Reclaiming History (358 page)

^*
Marguerite had since left the employ of Lerner Shops and was now working at Martin’s Department Store in Brooklyn. The next month she went to work for Lady Oris Hosiery on Park Avenue South in Manhattan, a chain of hosiery shops she had worked for in New Orleans in 1943. (Carro Exhibit No. 1, 19 H 309; CE 2213, 25 H 110)

† The consensus of many observers is that Oswald was not bright and was intellectually shallow. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I have always been puzzled by this assessment. In my opinion, his words and thinking process in his late teens and early twenties have always struck me as being those of someone not only above average in intelligence, but much more intellectual than I would expect most people of his young age to be.

^*
As with the common perception about Lee’s intelligence, I also tend to disagree, although not as confidently, in the general impression of Marguerite. Obviously, Lee and his brothers knew Marguerite and I didn’t. But from the cold written record, and taking cognizance of the fact that everything in life is relative, I don’t find Marguerite to have been that bad a mother. She may have been deficient in several respects, but she was always working hard and providing for them. And the record seems to reflect, as her friend Myrtle Evans would agree, that at least with regard to Lee, alongside of whom she is now buried for eternity, she did love him dearly. One wonders if it wasn’t her offending personality, rather than her conduct and attitude, that turned people off so, and that the two somewhat separate realities seemed to slop over onto each other and get blurred, influencing people’s perception of her. As an example of her disobliging personality, journalist Hugh Aynesworth, who got to know the members of the Oswald family better than any of his peers, wrote, “Few people have ever so deeply annoyed me as Marguerite Oswald. And of all the things I disliked about her, none irritated me more than her voice. It was strange—unique in my experience—a jarring combination of birdlike sing-song, childish whine, and predatory threat that invaded your head like a dental drill. She would not stop talking” (Aynesworth with Michaud,
JFK: Breaking the News
, pp. 123–124).

^*
On the day after the assassination, Dr. Hartogs was interviewed on television about why anyone might want to murder a president. At the time he did not recall having Lee in observation and his remarks were entirely generalities. Such an assassin, Hartogs thought, would be mentally disturbed, with a personal grudge against authority figures, and likely a person seeking to overcome his own insignificance and helplessness with an act that frightens others, even one that would shatter the world, discharging his own insecurity by making others insecure. (8 H 219–220)
Oddly, Hartogs found fit to tell the Warren Commission (perhaps to impress others that he had foreseen Oswald as doing what he did, and without there being any indication he knew of the two knife incidents) that he had found Oswald “to have definite traits of dangerousness. In other words, this child had a potential for explosive, aggressive, assaultive acting out” (8 H 217). But if Hartogs actually believed this back in 1953, he knew he obviously should have recommended that Oswald not be returned to the community and that he be institutionalized immediately. In his Warren Commission testimony, he said, “I recommended that this youngster should be committed to an institution.” Question: “Immediately?” Hartogs: “Yes, that is right.” But Hartogs did not make this recommendation, only recommending institutionalization as a last resort. In his testimony before the Commission, when confronted with his earlier report by Warren Commission counsel, Hartogs was forced to concede that his earlier report in 1953 “contradicts” the recollection of Oswald’s character and disposition he gave the Commission. Trying to cover himself on another point, he said that he “implied” Oswald’s potential for explosive violence by his “diagnosis of passive-aggressive,” but the latter is hardly a synonym for the former. Hartogs told the Commission that although he did not use the words “potentially dangerous” in his report, he believed that violence was always a possibility with a passive-aggressive personality, whose aggressivity can be triggered by a situation of high stress, particularly if he “nourishes his hate and hostility for [a] considerable length of time.” (8 H 218, 221–222, WCT Dr. Renatus Hartogs)
Author Gerald Posner, apparently trying to explain away Hartogs’s contradictory testimony, says Hartogs did not mention in his 1953 report his belief that Oswald was capable of explosive violence “since that would have mandated institutionalization,” and Hartogs only wanted “probation” with “guidance” (Posner,
Case Closed
, p. 13). But Posner gives no source for this, and Hartogs himself never said this in his testimony. Further, if one were to embrace Posner’s logic, it’s understandable and acceptable for a psychiatrist to recommend only probation and guidance, not institutionalization, for someone he believes is dangerous and capable of explosive violence.

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There were differences of culture between New York City and New Orleans that resulted in Oswald getting beaten up one day. Lee got on a crowded school bus headed for Beauregard and sat where a seat was available. It happened to be in the section of the bus to the rear for colored people. Coming from New York City, Lee didn’t have the faintest idea that he had done anything wrong. He found out differently at the end of the line in front of the school. White boys on the bus jumped and pummeled Lee when they got off the bus, loosening his front teeth. (8 H 124, WCT Lillian Murret; 8 H 159, WCT Marilyn Dorothea Murret)

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To elaborate on the earlier footnote on Marguerite, the knock on her by virtually everyone who knew her that she was almost impossible to coexist with and not a good mother has a few dissenters, at least as to the issue of whether she was a loving and caring mother. The Evans are two of the few dissenters. And Lee’s junior high school friend in New Orleans, Ed Voebel, was another, telling the Warren Commission that “I think she [Marguerite] tried to take care of him,” adding that “if he wanted something, no matter what it was…she would try to get it for him” (8 H 11). These testimonials cannot be disregarded, though it has to be noted that neither the Evans nor Voebel lived in Marguerite’s household, and Voebel only personally met Marguerite one time and did sense that “something was lacking” in Lee’s relationship with his mother. But more importantly, even if we ignore the negative observations about Marguerite by the professionals like the psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers in New York, even, indeed, those of her own sister Lillian—sisters, of course, can be catty—the relationship a son has with his mother is so special that virtually nothing can tear it asunder. Yet not just one, but all three of Marguerite’s sons seemingly had no respect for her and felt she left much to be desired as a mother. That assessment, coming from such a source, is even more difficult to disregard, although the available record of that assessment from the three sons is mostly conclusionary about their feelings concerning Marguerite, as opposed to supporting their conclusions with chapter and verse.

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Some confusion has been caused by the fact that there were two businesses under the name Tujague in New Orleans, one of them a restaurant reputed to be an underworld hangout involved in gambling. The HSCA checked to see where Oswald had actually worked, and it turned out to be the shipping company. Frank DiBenedetto, who took over the business when Gerald Tujague died, told the committee that Tujague had once told him that he was in no way related to the owners of the restaurant. (9 HSCA 101–102)

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Apparently, Oswald wasn’t bad with a pistol either. At the naval air base in Japan where he was later stationed, his pistol instructor, Marine sergeant Arnie Vitarbo, said, “Everyone was required to train with a pistol and rifle, and he showed a special interest. He was better than average…but everyone seemed to think he was different. A loner” (
Los Angeles Daily News
, April 21, 1992; see also 11 H 305, WCT Maj. Eugene D. Anderson).

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There’s no way to know for sure if Oswald used the alias Hidell because of his exposure to Heindel or not. The likelihood is that he did not, it just being a coincidence, the further coincidence being that Heindel was also from New Orleans, though there’s no evidence the two knew each other before Atsugi. Because Marina, who had firsthand knowledge, said Oswald came up with Hidell as an “altered Fidel” due to his reverence for Fidel Castro (1 H 64), and Heindel saying the “i” in his nickname was hard, not soft, as in
Fidel
, it’s safe to assume that Oswald’s alias had nothing to do with Heindel.

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There was another puzzling question. On Oswald’s take-home pay of eighty-five dollars a month, how was he even able to afford going to the Queen Bee, one of the three most expensive nightclubs in Tokyo whose “strikingly beautiful hostesses…catered to an elite clientele,…not impoverished marine privates”? A night at the club “could cost anywhere from sixty to one hundred dollars.” (Epstein,
Legend
, p. 71) But one should remember that Oswald was notoriously close with his money all of his life and did not gamble like his fellow marines, so he could have easily saved enough to go to the Queen Bee. After all, we know that no one thought any bigger than Oswald. And of course he could have met the hostess at some place other than where she worked.

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Most of the former squad mates whom the Warren Commission took testimony or affidavits from were only with Oswald in Santa Ana, not Japan. Of three squad mates who were stationed with Oswald at Atsugi, one never mentioned one way or the other whether he had heard of Oswald’s pro-Russian and anti-American bent (8 H 318, WC affidavit of John Rene Heindel), and another said, “I never heard Oswald make any anti-American or pro-Communist statements” (8 H 317, WC affidavit of Peter Francis Connor). However, as indicated, fellow marine Paul Murphy did say that Oswald spoke “a little Russian” in Japan (8 H 320, WCT affidavit of Paul Edward Murphy).

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At the trial in London, Delgado said that Castro ended up executing an American, Major Morgan, who had assisted him in the revolution, and whom Oswald and he had spoken of emulating, and that execution in particular disillusioned Delgado about Castro (Transcript of
On Trial
, July 24, 1986, p.593–594).

† A much more famous remark of this nature has been attributed to Oswald, but he may not have made it. Kerry Thornley told the Warren Commission that Oswald “looked upon history as God. He looked upon the eyes of future people as some kind of tribunal, and he wanted to be on the winning side so that ten thousand years from now people would look in the history books and say ‘Well, this man was ahead of his time.’” Oswald, he said, “was concerned with his image in history.” (11 H 97–98) From the context it is not clear whether Thornley came up with the ten-thousand-year observation himself, or Oswald mentioned it to him first.

^*
He was transferred to the Marine Corps Reserve, in which he was expected to serve until December 8, 1962, his unit headquartered at the Naval Air Station in Glenview, Illinois (WR, pp. 688–689; Folsom Exhibit No. 1, 19 H 679).

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Where Oswald spent the night of October 9 is not known, but it’s likely he spent it in an airport waiting room. The Warren Report (p. 690) says, “On the same day [he arrived at Southampton] he flew to Helsinki,” but the visas in his passport (CE 946, 18 H 162–163) showed that he arrived at Southampton on October 9 and left London Airport (now Heathrow) for Helsinki on October 10.

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Oswald told UPI reporter Aline Mosby in November in Moscow, “For two years I’ve had it in my mind, don’t form any attachments, because I knew I was going away. I was planning to divest myself of everything to do with the United States. I’ve not just been thinking about it, but waiting to do it. For two years, saving my money” (CE 1385, 22 H 705).

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The reader will note in reading the many writings of Oswald in this section that his dyslexia caused various degrees of errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar, ranging from really bad to almost passable. The only explanation that makes sense for why his dyslexia was not as obvious in some of his letters is that, like the above referred-to letter to the Supreme Soviet, he had third-party help, or he deemed a particular letter important enough to rewrite it several times to make it better. For instance, Marina told the Warren Commission that with respect to the envelope alone on his November 9, 1963, letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., “Lee retyped it some ten times or so” (1 H 45), although she later told her biographer Priscilla McMillan it was more like four times (McMillan,
Marina and Lee
, p. 624 note 17). The Warren Commission noted the varying quality of his letters and dismissed a third possibility, at least as to the letters coming from Oswald in the United States. “There is no evidence,” the Commission’s report said, “that anyone in the United States helped Oswald with his better written letters or that anyone else wrote his letters for him” (WR, p. 666).

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In a memorandum dated October 22, 1959, the KGB also decided that “it was not advisable to give [Oswald] refugee status in the Soviet Union” (Nechiporenko,
Passport to Assassination
, p. 34).

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Thirty years later, Rimma told
Frontline
that “I saw Lee in the bath. It was water there and it was reddish, so it was blood. Lee cut his wrist” (Transcript of “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?”
Frontline
, PBS, November 16, 1993, p. 8). But two years later she told author Norman Mailer that she stayed out in the hallway and did not see Lee in the tub, and was told he had “cut his wrists.” When they brought him out on a stretcher she said he was unconscious, his cheeks were hollow, his face was bluish, and he looked like a person about to die. (Mailer,
Oswald’s Tale
, p. 50)