Reclaiming History (162 page)

On January 21, 1963, an all-white federal grand jury in Oxford, Mississippi, declined to return an indictment against Walker on insurrection and other charges (including seditious conspiracy and assaulting, resisting, and impeding federal officers), and the federal U.S. attorney there had the federal District Court judge dismiss all charges against Walker. “I am glad to be vindicated,” Walker told the press. “Today my hopes returned to the [anti-Castro] Cubans…who long to return to their homes.” The dismissed charges against Walker made the front page in the January 22 edition of the
Dallas Morning News
.
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When Oswald ordered his revolver five days later, on January 27, he started talking about sending Marina and June back to Russia. “I told him that…if he wanted me to go,” Marina would later tell the Warren Commission, “then that meant he didn’t love me.” But Lee “said he loved me but that it would be better for me if I went to Russia, and what he had in mind I don’t know.”
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What Lee had in mind very likely was his plan to murder General Walker.

Marina would tell Priscilla McMillan that the month of February in 1963 was the worst month of her married life. The beatings grew more frequent and more savage. Before that February he would slap her once or twice with the flat of his hand; now, Marina told McMillan, he began to hit her with his fist five or six times. “When he started to strike her, his face became red and his voice grew angry and loud. He wore a look of concentration, as if Marina were being paid back for every slight he had ever suffered by her, and he was bent on wiping her out, obliterating her completely. To Marina, it seemed that it was not even a human being he saw in front of him. Most horrifying of all was the gleam of pleasure in his eyes,” as he would say things like, “I’m not hitting you just for
this
, but because I’ll never forgive you for running off to your Russians. Oh, what humiliation you made me suffer. Always you go against me! You never, ever do what I want!”
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Marina, naturally, sought some affection from Lee during this period, and whenever she did he would say, “I know what you want,” referring to sex. But he himself made violent sexual attacks on her, insisting on having her when and where he wanted, pinning her down and forcing himself on her, even if she was crying. “You’re my property,” he told her, “and I’ll do with you as I please.”
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Perhaps even worse than the beatings, which Marina had almost accepted as a part of her life, was his talk about her returning to the Soviet Union. She had no way of guessing that this might be part of his plot to murder General Walker. If Lee survived the killing of Walker and got away, he might make his escape, perhaps to Cuba, and then find some way to send for Marina and June. This, of course, is speculation, but by this time he had already ordered the pistol, and he was staying out late in the evening, probably scouting Walker’s home on Turtle Creek Boulevard across town. He was also busy forging a couple of ID cards for the fictitious “A. Hidell” at Jaggers by photographing his own Marine Corps and Selective Service cards and other documents, blanking out the data, rephotographing the documents, and then typing the new false data directly on the resulting prints. The separate prints for the front and back of the cards were then glued together.
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He would soon need such identification when he had to pick up “Hidell’s” pistol at the post office.

On February 14, 1963, the
Dallas Morning News
ran a front-page story on General Walker’s cross-country speaking tour with the fire-and-brimstone right-wing evangelist Billy James Hargis
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to warn against the dangers of Communism. Three days later, the
Morning News
carried another story on General Walker’s speaking tour, emphasizing the anti-Castro side of his “crusade.”
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Later that same day, February 17, Lee forced Marina to handwrite a letter to the Soviet embassy asking to return to the USSR:

Dear Comrade Reznichenko!

I beg your assistance to help me return to the Homeland in the USSR where I will again feel myself a full-fledged citizen. Please let me know what I should do for this, i.e., perhaps it will be necessary to fill out a special application form. Since I am not working at present (because of my lack of knowledge of the English language and a small child), I am requesting you to extend to me a possible material aid for the trip. My husband remains here, since he is an American by nationality. I beg you once more not to refuse my request.

Respectfully

Marina Oswald
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Marina told the Warren Commission that on her own she had never once considered returning to the Soviet Union, but that Lee insisted on it. “He handed me the paper, a pencil, and said, ‘Write’…What could I do if my husband didn’t want to live with me? At least that is what I thought.”
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Marina told Priscilla McMillan that the week after she wrote the letter to the Soviet embassy was the most violent of all. They had celebrated June’s first birthday on February 15, and the next day she confirmed she was pregnant again. “Very good,” Lee said. “Junie is one year old and Marina is cooking up a present. A baby brother. What better present could there be?” But after a day or two of exulting over the prospect of another child, Lee soon resumed showing no compassion for its mother. On one occasion he hit Marina so hard that she started bleeding from the nose. He seemed contrite and made Marina lie down, but his anger persisted. He stormed out and didn’t return for hours. Marina had locked both front and back doors, but Lee just broke the window in the back door, came in, and went to bed without even speaking to Marina. Even as he feigned regret for his violence, he contrived to lay the blame on her: “You see I’m in a bad mood, try not to make me mad. You know I can’t hold myself in very long now.”
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In mid-February the de Mohrenschildts invited Lee and Marina to dinner and a screening of the film on their walking trip through Mexico and Central America. Among the guests were the Dallas chemist Everett Glover and his roommate, Volkmar Schmidt—Glover was between marriages at the time. Lee had already seen the film and preferred to spend the time in earnest conversation with Schmidt, a young German geologist who had recently come to the United States to work at Magnolia Laboratory in Dallas, owned by Standard Oil of New York. Schmidt, who spoke English but little Russian, was interested in Lee’s story.
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“Lee Harvey Oswald brought up in the conversation with me,” Schmidt told
Frontline
in 1993, “the fact that he really felt very angry about the support which the Kennedy administration gave to the Bay of Pigs invasion. It turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald really idealized [the] socialism of Cuba, while he was critical of the socialism in the Soviet Union. And he was just obsessed with his anger towards Kennedy.”
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The credibility of this statement has to be questioned. Although there is evidence of Oswald’s opposition to Kennedy’s support of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in all the literature on the Kennedy assassination this is the only reference to Oswald being obsessed with anger against Kennedy prior to the assassination. Much more importantly, when the FBI interviewed Schmidt thirty years earlier on November 29, 1963, the agents’ report said that Schmidt told them that “Oswald did not speak of President Kennedy or his politics. On one occasion, Schmidt praised Kennedy by stating that President Kennedy would improve the welfare of the working man in the United States. Oswald made no objection to this statement.”
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George drove the Oswalds home afterward and spoke Russian when he discussed the evening. Getting around to Schmidt—George called him “Messer Schmidt”—George said to Marina and Lee, “Just imagine, such a young man. Yet a fascist from his brains to his bones.”

It was the first time Marina had heard George or Lee use that word—readily comprehensible even when they spoke English, since it is virtually the same word in Russian. It was news to her that there were fascists in America. George told her about the John Birch Society and said Schmidt’s ideas were like theirs, enough to “make your hair stand on end.”
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A few days later, on February 22, Glover invited some friends interested in the Russian language to his own apartment to meet the Oswalds. It was a chance for the Oswalds to shine, in spite of their shabby clothing, as they were the only ones there who had fresh knowledge of the Soviet Union. The de Mohrenschildts put in an appearance but left early. Among the guests was a tall, thin, freckle-faced young woman, an acquaintance of Glover’s who would come to play a very large and critical role in the Oswalds’ lives, Ruth Hyde Paine.
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R
uth Paine, thirty years old and a housewife at the time, would become, over the next nine months of Marina and Lee’s life, the single person closest to both of them, and for that reason she has attracted a great deal of attention from assassination conspiracy theorists. (Paine would become one of my star witnesses at the London trial.) At the Second National Conference of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) in 1995, three researchers, Barbara LaMonica, Carol Hewett, and Steve Jones, who had been working together compiling information on Paine and her estranged husband Michael, each presented research papers based on “all the Paine files they could find, including FBI and Secret Service background reports, Warren Commission testimony, and CIA documents—over two thousand pages in all,” as well as “Ruth’s grand jury testimony in New Orleans [in the Clay Shaw case], Dallas police files, and reports of a Quaker activist who was with Ruth Paine in 1991.” They found mighty slim pickings, mostly things like the fact that Ruth’s father, William Avery Hyde, had been in the Office of Strategic Services, the Second World War forerunner of the CIA, became an insurance executive, and in 1965—well after the assassination—took leave from his company to work for a time for the Agency for International Development, “a mysterious agency about which not much is known,” in the words of assassination researcher Steve Jones. An FBI document also revealed that the CIA had approached Hyde about running an educational cooperative alliance in Vietnam in 1957, although the plan was dropped. He also “traveled abroad frequently.”
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Ruth’s mother was a Unitarian minister who was still studying for her bachelor of divinity degree at Oberlin College in Ohio. An FBI report said that a confidential informant for “another U.S. Government Agency” advised back in 1952 that Mrs. Hyde had admitted to many neighbors in the past years that she was a “Communist.”

The father of Ruth’s husband, Michael, was a “notorious Trotskyite” (coincidentally the same wing of the Communist Party that most attracted Oswald), although Michael had little contact with him. Michael’s stepfather, Michael Young, was the inventor of the first commercially licensed helicopter, the Bell 47.
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Ruth Paine herself was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and League of Women Voters in Dallas. She considered herself a pacifist and had been connected with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.
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Ruth was a graduate of Antioch College in Ohio, as was her brother, a doctor. She also had a sister living in Ohio. In early 1951 Ruth joined the Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, “tremendously excited,” she said, “by the idea of the ‘inner light’—the possibility of direct communication between God and man—and also by the Quaker concern for other people.” She met Michael at a folk dance in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1955. Michael had flunked out of Harvard and transferred to Swarthmore College, spending a year there majoring in physics before dropping out of college in 1951. They married at a Friends meeting in Media, Pennsylvania, in December of 1957 and moved to Irving, a suburb of Dallas, where they bought a house in 1959. They had two small children, Sylvia Lynn, three, and Christopher, two.
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Although Michael and Ruth, each of serious personality and strong social conscience, were soul mates on political issues, both being very liberal, their marriage had already gone stale by the time Ruth met the Oswalds.
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In September 1962, Michael and Ruth separated, although Michael continued to support the family, came to dinner twice a week, entertained and enjoyed his children, and generally made himself handy when he was there, often working in his workshop in the garage. Although the Paines were planning to divorce, Ruth thought they went out to the movies more often than some of their married friends.
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Ruth would later volunteer her view of the marriage to the Warren Commission: “Our marriage is marked both by mutual honesty that is exceptional and by a lack of overt or interior strife, except that it hasn’t quite come together as a mutual partnership. My mother recently said to me that ‘If you would just look only at what Michael does there’s nothing wrong with your marriage at all. It is just what he says,’ and I concur with her opinion on that, that he is so scrupulously honest with his own feelings.” While they lived together, Michael had been, Ruth thought, “insufficiently attentive” but “always kind and thoughtful.”
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Ruth knew no one at Glover’s gathering but Glover himself, whom she had met in a madrigal (old English songs) singing group to which she and Michael belonged.
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She was eager for an opportunity to talk with native Russian speakers, as she had been studying the language with a Russian tutor in Dallas, took summer courses in Russian in Pennsylvania and Vermont in 1957 and 1959, and enrolled in a Berlitz course in Russian in 1959. She hoped one day to become a teacher in Russian, and later that summer began tutoring one student.
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At Glover’s home Ruth had little opportunity to speak with Marina, who spent the first half of the evening trying to get baby June to stop crying and go to sleep. The de Mohrenschildts had a few words of Russian with Marina in the kitchen, but they did not amount to much, and Ruth was too embarrassed by her own poor Russian to do much more than listen.
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Ruth also heard Oswald holding forth on his experiences in the Soviet Union in the living room, enough to know he considered himself a Marxist and had thought—before going there—that the Soviet Union’s economic system was superior to that of the United States. He complained about censorship, mentioning a letter his brother Robert sent to him in the USSR with a clipping about his “defection” that he never received, probably, he believed, because the Soviet authorities intercepted it. Ruth was puzzled. “His discussion of the censorship made me feel that he wanted his listeners to know he was not blind to the defects of the Soviet system,” she told the Warren Commission. “I was left wondering which country he thought conducted itself better,” though he did indicate he did not like the capitalist system.