Although his hints were more than enough to poison her frame of mind, she did not really believe them. “He has started speaking Russian so badly, he no longer knows what he is saying,” she said to herself. “Besides, he gets pleasure out of tormenting me.” But the fact is, Lee knew very well what he was saying, and he did indeed have a far-reaching scheme. It is a scheme he may already have had in mind when he took the Elsbeth Street apartment in early November. Alexandra Taylor noticed that on the day he moved in, he inspected all the doors and windows with care, perhaps to check whether the neighbors could witness his comings and goings.
— 22 —
The Sanction
For Marina, the month of February 1963 was far and away the worst in all her married life. Lee had been hitting her ever since they arrived in America; in February there was a dramatic change in the style and ferocity with which he did it. No longer did he strike her once across the face with the flat of his hand. Now he hit her five or six times—and with his fists. The second he got angry, he turned pale and pressed his lips tightly together. His eyes were filled with hate. His voice dropped to a murmur, and she could not understand what he was saying. When he started to strike her, his face became red and his voice grew angry and loud. He wore a look of concentration, as if Marina were the author of every slight he had ever suffered and he was bent on wiping her out, obliterating her completely. To Marina it seemed that it was not even a human being he saw in front of him. Most horrifying of all was the gleam of pleasure in his eyes.
Their fights occurred over nothing, with Lee’s anger ballooning up quickly, out of all proportion to the occasion. He became even stingier than usual, and if by accident Marina left some item off the grocery list she gave him, or if she went to a store by herself and bought some item, no matter how cheap, that they did not absolutely require, it might be the cause of another beating.
Marina could defend herself only with words. “Your beating me shows your upbringing,” she said on one occasion.
“Leave my mother out of this!” Lee cried and struck her harder than before.
He stored up every grievance, and at the tiniest pinprick from her, they all came pouring out. “I’m not hitting you just for this,” he would say, naming the pretext of the fight, “but because I’ll never forgive you for running off to your Russians. Oh, what humiliation you made me suffer. Always you go against me! You never, ever do what I want!” Or if they were fighting over one thing, he would ask, “Do you think I’ve forgotten that?” and bring up something entirely different. “I’ll never, ever forget.”
Marina yearned for some sign of affection. But whenever she tried to wheedle it out of him, he would say, “I know what you want,” meaning sex, and Marina’s feelings were so hurt that she would run from the room. His sexual demands were violent. Late on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon he might bark at her. “Stop washing the dishes. Lee’s hot!” and try to force himself on her. He insisted on having sex any time he felt like it, whether Marina wanted it or not. He would pin her down by the arms and legs and take her by force while the tears came pouring down her cheeks.
Marina thought that it was only the violence, the struggle, that made him want her at all. Once she told him he was “crazy.”
“What’s that you said?”
“You’re crazy.”
He grabbed her by the throat and threatened to kill her if ever she said that again.
But the complaint that came up like a refrain was her disloyalty in “running off” to “her Russians.” When she asked why he had begged her to come back, he said it was only because of the baby.
“It wasn’t me you needed at all?”
“No—not at all.”
“There’s nothing for me here, then,” Marina said, crushed.
On another occasion he told her he had asked her back to prove that he had power over her, more power than Bouhe and the other Russians, and that “I could get you back if I felt like it.”
“What on earth do you want from me, Alka? What is it you need?”
“You’re my property,” he said, “and I’ll do with you as I please. So long as I want you, you’ll stay. If not—then off with you. Don’t you forget as long as you live that you belong to me any time I want.”
In Minsk Lee had urged Marina more than once, in matters outside their home, to stand up for herself, “be her own person,” and express her individuality. But now he behaved like a slave owner, smiling triumphantly when he had forced her to beg his forgiveness. Wistfully, Marina recalled a halcyon time, the Stone Age, she thought it was, when she read that there had been matriarchy before patriarchy reared its ugly head. She wished she were in a matriarchy now. Looking back on it with wry humor, Marina describes their life together as “a period of slave ownership with a number of slave revolts in between.” She adds with regret, however, that the “slave revolts” were quickly put down by force. At work Lee’s behavior was also growing more erratic. One day in the darkroom, Lee and another man, each hurrying as usual to meet a deadline, were trying to develop film in the same pan. The man asked Lee to move over a little, and Lee refused, saying he had gotten there first. In the midst of narrow aisles and delicate equipment, they were on the edge of fisticuffs when John Graef spotted trouble on the far side of the darkroom and moved in to break it up. It was this incident that awakened Graef to the fact that of the eighteen or twenty men in the photographic department, not one liked Lee. Graef was slowly reaching the conclusion that “everybody couldn’t be wrong.”1
Lee was also growing more and more secretive. When he started typing school, he began to sign out of work half to three-quarters of an hour later than he had before. On Wednesdays, when he did not have a class, he regularly, and from the outset, signed out even later. It is possible that during this time, when most of the other employees had gone home, Lee rifled the files of Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall and reproduced its tax returns, an item he later appended to a curriculum vitae as an example of his photographic proficiency.2 And it is possible that it was at this time that he produced the forged documents later found in his possession: a Selective Service notice of classification and a Marine Corps certificate of service, both in the name of Alik James Hidell—the name he had used to order the revolver. It is also likely that on his way from work to typing class, he regularly stopped by the post office to see if the gun had arrived, which would account for the fact that he often “slipped into” class late and out of breath.3
Lee’s increasing inability to control himself both at home and at work suggests that emotionally he was in turmoil. What cannot be known is whether his deterioration was the result of a cumulative process that had been taking place for months, or whether in January he suffered some sort of precipitous “breakdown,” triggered perhaps by Marina’s letter to Anatoly on January 7, her brief pregnancy scare on the 10th with its hint of added responsibility, and her subsequent confession of infidelity. The previous fall, in his correspondence with the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party, Lee had made tentative moves toward the peaceful expression of his political views. Signing up for night school on January 14 fitted in with that plan; but it may also have been an indication that he had conceived another plan—a violent, destructive expression of his political views that would require a cover. Ordering a revolver on January 27 under a false name, and his hints to Marina starting the same day that he was thinking of sending her back to Russia without him, both suggest that he was leaning further toward violence. And during the first week of February, he twice misdated his time sheets at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. It was the sort of error he made when he was under stress and in conflict. Gradually, with what appears to have been pain, he was reaching a decision to use the gun.
On Wednesday, February 13, Lee and Marina went to a dinner party at the de Mohrenschildts’. The party had been organized around a showing of the de Mohrenschildts’ film about their adventures in Mexico. Lee had seen the movie before, so he simply ignored it. The other gue
sts, and there were six or eight of them, remember Lee and another young man standing in the center of the room all evening locked in conversation. Each of them stood out: Lee for the informality of his attire (he was wearing slacks and an open-collared shirt while the rest of the men were in business suits), the other for his blond, unmistakably German good looks. He was Volkmar Schmidt, twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, a bachelor, and a geologist for Dallas’s Magnolia Laboratory of Standard Oil of New York. Schmidt had arrived only recently from Germany and was going back there in a week or two on holiday.
Presumably Lee was interested in Germany, and Schmidt in Lee’s account of his experiences in Russia. But George de Mohrenschildt must have been astonished by the rapport between these two young men whose politics, he knew, ought rightly to have set them at war. Lee was a liberal. Schmidt was not. George happened to like Schmidt, but he teased him for being a rabid reactionary, and it was one of his many jokes to call him “Messer Schmidt,” after the Nazi fighter plane of World War II.4
It is not known what Lee and Schmidt discussed, although Schmidt did say later their conversation lasted “several hours” and had been about politics. Schmidt remarked that Lee was “very frank” and “very articulate in his descriptions of US and Russian societies.” He felt that he had a “burning dedication to political truth.” He also felt that the young American had enormous ambition but was resigned, because of his limited education, to being unable ever to fulfill it. Summing up his impression of Lee, Schmidt said: “Oswald did not express any views which would indicate violent future action but appeared to be a violent person.”5
George drove Lee and Marina home after the party, and the talk at first was of nothing but Volkmar Schmidt. George was at the wheel of his convertible, with Lee and Marina in the back seat. Marina remembers Lee’s intense concentration on every word George said, and the use by both of them, for the first time in her hearing, of the word “Fascist,” which is the same in both Russian and English.
“Just imagine.” George leaned back toward Lee and spoke in Russian. “Such a young man! Yet a Fascist from his brains to his bones!”
“Oh, I liked him,” Marina said. “Fancy meeting a real, live Fascist! Are there really any in America?”
“A whole organization,” George explained, in Russian again, and he described the John Birch Society. Schmidt’s ideas, he added, were much like those of the Birchers. “He has such frightful ideas it would make your hair stand on end.”
Then they began to speak in English, a sign that George and Lee were talking politics. Marina could not follow what they were saying, but she has always felt that this evening was a turning point in Lee’s life. She believes that Lee pounced on some remark George made, a remark that affected his later actions. She suspects that George said something that inadvertently, in her words, “influenced Lee’s sick fantasy,” and that Lee, having seized the idea, squirreled it away out of sight so that neither she nor George would guess where it came from.
Not only did George hate the John Birch Society, he was also convinced that a group of Birchers and FBI men had together broken into his apartment while he was in Mexico and rifled his papers. He and Lee had often discussed the John Birch Society and its most visible spokesman, General Edwin A. Walker. Just what it was that George may have said or implied about them on this occasion, or in some earlier discussion, is a matter for speculation. Samuel Ballen, who was George’s closest friend at the time, says that in conversation with Lee as with everybody else, “unconventional, shocking, humorous and irreverent ideas would have been coming out of George all the time.” Asked whether he might have said something like this to Lee about Walker—“Anybody who bumps that bastard off will be doing this country a favor”—Ballen answers, “Exactly.”6 Marina and the Fords agree that these words, or words very like them, were probably spoken by George to Lee on the night of February 13 and possibly on other occasions as well.
What George did not know was that Lee already was thinking of killing Walker. He had ordered his weapon and had been studying maps for two weeks. But he was not yet wholly committed to the deed. Had he been, and had his pistol arrived, he could have shot at Walker that very day, for he had given a well-publicized speech that afternoon on the campus of Southern Methodist University, not far from where de Mohrenschildt lived. Lee was still hesitating.
The evening of February 13 may have been the catalyst Lee required. First there was his talk with Schmidt, who was rumored to be the son of an SS officer and who may have reminded Lee of the attempt on Hitler’s life by officers of his own staff in 1944, which, had it been successful, might have ended the war early and saved the lives of many Germans. Then there was his talk with George, who may again have equated the John Birch Society and General Walker with the “Fascist threat” in the United States. Lee was later to say that “if someone had killed Hitler in time, many lives would have been saved.” He was not original in the way he phrased things, and in this case even his words may have come from Schmidt or de Mohrenschildt. It hardly matters. With or without them to say it for him, it is clear that Lee looked on Walker as the “Hitler” of tomorrow.
So did George, and in this consonance of views with a man whom he admired and whom he very much wanted to impress, Lee may have found the sanction—the permission—he needed to go ahead with his plan. He would at one stroke win George’s respect and even awe, save the United States from fascism, and prove to the world that Lee Harvey Oswald was a dedicated idealist willing to make any sacrifice for the sake of his political beliefs.
As it happened, on the next day the Dallas Morning News announced that Walker would join the well-known right-wing evangelist Billy James Hargis in a cross-country speaking tour to warn against the dangers of communism. The tour, to be called “Operation Midnight Ride,” was to begin February 27 in Miami and end in Los Angeles on April 3. Dallas was not on the itinerary.
On the night of the de Mohrenschildts’ party, February 13, or the night after the announcement of the Walker tour, February 14, Marina is not sure which, she heard Lee talking in his sleep. He spoke very loudly and enunciated each word so clearly that Marina sat upright in bed, thinking he was talking to her. But he was speaking in English, not Russian, and was repeating the same words again and again. Marina did not understand what he was saying, but it was the first time he had talked in his sleep since they were in Minsk, when Lee was making up his mind to return to the United States and was afraid that he would be arrested by American officials.
The next morning Marina repeated Lee’s words to him.
“Where did you find that out?” Lee looked stunned.
“You told me in your sleep.”
“Wake me up next time.”
“And what were you saying?” Marina as always was afraid he was talking about an old girlfriend.
“Nothing at all.” He smiled out of his enigmatic smiles. “Better for you not to know.”
“I’ll know all your secrets soon.”
Again, he said nothing. But he was anxious after that and once or twice in the weeks that followed asked whether he had talked in his sleep the night before.
Right after the initial announcement, there were more stories about Walker’s anti-Communist, anti-Castro crusade. They made Walker seem very real, very human, and very close. Indeed, he was close; he lived in Dallas just across the river from Lee. The stories must have been electrifying to Lee, yet filled him with anxiety at the same time. Either he must kill Walker right away, or he would have to wait for six weeks, until Walker returned from his tour. Meanwhile the revolver had not arrived, a choice of weapon that indicated that Lee meant to kill Walker at close range and at the risk of his own life. There seemed to be no question of obtaining another weapon. Lee was not the man, at any time, to show his face in a gun shop and buy a weapon openly.
Lee was apparently very anxious for his gun to arrive. His colleagues John Graef and Dennis Ofstein remember that he was always headed for the post off
ice when he left work, and yet whenever they offered him a ride he invariably declined. He was checking for his gun. He could pick up a package at the post office only between 8:00 and 5:30 on weekdays, hours when he was normally at work, or between 8:00 and 12 noon on Saturdays. On Friday, February 15, the day after the Walker trip was announced, Lee signed out of work at 5:15 P.M., early enough to pick up a package at the post office. The next morning, Saturday, for the only time in all his months at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, he signed in at 9:00 A.M., a full hour later than usual, an indication that he may again have stopped by the post office hoping to pick up the revolver. It was not there.
That same day Lee received another piece of news that must have confounded his plans and emotions—until he found a way to fit them together. Marina told him on his return from work that she was pregnant. This time she was sure of it. Lee was pleased. Marina was not. What do you expect, he asked, when you don’t even bother to take precautions? June had had her first birthday only the day before, and Lee said: “Very good. Junie is one year old, and Mama is cooking up a present. A baby brother. What better present could there be?” He crowed and exclaimed for a day or two, and then, uncharacteristically, he seemed to forget all about it. He did not take Marina to a doctor.
On Sunday, February 17, the Dallas Morning News carried a long feature story on Walker’s “crusade.” It was the story that made Walker seem the closest and most human of any, and it stressed the anti-Castro side of his trip. On that very day Lee made good his earlier threats. He forced Marina, a Soviet citizen, to sit down and write to Nikolai Reznichenko, chief of the consular section of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, asking officially that she and June be allowed to return to the USSR alone, without Lee. In a message that was dictated by Lee, Marina asked the embassy to give her “material aid” for the journey. Having moved heaven and earth to get his wife and child out of Russia, Lee, less than a year later, was asking the Soviet government to pay for their return.7
Marina and Lee Page 41