Reclaiming History (160 page)

In mid-December 1962, Oswald had subscribed to the
Militant
,
¹⁰¹⁵
the Troskyite publication of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in America which was so often critical of Moscow. The
Militant
, more supportive of Castro’s brand of Marxism than the Kremlin’s, was known to publish “more complete texts of the speeches of Fidel Castro and other documents of the Cuban Revolution in the English language than any other news source in the world.”
¹⁰¹⁶
It was also highly critical of General Edwin Walker and of Kennedy’s policies on Cuba.
¹⁰¹⁷
In late October, Oswald had sought to join the SWP,
¹⁰¹⁸
but the party wrote him back saying, “It is not our practice to take in individual members when no branch [of our party] yet exists. Unfortunately, we don’t have any branches at all in Texas.”
¹⁰¹⁹
(Not a surprise.) As we’ve seen, way back in August, Oswald had also subscribed to the
Worker
and the
Midweek Worker
, publications of the Stalinist “Communist Party, United States of America” (CPUSA).
¹⁰²⁰
It is not known whether he was aware that the two parties (CPUSA and SWP) were, at a minimum, rivals of each other (though both glorified Castro), and that Stalin had had Trotsky murdered.

Around this time at his job, Oswald asked his coworker Dennis Ofstein whether the company equipment could be used to make copies of prints and enlargement of photographs that had been taken in small-format cameras. Ofstein told him that while Jaggers didn’t sanction the use of company equipment for private projects, people did it now and then. He showed Oswald how to do it and watched as Oswald made photographic enlargements of snapshots taken in Minsk and while Oswald was in the service in Japan.
¹⁰²¹
Lee would later also do some other work that Ofstein never knew about, making calling cards for George de Mohrenschildt as well as Marina and himself. He also experimented with making photographic copies of some of his own documents—his birth certificate and his military and draft registration ID cards—which he would soon use in attempts to create crude forgeries.
¹⁰²²
It was also during this period that Oswald started sending samples of his photographic work, apparently carried out in stolen moments at Jaggers, to leftist organizations back East. It isn’t known what he sent to the SWP to aid the party in connection with its posters and advertising, but his offer was diplomatically declined in a letter to him dated December 9, 1962.
¹⁰²³
And when Gus Hall and Ben Davis, two leaders of the American Communist Party, were on trial in Washington, D.C., for violating the McCarran Act (which required the registration of agents of the Soviet Union to fight subversive activities in America), Oswald sent a poster to the Hall-Davis Defense Committee reading,

The Gus Hall–Benjamin J. Davis

Defense Committee

END McCARRANISM

The executive director of the defense committee wrote back on December 13, 1962, thanking him, but politely declining his offer of help.
¹⁰²⁴
*
And in response to another poster Lee had submitted, this time to the
Worker
(“Read
The Worker
If you want to know about Peace, Democracy, Unemployment, Economic Trends”), on December 19, 1962, Louis Weinstock, general manager of the
Worker
in New York, wrote Lee and, in as delicate a way as he could find, told him the paper wasn’t interested in using the poster-like blowup Lee had submitted. “Your kind offer,” Weinstock said, “is most welcomed and from time to time we shall call on you.” In other words, thanks but no thanks.
¹⁰²⁵
†

On December 28, George de Mohrenschildt picked up Lee and Marina in his big convertible to take them to a holiday party at Declan and Katya Ford’s house. En route they stopped by the Sanger-Harris department store, where Jeanne worked as a designer, to pick her up. The de Mohrenschildts pitied the young couple for their isolation and wanted to do something to relieve the gloom of the holidays. Jeanne had called Katya and asked permission to bring them, and she even arranged for one of her neighbors to babysit June. Katya had hoped she had seen the last of the Oswalds—a sentiment no doubt shared by many of her guests, some of whom thought the de Mohrenschildts were again being deliberately provocative—but she could hardly say no.

Marina was delighted to see George Bouhe again and kissed him on the cheek, to Lee’s palpable scorn. “Why are you sucking up to him?” he asked her when he got the chance. He then put on another display of caddishness by devoting virtually all of his time and attention, to Marina’s increasing concern, to Yaeko Okui, a young Japanese woman who had come with Lev Aronson, a Latvian who played first cello in the Dallas symphony. Lee and Yaeko sat on the steps at one end of the room and talked about Japanese and American customs as well as ikebana, the art of flower arrangement, which Yaeko was certified to teach, while Marina ate her fill and gathered at the piano with others to sing Russian songs.

Lee was also attracted to the Fords’ daughter Linda, who found him staring solemnly at her while the rest of the party laughed at comedian Vaughn Meader’s takeoff on President Kennedy on the best-selling album
The First Family
. Linda was so troubled by that stare that she remembered nothing else about the party.
¹⁰²⁶

Whatever joy Marina got from getting out of the house for the Fords’ holiday party was dashed just three days later, on New Year’s Eve, traditionally a much more important celebration in the Soviet Union than Christmas, which the atheistic Communist government shunned. To her great disappointment, Lee turned in early, about ten, and left her to celebrate by herself. When the momentous year of 1963 began at midnight, she was in the bathtub, imagining it was full of champagne and thinking of her friends in Minsk and the good times they were having. Later, so troubled she could not sleep, she sat at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to Anatoly Shpanko, the medical student who had asked her to marry him. Might she not have been happier with him?

Much later she reconstructed the letter for Priscilla McMillan. In the letter, which she starts with “Anatoly Dear,” she tells Anatoly she is writing him, as he requested, about her life in America. She tells him she feels “very much alone,” that her relationship with Lee had changed from what it was in Minsk, and that he no longer loved her. She says she is “sad” that an ocean separates her from Anatoly and she has “no way back” to him. “How I wish you and I could be together again,” she writes.

Marina then alludes to a time in Minsk when Anatoly had held himself back (presumably a reference to sexual intimacy), saying, “You did it for me, I know,” but adds that if he hadn’t, “everything might have turned out differently. But maybe, after the way I’ve hurt you, you would not take me back.” She closes with “I kiss you as we kissed before” and a postscript: “I remember the snow, the frost, the opera building—and your kisses. Isn’t it funny how we never even felt the cold?”

Marina was in tears as she finished the letter. She kept it for several days before mailing it.

On Monday, January 7, 1963, Lee came home from work with the letter in hand. Marina had mailed the letter showing Lee’s post office box as a return address. The postage rates had gone up one cent and the letter was returned for insufficient postage. Lee asked Marina what the letter was about and asked her to read it to him. When she refused, he read it to her, although he broke off before he finished.

“Is it true what you wrote?” he demanded.

“Yes,” she said. Marina recalls, “And of course he hit me, but he did not believe this letter was sincere.”

“Not a word of it is true,” he insisted. “You did it on purpose. You knew they changed the postage and the letter would come to me. You were trying to make me jealous. I know your woman’s tricks. I won’t give you any more stamps. And I’m going to read all your letters. I’ll send them myself from now on. I’ll never, ever trust you again.”

Marina would recall that “it was a very ill-considered thing” she had done, and Lee’s hitting her had been “the right thing to do. There [were] grounds for it.”

He made her tear up the letter in front of him. And he was true to his word. From then on he made Marina hand him all of her letters in an unsealed envelope so he could search them for secret messages to Shpanko or anyone else who presented a threat, however distant, to his domination of her.
¹⁰²⁷

Apart from his pathological need to keep Marina a prisoner at home, and continuing to be physical with her on occasion, Lee, perhaps chastened by Marina’s letter to a former suitor, was now a more considerate and affectionate husband, according to Marina. He did the vacuuming, carried out the garbage, washed the dishes, turned down the bed at night, and generally made himself useful. On weekends, when Lee was off from work, he followed Marina around wherever she’d go, even coming with her to the landlady’s to borrow the vacuum cleaner shared by all the tenants. He “wore me out with his kisses,” Marina told Priscilla McMillan. Lee granted Marina two indulgences—deciding if and when they would have children, and staying in bed when he awoke in the morning. He got up by himself, made his own breakfast, and left coffee on the stove for her. His increased affection for Marina was not at little Junie’s expense. He did not trust Marina to bathe June without endangering her, and would happily climb into the bath to play with his baby, ordering Marina to bring them the baby’s bath toys and clean up the water they splashed on the floor.
¹⁰²⁸

That first month of the year brought very disquieting news to Oswald—there could be another invasion of his beloved Cuba. One of the first issues of the
Militant
that Oswald received early in January commented on the speech Kennedy gave at the Miami Orange Bowl on December 29, 1962, in which he declared to the anti-Castro Cubans who had been repulsed by Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs, “I can assure you that this [battle] flag will be returned to this [Cuban] brigade in a free Havana.” The
Militant
called Kennedy’s remarks “the most barefaced and disgusting display of immorality, ignorance, and bad taste ever put on by a U.S. President.”
¹⁰²⁹
In the January 21 edition, which Oswald would have gotten, the
Militant
quoted Castro as saying Kennedy was acting “like a pirate,” Castro declaring, “Mr. Kennedy, too much blood has flowed between you and us.”
¹⁰³⁰

On January 14, Oswald enrolled in a night-school typing course at Crozier Technical High School in Dallas, paying a tuition fee of $9.00.
¹⁰³¹
How serious Oswald’s interest in typing was is open to question. Evidence suggests that he was already planning a change of career, as an assassin, and he may well have undertaken the typing classes as a cover for more sinister activities.

If there is one thing Lee Harvey Oswald had, it was pride. That undoubtedly was the main reason he normally resisted help from third parties for him and his family. Concomitantly, the thought of owing his brother Robert and the U.S. State Department weighed on him. As his friend George de Mohrenschildt observed, “I ask you where do you find another man in Lee’s position, on the verge of starvation [obvious hyperbole], who would be in such a hurry to repay a government loan, which would be very difficult to collect from a poor man like Lee? But somehow Lee felt this obligation very sincerely.”
¹⁰³²
Although Oswald usually didn’t have two nickels to rub together, by October 7, 1962, he had finally managed, through scrimping, to pay off his loan to Robert, even though Robert had insisted he wait until he was making more money, and, after paying $10.00 month on his $435.71 State Department loan, he sent in two money orders totaling $106.00 on January 25 to pay that off.
¹⁰³³

Just two days free of debt for the first time since he returned to America, on January 27, 1963, Oswald ordered a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver from a Los Angeles company named Seaport Traders Inc., enclosing $10.00 in cash as a downpayment on the full price of $29.95, the balance to be paid COD. He signed the order form, “A. J. Hidell,” age “28.” (He was twenty-three.) He gave his Dallas post office box, 2195, as his address. The form had to be countersigned by a witness who could attest that the person ordering the gun was an American citizen who had never been convicted of a felony. Oswald obliged by signing as his own witness, using the name “D. F. Drittal.”
¹⁰³⁴

The gun was in fact a very poor one in terms of accuracy. First, Seaport had arranged for the gunsmith, L. M. Johnson, to shorten the barrel from five inches to two and a quarter inches, considerably reducing its accuracy—the company had a demand for the shorter weapons, presumably from those who wanted to conceal them on their persons. The muzzle had been recrowned, the front sight reset, and the cylinder rechambered to take the more popular .38 Special cartridges (as opposed to .38 Smith & Wesson cartridges), although the barrel had not been changed. Since the .38 Special cartridge was of slightly smaller diameter, the bullet wobbled slightly in the barrel, which further reduced the weapon’s accuracy. The pistol might be okay at very close range, but no target shooter would want to use it.
¹⁰³⁵

January also brought new troubles for Oswald, both at work and in his marriage. By mid-January he must have realized that his days at Jaggers were numbered. He had been employed there over three months and was expected to start pulling his own weight, but his work, which required a great deal of precision, was sloppy, and, as indicated, his manner annoyed his fellow workers in the cramped darkroom quarters. John Graef was being remarkably patient with Oswald, even though the finished jobs Lee turned in had to be redone far too frequently, much more often than the work of other employees. Oswald had to know that Graef’s patience would not be without limit.
¹⁰³⁶

Also in January, the Oswalds’ marriage took a sharp turn for the worse. They continued to bicker, and Lee slapped Marina from time to time, but there were sweeter moments too. Then one night, while laying in bed together in the dark, Lee told Marina something about his old girlfriends. Marina jumped from the past to the future, asking him to tell her if he ever intended to be unfaithful.