Lee complained that he felt “inhibited” by the FBI and hated being bothered all the time.
Ruth wondered if he was worried about his job, and he said he was.
Ruth then told him the only other thing there was to tell. Hosty had inquired whether he might have a mental problem. Lee did not even answer. He barely suppressed a “scoffing laugh.”9
Lee was pensive and withdrawn for the rest of the evening. Seeing how disturbed he was, a part of Marina decided that she must be a fool indeed not to have understood the seriousness of the whole affair. But another part kept telling her that Lee was making a mountain out of a molehill. She was tired of the way he was always blowing things up out of all proportion and trying to make her as suspicious as he was himself.
Early the next day, Saturday, Lee asked Ruth if he might use her typewriter. Ruth assented, and as he began typing she carried Junie in her high chair over beside him, where he could keep an eye on her. When she came near, Lee quickly covered up the paper written in longhand that he was typing from. His gesture aroused her curiosity.10
About eleven that same morning, after Lee had finished typing, all seven of them—Ruth, the Oswalds, and the four children—piled into Ruth’s station wagon and drove to the Texas Drivers’ License Examining Station in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Lee wanted to apply for a learner’s permit, get a license, and then buy a car so he would qualify for better jobs. But the station was closed because of the Veterans Day weekend. Finding themselves in a shopping center, all seven then trooped into a dime store, where Ruth bought a few items for her children and Lee bought rubber pants for June and Rachel. “Rachel is so rich,” he said with pride. “Junie didn’t have so many clothes when she was born, and I didn’t either. She’s lucky. She was born free of charge, and the neighbors have given her lots of clothes and such a fine bed!”
On the way home in the car, Lee was as cheerful as Ruth had ever seen him. “He sang, he joked, he made puns” and word plays on the Russian language that caused Marina to double up with laughter.11
Marina was relieved at the change in him. She understood that whatever he had written that morning had calmed him after his fright of the evening before. He had been similarly calmed after ordering her to obtain the license number, and calmed again after he took the number off their bureau.
Ruth left the house to vote after lunch, and Lee, cutting up a little again and behaving like a naughty child, said, “Hurry up, Marina. Make me some potatoes and onions before Ruth gets back.”
“As if Ruth will mind if you eat potatoes.”
“I feel funny eating her potatoes every day.”
Marina fried some potatoes and onions mixed with flour and eggs, and for once it was a success. “Finally it comes out right,” Lee said, seating himself on the floor in front of the television set. “I told you again and again how to do it, and at last you know. Now I feel like a king!” He proceeded to down it with gusto.
When there was a break in the football game, Lee shepherded the children down the street to buy popsicles. Chris Paine ran on a little ahead, and Lee was afraid that he would end up under a car. He caught Chris, smacked him on the bottom, and carried him the rest of the way. When they got home, he still had Chris in his shoulders. “This little brigand got away,” he explained, “and I was afraid he’d be hit by a car. So I gave him a little spank on the behind. He’s such a big boy that I can hardly carry him on my shoulders.”
Marina told Lee that he had no right to spank somebody else’s child.
“Thanks,” said Lee. “And if anything happened to him, it would be my fault.”
After the football game he got down on all fours, allowed Chris to ride on his back, and played “Horsey” on the living room floor. The two of them enjoyed it greatly, and Marina could see that her husband still was dreaming of having a son.
That night was a special one for them. It started on a playful note, with Marina, in bed, begging Lee to give up any thoughts of going back to Russia.
Half teasing, half thinking out loud, he said: “We’ll go to Russia. I’ll get a decent job at last. I’ll work, you’ll work, the children will go to kindergarten. We’ll see Erich and Pavel.”
“I don’t want to go to Minsk. Let’s go to Leningrad.”
“I don’t want Leningrad. Let’s go to Moscow,” he said.
“Alik, if you want Moscow, I won’t go. Come on, Alka, let’s not go to Russia at all.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Hooray,” Marina nearly shouted, pouncing around the bed like a kitten. “Do you swear?”
“I swear.”
“Word of honor?”
“How you need my word of honor?”
“Because sometimes you promise one thing and do another.”
“I won’t betray you this time.”
At that moment he looked just the way Marina liked him best—“no clouds in his head.”
Suddenly Lee turned tender and was more frank with her than he had ever been before. Neither of them had said much to the other about the lives they had led before they met, for what each had been seeking in marrying the other was a new life. In fact, it had only been a month or so before, in New Orleans, that Marina finally told Lee that as a teenager in Leningrad she used to go around cold, hungry, and threadbare, delivering telegrams during the New Year’s season. She had hardly ever mentioned Petya and Tanya, her brother and sister, or her stepfather, Alexander Medvedev.
Lee had told Marina even less, but tonight he wanted to talk about every woman he had ever cared about before he met her. The first had been in Japan while he was stationed there in the Marine Corps. She had been thirty-four years old, nearly twice his age, but she looked much younger than she was. He threw her over, he said, after she had taught him something about sex and he realized that she wanted to marry him. The next one had been thin, but she had had a great many lovers, and he was afraid of catching venereal disease. The third had cooked for him, and he saw more of her than of anybody else. “But she was fat, I soon got tired of her, and she bored me,” Lee said. “I went to see her more for her cooking than for love.” He had had five other women in Japan.
In Russia he had at first gone without a woman for a year. Then there had been a whole parade. “But it’s all in the past,” he said. “I was only tricking them. Then a girl came along in a red dress—and she tricked me.”
The girl in the red dress was Marina, of course, but he did tell her a little about the others, especially Ella Germann, the girl he had asked to marry him. “Her grandmother scared her away,” Lee said. “Being American, she thought that I must be a spy.” He added that he was grateful to Marina because she had never thought he was a spy. And he told her that of all the women he had known, she was the only one he ever loved.
“Oh, Alka, you don’t love me. Look at the way we fight.”
“Everyone does that.”
“If you loved me, maybe we wouldn’t fight.”
“You silly, don’t you see that I love you?” He stroked her hair. “Did you grow your hair long especially for me?”
“Who else but you?”
“Mama will have long hair now. See how pretty her hair is. I love Mama’s eyes, her little bones, her nose, her ears, her mouth.” And he began to kiss her. “Who taught you to kiss?” he asked her, looking into the mirror above her head.
“It’s all in the past,” she said.
The next morning, Sunday, Ruth was up ahead of everybody else. She went to the living room, and there, on her desk, lay the handwritten note Lee had been typing from the day before. The note was folded, and Ruth started to read below the fold. The words she saw were these: “The FBI is not now interested in my activities …” Ruth was thunderstruck. She had no idea to whom these words were addressed, but she of all people knew they were not true. She was not accustomed to reading other people’s letters without permission. But Lee was using her typewriter for his lies, and she felt, in a way, that she had the right. So she r
ead the whole thing:
Dear Sirs:
This is to inform you of events since my interview with Comrade Kostine in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City, Mexico.
I was unable to remain in Mexico City indefinitely because of my Mexican visa restrictions which was for 15 days only. I could not take a chance on applying for an extension unless I used my real name so I returned to the US
I and Marina Nicholeyeva are now living in Dallas, Texas.
The FBI is not now interested in my activities in the progressive organization FPCC of which I was secretary in New Orleans Louisiana since I no longer live in that State.
the FBI has visited us here in Texas. On Nov. 1st agent of the FBI James P. Hasty warned me that if I attempt to engage in FPCC activities in Texas the FBI will again take an “interest” in me. This agent also “suggested” that my wife could “remain in the US under FBI protection,” that is, she could defect from the Soviet Union.
Of course I and my wife strongly protested these tactics by the notorious FBI.
I had not planned to contact the Mexican City Embassy at all so of course they were unprepared for me. Had I been able to reach Havana as planned the Soviet Embassy there would have had time to assist me. but of course the stuip Cuban Consule was at fault here I am glad he has since been replaced by another.12
Ruth was suddenly alarmed.13 She wondered what sort of man she was giving shelter to, and she saw immediately that he was a good deal “queerer” than she had supposed. The letter sounded to her less like that of a spy than of someone who was trying to make an impression on someone else who was a spy. It contained, in any event, statements she knew to be lies, weird language like “the notorious FBI,” references to Mexico, and a false name. Ruth wondered whether a single word was true.
The shower was running; Ruth hoped that Lee might be in it, and she hurriedly made a copy of the letter, stuffed it in an envelope, and shoved it deep into a corner of her desk. If anybody from the FBI came that week, she would hand it over right away, for she wanted to be rid of the thing. Ruth was convinced that the FBI must know a lot about Lee, more than Hosty had let on. She therefore expected that the FBI would know what to make of her discovery. Meanwhile, she put the original of the letter back where she had found it, right in full view on the desk, and there it lay all day Sunday as it had lain all day Saturday. Its being there for everyone to see did not seem to bother Lee a bit.
As usual he looked at football that afternoon. Michael was at home and had occasion to step over Lee while he was lying stretched out on the floor. Michael felt a pang of self-reproach. He thought he was being rude, stepping over Lee that way without even trying to make small talk. But he had given up trying to build a bridge to Lee or understand him because Lee seemed to block it somehow. Michael thought it a shame that they should be there, two men in the same house, and be unable to talk to one another. He wished they could communicate better.
Michael had another thought. He did not resent Lee lying on his floor, watching his television, and crowding his house a bit. But he did feel that for a man who professed to be a revolutionary, Lee had an awful lot of time on his hands. To be a revolutionary, Michael thought, is a perfectly good and valid thing. But if Lee wanted to be a revolutionary, he ought to go out and be one. To lie around watching television all day, Michael said to himself, “is one hell of a way for a revolutionary to be spending his time.”14
Late in the afternoon Ruth gave Lee his third driving lesson—backing, parking, and a right-angle turn. She thought Lee really got the feel of parking that day.
In the evening she decided to rearrange the living room furniture, and she asked Lee and Michael to help. Preceding them into the room, she saw Lee’s letter still in full view on her desk. She popped it inside the folding front and the three of them moved the furniture around. When they were through, she put the letter gingerly back where it had been before.15
At the end of the evening, Ruth was still upset by the letter and knew that it would be a while before she could get to sleep. She sat on the sofa next to Lee, who was watching a spy mystery, hoping to ask him about the letter. She wanted to say, “What is this I found on my desk?” But she did not want him to think that she was watching him, and she was fearful. Mostly, the letter made her think that something was wrong with Lee mentally. But supposing he was a spy. Would it not be better in that case just to give the letter to the FBI? Ruth did not know what to do.
Suddenly, Lee turned sweet with her. “I guess you are real upset about going to the lawyer, aren’t you?” he asked sympathetically, knowing that Ruth was to see a divorce lawyer in a day or two.
Ruth was disarmed. It had been thoughtful of Lee to ask. She watched the mystery a moment longer, then left him and went to bed.16
It was the Veterans Day weekend, and Lee did not have to go to work on Monday. Ruth was gone the first part of the day and parked her children with a neighbor, leaving the Oswalds to themselves. Lee was pensive and withdrawn. He sat alone in the backyard on the children’s swings. Then he came into the house and went back to work on his letter. He told Marina that he was writing the Soviet embassy in Washington to complain about the FBI. He even asked her to sign it. She refused. She was sorry he was fussing with the embassy again, but somehow she felt that she was never going to have to go back to Russia.
She noticed that Lee was nervous. He typed the letter twice before he got it right and had to do the envelope at least four times.17 Once he put the return address where the embassy’s address ought to be and other times he simply left letters out of the address.
Lee’s letter is similar but not identical to the draft version Ruth had seen. In one significant change in the next to last paragraph of the final version, he betrayed his newly made promise to Marina that they would never return to Russia. The paragraph read: “Please inform us of the arrival of our Soviet entrance visa’s as soon as they come.”18
That Monday afternoon, while they were hanging up diapers again, Lee and Marina had another talk about the FBI. After Christmas the two of them expected that they would have saved enough money to find an apartment of their own. Lee insisted that their new address should remain a secret from the FBI. But Marina told him that after all Ruth had done for them, she could and would not turn her back on Ruth and keep their address a secret. How, then, to keep it secret from the FBI?
“I know,” said Lee. “Ruth is too honest. If you ask her not to say a certain thing, she won’t be able not to. She doesn’t know how to lie. She’ll tell them where we are living and how. And I don’t want the FBI to know anything about me.”
Marina repeated that it would be a “swinish” trick not to give Ruth their address. She liked Ruth and wanted to remain her friend.
“I’ll think of something,” said Lee.
And he did.19
The next morning, Tuesday, November 12, he kissed Marina goodbye while she was still in bed. He lifted Rachel’s foot and kissed it, too. “She’s so warm. And I’ve got to go to work.” Then he either left his letter to the Soviet embassy for Ruth to mail along with her letters, or he dropped it into a mailbox opposite the house of Wesley Frazier, with whom he was riding into town. The letter bears the postmark: “Irving, Texas, 5:00 P.M., November 12”20
Lee reported for work at the book depository, and during the noon hour, taking Ruth’s advice, in a way, he went to the main FBI office at 1114 Commerce Street, not far from the depository. He walked up to the receptionist, Nanny Lee Fenner, looking “awfully fidgety,” with what she later said was “a wild look in his eye” and an unsealed envelope in his hand. He asked if Agent Hosty was in, and she told him Hosty was out to lunch. “Well, get this to him,” he said and tossed the envelope on her desk. He turned and walked back to the elevator.
Soon afterward Hosty stopped by. “Some nut left this for you,” Mrs. Fenner said and handed Hosty the letter. The envelope, a 10-inch white business envelope, had one word written across it—“Hasty.” It conta
ined a single sheet of eight-by-ten-inch bond paper. It had no greeting, no signature, and no return address. There were only two handwritten paragraphs. One stated that Hosty had been interviewing the wife of the author without permission, and the author did not like it. If you want to see me, come to me. Don’t bother my wife, it said. In the next paragraph the writer warned that if Hosty did not stop talking to his wife, he would be forced to take action against the FBI. He did not say what that action would be.21
Since the note was not signed, Hosty was not certain who had left it. He surmised that it might be Oswald or one other person who had been giving him trouble. Either way the complaint seemed “innocuous,” the kind he got a good many of, and it did not appear to require action. He put it in his work box and left it.22
Oswald’s letter to the Soviet Embassy and his warning note to the FBI are the work of a man who had come a long way in only a few days down the road of his own delusions. It is true that Oswald had suffered an accumulation of disappointments in the year and a half since his return from Russia and had lately suffered a serious blow at the hands of Castro’s chief consul in Mexico City. The letter to the Soviet embassy confirms what Marina had noticed: an ebbing of her husband’s enthusiasm for Cuba and a revival of his faith in the USSR. But what apparently completed his inner undoing, and in little more than a week, were the visits of FBI Agent James P. Hosty to the Paine household on November 1 and 5.
The FBI is, indeed, an organization with an exceptional capacity to magnetize, then crystallize, the fears and longings of many people. And Oswald’s feelings toward the FBI did contain an element of longing, did have their favorable side. In a New Orleans jail only a few months earlier, he had asked to see an agent of the FBI, and his request had been granted. The FBI’s attention elated him then, for it was proof of his importance. Moreover, his summoning the FBI into his life that summer, two months after he had for the first and only time paid a visit to the grave of his father, suggests that for Oswald as for others, the FBI was a symbolic father whose approval and protection he craved.
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