Reclaiming History (9 page)

Finally, I believe readers will also be struck by the incredibly rich cast of diverse characters who people the Kennedy assassination saga, characters who would rival those in the most inspired of fiction, including that of Shakespeare. I don’t read fiction but I’ve been told that most prominent novelists really only have four or five characters who keep reemerging, in different clothing, in their various stories, whereas Shakespeare allegedly had more than twenty disparate characters. I can assure the readers of this book that within its pages they will meet many extremely fascinating people in addition to President Kennedy himself and his wife, Jackie, not the least of which, you will find, are Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara are among the many others.
†
Conspiracy author Paris Flammonde said it well when he observed that the dramatic personalities in the Kennedy case were among “the most extraordinary ever to stride, slink, and flee across the stage of greater human events…, and like the pageant of characters” in “Lawrence Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet
, almost all enter as enigmas and most are hardly more understandable when they depart.”
⁸⁹
Longtime JFK assassination researcher Bill Drenas connects these characters with the unbelievable twists and turns in this story when he says, “If you sat down and tried to write something that was this interesting about a presidential assassination, you couldn’t do it. It’s the most fascinating story ever told. That’s why people will never stop talking about this case.”
⁹⁰

Though the president’s murder happened in Dallas, Texas, the long journey you the reader are about to embark on will take you to many other places—New Orleans’s colorful and steamy French Quarter, a hotel room in Moscow, the beaches of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, and the roiling waters of the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam; from a mob hangout in Chicago to the little town of Stanley, North Dakota; a park bench in Central Park and bullring in Mexico City to the anti-Castro–laden streets of Miami’s Little Havana; and so on. Though a good portion of the subject matter will be complex, sometimes even arcane, I hope I will have infused even these areas with enough interesting and understandable narrative to keep your interest throughout this very long and circuitous journey.

Vincent Bugliosi

January 2007

Los Angeles, California

Author’s Note: All times noted throughout this chapter are derived, when possible, from reliable sources (e.g., Dallas police radio recordings, television videotapes with times on screen). When not, times are inferred from the unfolding events and the totality of witness statements. This methodology is necessary because the time estimates given by, for instance, a single witness would often change every time the witness was interviewed and nearly always be in conflict with those given by other witnesses. All of this, of course, is normal and to be expected. I believe the following chronology to be the most accurate reconstruction to date. Throughout this chronology, the times, unless stated otherwise, are those of Central Standard Time.

Friday, November 22, 1963

6:30 a.m.

Marina Oswald awakens in the dark. This late in November the sun doesn’t rise until seven, even as far south as Irving, Texas. The young Russian woman, born Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova, is still tired from an uneasy night. She and her American husband, Lee, argued the night before, not as intensely as usual, but unpleasantly enough, particularly as they hadn’t seen each other for nearly two weeks. And their newborn, Rachel, awoke twice, as babies will.

Lee usually woke up before the alarm went off, but this morning he didn’t, sleeping through the sound, and Marina awakened him about ten minutes later. In the other bedroom Marina’s friend Ruth Paine, the owner of the house, is still asleep with her kids.
¹

Lee has changed a lot in the two and a half years since Marina first met him at a dance at the Palace of Culture in Minsk, the capital city of the Soviet province of Byelorussia. She was only nineteen then, he was twenty-one and just a few months out of the U.S. Marines. Marina thought him to be very well dressed in his gray suit, white shirt, and white tie.
²
When she found out later that he was an American defector to the Soviet Union, it only increased her attraction to him. She still finds him good looking, in some ways even more so since he has been losing weight and some of the babyish plumpness of cheek that made him look a bit like a chipmunk. At five foot nine inches and less than 150 pounds, Lee is rather small of build. But he’s wiry, and his hands and arms are unusually strong. He is hardening into a man, and Marina is still Lee’s woman, despite his crazy imagination. Honestly, some of his ideas would make the cat laugh. He told her not long ago that in twenty years he would be the “prime minister.”

The lingering squabble from the night before is nothing out of the ordinary. They have been bickering from the first day of their marriage, and Lee isn’t above hitting her when he loses his temper. They quarrel when they live together, they quarrel when they live apart. Marina has plenty of reason to want to live apart, but now he wants her to come back to live with him. He wants to take an apartment near his job, in Dallas, so they can all be together again—quite a turnaround from the pressure he had been putting on her to return to the Soviet Union, unless he is just trying to manipulate her again for some hidden reason of his own. Marina can never be quite sure. She knows she will eventually have to go back to him—she can’t presume upon the hospitality of Ruth much longer—but she isn’t ready yet. She is particularly outraged that Lee has been living in Dallas under an assumed name—more of his foolishness. She doesn’t even know where in Dallas—some cheap furnished room somewhere, she supposes—and it was more or less an accident that she found out about the phony name at all.

Lee didn’t come out to Irving last weekend. He didn’t call her either. Perhaps he was angry because she had asked him not to come. Ruth, an intellectually inclined Quaker, was having a birthday party for her daughter on Saturday, her estranged husband Michael would be there, and Marina felt Lee’s presence would be an intrusion on what ought to be a family day.

Then on Sunday, baby June, their two-year-old, was playing with the telephone dial, and Marina, perhaps feeling a little guilty, impulsively asked Ruth to call Lee. After seventeen months in the United States, Marina still doesn’t speak English, so she had Ruth call for her. The man who answered the phone told Ruth that no one by the name of Lee Oswald lived at that number. Neither she nor Ruth knew that he was living there under an assumed name, and when he finally did call on Monday, Marina let him know she was furious that he was up to his childish tricks again. He got very angry and ordered her to remove his name and phone number from Ruth’s address book. She said she wouldn’t, and they argued about it. He claimed he did it because he didn’t want the landlady to know his real name. She might, he said, read in the paper that he had defected to Russia. He told her he also didn’t want the FBI to know where he lived because his contacts with the bureau were unpleasant. He never did tell her what name he had registered under at the rooming house.
³

She is further aggravated by the fact that Lee came out to Irving last night—Thursday—instead of Friday, in violation of their understanding with Ruth. Lee is allowed to come out on Friday evening and stay over the weekend, but this week he’d come out a day early, which he had never done before, claiming he’d gotten “lonesome for my girls.” But he wanted more, begging her to come live with him again, in Dallas, with their two girls.
⁴

For all his faults, Lee loves the children. Last night he played with them out on the lawn in the gathering dusk—Ruth’s children, the neighbors’ kids, and his and Marina’s own toddler, June. He loved that. They were still out on the lawn and it was nearly dark when he asked Marina for the third and last time to come back to him. He even agreed to buy her a washing machine, an unusual gesture for Lee, who was always so close with the little money he had. Marina nearly did give in. If he’d waited until Friday evening, she might have said yes. The truth of the matter is, despite their sorry marriage, he’s all she’s got. Even the warm friendship and support of Ruth, who only speaks sufficiently serviceable Russian to teach it part-time at a private high school and is delighted to have Marina around the house to pick up better Russian from her, doesn’t make up for Lee’s absence. But she isn’t ready to give in yet. For once, she enjoys having the upper hand, however slight.

Lee didn’t sleep well last night, although he’d turned in at ten o’clock, an hour earlier than usual. She could tell he was very upset when he retired for the evening and wasn’t really asleep when she crept into bed after a late, hot bath. Around three in the morning she rested her foot on his leg, but he shoved her foot away hard. “My, he’s in a mean mood,” she thinks, believing he’s angry at her for not coming back to him right away. She senses he may not have slept at all until about five o’clock in the morning.
⁵

His mood has changed since last night, as it so often does. He seems upset rather than angry. Marina, at the mercy of his moods, knows the difference well. He is quiet and calm. He doesn’t ask her to come to live with him in Dallas anymore.

As Lee finishes dressing, he comes over to the bed.

“Have you bought those shoes you were going to get?” he asks.

“No, I haven’t had time,” Marina answers.

“You must get those shoes, Mama,” Lee tells her, then adds, “Don’t get up, I’ll get breakfast myself.”

It was an odd comment for him to make, since there was little danger that she would. Lee rarely ate breakfast, it was usually just a cup of instant coffee, which he had this morning, and she certainly had never fixed him anything before. Why would he say that? she wondered.
⁶

Before he leaves the bedroom, Lee kisses the children, as he always does, then walks to the bedroom door. He stops and returns to the side of the bed. He has always kissed his wife good-bye and Marina assumes he will do so now. But this time, she only hears his voice.

“I’ve left some money on the bureau,” he says in his odd, if fluent, Russian. “Take it and buy everything you and Junie and Rachel need.”

In the dark he has left $170 in bills, and something else—his wedding ring, quietly placed in a little china teacup that had belonged to Marina’s grandmother. She won’t find it until later that day.

“Bye-bye,” he says, then turns and goes out the door.

Marina is surprised at her husband’s sudden and unexpected kindness. She knows his $1.25-an-hour job doesn’t really allow for a lot of new shoes, much less everything she and the children need. He certainly had never said such a thing before. But she is used to his erratic behavior, and it doesn’t keep her from drifting back to sleep.
⁷

7:21 a.m.

Linnie Mae Randle fixes a lunch at the kitchen counter for her nineteen-year-old brother, Wesley Frazier, to take to work. She sees a man crossing Westbrook Street. She doesn’t recognize him at first but realizes he is heading to where her brother’s automobile is parked in the carport.

“Who was that?” Linnie Mae’s mother asks from the breakfast table, having caught a glimpse of him as he looked in the kitchen window.

“That’s Lee,” Wesley says.

He looks at the clock. It’s late. Wesley likes to leave the house by 7:20 for the fifteen-mile drive into Dallas, even if that means getting there a few minutes early. He finishes off his coffee and jumps up from the table, where he has been having breakfast with his mom and his sister’s kids, and hurries to get his lunch and a jacket. It is a gray, cold, miserable morning, and he will probably need that jacket.
⁸

Linnie Mae, at the back door, watches Lee go over to Wesley’s beat-up ’59 Chevy four-door, open the right rear door—the sticky one with the broken window—and lay the package he’s carrying on the backseat. She doesn’t pay much attention to the light brown paper package. It’s a couple of feet long, and wider at the bottom than at the top, where he carries it in the fashion soldiers call “trail arms.”
⁹

It isn’t so surprising that she didn’t recognize Lee, even though in a way she was responsible for getting him his job. She has only caught a couple glimpses of him when he came by to ride into work with Wesley. Linnie Mae knows that he is the husband of that Russian girl who has been staying with Ruth Paine, a neighbor who lives up the street from her. He came up in a conversation one afternoon at another neighbor’s house. In early October, just about the time Marina’s baby was due, Ruth and Marina were there drinking coffee. They were talking about Marina’s husband being out of work at the worst possible time. Linnie Mae told them about the job Wesley had just found at the Texas School Book Depository, a private company at 411 Elm Street near downtown Dallas that warehoused and shipped school textbooks for various publishers. She thought there might be another vacancy there,
¹⁰
so Ruth called the Depository and was told to have Lee come on in for an interview.
¹¹

Linnie Mae doesn’t have a lot of time to think about Marina’s husband, although she realizes vaguely that it is out of the ordinary for him to be out in Irving on a Friday morning. She’s heard about the odd arrangement where he lives in Dallas and only visits his wife and kids on the weekend. She was surprised to see him coming back with Wesley the night before when she was on her way to the store. Wesley told her Lee had come in a day early to get some curtain rods or something.
¹²

Wesley is relieved when the old Chevy finally fires up. It has been raining off and on all night and the battery is really weak. He notices that Lee doesn’t have a lunch bag with him, something he has always had before on trips back into Dallas.
¹³

“Where’s your lunch?” Wesley asks.

“I’m going to buy it today,” Lee replies.

Wesley figures Lee will get something from the catering truck that comes around the warehouse at ten o’clock. A lot of the boys do that.
¹⁴
As Wesley backs the car out, he glances over his right shoulder and notices a brown paper package on the rear seat.

“What’s the package, Lee?” he asks.

“Curtain rods,” Oswald says.

“Oh, yeah,” Wesley nods, shifting into forward. “You said you were going to go get them last night.”
¹⁵

Lee doesn’t have a lot to say. He rarely does. Lee is one of those guys who just doesn’t talk very much. Wesley, on the other hand, feels it’s important to make friends. That’s why he introduced himself to Lee when Lee came on the job in mid-October.

“We’re glad to have you,” he had told Lee. Wesley, a self-described country boy from Huntsville, Texas, had only been on the job four or five weeks himself, but he felt like a veteran. He already knew that Lee’s wife was living up the street from him, so he told Lee, “Any time you want to go, just let me know.”
¹⁶

Lee told him he had an apartment in Dallas and wouldn’t be going home every night like most men do. He said he didn’t drive either. That’s when he asked Wesley if he could ride out with him “on Friday afternoon on weekends and come back on Monday morning,” and Wesley said that would be just fine with him.

Wesley knows Lee’s wife is from Russia but doesn’t think anything about that. Lee said something about being in Russia, Germany, and France, and Wesley figured he had been in the service or something. Wesley doesn’t know much more than that. Come to think of it, he doesn’t even know Lee’s last name.
¹⁷

B
ack in Dallas, nightclub operator Jack Ruby is still asleep. Jack’s day starts when most people are thinking about going home from work. Today he will get up around ten to get his ad into the offices of the
Dallas Morning News
, but that’s early for him. Jack’s Carousel Club, on Commerce Street halfway between the county jail and the police station, stays open until two every morning, even though the curious Texas liquor laws require customers to stop drinking at a quarter past midnight. This is kind of a pain in the behind, but Jack is scrupulous about keeping drinks off the table after hours. He runs a clean joint, which everyone knows. Even that vice-squad dick Gilmore has never cited him, and, as one of Jack’s girls says, Gilmore would cite his own mother.