A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (26 page)

Then there was Rankin’s fearsome secretary, Julia Eide, who had worked for him at the Justice Department. Eide looked on herself as Rankin’s protector and enforcer. “She was not easy to get along with,” Goldberg remembered. “Once I sized her up, I was careful not to get in her way.”

Still, Eide was intelligent and hardworking, which could not be said for many of the other secretaries who were dispatched to the commission from elsewhere in the government. Many were sent over from the Pentagon, which had a large pool of secretaries with the necessary security clearances. It seemed to many of the commission’s lawyers that the Defense Department and other agencies had taken advantage of the opportunity to move out their worst secretaries and dump them on the investigation; a few could barely type. “They were incompetent, the dregs,” David Slawson remembered.

Most of the lawyers shrugged off their annoyance, thinking there was nothing they could do. But not Jim Liebeler, the young North Dakotan. As David Slawson remembered fondly, Liebeler had quickly proved himself to his new colleagues to be “fun, brave—and obnoxious.” Liebeler marched into Rankin’s office and demanded that the incompetent secretaries be removed. “We can’t work with these idiots,” declared Liebeler, who knew he was quietly being cheered on by the other lawyers.

From what he had seen of the secretaries, Rankin could not disagree. At Liebeler’s urging, he placed a call to the White House and left a message with McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson’s national security adviser. Slawson was in Rankin’s office when Bundy returned the call. “Rankin told him about the secretaries,” Slawson recalled, “and Bundy said, ‘Okay, just hold.’” As Rankin waited on the line, “Bundy apparently picked up another phone and called the Defense Department and then got back on the line to Rankin.” The national security adviser had good news: “I just told the Defense Department to have twenty of the best secretaries over there tomorrow morning.”

The new secretaries appeared the next day as promised, ready for work. Slawson marveled at what Liebeler had managed to accomplish: “From that point on we had good secretaries.” To no one’s surprise among his new friends on the staff, Liebeler managed to have one of the best, and the prettiest, assigned to him.

18

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1964

It was Marguerite Oswald on the phone again, which was never good news in the commission’s offices. A call from Oswald’s mother led, invariably, to a wave of rolled eyes and silent snarls among the staff members who were forced to deal with her, especially the unfortunate telephone receptionists and secretaries who were the first targets of her abuse.

The collect calls from her home in Fort Worth began in January, shortly after Mrs. Oswald obtained the commission’s phone number. The calls might have been treated as comical had it not been for Mrs. Oswald’s ability to manipulate the press corps in Dallas and Washington to pay attention to her. Her attacks on the commission were considered headline news, so her threatening calls had to be taken seriously.

As the mother of the man accused of killing the president, Mrs. Oswald was, for many reporters, a good story. She was always available and always quotable. Even reporters for powerful newspapers and magazines who should have known better—or, at least, signaled to their readers that she spouted easily refuted nonsense—wrote about her endlessly, lending credibility to her claims that she had evidence that could prove her son innocent.

On January 14, Mrs. Oswald became an even bigger threat. At a news conference in Fort Worth, she announced her decision to retain Mark Lane to represent her son’s interests. Lane, she said, had generously agreed to work without a fee, and with his help she would “fight to my last breath” to vindicate her son. The meeting with reporters gave Mrs. Oswald and Lane the chance to announce that they had rented a post office box in Fort Worth—No. 9578—so that anyone with evidence pointing to her son’s innocence could write in. Well-wishers were invited to mail in cash donations.

At the news conference, she pleaded again, as she had for weeks, for her daughter-in-law Marina to resume contact with “Mamma.” Mrs. Oswald said she had sent a written message to Marina through the Secret Service, which was continuing to protect the young widow. She said she had put the message in simple English so that her Russian daughter-in-law might understand it: “Marina, Mamma grieves. Marina, Mamma needs to see you and the grandchildren. Mamma
has
to see you and the grandchildren.”

Mrs. Oswald used the news conference to accuse the Secret Service of blocking her access to her son’s family: “They have no right to keep me from speaking to my daughter-in-law and granddaughters.” Lane went further, suggesting that the Secret Service was attempting to “brainwash” Marina Oswald to incriminate her husband; cutting off communication between Mrs. Oswald and her daughter-in-law was part of the agency’s plan. Mrs. Oswald appeared unaware that it was her surviving son Robert, not the Secret Service, who had insisted that Marina end all contact with his “irrational” mother.

*

No one posed more of an obstacle to Mrs. Oswald’s campaign to prove her son innocent than his widow. Marina had continued to say openly that she was convinced that her husband had killed the president and that he had almost certainly done it alone. In January, she authorized James Martin, her business manager, to tell the
New York Times
that she was so certain of her husband’s guilt that she had decided against bringing a negligence lawsuit against the city of Dallas over her husband’s death.

Marina, Martin, and her lawyer, James Thorne, arrived in Washington on Sunday, February 2, a day ahead of her scheduled testimony before the commission. She settled into the Willard Hotel, one of the city’s finest, with spectacular views up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol dome; the hotel was a few minutes’ drive from the VFW building. Marina had brought her daughters to Washington: June Lee, called Junie, who would turn three that month, and four-month-old Rachel.

Reporters got wind of Marina’s arrival and thronged the hotel. She did not resist their efforts to follow her. In fact, she seemed amused by the crush of reporters and photographers who had managed to turn her into a global celebrity. “Silly men, silly men,” she said, smiling, when the photographers turned up in the lobby of the Willard. Everywhere she went, she was also trailed by Secret Service agents. She had come to see them as her protectors—her friends, even.

A reporter from
Time
magazine found Marina at a table at Parchey’s Restaurant and noted the glamorous makeover she had undergone since the assassination. Her hair had obviously been set in a beauty parlor—“something her late husband would not have allowed,” the magazine noted—and she wore touches of makeup and smoked a cigarette while sipping, first, a vodka gimlet, before rejecting it in favor of a cherry cordial. Although she said she was not hungry, she ate a little of her filet mignon with mushroom sauce.

On Monday, February 3, at ten thirty, the commission met in the ground-floor conference room of the VFW building. Warren and four of the other commissioners were present; Senator Russell and John McCloy missed the start of the session. Under the commission’s rules, a witness could request a public hearing, but there had been no such request from Oswald’s widow or her lawyer, so the press had to wait outside.

“Mrs. Oswald, did you have a good trip here?” Warren said as he opened the session, his words translated into Russian by an interpreter. She nodded yes. With that, he asked her to rise from her chair and be sworn in.

Rankin oversaw the questioning, which would last for four days, and began by asking her full name.

“My name is Marina Nikolaevna Oswald. My maiden name was Prusakova.”

Rankin noted that, as best he could tell, this was the forty-seventh time that Marina had been questioned by government agencies since the assassination—by the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Dallas police, mostly. Rankin did not say it, but he and many of the commissioners were well aware that, in many of those earlier interviews, Marina had not told the truth. The list of her lies was long and disturbing, beginning with her initial claim to the FBI that she knew nothing about her husband’s attempt to kill the right-wing extremist Edwin Walker in Dallas in April, seven months before the president was assassinated. In fact, she later admitted, he had told her about the Walker attack in considerable detail on the night it had occurred; it resulted, she said, in a furious argument in which she threatened to go to the police if he tried anything like it again. She had also initially insisted that she knew nothing about her husband’s trip to Mexico. Later she confessed that she knew about the trip as he was planning it; he had even asked her what gift she would like him to bring back. She had requested a traditional Mexican silver bracelet.

Rankin asked if she wanted to correct anything she had said previously: “Do you know of anything that is not true in those interviews that you would like to correct?”

“Yes,” she answered, “I would like to correct some things because not everything was true.”

In the earlier interviews, she said, she had not been under oath and so felt that she could be “less exact.” She explained that, at first, she had wanted to believe that her husband was innocent of killing the president, and she did not want to implicate him—or implicate herself—in other crimes, including the Walker shooting. Her lies, she said, were also explained by her dislike for the FBI agents who did much of the questioning. “I didn’t want to be too sincere with them.”

Rankin led her through hours of questioning about her marriage. He asked her what she had initially found attractive about the young American defector she had reportedly met in March 1961 at a community dance in the central Soviet city of Minsk, where Oswald was working at an electronics factory. “You don’t meet Americans very often,” she said, recalling her husband-to-be as “very neat, very polite … it seemed that he would be a good family man.” After the dance, he asked to see her again, and she agreed.

Oswald soon told her how disillusioned he had become with the Soviet Union, she said. “He was homesick, and that perhaps he was sorry for having come to Russia.” She recalled that “he said many good things” about the United States. “He said that his house was warmer and that people lived better.”

At the end of April 1961, only weeks after their first meeting, they married. About a month after that, Marina said, Lee proposed that they go together to the United States. A year later, after tangling with bureaucrats in the Russian government and the State Department, the couple received permission to leave the Soviet Union. In June 1962, they arrived in the United States and settled in Fort Worth, near the homes of Oswald’s mother and brother Robert.

It was then, Marina said, that she discovered how dysfunctional her husband’s family was: he hated his mother and wanted little contact with his two brothers. He had difficulty finding a job and, once he did, holding on to it. He found most work boring, she said. Their marriage quickly began to unravel, with Oswald becoming distant and delusional, as well as violent, she said. He beat her regularly, leaving her with purplish bruises on her pale skin and, on one occasion, a black eye. “I think that he was very nervous and … this somehow relieved his tension.”

Raised in a culture in which wife-beating was not uncommon, Marina said, she thought that perhaps she had brought some of the violence on herself. “Sometimes it was my own fault,” she explained. She had given Oswald reasons for jealousy; he intercepted a letter she had written to an old boyfriend in Russia in which she said she should have married him instead of Oswald.

Her husband had never abandoned the commitment to Marxism that had taken him to Russia—far from it. He insisted to her that he was searching for a purer form of Communism and thought he had found it in Castro’s Cuba. He told her that he was planning to defect again, this time to Havana. “Lee wanted to get to Cuba by any means.”

He purchased a rifle and began practicing with it, suggesting to her that he would use it to hijack a plane to Cuba. He proposed that Marina join him, perhaps carrying a gun onto the plane herself. She rejected the idea as crazy. “I told him that I was not going with him—I would stay here.”

He had gone to Mexico City, she said, to get visas that would allow the family to travel to Cuba. His plan, it appeared, was to lie to the Russian embassy in Mexico, pretending that he wanted to return to the Soviet Union. With a new Soviet visa in hand, he could obtain travel papers from the Cuban embassy, supposedly to transit through Havana on the way to Moscow. In fact, Marina said, Oswald intended to stay in Cuba if he could get there. “He wanted to go to Cuba,” she said. “I know he had no intention of going to Russia.”

Rankin pressed her on other details of her husband’s trip to Mexico, asking what else he had told her about how he had spent his time there. She remembered he talked about attending a bullfight and doing other sightseeing. Was there anything else? Although her husband had never expressed any interest in other women during their marriage—“he doesn’t like other women”—he had specifically noted his distaste for women in Mexico. “He said he didn’t like Mexican girls,” she said, a comment that drew no follow-up from Rankin.

During her testimony, she insisted, as she had consistently since the day of the assassination, that she had no advance knowledge of Oswald’s plans to kill the president. In fact, she thought her husband liked Kennedy. “I had never heard anything bad about Kennedy from Lee.” Even so, she said she was convinced of her husband’s guilt in the assassination. She knew almost from the minute she visited him at Dallas police headquarters on the afternoon of the murder. “I could see by his eyes that he was guilty,” she said. And she was convinced that he had acted alone—that there was no conspiracy.

She thought that he killed the president because he was consumed by the idea of making a mark in history, she said. He was a voracious reader; he spent hours each week at the public library near their homes in Dallas and New Orleans, and he often checked out biographies of important figures from world history, including Kennedy. Lee Oswald wanted to be remembered, too. “I can conclude that he wanted, in any way, whether good or bad, to do something that would make him outstanding, that he would be known in history.”