Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  — 30 —

  “You Understand Me”

  One night just before he was arrested, Lee was shaving in the bathroom. June asked him for a piece of soap from the cabinet, and he absentmindedly gave her Marina’s makeup mirror instead. She banged it on the toilet seat, and the mirror slid out of its frame and shattered against the toilet pipes. Marina cried. To her superstitious mind the shattered mirror meant bad luck. She was afraid that something was going to happen to her or the baby she was expecting in October.

  President and Mrs. Kennedy were expecting their child just a few weeks before that. The Oswalds had been discussing Mrs. Kennedy’s pregnancy ever since it had been announced. Lee hoped it would be a girl; Marina wanted them to have a boy. She expected a son and wanted Jackie to have the same. One day in August—the 7th—Lee came home looking cheerful.

  “Guess what, Mama? Jackie’s had her baby, and it’s a boy.”

  He asked Marina, not for the first time, what sex their child would be, and again she predicted a son. “I can believe you this time,” he said, “especially since you were right about theirs.”

  Gently, because he knew Marina was worried about their own baby, he went on to break the news that all was not well with the Kennedys’. The doctors were afraid for his life and had rushed him to a special hospital. The doctors, Lee added, would be the best, and the baby would probably survive.

  The next day Lee listened to bulletins on the radio about the baby. Each time she heard the name “Kennedy,” Marina asked the news. “Still the same,” he would say, but Marina noticed that he was anxious and more and more reluctant to tell her anything. As evening came on, he admitted that Patrick Kennedy was very sick and the doctors did not have much hope.

  Coming on top of the broken mirror, the news signified to Marina that things would go badly for their baby, too. “For heaven’s sake,” she said to Lee, “if it’s a choice between me and the baby, keep the baby.”

  “Other babies we can have,” he said. “Junie has to have a mother.”

  Marina had not yet even seen a doctor, and she thinks that both she and Lee were anxious about the same thing: if the president’s baby could not be saved—the president, for whom everything could be done—then what about their baby?

  “If anything happened to our baby, who would care?” Marina asked.

  “No, no, you’re not to worry,” Lee tried to reassure her. “You’ll be taken care of. Once you’re in the hospital, the doctors don’t care whose baby it is. They do the same for everyone. I’ll borrow money. I promise you, you’ll never be thrown out of the hospital.”

  When the news came over the radio early on August 9 that Patrick Kennedy had died during the night, Marina wept. Lee tried to comfort her. Maybe it was better for the baby to die rather than be sick all its life.

  Jackie was frail, he said. She had lost other babies. He thought he had even read somewhere that she got sick on planes.

  “We’ll have an easier time,” he said. “We haven’t any money, and maybe we can’t get good doctors. But you’re strong. We’ve got a baby already. Ours will be healthy. Everything will be all right.”

  Friday, August 9, the day Patrick Kennedy died, was the same day Lee was arrested. And as soon as he was released, he started stamping leaflets again. He and Marina sat many nights after that, she sewing and he pausing now and then to listen as she tried to talk him out of it. Sometimes he stole the leaflets from the closet when she was not looking and tried to stamp them on the sly. She told him to do it openly. “Up to your old games again, are you, big boy?” she said.

  “For God’s sake shut up,” he said. “Why did God send me a wife with such a long tongue? I’ve been a good boy all day. Why can’t you leave me be at night?”

  Marina was trying to drag him back to reality and make him see himself as others saw him. She told him he was no genius, “not like a tall pine tree on a flat plain,” towering above everybody else. Even if he were clever and everyone else stupid, he still had to understand how others looked on things before he could win them over. How could you convince anyone, living in the clouds and taking into account nobody’s views but your own?

  “Be content to be an ordinary mortal, as you are,” Marina said. “You’re nobody special. Cuba has lived without you, and it can continue to get along without you now. One Lee Oswald can’t do anything. Do you think you’re such a great man that you’re the only one who can help?”

  Cuba was “a tiny country surrounded by enemies,” Lee explained. “If only everyone would do a little, the way I do, then we could help Uncle Fidel. With these leaflets I can wake up the American people.”

  Marina said sarcastically that she had never seen leaflets passed out except in old movies of the Russian Revolution. It surely would be fascinating to see it happen in real life. “Look at our neighbors,” she said, “the people living all around us. They don’t care about leaflets. They are peace-loving people, busy with their families. They don’t want a revolution. No one does, here. If it’s a revolution you’re waiting for, I tell you, this country isn’t ready for it yet.”

  “You’re right,” Lee sighed. “I ought to have been born in some other era, much sooner or much later than I was.” “I know, but you were born now,” Marina said. “Better forget the whole thing.” Lee added that he had no desire to be like their neighbors. “They’re petty bourgeois. I’m not interested in the stupid things they care about.”

  Marina did not mention the obvious—that he ought to be out looking for work rather than spending the little money they had on guns and leaflets and fines. But she did say, “Poor great man sits here all by himself. He’s part of a great cause, and yet he has nothing to eat. Nobody sees that he’s a genius.”

  “You laugh now,” Lee said to her. “But in twenty years, when I’m prime minister, we’ll see how you laugh then.”

  Their conversations went on like this for weeks, and it seemed there was nothing Marina could say to convince her husband that he was only an ordinary person. Her efforts were further subverted by the letter Lee received in early August from Arnold Johnson of the Information and Lecture Bureau of the Communist Party. Perfunctory as it was, this letter, together with Vincent Lee’s letter of May 29, contributed, Marina thinks, to Lee’s feeling that he was a great man—a man of loftier concerns than the common herd.

  “Okay,” she said to him, as he was stamping leaflets one night. “So you take two hundred of these things. You go out on the street and give them to people. They toss them away. Has one person come to you as a result of them? People don’t care about that here.”

  Lee’s eyes filled with tears. He threw down his leaflets and read Johnson’s letter aloud. “See this?” he said, waving it in front of her. “There are people who understand me and think I’m doing useful work. If he respects what I’m doing, then it’s important. He’s the Lenin of our country.”

  Lee had already told Marina that American Communists were not like Russian ones.1 The Communists in Russia are careerists, he said. They join for a job or an apartment. Here it’s like Russia in the old days. The members are people of principle. They work underground, in conditions of persecution. Knowing Lee’s respect for the American Communists, Marina was routed. “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead and stamp your papers if it makes you happy.”

  On Friday, August 16, wholly unchastened by his arrest just a week before, Lee waited with unaccustomed patience for Marina to iron his favorite shirt. He had already called the local TV stations to tell them that there would be a Fair Play for Cuba demonstration that day in front of the Trade Mart building in downtown New Orleans.2

  Lee hired two recruits, a nineteen-year-old boy named Charles Hall Steele Jr. and another young man who has never been identified, to help him hand out his leaflets. The fifteen- or twenty-minute demonstration went off without trouble, and pictures of Lee were shown on the television news that night.

  Marina refused to go to the Murrets’ to watch the broadcast. “
I see you every day at home in all forms. I don’t want to see you on TV. Besides, how come you’re not ashamed to telephone the stations yourself?” Marina was appalled that her husband had sought publicity. To her it was very poor form. But it was just what Lee wanted, and there was more to come.

  At 8:00 A.M. the next day, Saturday, August 17, William K. Stuckey, a young reporter with a weekly radio show on station WDSU, drove up to the Oswalds’ in search of Lee, whose name and address he had obtained from Carlos Bringuier. New Orleans was a hotbed of right-wing political activity, and now that a bona fide left-wing organization had appeared, Stuckey wanted to cover it on his program, “Latin Listening Post.” He expected to find a “folk-singer type,” a fellow in sandals and beard, and was startled when a clean-cut young man appeared, clad only in Marine Corps fatigues—no shirt—and invited him onto the porch. He would like to ask Stuckey in for coffee, Lee said, but his wife and child were still asleep.

  Stuckey explained who he was and invited Lee to record a five-minute interview for his show that night. If Lee would come to the station about 5:00 P.M., well before the 7:30 broadcast, they could have a long interview and Stuckey could cut it to the required few minutes. Lee accepted.

  He showed up punctually and recorded an interview of nearly forty minutes. Then, in Lee’s presence, Stuckey cut the tape to four and a half minutes. Lee was pleased as he heard the tape being played back.3 He felt he had “scored a coup.” He had not allowed himself to be lured out of his depth or led into talking about subjects he did not wish to pursue. Nor was anything said about his years in Russia, since Stuckey knew nothing about them.

  Stuckey, too, was pleased, and he used the edited tape on his program that evening. He found Oswald highly “articulate,” a man who seemed “deliberate” about every word he spoke and every gesture he made, the sort who would inspire confidence because of his self-control.4 He was more than a little amused that such a man should have materialized as a pro-Castro organizer in kooky, anti-Communist New Orleans. Hoping to persuade the news director of his station to let him run the entire thirty-seven-minute tape, he asked Lee to call him on Monday.

  The news director would have none of it. Indeed, he said, there had been an angry public reaction already. Rather than run the uncut tape, he urged Stuckey to schedule a radio debate with some local anti-Communists to refute Oswald.5

  With his usual imperturbable punctuality, Lee telephoned Stuckey on Monday and was asked to take part in a debate on Wednesday, August 21. The other participants were to be Carlos Bringuier—“to add a Cuban flavor,” Stuckey said—and Edward Scannell Butler, director of the Information Council of the Americas, a propaganda organization that taped interviews with Cuban refugees and refugees from Iron Curtain countries and distributed them to radio stations south of the border. Lee agreed to the debate.

  Meanwhile, Stuckey had decided to do some checking on Oswald. That same Monday he made the entire thirty-seven-minute tape available to the local FBI office, where the stenographer pool made a transcript, then returned the tape to Stuckey along with a copy of the transcript.6 While he was talking to an FBI source over the telephone that day, Stuckey, as he remembers it, was put through to the chief or deputy chief of the New Orleans bureau, and this man read aloud to him over the phone portions of Oswald’s FBI file, including the facts that he had been to Russia, tried to renounce his US citizenship, stayed there nearly three years, and married a Russian woman. Stuckey went to the FBI office and was permitted to examine the file, as well as newspaper clippings from Moscow at the time of Oswald’s defection.7

  While Stuckey was at the FBI office, Edward Butler received a visit from Carlos Bringuier and a fellow Cuban exile, Carlos Quiroga, who had done some investigating of their own. On the evening of the demonstration in front of the Trade Mart, Quiroga, posing as a Castro sympathizer, had paid Oswald a call to see what he could find out. Oswald, who suspected that Quiroga was an agent either from Bringuier or from the FBI, told him nothing. But while the two men were talking on the porch, June came running out and spoke to her father in Russian. Bringuier and Quiroga reported the incident to Butler and told him they had information that Oswald had been to Russia and had a Russian wife. Butler tried to reach someone in Washington by telephone.8 Later in the day he informed Stuckey that he, too, had learned of Oswald’s Russian background—from someone at the “House Un-American Activities Committee.”9

  Stuckey and Butler agreed over the telephone that they would bring Oswald’s Russian past to light on the program, expose him as a Communist sympathizer, and destroy his organization.

  On Wednesday Lee arrived at the station first, wearing a heavy flannel suit that was totally wrong for the New Orleans heat, and looking nervous because he knew that this time he faced opposition. He had been practicing at home all day. He wrote down what he wanted to say on scraps of paper, then he strode around the living room delivering his remarks with what he thought were appropriate gestures.

  When Stuckey arrived, Lee joshed him a bit about inviting people “to gang up on me.” Bringuier was the next to appear; Lee went up to shake hands, and Bringuier remarked humorously that if ever Lee wanted to join his side, the anti-Castro side, he would have nothing against him personally. Lee answered good-naturedly that he believed he was right and was doing his best.

  The debate was taped for broadcast that evening, and it was a disaster for Lee. Stuckey started off by announcing that Oswald had a Russian past, had tried to renounce his US citizenship, and had concealed it on their interview only a few days before. The rest of the “debate” amounted to a verbal pummeling: did not Oswald’s self-proclaimed Marxist faith and his residence in the USSR signify that the FPCC “chapter” of which he was “secretary” had to be Communist? Lee had been sandbagged, and there was little he could do but keep his temper, which he did.

  Afterward he looked “dejected,” and Stuckey invited him to have a drink. They went to Comeaux’s, a bar down the street from the station, where Lee slowly nursed a beer. When Stuckey pointed out that he was not doing well with his beer, Lee answered that actually he was accustomed to vodka—his father-in-law, a colonel in the Red Army, had taught him to drink it straight.10

  Lee told other lies, as well as one or two truths, to impress Stuckey. And in general Stuckey was impressed. He thought Lee was open, friendly, relaxed, and perhaps even relieved that his Russian past at last was out in the open. But Stuckey also got the impression that Lee, without being arrogant exactly, felt he was living in a world of clods, of men and women who were his intellectual inferiors.11

  In fact, Lee was far from relieved. “Damn it,” he said to Marina when he returned home, “I didn’t realize they knew I’d been to Russia. You ought to have heard what they asked me! I wasn’t prepared, and I didn’t know what to say.”

  Still, he was anxious to hear what he had said. He called the Murrets to let them know about the program. They were not amused. An irate Dutz said later that they had not heard the whole of the program, “but enough.”12

  Long before the program was to go on the air, Lee switched on the radio and sat in the kitchen waiting. “Come quickly,” he called out to Marina. “I’m about to speak now.”

  Marina did not understand who was saying what, but she could tell who was on what side and that Lee was claiming to be secretary of an organization. She also could tell from his voice when he was lying.

  Afterward she asked, “Are they such fools there at the station that they actually believe you have an organization? One man is chairman, secretary, and sole member!”

  “Maybe the debate will help, and others will join,” Lee said.

  “I doubt it,” Marina replied. Her reaction was not one of pride at hearing her husband speak, but of amusement at the way he sat, “proud as a rooster,” listening to his own voice.

  “Twenty minutes!” he said, when the program was over. “And I spoke longer than any of them. Every minute costs a lot on radio. And I talked by far the most.�
��

  Whatever euphoria he may have felt at the moment, after thinking it over, Lee seems to have realized that his position as a political organizer in New Orleans had been drastically changed as a result of his exposure as an ex-defector. All through August he had continued to write Vincent Lee of the FPCC and Arnold Johnson of the Communist Party. He had sent both a small clipping from the New Orleans Times-Picayune of August 13 about his arraignment for “disturbing the peace” and had also written Vincent Lee about the August 16 demonstration and his original appearance on Stuckey’s program. But he had had no response.

  Now he was baffled. Having been exposed as Marxist and possibly pro-Soviet, was it any use to go on trying to organize an FPCC chapter, or had he been totally discredited? He made a strange decision. He would seek advice, but instead of appealing to the FPCC, the organization that he feared he had compromised, he would write to the Communist Party. Since he was going to write the party, it would have been logical to write Arnold Johnson. Instead he decided, typically, that he would go straight to the top, to the Central Committee—the party’s highest governing body. It was a breach of protocol, for he was not a party member. But it shows how seriously he took himself and his dilemma. It also reveals that, as usual, he felt entitled to special consideration, even when he might have done wrong.

  The letter itself was presumptuous. It opens with the greeting, “Comrades,” and closes: “With Freternel [sic] Greeting,” both party salutations that Lee was not entitled to use since he was not a member. The letter is likewise remarkable for its execrable spelling, a sign that Lee was upset, and for its totally uncharacteristic tone of humility. Lee wrote that he had lived in the Soviet Union and, on his return, had organized a branch of the FPCC in New Orleans, “a position which, frankly, I have used to foster communist ideals.” But now that his previous history had been made public in a radio program, he wondered whether he could continue to wage the struggle against “anti-progressive forces above ground,” or whether he would have to go underground. The letter closes: “I feel I may have compromised the F.P.C.C., so you see that I need the advice of trusted, long-time fighters for progress. Please advise.”13