Reclaiming History (161 page)

“If I were planning it, I wouldn’t tell
you
,” he said. He was suddenly struck by a new thought. “Have you been with any other man since we were married?”

Marina, always brutally candid, answered yes. She told him about her assignation with Leonid Gelfant in Minsk when Lee had gone to Moscow. She told him everything, including the fact that Leonid had proved impotent.

“Why?” Lee asked.

“Because he was a virgin. And I wasn’t about to be his teacher. I never wanted to see him again.”

“And you didn’t?”

“I ran into him once or twice on the street.”

“And nothing happened?” Lee pressed.

Marina laughed. “You were home. Where on earth could we go?”

Lee could not or would not believe her. “You’re making the whole thing up,” he insisted.

“No, I’m not,” Marina said, insisting on telling him the painful truth, with nothing to lose if she told him the lie she knew he wanted to hear except a splinter of her own honesty. But perhaps sensing she had gone too far, she tried to explain that the experience had taught her a lesson, and it had taken away any desire she would ever have for anyone but Lee.

Lee still wasn’t convinced that Marina had been unfaithful. They had agreed that if either of them used the phrase “word of honor,” the other had to tell the truth—he made her give him her “word of honor” that everything she told him was true. She did, and he still did not believe her.

The next morning he returned to the subject. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “You women are all alike. You want to make a man jealous.” Then Lee, the arch-nonconformist, took the modern male conformist view, adding, “If I ever see you with another man, I’ll kill
him
right off,” as if the male stranger, more than his wife, would have been the one who breached a moral responsibility to him.

Marina, amused, and perhaps wondering about his logic, asked, “And what will you do to me?”

“We’ll see about
that
.”
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It is impossible to tell what the real impact of Marina’s confession had on Lee or how much it contributed to the darkness that was beginning to fall on him. Overtly, though, he claimed not to believe her. He made it clear to Marina that he thought she had written her letter to Anatoly Shpanko knowing it would fall into his hands and make him jealous, and he now decided that her tale of the encounter with Leonid Gelfant was another ruse for the same purpose. Since he was an inveterate liar himself, it was an explanation that came easily to mind, and it may be that it was what he really needed to believe. There were, after all, only two elements of his life over which he had any control, his baby daughter and his wife, and his control of Marina was slipping, as her brief escape from him had shown. Keeping her ignorant of English would work only for awhile, and the act of beating her was only an admission that he could not keep her in line except by physical force.

For the moment, Lee and Marina were locked in the deadly symbiotic embrace of emotional neediness, each of them utterly reliant on the other to fulfill this need. The descending spiral of the battered woman syndrome, neediness leading to ever-dwindling self-esteem and lack of confidence, is well known. Priscilla McMillan had come to believe from exhaustive conversations with Marina that Lee was in fact much the weaker of the two. The proposition is easy to entertain. One has only to imagine which of the two would have thrived if he or she had come to the United States separately: Marina, with her new-found friends who were so willing to help, or Lee, whose abrasive personality and towering ego, unsupported by even normal capabilities, made him so offensive to everyone. Lee seemed doomed to fail at everything, including his marriage, which he was keeping together by intimidation and brute force. And he seemed to be keeping himself together, as he had as a child, by his turn to fantasy. His wife’s confessed infidelities were just attempts to trick him. And if the world would not present him with the grand position he imagined as his due, he would invent one all of his own.

On January 28, the day after he ordered the pistol, he started the typing course at Crozier Tech. The classes met only three evenings a week, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, from a quarter after six to a quarter after seven. Not only did Lee miss a lot of classes (he was dropped from the class after a little over two months because of his absences),
¹⁰³⁸
but Marina noticed he rarely got home from work before seven on any evening of the week, whether there was a class or not. He would then spend a lot of time in the kitchen, ostensibly to practice typing on a printed keyboard there, but he was also studying bus schedules and a map of Dallas. When Marina asked why, he told her he was trying to figure the quickest way home from Crozier Tech, but that couldn’t have required much planning. The night school was a few blocks from Jaggers, and he had been returning home from there for months.
¹⁰³⁹

Apparently what he was really doing was plotting the assassination of Major General Edwin Walker.

L
ee Oswald was still in the Soviet Union when Major General Edwin A. Walker received worldwide attention stemming from an April 13, 1961, story in the tabloid
Overseas Weekly
that Walker, a decorated war hero in the Second World War, had been indoctrinating the troops of his command in West Germany, the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division, with literature published by the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society, and had given a speech to a group of mainly military dependents in which he said that Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and former secretary of state Dean Acheson were “definitely pink.”
¹⁰⁴⁰

Walker denied the allegations, denouncing the
Overseas Weekly
as “immoral, unscrupulous, corrupt, and destructive.” The controversy snowballed all through the spring of that year. President Kennedy eventually ordered an investigation by the Defense Department and Walker was relieved of his command and transferred to army headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany. On June 12, the army gave him an administrative “admonition” (not considered punishment by the army) for his speech and for refusing to heed superior officers’ advice against participating in “controversial” activities beyond the scope of his military duties. But he was cleared of the main charge against him. The army concluded that the “pro-blue” program initiated by Walker in his division was “not attributable” to any program of the John Birch Society.
¹⁰⁴¹
Although originally destined to command the Eighth Corps in Texas, he was derailed to Hawaii as assistant chief of staff for training and operations, a much less glamorous position.
¹⁰⁴²
It looked as though a third star might never be pinned to his collar.

The American Right took up the general as a cause celebre. Several senators put together a subcommittee of a Senate Arms Services subcommittee to investigate the Kennedy administration’s “muzzling” of military officers. But on September 6 and 7, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified that Walker’s activities had violated a federal criminal statute
¹⁰⁴³
in attempting to influence senatorial and congressional elections by indoctrinating his troops, as well as violating noncriminal provisions of the Hatch Act, which prohibit political activities by federal employees. However, McNamara also gave the subcommittee a copy of the army’s report on Walker, which called him eccentric but “a sincere, deeply religious, patriotic soldier” and a passionate anti-Communist. The report also confirmed that he was a member of the John Birch Society and that his indoctrination programs were “remarkably identical” to the tenets promulgated by that ultra-right-wing group.
¹⁰⁴⁴
On November 2, 1961, when Oswald was still struggling to leave the Soviet Union, Walker resigned from the army, a celebrated martyr among the nation’s right wing. He announced that he would “find other ways to serve my country in this time of her great need.”
¹⁰⁴⁵

How much of this story Oswald knew before his return to the United States cannot be determined, but he certainly knew something. Among the notes he wrote aboard the
Maasdam
as it carried him and his family toward New York is this: “The case of Gen. Walker shows that the army, at least, is not fertail enough ground for a far right regime to go a very long way.”
¹⁰⁴⁶
He probably got the story in Russia from two articles that appeared in the
Worker
on November 12 and December 10, 1961: “Gen. Walker Bids for Fuhrer Role” and “Walker Defends American Nazis,” the former denouncing the general with the label “Fascist,” the latter citing Walker’s defense of George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party.
¹⁰⁴⁷
Marina told the Warren Commission that Lee read the English-language edition of the
Worker
while in Russia.
¹⁰⁴⁸

General Walker continued to command headlines after his retirement to Dallas, where he rented a gray mansion high up from the street in the upscale Turtle Creek area, and promptly raised the American flag and the flag of the state of Texas on the front lawn. In the spring of 1962, the six-foot four-inch Walker ran against Governor John Connally in the Democratic primary for governor of Texas and finished last in a field of six, but he received 138,387 votes, which was a respectable 10.46 percent of the total. Connally, who won the primary, received 431,498 votes.
¹⁰⁴⁹
On September 14, 1962, by which time Lee and Marina were living on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth, the city’s
Star-Telegram
published a story about a speech Walker gave to Lampasas County ranchers protesting the army’s intention to hold maneuvers on their land. He told them, “If Fort Hood needs any maneuvering or training grounds, it should be training in Cuba now.” On September 28 he hit the headlines again: the previous day he had called for ten thousand civilian volunteers to go to Oxford, Mississippi, to oppose any federal troops trying to enforce the court-ordered admission of the black student James Meredith to the state university there.
¹⁰⁵⁰
*

On September 29, President Kennedy started massing hundreds of army troops and five hundred U.S. marshals at a large naval air station near Memphis, some twenty miles away, to be dispatched to Oxford to force Meredith’s admission, which was bitterly opposed by the state’s governor, Ross Barnett, a rabid segregationist. The next day, September 30, Kennedy called Mississippi’s National Guard into service and in the evening made an unprecedented plea on national television and radio for peace, but it was unavailing. Shortly thereafter, Walker, who heard the president’s speech on radio in an Oxford café and called it “nauseating,” was on the scene as rioting broke out that night when Meredith was admitted to the campus for enrollment the following day. Two people, one a French newsman, were killed and another severely wounded in a bloody riot in which over three thousand U.S. soldiers, federalized Mississippi guardsmen, and federal marshals fired rifles, threw tear gas grenades, and used clubs to overcome the bottle-and brick-hurling rioters. Soldiers, Negroes, and newsmen were beaten and homes and automobiles were damaged. The fifteen-hour rioting persisted through the night, and Governor Barnett eventually gave up the fight, saying he was “physically overpowered.” Two hundred rioters were arrested on various charges.

The next morning, October 1, Meredith enrolled and started attending classes without further violence, although white students shouted racial epithets and threats at him as he was guarded by seventy-five U.S. marshals. Walker was arrested on several charges, including inciting insurrection, and conspiracy to commit sedition, and flown to the U.S. Medical Center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric observation. On October 6 he was released on a $50,000 bond and his agreement to submit to further psychiatric examinations in Dallas.
¹⁰⁵¹

A subplot had begun on the night of the Oxford rioting, though many miles away in Dallas, when police stopped a car driven by Ashland F. Burchell and found a .357 Magnum and three .22 caliber pistols, a rifle, three thousand rounds of ammunition, blankets, a change of clothes, two or three hundred card files, and a switchblade knife. Texans toting small arsenals were neither uncommon nor outside the law—only the switchblade knife was actually illegal—but Burchell, a twenty-two-year-old graduate of Walker’s “special warfare” unit in West Germany, was known to be one of the general’s disciples. He had come to Dallas that spring to work on Walker’s failed run for governor in the Democratic primary. He denied he was on his way to Oxford, said the guns were his hobby and the index cards belonged to a friend. In the end the story did not amount to much. Burchell quickly made bail and was later slapped on the wrist for possession of the switchblade, but that did not keep the October 21 issue of the
Worker
, to which Oswald was subscribing, from reading the utmost sinister significance into it all—“Oxford Campus Plot for Bloodbath Bared.” The paper asserted that “hundreds” of other cars “carrying arms and ammunition were stopped on the way to Oxford on Sunday night and Monday morning,” something that escaped the attention of other news-reporting agencies. Only the Burchell incident appeared in the October 2 edition of the
Dallas Morning News
.
¹⁰⁵²

None of this, of course, could have escaped the attention of Oswald, who always followed the news. It is worth being reminded that on the same day, October 7, that General Walker returned to Dallas to a welcoming crowd of two hundred supporters waving signs, including those urging Walker to run for president in 1964,
¹⁰⁵³
Oswald announced to the small group of Russian emigrés at his Fort Worth apartment that he had decided, without giving them any explanation, to move to Dallas.

Over the next three weeks, stories about Walker appeared almost daily, many on the front page, in the Dallas papers, as his attorneys denounced the government’s persecution of their client. There weren’t too many literate Americans that October who did not know anything about General Walker, but the Dallas newspapers, of course, gave the story much more play than it got nationally—Walker was, after all, a resident of the town. The friendship between George de Mohrenschildt and Lee was just beginning to flower during what George called Walker’s “big show-off” period, and the general was a hot topic of their conversations. George knew that Lee hated the man. Quite apart from the fact that Lee revered Castro and Walker reviled him, Lee was, per George, “ferociously” in favor of integration, and Walker was just as fanatically a segregationist.
¹⁰⁵⁴