbox came from Oswald. Unable to calm him down, Hosty took a seat in the corner with Bookhout and let Fritz continue with his interrogation.
In the past, when Oswald was questioned by agents Fain and Quigley and Lieutenant Martello, he had told many calculated lies. Some of his responses now showed the same calculation. When Fritz asked Oswald if he owned a rifle, he replied that he had seen his superviser, Mr. Truly, showing a rifle to some other people in his office on November 20, but he denied owning a rifle himself. He maintained that he had been eating his lunch when the motorcade passed by and that afterward he assumed there would be no more work that day, so he went home and decided to go to a movie. When he was asked why he took his pistol with him, he said it was because “he felt like it.” He claimed that he had bought the pistol from a dealer in Fort Worth. At one point, when Hosty spoke up and asked him if he had ever been to Mexico City, Oswald again displayed anger. According to Fritz, he “beat on the desk and went into a kind of tantrum.” He said he had never been in Mexico City. The interview was interrupted several times for identification lineups in which witnesses identified Oswald as the man they had seen shooting Tippit or running away from the scene.
Sometime that day FBI agent Manning C. Clements asked Oswald for some routine background information, including his previous residences. In his reply Oswald mentioned the addresses of every place he had lived since he returned from Russia—except the Neely Street apartment in Dallas, where Marina had taken pictures of him holding a rifle in the backyard. Instead, he claimed that he had lived on Elsbeth Street for about seven months, that is, the entire time he had been in Dallas in early 1963.
At 7:10 P.M. Oswald was arraigned for Tippit’s murder. Around midnight he was taken downstairs for an interview with the press corps, which had been clamoring to see him. There Oswald said of his arraignment, “I protested at that time that I was not allowed legal representation during that very short and sweet hearing. I really don’t know what the situation is about. Nobody has told me anything except that I am accused of, of murdering a policeman. I know nothing more than that and I do request someone to come forward to give me legal assistance.” A reporter asked, “Did you kill the President?” He answered, “No. I have not been charged with that. In fact nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question.”
Among the observers crammed into the room was Jack Ruby, the owner of a nightclub featuring stripshows. A well-known character in Dallas, a habitual gladhander and publicity-seeker, Ruby was a police buff who knew several dozen members of the local force. He also had an old arrest record for disturbing the peace, carrying a concealed weapon, and assault, and he knew several individuals in the Mafia. Perhaps because of the nature of his business, Ruby often carried large sums of money and a pistol. Despite his rough background, acquaintances had noticed that Ruby, like many other people, seemed greatly affected by the president’s murder.
At approximately 10 o’clock on Saturday morning the interrogation résuméd. Oswald denied that he had told Wesley Frazier he was going to Irving to pick up curtain rods. He said the package he brought to work contained his lunch. He said he had gone to Irving on Thursday because Mrs. Paine was planning to give a party for the children that weekend and he didn’t want to be there then. In fact, the party had been held the weekend before, but if Ruth were questioned about it, he could say he had simply misunderstood. As so often happened, Oswald was twisting the truth to fit his own purposes—it was almost as though he saw reality itself as nothing more than raw material to be shaped and used. Oswald said that when the motorcade passed the building he had been in the second-floor lunchroom with some of his co-workers, one of them a Negro named Junior. In fact, Junior Jarman didn’t see Oswald in the lunchroom that day. Jarman finished eating before noon and went up to the fifth floor to watch the motorcade with Harold Norman and Bonnie Ray Williams. They heard the shots going off over their heads. Norman was at the window directly beneath the sniper and could hear the ejected shells hitting the floor above him.
According to a Secret Service report, Oswald refused to answer any more questions concerning the pistol or rifle until he had seen a lawyer.
… He stated that he wanted to contact a Mr. Abt, a New York lawyer whom he did not know but who had defended the Smith Act “victims” in 1949 or 1950 in connection with a conspiracy against the Government; that Abt would understand what this case was all about and that he would give him an excellent defense.…
Upon questioning by Captain Fritz, he said, “I have no views on the President.” “My wife and I like the President’s family. They are interesting people. I have my own views on the President’s national policy. I have a right to express my views but because of the charges I do not think I should comment further.”
Oswald was returned to his cell before noon.
Seth Kantor had joined the horde of reporters inside the jail, and at one point he saw the prisoner being led through the hall. Reporters were shouting, “Why did you kill the President?” One asked if he blamed the wounded Governor Connally, a former
secretary of the navy, for his dishonorable discharge, and Oswald shouted back over his shoulder, “I don’t know what kind of newspaper reports you are getting but these are not true.” Kantor’s impression of Oswald was visceral: “He was defiant. He looked alert at all times. In his profile, he was sharp-featured. Full-faced, he had a cunning look.” He reminded Kantor of the demonstrators who had disrupted a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in September. The demonstrators had seemed to time their actions to get the best camera angles when the police dragged them out of the room. “This was Lee Harvey Oswald,” Kantor wrote in his notes. “He was living the part of a martyr.” Oswald also told the reporters, “I’m just a patsy.”
On November 23 Aline Mosby picked up a newspaper and saw a photograph of the young defector she had interviewed in 1959. The picture, taken after his arrest, had a caption that said he was “glaring at photographers defiantly.” Looking at his face, Mosby disagreed. She thought Lee Oswald was probably enjoying every minute of it.
That morning the police had returned to Ruth’s house armed with a warrant for a more thorough search than they had conducted the day before, and they found copies of the photographs showing Oswald holding a rifle, and one negative. In the meantime Michael Paine had been questioned about Oswald’s previous residences and mentioned the Neely Street apartment. After lunch Fritz asked Oswald about the Neely address and found that he was “very evasive about this location.”
Afterward Oswald was allowed to speak with his wife. Marina had been apprehensive ever since she first heard from Ruth that the shooting took place near the Depository. She hadn’t known the motorcade would pass by her husband’s place of work. Even if she had, she wouldn’t have suspected he would kill the president—Walker, yes, but not Kennedy. When the police came on Friday she showed them where Oswald kept his rifle. The blanket was still there, neatly tied, but when a policeman picked it up the ends fell limp and she turned ashen, realizing the rifle was gone. That night she had found the two pictures of her husband in June’s baby book. Marguerite had by that time arrived at the Paine house, having heard that her son had been arrested. Marina showed her one of the photographs of Lee brandishing a rifle, and Marguerite groaned and shook her head to indicate that she shouldn’t tell anyone.
Before she went to see Lee that afternoon Marina folded the pictures and stuffed them inside her shoe. She wanted to ask him what she should do with them. Separated by a glass partition they spoke over a pair of telephones. Thinking of the pictures, she asked him, “[C] an we talk about anything we like? Is anybody listening in?”
“Oh, of course,” he said. “We can speak about absolutely anything at all.” And she knew from his tone that he was warning her not to say anything significant.
He assured her everything would work out fine, but she didn’t believe him. He told her she had friends who would help her, and if necessary she could get help from the Red Cross. Marina could tell that he was guilty. If he hadn’t been, she thought, he would have been loudly protesting his arrest, and besides, she sensed that he was saying goodbye to her with his eyes. McMillan has written that Marina didn’t know if he would confess or not: he might claim that his act had been justified, or he might insist that he was innocent. Either way, he would take the opportunity to proclaim his ideas.
Concerning their conversation, Marina testified, “He spoke of some friends who supposedly would help him. I don’t know who he had in mind. That he had written to someone in New York before that. I was so upset that of course I didn’t understand anything of that.… I told him that the police had been there and that a search had been conducted, that they had asked me whether we had a rifle, and I had answered yes. And he said that if there would be a trial, and that if I am questioned it would be my right to answer or to refuse to answer.”
Oswald was perhaps referring to the lawyer in New York, John Abt, who had represented Gus Hall and Ben Davis. Oswald hadn’t written to him, but he had written a letter to the Hall-Davis defense committee in 1962. Abt, an attorney for the Communist party, had never heard of him and would undoubtedly have been horrified to be asked to take this case. The Left certainly had no intention of rallying to Oswald’s cause, even if he claimed he was innocent. Since John Abt’s name had appeared several times in The Worker during the months Oswald was planning his attack on Walker, it’s probable that this was the lawyer he had intended to ask for if he had been arrested after shooting Walker. In any event, it’s clear that Oswald was now planning ahead for his trial, and it’s likely he had already given it considerable thought. Evidently he intended to charge the FBI with harassment and say he’d been framed because of his political beliefs. Even from his jail cell, he still expected to manipulate events. He would try to turn his trial into a political cause célèbre like the Rosenberg case, thus making propaganda and ensuring his place in leftist history.
If this was Oswald’s plan, it was typical of his thinking—grandiose, perverse, manipulative, unrealistic.
Sometime that afternoon Robert Oswald visited his brother and found him “completely relaxed”—he talked “matter-of-factly, without any sign of tension or strain.” As soon as they picked up the telephones in the visiting room, Oswald said, “This is taped [sic].” (When Marguerite spoke with Robert alone at the police station, her first words were, “This room is bugged. Be careful what you say.”) As with the police, Oswald seemed willing to discuss anything but the assassination. Robert later wrote that he asked, “Lee, what the Sam Hill is going on?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know? Look, they’ve got your pistol, they’ve got your rifle, they’ve got you charged with shooting the President and a police officer. And you tell me you don’t know. Now, I want to know just what’s going on.”
He stiffened and straightened up, and his facial expression was suddenly very tight.
“I just don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said, firmly and deliberately. “Don’t believe all this so-called evidence.”
Robert stared into his eyes, trying to find the truth, and Oswald said quietly, “Brother, you won’t find anything there.”
Although Oswald was uncommunicative, he made two statements to Robert that suggest he saw the assassination as an act similar to both his defection and the attack on General Walker. When Robert asked him what he thought was going to happen to Marina and his children, he said, “My friends will take care of them,” and indicated that he meant the Paines. He was depending on other people to look after his family, just as he had done when he tried to kill Walker. Shortly before Robert left, Oswald told him not to get involved in his case, or he might get in trouble with his boss and lose his job. He had said the same thing in Moscow. He told Aline Mosby, “I don’t want to involve my family in this,” and “My brother might lose his job because of this.”
After talking with his brother, Oswald telephoned Ruth and asked her to call John Abt for him, giving her two numbers he had gotten from information. He had already tried to reach the attorney himself. He made no reference to the reason he was in jail, and Ruth was appalled and irritated that he sounded so apart from the situation. He sounded to her “almost as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.” Later she tried to reach Abt, but he was out of town.
Meanwhile the president of the Dallas Bar Association, H. Louis Nichols, had been getting long-distance calls from other attorneys who had seen Oswald’s press conference and were afraid his legal rights weren’t being protected. Nichols decided to offer Oswald his assistance. When he saw Oswald in his cell that afternoon, the prisoner seemed calm and appeared to know “pretty much what his rights were.” Oswald told him he wanted Abt or a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. If he couldn’t get either one, Oswald said, and if he could find a lawyer in Dallas who “believes as I believe, and believes in my innocence—as much as he can, I might let him represent me.” Oswald told Nichols he didn’t think he would need his assistance but that he “mig
ht come back next week.” Nichols left, having satisfied himself “that the man appeared to know what he was doing. He did not appear to be irrational.”
By this time the police lab had enlarged one of the backyard photographs and Fritz had Oswald brought in at six o’clock to confront him with this evidence. Oswald claimed that the photographs were fakes and that he had never seen them before. He said he knew all about photography and that the small picture was a reduced copy of the large one. Fritz reported, “He further stated that since he had been photographed here at the City Hall and that people had been taking his picture while being transferred from my office to the jail door that someone had been able to get a picture of his face and with that, they had made this picture. He told me that he understood photography real well, and that in time, he would be able to show that it was not his picture, and that it had been made by someone else. At this time he said that he did not want to answer any more questions and he was returned to the jail about 7:15 P.M.”
This was probably the line Oswald intended to pursue had the backyard photographs been found after he shot Walker. For years to come there would be a controversy about the authenticity of these pictures. The House Assassinations Committee had a panel of photographic specialists examine the recovered photos and negative. Using sophisticated analytical techniques, the panel could find no evidence of fakery. In addition, the panel used similar techniques to uncover a unique mark of wear and tear on the rifle in the photos that corresponded to a mark on the weapon found in the Depository, and concluded that the two weapons were identical.
On Sunday morning the accused assassin was questioned for the last time by Fritz, two Secret Service men, and a Dallas postal inspector, Harry Holmes. During this interview Oswald denied knowing anyone named A.J. Hidell, the name on an I.D. card in his wallet and on his post office box application, and denied using the name as an alias. He began talking politics again, and said that Cuba should have full diplomatic relations with the United States. Asked if he was a Communist, Oswald said, “No, I am a Marxist but I am not a Marxist Leninist.” When Fritz asked him the difference, Oswald said it would take too long to explain it to him. When a Secret Service inspector asked him if he thought the assassination would have any effect on the Cuban situation, Oswald at first responded with a question. “I am filed on for the President’s murder, is that right? Under the circumstances, I don’t believe that it would be proper [to respond].” Nevertheless, he went on to say that he thought there would probably be no change in America’s attitude toward Cuba with Vice-President Johnson becoming president “because they both belonged to the same political party and the one would follow pretty generally the policies of the other.”
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