Reclaiming History (153 page)

Oswald goes on to write that he intends to “put forward” an “allturnative” to the two systems of capitalism and communism, and “supporters” of his alternative “must prepare now in the event the situation [he writes the word “melatarist,” by itself, below “situation”] presents itself for the practical application of this allturnative.”
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But then he loses his focus, does not present an alternative (other than to resort to the meaningless platitude that “what is needed is a constructive and practical group of persons desiring peace but steadfastly opposed to the revival of forces who have led millions of people to death and destruction”), and proceeds to make his emotional rejection of both the communist USSR and the capitalist USA very clear:

We have lived into a dark generation of tenstion and fear. But how many of you have tried to find out the truth behind the cold war clic’es [cliches]! I have lived under both systems, I have
sought
the answers and although it would be very easy to dupe myself into believing one system is better than the other, I know they are not.

I despise the representatives of both systems weather they be socialist or cristan democrats, [whether] they be labor or conserative they are all products of the two systems.
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He finishes his paper, mostly devoted to abstractions he can’t quite get a handle on, with two peculiar codas. The first is a confession that he had in fact taken Russian gold:

Whene I first went to Russia in the winter of 1959 my funds were very limited, so after a certain time, after the Russians had assured themselfs that I was really the naive american who beliyved in communism, they arranged for me to recive a certain amount of money every month. OK it came technically through the Red-Cross as finical help to a…polical immigrate but it was arranged by the M.V.D. I told myself it was simply because I was broke and everybody knew it. I accepted the money because I was hungry and there was several inches of snow on the ground in Moscow at that time but what it really was was
payment
for my denuciation of the U.S. in Moscow in November 1956 [1959] and a clear promise that for as long as I lived in the USSR life would be very good I didn’t relize all this, of course for almost two years.

As soon as I became completely disgusted with the Sovit Union and started negotitions with the American Embassy in Moscow for my return to the U.S. my “Red Cross” allotment was cut off. this was not diffical to understand since all correspondece in and out of the Embassy is censored as is common knowledge in the Embassy itself. I have never mentioned the fact of these monthly payments to anyone. I do so in order to state that I shall never sell myself intentionly or unintentionly to anyone again.

The second coda is another peek into Lee’s fantasy life, not unlike the imagined admiration by the newspapers who would be interviewing him. It assumes that what he has written will be published and that he would be offered an appropriate fee for it:

as for the fee of $_____ I was supposed to recive for this _____ I refuse it. I made pretense to except it only because otherwise I would have been considered a crack pot and not allowed to appear to express my views. after all who would refuse money?!?
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T
he SS
Maasdam
put into Hoboken, New Jersey, and the Oswalds cleared immigration on June 13, 1962.
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The hordes of reporters eager to hear Lee’s story were notably absent. But INS inspector Frederick Wiedersheim was there to briefly question Lee about his Soviet interlude. Oswald told Wiedersheim that he had been employed as a mechanic in Russia, had threatened to renounce his U.S. citizenship but had never carried out the threat, had never voted in Russia, and had not held any position in the Soviet government.
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Also there to meet Oswald was a representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society, Spas T. Raikin, who had been alerted by the State Department. Lee did need Raikin’s help, as he had only sixty-three dollars to his name, nowhere to spend the night, and was without funds to go on to Texas as he wanted to do. Raikin helped Lee and Marina get through Customs and then sent them on to the New York City Department of Welfare.
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The Welfare Department put the Oswalds up for the night in the Times Square Hotel
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and called his brother Robert’s home in Fort Worth. A case worker spoke to Robert’s wife Vada, who offered to help. She called Robert at work, and he immediately wired two hundred dollars.
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The next morning Oswald tried to refuse Robert’s money on the grounds that his brother, raising a family on a milkman’s wages, could hardly afford it. Lee wanted the Welfare Department, not Robert, to lend him the money, which he’d repay when he could. When that didn’t work, he suggested that he and his family could take the train as far as his sixty-three dollars would take them, and then apply to the welfare services wherever that was for transportation the rest of the way. He was advised that this plan was highly unrealistic and dangerous, and he finally accepted, grudgingly, Robert’s money. A case worker for the department then escorted him to a Western Union office and a bank to help him cash Robert’s money order, to the West Side Airlines Terminal to buy the tickets for the flight reserved for them, Delta Airlines flight number 821, and back to the hotel to pay their room rent and pick up their luggage. The worker then took them to Idlewild airport and remained with them until they boarded their flight for takeoff at 4:15 p.m.
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When Lee, Marina, and June Lee descended from the plane at Dallas’s Love Field in the early evening of June 14, 1962, Robert and his family were there to greet them. Lee’s first words to his brother were, “No reporters?”

“I managed to keep it quiet,” Robert said, “as you asked in your letter.” Robert thought Lee was a little disappointed, but Lee said nothing more about it.
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Lee had stated his intention, in his affidavit of support for Marina, to reside with his mother in Vernon, Texas,
⁸⁶⁰
but he was probably relieved when Robert had offered in a letter to let Lee and his family stay with them instead, and after Lee arrived, he asked how everyone was doing without even mentioning Marguerite.
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Robert found his younger brother only a little changed after his two and a half years in the Soviet Union. He was thinner, beginning to bald, his curly hair somewhat kinkier—Lee blamed his hair loss on the Russian weather, while Robert wondered if Lee had received shock treatments in Russia that caused the loss—but he also seemed rather tense and anxious the first couple of days. He might have picked up a hint of an accent as well. Nonetheless, Robert said that “to me, [Lee] acted the same as he did in 1959 prior to going to Russia…He appeared to be the same boy I had known before.”
⁸⁶²

The brothers got on well together, although Lee avoided talking politics with Robert, who, as Lee knew, considered himself a born conservative.
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Robert, for his part, was delighted to have Lee, Marina, and June with him on Davenport Street, out on the western edge of Fort Worth. The house had two bedrooms. Their infant son, Robert Lee, had his baby bed in Robert and Vada’s room, and their daughter, Cathy, slept in the other bedroom. So all they had to do was shift little Cathy onto a couch in the living room to give Lee, Marina, and June a room to themselves. The two young wives communicated happily by sign language as they washed, ironed, and looked after their infants, and Marina pitched in to help Vada with the other housework.
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Marina was ecstatic about everything in her new surroundings, from the kitchen equipment to the shrubs in the yard, and she asked Lee wonderingly, “Will we be able to live like this?” After the first few days she even prevailed upon Vada, a licensed hairdresser, to give her a short, fluffy haircut like Vada’s own. Both she and Lee were delighted with the result.
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Robert and Vada were just “tickled to death” to be able to show Marina things in America she had never seen before, and Vada gave her some lightweight summer clothes to replace her heavy Russian woolens, which were a misery in the Texas heat. But Marina hesitated to accept a pair of walking shorts because she feared they were immodest, even though they came nearly to her knees. In Russia, shorts were only worn at the beach, and the thought that she could wear them elsewhere was revolutionary.
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Robert was perplexed by the fact that although Marina seemed happy, she seldom smiled, until Lee explained that, embarrassed by a crooked tooth, she had pulled it herself before they left Minsk. She wasn’t smiling because she didn’t want to reveal the gap. Her first trip to an American supermarket, though, finally evoked plenty of smiles. It was a fairyland for her and she couldn’t wait to push the shopping cart.
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The first weekend home Lee showed Robert the sheaf of notes he had been keeping for a book he was writing about the living and working conditions in Minsk, and Robert read the first fifteen or twenty pages of them.
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On Monday morning, June 18, Oswald went to the offices of Mrs. Pauline Virginia Bates, a public stenographer whose name he got out of the telephone directory, and asked her to type a manuscript he had started working on in Russia that was supplemented by the sheets of paper on which he had recorded his impressions of the Soviet Union. After Oswald told her that he had just returned from Russia and smuggled his notes out of the country, she was immediately intrigued, enough for her to agree to type the notes for one dollar per page or two dollars an hour, fifty cents less than her usual hourly rate. Over the next three days, Bates spent eight hours typing for Oswald while he helped her translate portions of the notes written in Russian. At the end of each session, Oswald took home with him all of his notes and as much of the manuscript that she had completed. After paying ten dollars for ten single-spaced pages, he told her he had no more money to give her. Fascinated with what she was typing, she offered to continue to type for nothing, but he declined, telling her, “No, I don’t work that way.”
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He continued to work on the book at Robert’s house, sometimes spending hours at a stretch reworking his notes. What remains from this projected book are reprinted in fifty-one pages of a Warren Commission exhibit, the typed (by the Commission) narrative of Oswald’s handwritten manuscript,
⁸⁷⁰
along with ninety-seven other pages of Warren Commission exhibits (forty-one of which consist of Oswald’s original handwritten manuscript) of other handwritten and typed thoughts of Oswald’s that he may or may not have intended to be a part of the book.
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That he intended to write a book is beyond doubt: the manuscript even includes, in Oswald’s handwriting, a “furword” (foreword), an “About the Author” profile (the latter containing, as alluded to earlier, one of the most famous phrases ever attached to Oswald: “Lee Harvey Oswald was born in Oct 1939 in New Orleans La, the son of a Insuraen Salesman whose early death left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by neckleck”), and a table of contents with forty-five sections or chapters.
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Nowhere in the historical record is there any indication that Oswald even got around to making any attempt to get his writings published, either as a book or as a long article. However, someone else was planning a book on Lee’s defection—Marguerite. She had received notification from the State Department that Lee was returning to the United States, and although he hadn’t bothered to tell her he was home and staying at Robert’s, she figured that out. About a week after his arrival, she took a few days off from her practical nursing job in Crowell, Texas, where she looked after an elderly invalid woman, to travel to Fort Worth to meet her new grandchild and daughter-in-law. Renting a motel room paid for by her client’s daughter, she visited her sons and their families every day. She was happy to see Lee again, loved to hold June in her lap, and was thrilled to death with Marina, raving over her looks.

“Marina doesn’t look Russian,” she told her son. “She is beautiful.”

“Of course not,” he said. “That’s why I married her, because she looks like an American girl.”

“You know, Lee,” she said, “I am getting ready, I
was
getting ready to write a book on your so-called defection.”

Lee was alarmed, only hearing the “am” not the “was.” “Mother, you are not going to write a book!” he asserted.

She told him that she didn’t like his telling her what to do, since it was her life, and his defection had an impact on it, but went on to say, “I cannot write the book now because honey, you are alive and back.” She told the Warren Commission that she was contemplating a book at the time because she had no way of knowing “whether my son was living or dead.”
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Marguerite proceeded to make an offer to Lee that clearly didn’t please him. She said she planned to give up her job and move back to Fort Worth to take a place where Lee, Marina, and June could live with her. Lee told her that they would find their own place as soon as he landed a job, but Marguerite was insistent.
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However, that was some time off, and Lee’s main concern now was to get a job. Indeed, he had already visited the Fort Worth office of the Texas Employment Commission to check job possibilities on the same day he started work on his manuscript with Pauline Bates. He also asked if there was anyone in town who spoke Russian. He was given two names, one of them Peter Paul Gregory, a Siberian-born consulting petroleum engineer who taught classes in Russian at the public library. He called Gregory in his office the following morning and asked whether he would be willing to give him a letter certifying his ability to translate Russian into English. Gregory suggested he drop by the office.
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