Chapter 33. Lee and Michael
1. Testimony of Mrs. Arthur Carl Johnson, Vol. 10, pp. 292–296.
2. Testimony of Roy Sansom Truly, Vol. 3, pp. 216–218.
3. Testimony of Bonnie Ray Williams, Vol. 3, p. 164; Testimony of Daniel Arce, Vol. 6, p. 364; Testimony of Roy Sansom Truly, Vol. 3, p. 218; Testimony of Billy Lovelady, Vol. 6, p. 337; and Testimony of Charles Douglas Givens, Vol. 6, p. 352.
4. In August 1964 Marina came across several of her husband’s possessions that the Secret Service had accidentally failed to confiscate. Among them was an English-Russian, Russian-English dictionary inscribed, in Lee’s hand, “Lee Harvey Oswald, Hotel Metropole, Moscow, November 22, 1959.” The date, of course, is coincidence, yet it underlines an impression that autumn was a time of unhappy events in Oswald’s life. His happier anniversaries appear to have been in the spring.
5. Conversation with Michael R. Paine, August 23, 1973.
6. Ibid.
7. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 401.
8. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
9. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, p. 474.
10. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 401, 409–410.
11. In her testimony before the Warren Commission (Vol. 5, p. 396), Marina stated that after the meeting that night Lee told her, “Paine knows that I shot at Walker.” Marina later said her memory was in error. Lee made the remark, as quoted in the text, before the meeting.
12. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
13. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 11, p. 403.
14. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 408.
15. Testimony of Raymond Frank Krystinik, Vol. 9, pp. 465–466.
16. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 408.
17. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973; Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 418–419.
18. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 409.
19. Ibid., p. 401.
20. Ibid., p. 419.
21. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 401, and Vol. 11, pp. 402–403. It is ironic that of all people it was Michael Paine—who considered himself a failure with people, and who thought his father was a genius at drawing others out but despaired of ever being able to do so himself—who better than anyone else has explained Oswald’s intellectual justification for the assassination of President Kennedy. He did so, with brevity and clarity, in two of his three appearances before the Warren Commission. Had the Commission accepted Paine’s summary as a true statement of Oswald’s beliefs, and placed it side by side with Oswald’s writings, it might have presented the American people not with the whole of his motive by any means, but with a rational component—with what Oswald thought he was doing.
22. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
23. An extrapolation by the author from her views and those of Michael Paine.
24. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 410.
25. Ibid., Vol. 11, p. 402.
26. Ibid., p. 411.
27. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, pp. 351–352.
28. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 414–418, and Vol. 9, pp. 437–448. Marina has been criticized for her failure to tell Ruth that Oswald had his rifle in her garage. But until mid-November, when Ruth happened to remark that she refused to buy toy guns for her children, Marina did not know Ruth’s feelings about weapons. Even then she did not know that the Paines were pacifists, or exactly what this meant. But Marina did realize that Ruth would not want the gun in her garage, and she still kept her silence. Her reasoning was that it was safer, especially now that they were back in Dallas, for the gun to be with her than in the rooming house with her husband. She asks: “Would it really have done Ruth any good if I had told her?”
Chapter 34. Agent Hosty
1. Exhibit No. 1145, Vol. 22, p. 169.
2. Exhibit No. 1145, Vol. 22, pp. 170–171. The letter, postmarked November 1, reached Mr. Johnson only on the 29th, with a line across the envelope in back suggesting that it had been opened along the way (Testimony of Arnold S. Johnson, Vol. 10, pp. 103–104).
3. I have based the account of Hosty’s visits on November 1 and 5 and Oswald’s reaction to them on the testimony of James P. Hosty in Vol. 4 and in the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights (Hearings on FBI Oversight, Serial No. 2, Part 3); of Marina Oswald in Vol. 1; of Ruth Paine in Vols. 3 and 9; on a conversation with Ruth Paine on November 23, 1964; and on three separate conversations with Marina Oswald. The three principals differ on such questions as the time at which the November 1 interview took place (one says 2:30, another 3:30, the third 5:00 P.M.); the duration of the second interview and where it took place; where Hosty parked the second time; on which occasion Marina talked longer with Hosty and after which occasion she gave her husband the fuller account; and whether Oswald came to Irving on Friday both weekends. I have tried to reconcile the versions with an eye to the effect of the Hosty visits on Oswald.
4. Testimony of James P. Hosty before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, op. cit., p. 145. This information was not revealed in Hosty’s testimony before the Warren Commission.
5. Conversation with Ruth Paine, November 23, 1964.
6. The floor plan, rear and front views, of the Paine house, are Commission Exhibits No. 430–437, Vol. 17, pp. 158–162.
7. As of this day, so many years after the assassination, Marina still does not know that the question of how she got the license number is a matter of acute debate among students of the event. They say that she could not have seen the license number from her position inside the house. In his testimony before the House Hearings (cited in note 3 above), p. 163, Hosty says he thinks he parked in the Paine driveway and that Marina could easily have taken down his number as he drove slowly up and down the street before and after the interview. Neither he nor anybody else realizes that Marina went outside and studied the car. J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI, said later that the number she took down was “incorrect in only one digit” (Testimony of J. Edgar Hoover, Vol. 5, p. 112).
8. Oswald had told Marina that, while he liked the job he had, he wanted to find another, in photography. He did not want Ruth to learn about this, because she had helped him find his job and he did not want to hurt her feelings. Still, he told Marina that one Saturday he would stay in Dallas and look for photographic work. Marina thinks that this was the weekend and that he came to Irving only on Saturday, November 9. Ruth’s recollections preclude this and establish that he came on Friday, November 8. Michael Paine does not place him definitely at the dinner table on Friday, November 1, and it is barely possible that he stayed in Dallas until Saturday, November 2. But again, the weight of evidence is that he arrived in Irving about 5:30 P.M. on Friday, November 1. (No photography lab in Dallas has any record of a job application by Oswald after early October.)
Marina’s confusion about the dates may result from the fact that the Hosty visits were, because of their impact on Oswald, by far the most traumatic event in her married life since Walker.
Two other points can be made. First, the fact that Oswald was thinking of another job indicates that he was not wedded to the book depository site. Second, he had been talking about coming late one weekend, and it may well be that, far from feeling angry when Marina told him not to come the November 15–17 weekend, he may actually have welcomed it.
9. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, pp. 101–102.
10. Ibid., p. 13.
11. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 9, p. 394; and conversation with Ruth Paine, November 23, 1964.
12. Exhibit No. 103, Vol. 16, pp. 443–444. It is interesting that Oswald exonerated the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and blamed everything on the Cuban consul. According to the defector Yury Nosenko, it was the Russians who were to blame for his troubles, the
KGB in Moscow having decided to refuse him a visa. Nosenko has added that, but for the assassination, Marina and her children would probably have been granted reentry visas, although Oswald would not have been permitted to return to the USSR. Oswald’s blaming the Cuban consul, however, is a clue to his frame of mind after his return from Mexico, when he turned against Cuba and resumed his old faith in the USSR. Questions have been raised about how Oswald knew that the Cuban consul in Mexico City, Señor Asque, had been replaced. On Oswald’s last visit to the consulate, September 27, Asque was closeted with the man who was to replace him when Mrs. Duran called Asque out and asked him to speak to Oswald.
13. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, pp. 14–17.
14. Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 412; and conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
15. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 17, and Vol. 9, p. 395.
16. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 17.
17. In her testimony before the Warren Commission, Vol. 1, p. 45, Marina stated that he had to do the envelope “ten times,” but in conversation with the author she said it was more like four.
18. Warren Commission Exhibit No. 986, Vol. 18, pp. 538–539.
19. Interestingly, Oswald’s solution, his visit to FBI headquarters, incorporated Ruth’s advice that he go straight to the FBI. It did not, of course, incorporate the rest of her advice, that he tell them everything they wanted to know.
20. According to the Warren Commission Report, pp. 439–440, the FBI in Washington became aware of Oswald’s letter to the Soviet embassy on November 18 and routinely informed the Dallas office. Hosty learned of it only on the afternoon of November 22.
21. No one in the Dallas office of the FBI in November 1963 recalls on what day the note was delivered, although Mrs. Fenner’s memory and other evidence suggest that it was delivered on the earliest possible date, November 12.
In his letter to the Soviet embassy mailed that day, Oswald claimed that he had already made his protest to the FBI. This was false, for he knew of Hosty’s second visit when he wrote the embassy, and he only learned of that visit on Friday, November 8. Because of the long holiday weekend, Tuesday, November 12, was the first day Oswald could have left the note. He would have to have been severely upset to go to the FBI offices at all. In fact, he picked a time when he could be almost certain that Hosty would be out. But when he was severely upset, he had a tendency to act quickly. All of this suggests that he delivered the note on November 12. The question has arisen whether he delivered it during the week of November 18, the week of the assassination itself. It is unlikely that Oswald would have called attention to himself by going to FBI headquarters with such a note at a time when he was thinking of killing the president. Thus Mrs. Fenner’s recollection that the note was delivered ten days before the assassination in itself is evidence that Oswald was not yet considering the act.
Testifying before the US House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights (op cit., pp. 35–59) on December 11, 1976, Mrs. Fenner created a considerable public stir by claiming that when Oswald tossed the note on her desk, it fell out of the envelope, and she read these words: “I will either blow up the Dallas Police Department or the F.B.I. office.” The FBI was then severely blamed for having ignored Oswald as potentially violent.
James Hosty’s description of the way the note was folded inward, with the writing inside, is in contradiction with Mrs. Fenner’s description, and his account of the contents also is at variance with hers (Hearings, op. cit., pp. 129–130 and 145–147). It appears almost certain that Hosty’s account is correct (interestingly, it matches that of Oswald) and that Oswald never made any threat of violence. If he had, Hosty would surely have tried to confirm the identity of the writer. But he has testified that he only became “100 percent certain” who the note was from on the afternoon of November 22 when Oswald, on meeting him in the county jail, became very upset and refused at first to speak to him (Hearings, op. cit., pp. 132 and 160).
22. On November 22, 1963, on his return from interviewing Oswald in the Dallas County Jail, Hosty was confronted at the FBI office by Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin with the note that Oswald had left several days earlier. Shanklin, who appeared “agitated and upset,” asked Hosty about the circumstances in which he had received the note and about his visits to Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald. On Shanklin’s orders Hosty dictated a two- to four-page memorandum setting forth all he knew, and he gave the memorandum, in duplicate, to Shanklin.
Between two and four hours after Oswald’s death on November 24, Shanklin summoned Hosty. Hosty recalls that Shanklin was standing in front of his desk and that he reached into a lower right-hand drawer and took out both the memorandum and Oswald’s note. “Oswald is dead now,” he said. “There can be no trial. Here, get rid of this.” Hosty started to tear up the documents in Shanklin’s presence. “No,” Shanklin shouted. “Get it out of here. I don’t even want it in this office. Get rid of it.” Hosty then took the note and memorandum out of Shanklin’s office, tore them up, and flushed them down a toilet at the FBI. A few days later Shanklin asked Hosty whether he had destroyed Oswald’s note and the memorandum, and Hosty assured him that he had. (Hosty’s testimony appears in Hearings, op. cit., pp. 124–175, Shanklin’s on pp. 59–129.)
Meanwhile, on November 23, Ruth Paine had given Hosty Oswald’s handwritten draft of his November 9–11 letter to the Soviet embassy (Oswald having left it on Ruth’s desk when he left the house on November 12, as if he wished her to find it), and a day or so later, she gave another FBI agent the copy she had made in her own hand on November 10. Hosty and the second agent, Bardwell Odum, told Shanklin about the letters, and again, from his remarks, they thought he was ordering their destruction. The two agents concluded that Shanklin was on the edge of a nervous breakdown; instead of destroying Oswald’s letter, they sent both copies to the FBI in Washington (Exhibits No. 15 and 103, Vol. 16, pp. 33–34 and 443–444).
Hosty’s testimony makes it appear that his answers on an internal FBI questionnaire were subsequently falsified either by Shanklin or by someone in FBI headquarters in Washington to admit “poor investigative work” in the Oswald case. Hosty received letters of censure from J. Edgar Hoover, was placed on probation, was reprimanded for his Warren Commission testimony, and demoted to Kansas City. Years later a promotion that was recommended for him was blocked by Clyde Tolson, chief deputy of J. Edgar Hoover. Except for Shanklin and two others, every FBI agent who had anything to do with the Oswald case in 1962 or 1963 was censured, transferred, demoted, or barred from promotion, while Shanklin received several letters of commendation from Hoover. The treatment of Hosty appears extraordinary, since it was he who saw that Oswald might warrant looking into and had recommended that the case be reopened in March 1963, after it had been closed for several months.
The statements of several witnesses before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights were at variance, particularly those of Hosty and Shanklin. Shanklin under oath denied that he had told Hosty to destroy the note and did not recall the rest of the incident as Hosty recounted it. Members of the subcommittee warned Shanklin, who is now retired, that he might be exposing himself to prosecution under federal perjury statutes. But prosecution has not been brought.
23. On April 19, 1963, President Kennedy delivered a speech on Cuba, and on April 22, Robert Kennedy made remarks in New York on Cuba that were reported in the Militant. Taken together, the remarks of the two men create a presumption that President Kennedy, and not just his brother, knew of plans physically to eliminate Castro. On September 9, while Oswald was still New Orleans, the Times-Picayune displayed prominently an AP dispatch from Daniel Harker, in Havana, quoting Castro: “The leaders of the US should think that if they are aiding in terrorist plans to eliminate the Cuban leaders, they themselves cannot be safe.” There has never been any indication that Oswald put two and two toget
her in either April or September and realized that the United States government was engaged in actual assassination attempts against Castro.
As for Castro, his interviews with Jean Daniel, foreign editor of the French newspaper L’Express, who was acting as an informal intermediary for President Kennedy and was with Castro when Kennedy died, suggest that Castro hero-worshipped Kennedy in spite of the assassination plots, of which he was aware. Castro said, “At least Kennedy was an enemy to whom we had become accustomed,” and “I’m convinced that anyone else would be worse.” Referring to Kennedy’s Cuban policy, Castro used words similar to those Oswald used in conversation with Marina the previous summer: “He inherited a difficult situation. I don’t believe a President of the United States is ever really free, and I believe Kennedy is … feeling the impact of this lack of freedom.” (The Daniel articles appeared in the New York Times, November 27, 1963, and the New Republic, December 7 and 14, 1963.)
There is no evidence that Oswald ever felt much animus against Kennedy because of his Cuban policies or that such animus played any part in his decision to kill Kennedy. To the contrary, Oswald gave every appearance of having lost interest in Castro by November 1963, and to have shot Kennedy for totally different reasons.
Chapter 35. The President’s Visit
1. Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
2. In his testimony before the Warren Commission in 1964, Hosty said that he was carrying twenty-five to forty cases in November 1963; but in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights in 1975, he said that he had been carrying forty to fifty cases.
3. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 3, p. 100.
4. Testimony of Ruth Hyde Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 515–516.
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