Reclaiming History (177 page)

I
n the meantime, Oswald’s determination to get to Cuba grew hotter than ever. So hot in fact that he now planned to hijack a plane. Around the third week in August, possibly just after his appearance on
Conversation Carte Blanche
, he told Marina of his plan and informed her that he would need her help. She rejected the proposal out of hand. “For God’s sake, don’t do such a thing,” she remonstrated. It was so ridiculous it was almost funny.

But Oswald was very serious. He started doing exercises to strengthen himself for the caper—deep knee bends, arm exercises, leaping about the apartment in his underwear—much to the merriment of June, who thought he was playing with her. Afterward, he would rub himself down with some strong-smelling liniment, take a cold shower, and emerge red as a lobster. Marina laughed along with the baby. “Junie,” she said, “our papa is out of his mind.” But Lee insisted in trying to drag her into the plot.

They would buy tickets separately under different names, he said. Lee would sit in the front of the cabin with a gun, Marina in the rear with a gun. Once Lee had subdued the pilot, Marina would stand up, address the passengers, and urge them to be calm and cooperative. Marina reminded him that she did not speak English. “That script won’t do,” he admitted, but it barely slowed him down. “I’ll have to think of something new,” telling her to sit on the bed as he left the room. Shortly thereafter, he bounded into the bedroom shouting to her, “Hands up and don’t make any noise!” Marina didn’t think she could handle even that much English, but he told her she could speak in Russian and if she stuck her gun out everybody would know what she meant. He begged her and promised to buy her a small handgun, one suitable for a woman. He had already been shopping around for one.

“Do you really think anybody will be fooled?” Marina asked. “A pregnant woman, her stomach sticking way out, a tiny girl in one hand and a pistol in another? I’ve never held a pistol in my life, much less shot anyone.”

Lee offered to teach her, and explained again how easy it would be. Nothing could go wrong. Marina thought plenty of things could go wrong and probably would, things he couldn’t even imagine. There was no way she was going to take part in the hijacking of an airliner. “Only a crazy man would think up something like this,” she said.

Lee was undeterred. He spent a great deal of time studying a large world map that he hung inside the porch of their house and was always measuring distances between places with a ruler, and talking about the need to hijack a plane that had enough fuel to get to Cuba. He collected flight schedules, some from nearby airports smaller than the one in New Orleans, with smaller planes, which would give him fewer passengers to intimidate and subdue. To solve the fuel problem, he talked of flying from New Orleans to some place nearer to Cuba—Key West, perhaps—and then taking a smaller plane headed inland and forcing it to turn back to Cuba. He told Marina he was looking for someone else who also wanted to go to Cuba and would be willing to help him with the hijacking. He soon gave that up, though, because, he told Marina, “Your accomplice is your enemy for life.” This madness lasted only about two weeks, Marina helping to convince him that he should try to find some legal and sane way to get to Cuba.
¹³⁵¹

Lee now began to work on another plan to get to Cuba. There was no legal way to get to Cuba directly from the United States, but there were regular flights between Mexico City and Havana, and there was a Cuban embassy in Mexico City where he might be able to get a visa into Cuba. “I’ll go there,” he told Marina excitedly. “I’ll show them my clippings, show them how much I’ve done for Cuba, and explain how hard it is to help in America. And how above all I want to help Cuba.” He just knew the child in Marina’s womb had to be a boy, a boy he’d call Fidel, he told Marina, to help ensure his welcome in Cuba. She replied there was going to be no little Fidel in her stomach. He told Marina that once he got established in Cuba he would send for her. But she paused. She was sure his vision of Cuba would turn out to be as illusory as his vision of the Soviet Union had. Whatever it was that was eating at him would not be vanquished by a change of scenery. He would only be happy, Marina thought, on the moon.
¹³⁵²

He drew a rosy picture of what their life in Havana might become. She could study there—education was free—and get a job. The Cubans would be grateful for the propaganda coup of attracting an American defector, and he would be granted special privileges as he had been in the Soviet Union, including “a nice little house” for the two of them. Marina hated the fact that her country conferred privileges on foreigners and was sure that Castro’s Cuba, about which she had heard nothing but good, would not do that. She thought Lee would last a few months there at most. Thus, she felt compelled to abet his scheme, mostly because she knew he would never settle down until he had been to Cuba and seen for himself that it was not really better than anywhere else. Marina would later tell Priscilla McMillan, “I loved him because I felt he was in search of himself. I was in search of myself too. I couldn’t show him the way, but I wanted to help him and give him support while he was searching.”
¹³⁵³

B
ut meanwhile there was a more pressing problem—Marina’s pregnancy and the lack of funds to adequately provide for her hospitalization and the child’s birth. This was a specter hanging over Lee’s head and he had already set in motion a plan to solve it. Back on August 11 (and not knowing that Ruth was only too happy to take care of everything concerning the birth of his and Marina’s child), he had gotten Marina to write Ruth to tell her he had lost his job, and therefore, in so many words, they were out of money. She was not to mention to Ruth his plan to send her and June to Russia (which, unbeknownst to him, Marina already had) or his own plan to abscond to Cuba. The letter Marina ended up writing was full of news about their trip to Mobile and the visit by Ruth Kloepfer, the clerk of the local Quaker Meeting whom Ruth had both called and written to in the hope of finding someone in New Orleans with whom Marina might speak Russian. “I liked her very much,” Marina wrote. “Don’t you think she is a fine woman? And such a pleasant and winsome face.” Marina said that she would be happy to see Ruth again when, as Ruth had promised in an earlier letter, she arrives in New Orleans for a visit around September 20.

Eventually, she slipped in the information Lee wanted Ruth to know: “[A] little about our life. June runs about, grows, and is a great joy for me. Lee doesn’t have work right now, already for three weeks. But we hope that everything will clear up, right? For the time being it is difficult to find work, but possibly at the end of summer there will be more openings, when some go to study. But we are not downcast and are hoping for better times.”
¹³⁵⁴

Marina sent the letter to Ruth in Paoli, Pennsylvania, where Ruth had gone at the end of July for a holiday that would last just under two months. From Paoli, Ruth replied in a letter postmarked August 25 about how “very sorry” she was that Lee was not working, saying she knew it was therefore “hard for him and for you in the meanwhile.” Because of their predicament, she added that it was “too bad” that she and Lee were not still living in Dallas. “I found out that you may go to Parkland Hospital and receive everything necessary, and pay only according to your earnings. Those unable to pay do not have to. But, in order to get this aid, you have to live in Texas for one year and in Dallas County for six months.” She also told Marina to look for her to arrive in New Orleans on Friday, September 20, “in daytime if I can make it; otherwise, in the evening.”
¹³⁵⁵

Lee was confident that Ruth had gotten the message intended, and felt that from that point on Ruth would be thinking about what she could do to ameliorate the fix Marina was in. Ruth did not have to renew her offer to Marina to come to her home in Dallas for the birth of the new baby in early October. She had already done that in the last letter she sent Marina before she left for her vacation.
¹³⁵⁶
What Ruth did not know was how much Lee was counting on her to do just that. Ruth had not disappointed. Her letter to Marina of August 25, saying she was coming to New Orleans on September 20 and speaking about the cost at Parkland Hospital to deliver the baby, gave Lee, by implication, the assurance he needed that Ruth would take care of Marina.
¹³⁵⁷

At some point Oswald set out to prepare a resumé of points to use to persuade Cuban authorities of his desirability. He wrote on pages of a looseleaf notebook, each headed by a different title. One was “Military and Far East,” which summed up his service in the Marine Corps. He also cited his training in electronics and claimed to have received a high school diploma “at the same time as my [Marine Corps] schooling in Biloxi, Mississippi.” At the end, he lists the papers he will produce to document everything he said, including his original discharge certificate, his diplomas from the service schools he attended in Jacksonville, Florida, and Biloxi, Mississippi, and a certificate of “high school completion,” which, though he never did complete high school, was proof of his satisfactory results on the high school–level General Educational Development test he took in the Marine Corps. He followed the same format on other pages titled “Resident of USSR,” “Marxist,” “Russian,” “organizer” and “Street Agitation,” the latter two dealing with his FPCC activities in New Orleans. He even had sections for “Radio Specker [Speaker] and Lecturer” and “Photograpes” (his work at Jaggers in Dallas).
¹³⁵⁸

What he wrote under all these categories was intended to be, in effect, the official “record” of his adult life up to somewhere around the end of August or the beginning of September 1963. It seems pitiful enough, even if you grant him some of the claims that really don’t bear close scrutiny. It was not pitiful to Lee, though. He intended to dazzle the Cuban authorities with it, so he must have thought it reasonably impressive. It is impossible to know with any certainty what Lee was thinking, as his fantasy life was spinning out of control, but the resumé offers an insight into his view of himself at that time. Some writers have assumed that Oswald was in despair over the many failures of his life, but his resumé suggests that at least at this point in time, he had not thrown in the towel and did not think of himself as a failure. He was a man of many accomplishments—which the Cuban authorities were bound to recognize.
¹³⁵⁹

On the morning of Septemaber 2, Labor Day, Lee rang up his Aunt Lillian and asked whether he, Marina, and the baby could come over for the day. Lillian, who was tired and often felt the strain of the language barrier between herself and Marina, suggested they come later, in midafternoon. They took the bus, and Dutz Murret, who just happened to be driving by, picked them up and saved them some of the walk from the bus stop. They arrived at about three or four in the afternoon.

Lillian asked them if they had had “dinner”—which means lunch in New Orleans—and they said they had, but Lillian somehow doubted that. She went to the store and bought some rolls, came back, and made coffee, and the fact that they ate all of the rolls made Lillian think she had guessed right that they probably hadn’t eaten. Later that evening she made hamburgers and Marina and Lee each ate two.

It was a pleasant family day, enlivened by the presence of two of Lee’s cousins, John and Marilyn. Dutz took the occasion to lecture Lee on his refusal to teach Marina English, which disappointed the Murrets.

“Lee, we love Marina very much,” Murret said, “but we feel very bad that we can’t converse with Marina because you speak to her all the time in Russian, and we don’t know what is going on, and she doesn’t know what is going on with us. Don’t you think you should teach her the English language?”

Lee said “No.” It wasn’t the first time Dutz had started this argument. “I’ll tell you right now,” Lee said, “I will never teach it to her.” He said he didn’t object to her learning the language on her own somehow, but “I am not going to teach her, because I do not want to lose my Russian.”

Why not? Lillian wondered. “Why do you want to keep up your Russian, Lee? Do you intend to go back to Russia?” Something happened right then—Lillian forgets what—but she never did get an answer to her question.

Though the Murrets faulted Lee for keeping Marina from learning English, they felt he was otherwise very attentive to her, noticing that he would always open the car door for her, pull the chair out when she wanted to sit down, and things like that. Lillian’s daughter, Marilyn, sensed that Lee was very devoted to Marina, loved his child very much, and was not just well mannered with his wife but with every woman in his presence. After the hamburgers John took them home in his car.
¹³⁶⁰

John was in no rush that Labor Day evening, so he drove the Oswalds around to see the church where he was going to be married on October 5. They also drove by the imposing home of his well-to-do fiancée on Palmer Avenue, where the reception would be held. Lee said nothing, but Marina knew that his fists were clenched in anger, not because he disliked or envied rich people
*
so much but because of his hatred for an economic and political system that made it possible for some people to be so wealthy. She could almost feel his hatred of American capitalism sitting next to him in the car.
¹³⁶¹

John finally dropped them at home, and that was the last that any of the Murrets ever saw—or even heard from—Lee and Marina.
¹³⁶²

Although Lee and Marina were facing a separation the consequences of which could hardly be foreseen—if Lee did manage to get to Cuba and Marina did not, it might be the end of their life together—their daily life on Magazine Street did not change very much. Lee continued to spend most of his days sprawled on the couch reading. Sometimes he also read all night long, in the bathroom so as not to disturb Marina. After he lost his job in July, his interest in serious books on social and economic policy and history and biography tailed off in favor of fiction, particularly science fiction and a sprinkling of spy novels. The only work of history or sociology he checked out of the New Orleans Public Library after he lost his job was
Everyday Life in Ancient Rome
by Frank Richard Cowell. The twenty other books he checked out in the two months before he left New Orleans included two books by Aldous Huxley,
Brave New World
and
Ape and Essence
, Lew Wallace’s
Ben-Hur
, and many science-fiction novels and collections by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, and others. In late July he checked out
Five Spy Novels
selected by Howard Haycraft, and he also took out three of Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy novels,
Thunderball
in June and
Moonraker
and
Goldfinger
on September 19, although he had little time to read much of them before he left New Orleans a few days later.
¹³⁶³
(All three Bond novels turned up in his Dallas rooming house after the assassination.)