Reclaiming History (360 page)

^*
A name derived from that of the father, especially by the addition to his first name of a prefix or suffix.

† Section 423.2-1 of the U.S. State Department regulations in force at the time provided that repatriation loans could be made to destitute U.S. nationals: “(a) Who are in complete and unquestioned possession of their citizenship rights; (b) Who are entitled to receive United States passports; (c) Whose loyalty to the United States is beyond question, or to whom the provisions of Section 423.1-2(b) apply” (7 FAM [Foreign Affairs Manual] § 423.2–1; 5 USC § 1701; WR, p. 771).
Oswald clearly satisfied the qualifications of items (a) and (b), although not (c). Surely, his statements at the embassy at the time of his “defection” rendered his loyalty to the country of his birth highly suspect, but the State Department felt that an escape clause, appended to Section 423.1-2 (b), was applicable here. It permitted such loans when “the United States national is in or the cause of a situation which is damaging to the prestige of the United States Government or which constitutes a compelling reason for extending assistance to effect his return.” (7 FAM § 423.1–2; CE 950, 18 H 310) The State Department did indeed feel that Oswald’s “continued presence in Russia was damaging to the prestige of the United States because of his unstable character and prior criticisms of the United States.” Government officials knew about his botched suicide attempt when he first tried to gain residence in the USSR, and no one could be sure that he would not pull some other crazy stunt that would create an international incident embarrassing to the United States. (CE 950, 18 H 309–311; WR, p. 771)

^*
Although transportation to Texas was not provided for, it still appears that the eight hundred dollars, then one thousand dollars, that Oswald had earlier requested from the International Rescue Committee for transportation was more than he actually needed.

^*
Though not included in the Warren Commission volumes, the cover letter of Agent Fain’s July 10, 1962, report to FBI headquarters of his June 26 interview of Oswald says that Fain asked Oswald if he’d be willing to take a polygraph test on whether he had furnished any information to the Soviets, or had been recruited by Soviet intelligence agents, or had made any deals with the Soviets in order to obtain permission to return to the United States. Oswald declined to take the test without giving any reason. (FBI Record 124-10010-10033, July 10, 1962, Cover page C)

^*
But some in the Russian emigré community felt that Marina was as much to blame for their difficulties as was Lee. One was Katya Ford. Though she liked Marina and agreed that Oswald was “mentally unstable,” she felt Marina was “a rather immature girl” who deliberately provoked Oswald by saying things to him that she knew would anger him, such as that he was “badly brought up or something like that.” (2 H 300, WCT Katherine N. Ford) Jeanne de Mohrenschildt said that Marina “ribbed him even in front of us. She ribbed him so, that if I would ever speak to my husband that way we would not last long.” When asked by Warren Commission counsel for an example of the ribbing, Mrs. de Mohrenschildt said Marina would say, “Oh, big hero” or “Look at that big shot, something like that.” (9 H 312–313) But George de Mohrenschildt seems to be the only one that went beyond this, claiming that Marina was always nagging Oswald over the fact that they weren’t as well off as others, and said that he and his wife finally told her to stop annoying him, that “he is doing his best” (9 H 233).

^*
Lee told Marina he had been fired at Leslie Welding but didn’t say why (1 H 5, WCT Marina N. Oswald). Shortly thereafter, he filled out an application card at the Texas Employment Commission in Dallas and said he was “laid off” by the Fort Worth employer, again without explanation (10 H 135, WCT Helen P. Cunningham). However, he implied to the group at his home that the reason he lost his job was that it was “seasonal” (McMillan,
Marina and Lee
, p. 252; 8 H 366, WCT George Alexandrovich Bouhe).

† Mrs. Taylor got the job of babysitting June while Marina was at the dentist. It wasn’t easy. “The minute Marina left, the child would start to cry. She whimpered all the time. I couldn’t feed her. Every time I got near her she’d scream. She never slept. She’s a very difficult child to get along with. She was not affectionate at all to anybody else but to her own parents” (11 H 127–128, WCT Mrs. Donald Gibson [Mrs. Gary Taylor, formerly Alexandra de Mohrenschildt]).

^*
It is not known where Oswald spent the nights of October 8 through October 14, 1962, in Dallas, which raises all types of sinister alarm bells for conspiracy theorists. But other than the fact that Oswald had been a defector—not a terribly important event—he was of no interest to anyone. Before the assassination, no one had any reason to have Oswald under surveillance, watching his every move. The conspiracy theorists, however, do not accept this obvious fact, and expect every day and minute of his time to be accounted for. Whenever a day is unaccounted for, it must be because Oswald eluded those who were watching him (but no one was), and snuck off to meet with those he was conspiring with to kill Kennedy.

† During part of this period Oswald stayed with Marina at Elena Hall’s residence in Fort Worth. Hall had an automobile accident on October 18 that resulted in her being hospitalized until October 26, and four days after returning from the hospital, she left for New York to visit friends, not returning until after Marina and Lee had moved into an apartment on November 3. So Marina was all alone at Hall’s residence and Oswald stayed overnight with her on several days. (11 H 137, WCT Mrs. Donald Gibson; 1 H 8, WCT Marina N. Oswald; 11 H 120, WC affidavit of Alexander Kleinlerer; WR, pp. 719–720)

‡ And with the contacts came the beatings, even though Lee wasn’t living with Marina at the time. Elena Hall told the Warren Commission that the first time Marina came to live with her after Marina’s stay at the Taylors, Marina “had black and blue over half of her face…He would beat her all the time” (8 H 395).

^*
Indeed, a harbinger that nothing had changed occurred at Elena Hall’s home in Fort Worth the day before the Oswalds moved into the Elsbeth apartment. Elena was away in New York and pursuant to Lee’s asking him, Alexander Kleinlerer came to Elena’s to discuss and help in the moving arrangements. While there, Oswald noticed that the zipper on Marina’s skirt was not completely closed. “He called to her in a very angry and commanding tone of voice, just like an officer commanding a soldier. His exact words were ‘Come here!’ in Russian and he uttered them in the way you would call a misbehaving dog in order to inflict punishment. He was standing in the doorway. When she reached the doorway he rudely reprimanded her in a flat imperious voice about being careless in her dress and slapped her in the face twice. Marina had the baby in her arms. Her face was red and tears came to her eyes. I was very much embarrassed and also angry but I had long been afraid of Oswald and I did not say anything” (11 H 120, WC affidavit of Alexander Kleinlerer).

^*
He would come to be described as “six feet one or two inches tall, handsome, dark, broad-shouldered, a man of arresting physique who frequently wore bathing trunks on the street the better to display it, loud, hearty, humorous, a man who was forever dancing, joking, and telling off-color stories, and who would drink all night and never show it, lover of innumerable women, a European aristocrat so secure of his lineage that there was no one whose friendship could demean him” (McMillan,
Marina and Lee
, p. 264). Albert Jenner, de Mohrenschildt’s questioner at the Warren Commission who clearly was taken with George, and whose enjoyment at questioning George leaps from the transcript pages, gratuitously added, for the record, that the witness was “athletically inclined…quite tanned, [and] an outdoors man” (9 H 180).

^*
Though de Mohrenschildt was impressed with certain character traits of Oswald’s, he did, on the other hand, discount the possibility that Oswald was a Soviet spy, saying, “I never would believe that any government would be stupid enough to trust Lee with anything important…an unstable individual, mixed-up individual, uneducated individual, without background. What government would give him any confidential work? No government would. Even the government of Ghana would not give him a job of any type” (9 H 237).

^*
Anna thinks that Marina said Lee had beaten her, but Marina said Lee hadn’t, and she didn’t tell Anna he had, but “perhaps [Anna] understood that he had beaten me, because it had happened [before].” Meller did say she saw no bruises on Marina when she arrived at her home. (1 H 34, WCT Marina N. Oswald; 8 H 386–387, WCT Anna N. Meller)

^*
Hall and Davis were convicted by a federal jury shortly thereafter. Their lawyer, John Abt (whom Oswald would later want to represent him after his arrest for Kennedy’s murder), had argued that the act of registration violated the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against self-incrimination, and the conviction was later reversed in 1965 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the McCarran Act was unconstitutional (
Albertson v. Subversive Activities Control Board
, 382 U.S. 70, 86 [1965]).

† Oswald’s appetite for the revolutionary cause carried over to the New Year, Lee celebrating the first day of 1963, when most other men his age were watching football games on TV, by sending thirty-five cents to Pioneer Publishers, the literary arm of the SWP, for three pamphlets by J. B. Cannon:
The Coming American Revolution, The End of the Cominterm
, and
The 1948 Manifesto of the 4th International Period
. And he said he’d appreciate it if they would send him the English words to the song “International.” (Dobbs Exhibit No. 7, 19 H 573)

^*
Ironically, in 1957, Walker, stationed with his army unit in Arkansas, subjugated his segregationist impulses and carried out his duty, commanding the “federalized” National Guard troops that forced integration on Little Rock’s Central High School (Cartwright, “Old Soldier,” p. 59).

^*
The Tulsa-based Hargis, whose oratorical style of preaching was what Oklahomans call “bawl and jump” (shouting to the point of hoarseness while flailing one’s arms), weighed in at 270 pounds and was known more for his anti-Communism than for his preaching the Gospel of Christ, though one of his favorite lines was “
for
Christ and
against
communism.” In the 1960s and early 1970s his fame and influence was on its way to rivaling Reverend Billy Graham’s. The Christian Crusade, which Hargis founded, had an enormous budget by 1972 and his message was being delivered in over 500 radio and 250 television stations around the country, mostly in the South. On the air and in his many books (e.g.,
Communist America—Must It Be?, The Real Extremists—The Far Left, Why I Fight for a Christian America
”), Hargis routinely accused the likes of President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and network news anchors like Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley of being soft on Communism. He himself had a soft side, shown by his establishment, in 1966, of a missionary foundation that ran medical clinics and orphanages in Asia and Africa. His power and reach substantially and irrevocably waned in 1974, when he resigned as president of the Christian college he had founded in Tulsa amid allegations he had had sex with a few male and female students.
Newsweek
noted in 1987 that Hargis was “the first televangelist brought down by allegations of sexual misconduct.” (Myrna Oliver, “Rev. Billy James Hargis, 79, Pastor Targeted Communism,”
Los Angeles Times
, November 30, 2004, obituary, p.B10;
New York Times
, November 29, 2004, p. A23) Likewise, it was charges of sexual misconduct against General Walker (arrested and convicted of public lewdness after making sexual advances to an undercover Dallas police officer in the men’s room of a public park) that brought his downfall as a significant force two years later in 1976 (Cartwright, “Old Soldier,” p. 59).

^*
The considerable and ongoing, to this day, interest by members of the conspiracy community in Ruth Paine is because they have actually entertained the notion that she and her husband were part of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy (e.g., Garrison,
Heritage of Stone
, pp. 80, 114–115). Indeed, at the London trial, Gerry Spence, on cross-examination, actually pushed the issue, suggesting that a series of incidents involving Ruth only appeared to be coincidences. “It just is a coincidence that you befriended the wife of the man who was later charged with the murder of our president?” Spence asked Ruth, disbelief in his voice. “And is it a coincidence that it was you, Mrs. Paine, who directed Lee to the job that put him in the Texas School Book Depository?” “And it’s just a coincidence that the gun that supposedly killed the president was located in your house?” (Transcript of
On Trial
, July 24, 1986, pp. 647–648) To me, and to all or most of the jury I’m sure, the thought of the extremely proper and straight-laced Quaker lady with the rimless glasses conspiring to kill an ant or flower, much less a president, was laughable, and my amusement was apparently picked up by the camera. Paine’s biographer, Thomas Mallon, writes, “Spence walks around with a giant photo of Oswald and throws everything he can at Ruth, even the suggestion she might be a KGB agent.” (As seen, he suggested much more than this.) Mallon goes on to write that the camera shows “Bugliosi, by contrast…beaming with delight [an exaggeration—only a measured smile] as Ruth gently forbears Spence’s assault. The prosecutor takes no advantage of several obvious opportunities to object, clearly preferring to let his opponent’s aggression backfire.” (Mallon,
Mrs. Paine’s Garage
, p. 147) While Mallon’s assessment of my strategy was correct, even if the majority of jurors felt the way I did, if Spence could muddy the waters to the extent of creating a reasonable doubt in the mind of just one of the jurors, he would have succeeded in creating a hung jury.