But it did not. The couple was divorced in June of 1948, and Marguerite resumed the name of Oswald. John was forced to testify against his stepfather, but Lee got out of it on the grounds that he was under age, being only eight and a half years old, and would not know “right from wrong and truth from falsehood.”12
Once again, money was thought to be the cause of the breakup, for Marguerite, who was better off financially than she had ever been, nonetheless complained that Ekdahl was not nearly as generous with her financially as she had hoped.13 One couple who knew the Ekdahls saw it differently. They thought it was Marguerite’s preference for her youngest child, Lee, that precipitated the divorce. She refused to discipline Lee or allow Ekdahl to do so. The wife says that after Lee’s father died, Marguerite “dumped all her love on Lee. She loved him to death and she spoiled him to death. She was too close to Lee.” It got so he “demanded so much of his mother’s attention” that she and Ekdahl “never could be alone.”14 Even Ekdahl, a sweet-tempered, patient man, complained.
The divorce was a disaster for all the boys. The first thing Marguerite did was drive to Port Gibson, Mississippi, and drag John and Robert out of the Chamberlain-Hunt Military Academy. They were heartbroken; they had been happy there and might have stayed on scholarships. But Marguerite wanted them home so they could help support her. It was downhill all the way after that—a succession of grubby houses in Fort Worth. “We were back down in the lower class again,” John recalls.15 As for Lee, so cramped was the family for space that he shared a double bed with his mother from the age of eight to ten and a half, literally moving into Ekdahl’s place.
Lee was apparently Marguerite’s favorite. In any dispute among the boys, she always sided with Lee. One night a neighbor was paying a call when Lee came hurtling through the kitchen door, chasing John and brandishing a long butcher knife. He hurled the knife at his brother; it missed and hit the living room wall. “They have these little scuffles all the time,” Marguerite said calmly.16 Not only did she excuse Lee and overlook the injury he might have done to John, but she sanctioned violent behavior by Lee when he was only eight years old.
By the autumn of 1948, all except Lee were working. Marguerite was a saleslady in a department store; Robert, aged fourteen and in the ninth grade, worked in a grocery store on Saturdays and on weekdays after school; and Marguerite demanded that John, who was sixteen and about to enter the eleventh grade, give up school and go to work full time. Burning with resentment, John complied and got a job as a stock boy in a department store.17
It was at this moment of rebellion and sacrifice that John began to turn against his mother. He saw that part of the family’s joyless struggle against poverty had its existence only in his mother’s head. She was a tough and tenacious businesswoman, and John observed that no matter how poor she claimed to be, she always had enough “to buy and sell a house.”18 Each time she did so, she made a profit, and she had by now bought and sold a good many houses. Still, the struggle against poverty went on. Trying to create a family life for themselves at home, the boys would be having a “friendly time” when their mother came in late from work. Then, says John, “we all got into that depression rut again.”19
Nor did Marguerite provide for the sons who were helping provide for her. She skimped on food; John, who weighed 130 to 140 pounds when he came back from military school, dropped to 118 pounds and regained his normal weight only after he had left home for good. When it came to clothing, Marguerite dressed her boys so shabbily that they were taunted by the neighborhood children. A neighbor who was a witness of their life is harsh in his judgment of Marguerite. He says that she was “selfish,” did not care if her boys “were embarrassed about their dress,” and plainly considered them a “burden.”20
John and Robert felt like strangers to Marguerite, as if she did not know them very well and as if they, too, were unaccustomed to her. They missed Captain Herbert D. Farrell, the head of their military school, whom they looked up to and whose discipline they had readily accepted. But their alienation went deeper. They had left home at the ages of six and eight, and apart from one interruption, they had been away for eight years. Exposed to values vastly different from hers, they had adopted them and acquired a detachment that was to protect them from her and her claims. By the time they came home, they were lost to Marguerite forever.
Robert had noticed from an early age that “our family was not like other families.” When the parents of other children came to visit at his boarding school, Robert saw that they enjoyed their children. But his mother did not enjoy him. “We learned, very early, that we were a burden. By the time we were teenagers, she felt that we should take over some of her burden.” The idea even crossed Robert’s mind that his mother might want to put him and John up for adoption; anything to be rid of her burden. “Mother felt the world owed her a living,” Robert says. “She felt that her life was harder than the lives of most people. All of us could feel that she wanted to be free of the responsibility—wanted to let someone else face it.”21
John speaks even more sharply about his mother’s obsession with money. “Money was her God,” he says, adding that her one thought was to “get as much out of me and as much out of Robert as she could.”22 He saw that his mother’s obsession, her placing money where other values ought to have been, had turned their family life upside down. No decision had ever been made on the basis of the children’s well-being, but only on the basis of what was cheapest and best for Marguerite. Instead of the more common sight of a mother making sacrifices to feed and clothe her children and give them an education, he and Robert were sacrificed to give their mother the feeling of financial security she would not have had if they had all been millionaires. Thus Marguerite’s exploitiveness caused her to lose the one thing that might have given her a better life—her children’s love. She embittered them and turned them against her.
Nor was she content to pocket their money and treat her older sons as men. She tried to control their lives to the last detail. She forbade them friends, once locked Robert out for going to a movie, and shrieked at him that he was “on dope” when she found cigarettes in his pocket. And when he was at an age to feel it most poignantly, she destroyed a romance of Robert’s because the girl was Italian and crippled.
Somehow Robert and John survived. They shrugged off their mother’s tirades. And they took similar paths. Both quit high school for a year to help support her. Both insisted, over her objections, on returning to school. Battling her every inch of the way, John graduated, and both left home early to enter the service. John at eighteen joined the Coast Guard, and Robert at eighteen the Marine Corps. Both genuinely felt that by leaving home they would be relieving their mother of a burden. But the real reason Robert and John left was that Marguerite had given them no choice. If they were to salvage anything of themselves, they simply had to get away.
Lee’s reaction to Marguerite was different. His mother’s ire did not fall on him often, but when it did, he was unable to shrug her off as his brothers had. Instead, he would “sulk or pout,” “get upset,” brood, or go off by himself to watch television or play with the dog. The one thing he did not do was talk back. He was under his mother’s thumb. Robert’s departure for the service in July of 1952 left Lee face to face with his mother. He now had no brothers to intercede for him. Twelve-year-old Lee was on his own.
Robert had been gone about a month when Marguerite piled Lee and their possessions into her car and drove to New York. John was living there now. He was still in the Coast Guard, he had an eighteen-year-old bride and a baby, and Marguerite moved right in. On the first day they were there, Marguerite came out of her room crying because Lee had slapped her, and John immediately saw that Lee was no longer the docile child he had known. All of a sudden he was boss.23
One day John’s wife, Marge, spoke to Lee about his rudeness to Marguerite. He gave her a sharp reply and after that treated her as rudely as he treated his mother. A few days later he was
watching television and Marge asked him to turn down the volume. He took out a knife, opened the blade, and moved menacingly toward her. Marguerite entered the room and told him to put the knife away. Lee hit her.
When John came home that night, he listened to both sides of the story. Marguerite, as she had done before, played the episode down. Lee had been whittling, she said, and Marge, seeing the knife in his hand, thought he was threatening her. It was just a misunderstanding. John asked Lee his side of the story, and Lee refused to speak to him. “I was never able to get to the kid again,” John recalls.24 It was true. Lee did not speak another word to John for ten years.
Marguerite and Lee moved up to the Bronx after that. Marguerite went to work and Lee went to junior high school. But he did not find it easy. His classmates made fun of him for his blue jeans and his Texas drawl. Lee was intelligent, but without knowing it he suffered from the reading disability (dyslexia) that must have caused him to feel frustrated from his earliest days in school, as if something impalpable, something he could at most only sense, was holding him back and keeping him from doing as well as others less intelligent than he.25 By the time he was thirteen and in the Bronx, Lee had largely compensated for the disability, but his years of undiagnosed struggle had, typically, left him with a legacy of low self-esteem and disruptive behavior that might have plagued him even had his home life been a happy one.
By January of 1953, when he had been in school less than four months, Lee had played truant two days out of three. With his mother working full time and coming home late, he spent some days at the Bronx Zoo, which he loved, and other days riding the subway as far as he could on a single fare. He got to know the city well, especially the area around Times Square. At home he sat glued to the television set watching dramas of mystery and violence. One of his favorites was I Led Three Lives, the story of Herbert Philbrick, an FBI agent who posed as a Communist spy.
Truant officers caught up with him, and in the spring of 1953, Lee was remanded to Youth House, a detention home on the Lower East Side, where he was sent for psychiatric observation. He was found to be “seriously withdrawn, detached, and very hard to reach,” the troubled relationship with his mother apparently the core of his problems.26 A social worker named Evelyn Strickman, later Mrs. Siegel, interviewed Lee and Marguerite. Miss Strickman found that Lee did have some ability to relate to others, an ability she found surprising in view of his solitary existence and his emotional starvation at home. Lee said his mother never punished him. She told him to go to school, but she did not make him do so, and he wished she would. “He just felt his mother ‘never gave a damn’ for him. He always felt like a burden she had to tolerate.” Lee added that he had to “be my own father” and that he and his mother were “very much” alike, since neither of them talked very much. He admitted to having fantasies of being powerful and killing people but declined to talk about them. Miss Strickman concluded that Lee had “suffered serious personality damage,” which might be partially repaired if he could get help soon.27
Marguerite was exceedingly reluctant to talk to a social worker at all. She complained to Miss Strickman that the truant officers were making a “criminal out of” Lee. She could manage him if they left him to her. She saw nothing wrong in his seclusiveness, saying she was not gregarious herself and had never felt the need to make friends. She was more interested in Lee’s physical than his psychiatric examination. She was dissatisfied with an examination of his genitalia, but on being told that they appeared normal, “she looked at once relieved and disappointed.” Miss Strickman concluded that “she didn’t seem to see him as a person at all, but as an extension of herself.”28
These reports were forwarded to the chief psychiatrist at Youth House, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, who interviewed Lee and wrote that he had a “vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power.” Lee told the psychiatrist that he was “very poor” in school, a remark that impressed Hartogs, since Lee’s performance, despite his truancy, was not poor. To Hartogs the contrast between Lee’s actual grades and his evaluation of them showed the “low degree of … self-esteem at which this boy has arrived, mainly due to feelings of general inadequacy and emotional discouragement.”29
Concluding that Lee was not psychotic, Hartogs recommended that he be released from Youth House and placed on probation by the Juvenile Court on condition that he be treated by a male psychiatrist and Marguerite be urged to seek psychotherapy. But Marguerite refused help for either of them. Instead, she condoned Lee’s truancy, claiming that she saw nothing wrong with it and that in Texas children stay out of school for months at a time. On this as on other occasions she was to prove that she preferred Lee intact, preferred to keep him as he was rather than afford him a chance either to grow or to change. Again and again, faced by a choice between what was unhealthy and what was healthy for her son emotionally, Marguerite reached for the unhealthy. Time was to show that Lee did not have a single antisocial impulse to which she did not, in one way or another, lend her sanction and support.
Lee was scheduled to report at intervals to the Juvenile Court, but Marguerite repeatedly telephoned his probation officer that she and Lee could not be there. In school the following fall, Lee was disruptive and belligerent, and his probation officer, having concluded that he had nothing whatsoever going for him in his home environment, tried unsuccessfully to place him in a children’s home. Finally, the judge referred Lee’s case to a social agency called the Big Brothers. On January 4, 1954, a representative of the Big Brothers called on the Oswalds. Marguerite informed him that her boy did not need counseling, and besides, they were going to New Orleans. The visitor reminded her that she was not free to leave the city without permission of the court because Lee was still on probation. Less than a week later, on January 10, 1954, mother and son arrived in New Orleans.
Marguerite rented an apartment from Myrtle and Julian Evans, whom she had known while she was married to Ekdahl. The Evanses observed that fourteen-year-old Lee was even more “spoiled,” more “arrogant,” and more difficult to control than he had been as a little boy. Mrs. Evans recalls Lee’s behavior when he came home from school. “Margie would be downstairs talking to me and he would come to the head of the stairs. He would just stand up there and yell, ‘Maw, how about fixing something for me to eat?’ and she would jump up right away and go running upstairs to get something for him.” Mrs. Evans added that Lee used to “holler” and “scream like a bull.” Marguerite never objected. “Her whole life was wrapped up in that boy and she spoiled him to death.”30
In New Orleans Lee gave up his truant ways and attended school regularly. He began to visit the public library and read. With most people he was quiet and aloof. Only with his mother was he demanding and loud. Like his mother, and unlike his brothers, Lee left school after the ninth grade. But like John and Robert he could not wait to leave home. With his mother’s connivance he tried to enlist in the Marine Corps at sixteen. The attempt failed, and for a year after that, he held jobs as an office boy or messenger boy. The following fall mother and son were in Fort Worth. There, Lee briefly attended the tenth grade but dropped out to enlist in the Marines on October 24, 1956, six days after his seventeenth birthday.
Lee’s decision to enter the Marine Corps was a dress rehearsal for every other major turning point in his life, and it contained the same elements—rejection of Marguerite and those aspects of her character that he perceived to exist within himself. Throughout his childhood Lee had been exposed to one person unremittingly: Marguerite. The impact of her rigid and unyielding personality upon his emerging one had been undiluted. He had no one else, and especially no man, on whom he could pattern himself. And so he did the only thing he could. He conquered his mother. He took over her personality, and he became very like her.
He sensed it—and he loathed it. By joining the Marine Corps, he would not only get away from her but would find a sheltering substitute that would also make up for his lack of a father. But t
he Marine Corps, too, failed him as a parent, and Lee defected to Russia.
Marina once commented with insight that Lee must have been rejected as a child or he would not have become a Marxist. It is true. In Russia, in what he conceived to be a perfect Marxist society, Lee was again looking for an impersonal mother, a society that would give to him “according to his needs,” without subjecting him to the angry vagaries of his real mother. Russia was, moreover, a society that was supposed to have ended “exploitation,” such as he and Robert and John had known at the hands of Marguerite. But once again the substitute failed. Lee rejected Russia and came back to his mother country and the real mother who was at the heart of it all.
By then each of Lee’s decisions, including his suicidal gestures, was in part a reenactment of his original attempt to reject his mother and that aspect of himself that was like her. Each time, of course, a new layer of experience had been added; the attempt was a compound of the old and the new; the emotional fallout was heavier; and the debris was more difficult to decipher. But underneath it was the same decision, and there is a sense in which, after he was seventeen, Lee never did anything new. For the truth is that he had lost his chance. Marguerite’s upbringing; the combination of neglect, resentment, exploitation; the surfeit of some things and starvation of others that is known as spoiling; a spoliation of the emotions—all this had done its work.
John Pic once said that from the moment Lee was born he had the feeling that “some great tragedy” was going to strike him.31 And of course he was right. Lee’s tragedy lay in the double conquest of the mother he despised. He had conquered her first by becoming like her. And he had conquered her again by winning the battle for her affections. She loved him better than Ekdahl, better than his brothers. She made him feel that he was special. Yet his chances of achieving maturity rested on his perceiving that it was one thing to be special to Marguerite, quite another to be special in the world outside. The fact that he had unlimited prerogatives with is mother did not mean he had unlimited prerogatives with everybody else. If Lee was ever to grow up, he had to relinquish the feeling that he was special, that he was at the center of the universe, and trade it for another and better incentive system. But far from giving up that feeling, he was to spend the rest of his life proving that he meant it.
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