But Marina had no way of knowing what Lee was thinking, for he had given her no hint. It was her ignorance, and her helplessness before it, that she was to ponder afterward. If Marina can be said to have failed Lee, it is not, as some people thought later, that she ought to have known what he was thinking and sent him frivolously to his death. It is rather that she, too, was fated—by her lifelong conviction that she was unworthy and by uncertainty over his affections—to refuse his request. Preoccupied by worries such as these, she failed altogether to realize what Ruth Paine called “her own great power over Lee.”
The way Lee saw it, perhaps fate did have a hand. To such a man, the uncanny selection of a route that would carry the president right under his window could mean only one thing. Fate had singled him out to do the dangerous but necessary task that had been his destiny all along and that would cause him to go down in history. If Lee really felt this way, really felt the outcome was fated, then Marina’s power on November 21 was not great, since he was destined to put his questions to her in such a way that she was destined to refuse.
But Lee was more than Pushkin’s Hermann, playing a role marked out for him by fate. He was a Marxist, and as a Marxist he was also enacting a part that had been determined ahead of time. For Marxism is a determinist philosophy, which says that the course of history is decided in advance and such choices as an individual may make have little to do with the outcome. According to Marxism, it made no difference what Lee did on November 22—history would grind on and turn out in more or less the same manner anyhow. Lee was a poor Marxist in another way as well, for Marxist philosophy repudiates the kind of terroristic act he had in mind.7 But Lee took his Marxism selectively. And according to his Marxism, history would be moved forward by his deed and the Marxist cause would be advanced.
It is ironic, yet in keeping with Lee’s rigid nature, that he had chosen not one but two determinist philosophies by which to live and to die. According to one, he was Pushkin’s Hermann, who staked his life on the toss of three cards, and according to the other, he was the implacable engine of history. Both as Hermann the fatalist and as Lee Harvey Oswald the implausible Marxist, Lee had no choice but to do as he did. It happened that the two roles came together at the same moment to demand the same thing of him.
Yet accident did play a role, in the timing, for example. Lee had already attempted one assassination. But he did not go around killing every day, nor was he capable of it all the time. By chance, the president’s visit came at a moment when Lee was insane enough so that he needed to kill someone and coherent enough to succeed.
And the president came to him. Compared to the route, no other determinant mattered at all. Everything that had ever happened to Lee Oswald could have happened it exactly the way it had, his whole life could have been exactly what it had been, and it would not have made any difference. President Kennedy could have come and gone from Dallas in perfect safety. But the choice of a route that would carry the president past his window could mean only one thing to Lee—fate, duty, and historical necessity had come together in this time and place and singled him out to do the deed.
The tragedy of the president’s assassination was its terrible randomness.
That was not the only tragedy. The death of the president was a complex thing, made up of opposites. There was the tension between determination and accident, fate and chance. And for the assassin there appears also to have been a conflict between love and duty. As Lee saw him, the president embodied a social and historical evil that had become his duty to destroy. But Lee had not created his opportunity, and in some respects he did not relish his task. He did not leap to a decision immediately upon learning the route, and as late as the evening before, he gave a veto power of some sort to his unknowing wife.
Yet he went ahead despite his doubts, and in so doing he acted like another hero of his, Will Cain, the sheriff in the movie High Noon, who stands up to a band of outlaws, alone, because it is his duty, even though he is risking his own life and the love of his wife, who is opposed to violence. Lee may have felt that he had something in common with Will Cain, whose song he had sung so many times in Russia, and whose refrain—“Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’ ”—Marina had heard again and again as Lee was writing his diary.
Oh, to be torn twixt love and duty
Sposin’ I lose my fair-haired beauty …
I’m not afraid of death but, oh
What will I do if you leave me?…8
Lee may have seen himself, too, as torn between “love”—Marina and his children—and “duty,” which required that against his kindlier instincts and at the cost of his life, he must kill the president of the United States.
When he said goodbye to Marina at the Paine house on the morning of November 22, Lee left his wedding ring behind. It was a stunning repudiation of Marina and the family “love” she represented. And it was an act of retaliation, the sort of vengeful response to her rejection of the night before that had characterized Lee all his life. But it was much else besides. It was a way of dissociating Marina from the deed he was about to commit and the guilt he would incur for it. And it was a way of showing his scorn and relegating her, too, to the everyday herd of men and women who would be too stupid and cowardly to understand the great and heroic deed he was performing for their sakes. Lee’s leaving his wedding ring was an elegant gesture of contempt, an equivalent of Will Cain’s tossing his sheriff’s badge in the dust. Cain, too, is expressing his contempt. He is saying that the people for whom he has risked everything, love and life itself, are not worthy of what he has done for them. But their unworthiness did not alter his duty, and he would have been diminished as a man if he had failed to do it.
Yet Lee did not want to lose Marina, just as Cain does not want to lose Amy. In Irving on the evening of November 21, Lee in effect had asked Marina, as Cain asks Amy, “What will I do if you leave me?” Twice on the day after he shot the president, in the direst situation he was ever to know, Lee begged Marina not to forsake him, first during their brief visit in the city jail and later, that same evening of November 23, when he telephoned Ruth and virtually commanded that Marina return to her house so that she would be available to him at whatever hour he might call. If Lee saw himself as Will Cain, he may also have expected his personal drama to end the way High Noon does. Cain not only earns the thanks of the townspeople, he also wins back the love of his wife.
There may have been still another voice speaking to Lee before the assassination and telling him what he ought to do—that of John F. Kennedy. A few months earlier Lee had read Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, and since the book, like High Noon, was a product of the McCarthy era, it is not surprising that the message they carry is identical: a celebration of the brave and lonely hero who will stand up against the wrong-headed crowd and the climate of his time to do what he believes to be right. Kennedy’s book is addressed to the ordinary citizen, and its subject is political courage. When he read the book in the summer of 1963, Lee apparently took its message to heart, both as a citizen and the great man he supposed himself to be. Kennedy, in the book, defined the man of political courage as the one who will do the thing he knows in his heart to be right, whether the people understand that it is right for them or not. He cannot expect their approval. It is to history that he must look for vindication. “A man does what he must,” Kennedy wrote, “in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures.” These words, or words very like them, may have been in Lee Oswald’s head when he took aim and fired just after high noon on November 22.9
Oswald may also have thought that by acting as Kennedy had enjoined him to do and as his conscience told him he must, he would be achieving in life and in death a oneness with the man he was destroying. For it is clear that Oswald’s motives were not purely political. In addition to the conflict between love and duty and the polarity between accident and determinism, there was something else at work—the tension, the attraction, that the ass
assin felt for his victim.
Of all the bonds between this assassin and the victim, the strongest, perhaps, lay in a similarity the two of them shared. Both Oswald and Kennedy were attracted to death, and both had tempted it often. Oswald had tried suicide at least once and had made a murder attempt that could easily have led to his own death. One of his fictional heroes, Will Cain, had placed himself in a position from which he could barely escape alive. Another, Hermann in “The Queen of Spades,” had stabbed himself to death.
Even more frequently than Oswald, Kennedy had placed his life at hazard. He was a reckless driver, and he had often taken a risky charter flight in foul weather so as not to miss a political appointment.10 During World War II in the Pacific, he was known not merely for his bravery but for the frightening, and some said needless, risks he had taken with his own life, with his PT boat, and perhaps with the lives of his crew.11 As for literature, his favorite verses were said to be from a World War I poem by the American, Alan Seeger:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple blossoms fill the air—
…
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
…
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.12
Marina has said sadly of her husband that he “did not value his own life at all.” And Kennedy, on the morning of his death, actually pantomimed an assassination attempt that he thought could have been carried out against him the evening before.13 As greatly as he enjoyed life, and as much as he helped others to enjoy it, Kennedy exuded fatalism, a “come and get me” air. And Oswald, with his own fatalism, may have been peculiarly attuned to pick this up.
The Kennedy fatalism was a profound matter, with implications for others besides Oswald. Thus the president may have been attracted to death, in part, because he had already lost a beloved older sister and older brother in tragic air accidents. All of this had been publicized a good deal and had become part of the family mystique. But in becoming part of the mystique, it had also become a family taint. Already, in 1963, it was as if the Kennedys had had more than their share of untimely deaths. Each of these heightened the association in the public mind between the Kennedys and death, each made the taint greater, and each increased the vulnerability of the rest of the family, and especially of its head, the president.
To a person whose stability was as fragile as Oswald’s, even a tenuous connection, such as occurred in June 1963, when President Kennedy spoke on civil rights from the White House and a black leader, Medgar Evers, was murdered a few hours later only two hundred miles from where Oswald lived, could have strengthened some half-conscious association in Oswald’s mind between the president and death. And the death of the president’s newborn son in August, at a time when Oswald, too, was hoping for a son, may further have strengthened the association. Marina has said that her husband was upset by the Kennedy baby’s death, and it was on that day that he became engaged, for the first time, in a pro-Castro street fracas and was tossed into jail, almost as if he was impelled to sidetrack his own thoughts. Lee Oswald was fascinated by death, President Kennedy was fascinated by death, and of the ties between them in Oswald’s mind, this was the greatest of all.
But it was not the only one. For President Kennedy, like Lee Oswald, was a young husband and father. At the time of his election, he was handsome and in his early forties, his wife was thirty-one and beautiful, and they had been married only seven years. It was obviously true of Kennedy—as is not always the case with an older president who has been married for many years—that this president had an ongoing sex life, and there were infant children as proof. Both the president and his wife had, moreover, an extraordinary capacity to project themselves into the yearnings and fantasies of millions, and some of these fantasies were sexual. Their photographs were frequently displayed on the covers of movie magazines, which exist to exploit such fantasies. And since the Kennedys had close ties with Hollywood, members of the family were seen constantly with film stars and other celebrities. The symbolism surrounding such celebrities also tends to be sexual, and the presence of the Kennedys in their company contributed to a dangerous eroticization of the presidency.
Television was part of it, too, for it made the Kennedys’ life in the White House more visible than that of any First Family before them. Because of these elements and, above all, because of the attractiveness of husband and wife, both of the Kennedys appealed powerfully and intimately to men and women in every age group and every walk of life, people who did not ordinarily think about politics or see their own lives reflected in any way in that of the First Family.
Far from being unusual, the Oswalds were in some respects typical. They were young, twenty-two and twenty-four years old, and they read eagerly about the Kennedys in every fan magazine they could peruse during their evening strolls past the newsstands of New Orleans. They speculated without surcease about every facet of the Kennedys’ lives. Even their speculations were typical. Each seems to have yearned a little toward each of the Kennedys. Marina, for example, considered Jacqueline Kennedy a “goddess.” Since she was a goddess, however, it occurred to Marina that perhaps Mrs. Kennedy was “cold,” and that the president might need extra warmth in his life, warmth that a less perfect, more earthy woman such as she herself might provide. In thinking thoughts such as these, Marina seems only to have been thinking what many American women thought. She was unusual, perhaps, in that President Kennedy was a physical reminder of the suitor she wished she had married. And she was unusual in that, unlike other women whose daydreams about the president were innocuous, she was married to a man who happened to be capable of killing.
Oswald’s feelings are difficult to surmise, although Marina confirms that neither he nor she had heard rumors of the president’s affairs with women, nor of his Addison’s disease. They thought the Kennedys were just another couple such as they were, raised to the thousandth power of beauty and success. Oswald approved of Mrs. Kennedy and knew of her troubles in having children. He was a considerate husband in one respect—he let his wife decide how many children they would have. It may be that in shooting the president, Oswald imagined that he was protecting “Jackie” from a sexually exigent Catholic husband—Oswald despised religion—who compelled her to have children no matter what the injury to her health. And it is possible, although again a matter of conjecture, that the act of assassination was enhanced, and not diminished, in its attractiveness for Oswald by the fact that Jacqueline Kennedy would be there, that she would see it, that she would witness the “deed of unheard-of prowess” that he was performing for her sake.14
To say that President Kennedy shared with his assassin a fatalism and perhaps a yearning toward death, and that the Kennedys were surrounded by a volatile set of symbols concerning both death and sex, may explain a phenomenon reported soon after they entered the White House by U. E. Baughman, head of the Secret Service.15 In a book published in 1961, Baughman stated that the number of letters to the president increased by 50 percent during the early weeks of the Kennedy administration. Somewhat ominously, Baughman added that the proportion from what he called the “lunatic fringe” had increased by 300 percent, and that the number of “insane” people who tried to telephone the president or who stopped by the White House gates to threaten the president’s life or the lives of members of his family had also greatly increased. Thus there was an unusually large pool of potential assassins for this particular president. John F. Kennedy was, from the outset, highly assassinable.
There was another aspect of Kennedy’s special vulnerability that enhanced his appeal as a victim to Lee Harvey Oswald. It lay in the many roles he played, as a man, as a member of the Kennedy clan, as head of the First Family, and as president of the United States. Because he was vibrant and handsome, because his age gave
him an across-the-board appeal, and because of his ability to project himself into other people’s longings, there was something in Kennedy for nearly everyone. There was scarcely any American who could not see something of himself in this president, or who did not want to. Countless men and women saw in him someone in their own lives who had been close to them, or someone they would like close to them.
Also, Kennedy had two living parents, an unusual thing for a president, and there must have been many older men and women who looked on him as a son, or as the son they wished they had had. And the children of such people could have been jealous of the president. John Kennedy was one of a large brood of brothers and sisters, and there must have been some among the population who viewed him as the fantastically successful older brother whose achievements they could not hope to match. These people, too, must have envied him.
Still others must have envied him his upbringing in a loyal and close-knit family. Oswald seems to have been one of these, for, switching things around in his mind, he told Marina that he himself would like enough children for a “whole football team.” There was only one family in America that was famous for having enough children to rouse up a football game at any moment—the Kennedys.
And Oswald appears to have envied the president not only the ebullient boyhood that was in such contrast with his lonely one, but he envied him his job—a job in which the president dealt daily with Russia and Cuba—for Oswald wanted to be president, and at the very age, forty-three, at which Kennedy had attained the office. Moreover, he wanted his “son,” the son he did not yet have, to be president. This, again, appears to have been a case in which Oswald identified not only with the president but with Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., “founding father” of the dynasty.
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