The Kennedy Half-Century (35 page)

Major General Edwin A. Walker was a member of the extremist John Birch Society, which had declared at one point that President Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander during World War II, was a “Communist” or a “stooge.”
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Walker had retired from the army after being accused of indoctrinating his troops with right-wing propaganda. After leaving the military, he moved to Dallas and settled in a large house in an upscale area. In the spring of 1962, he challenged Governor John Connally in the Democratic gubernatorial primary and received around 10 percent of the vote. Not to put too fine a point on it, Walker was a racist and arch-segregationist, and he called for thousands of civilian volunteers to march on Oxford when the African American James Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962. In the wake of the violence at Ole Miss, he was arrested and charged with instigating a riot. The authorities eventually released Walker on a $50,000 bond.

Volkmar Schmidt, a friend of George de Mohrenschildt’s who also associated with the Russian expatriates, believes a conversation he had with Lee Oswald one night may have convinced him to take a potshot at Walker and later, JFK. Schmidt says that an academic acquaintance had told him that showing empathy toward troubled individuals sometimes brought them back to reality. Schmidt says he employed this tactic during a conversation with Oswald because he considered him to be a “very disturbed man” and “totally desperate.” “When I heard how hateful he was towards Kennedy and Cuba … I tried to say ‘hey, there’s something much more real to be concerned about, because I don’t know about Castro, but I know about this Walker, he’s kind of a Nazi, yeah?’ ” Schmidt said during a 1995 interview.
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“Not so bad as those Nazis in Germany, but I had specifically mentioned to … Oswald that Walker had given a speech to the students at the Mississippi campus and those guys went off and killed a couple of journalists.” Schmidt says that he encouraged Oswald to “think about” the Walker incident and the importance of bringing “justice to the minorities” in a “constructive” fashion. Schmidt thinks Oswald may have decided then and there to assassinate Walker: “Actually, a few days after I talked with him, he bought his weapons,” Schmidt says.
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On April 10, 1963, the available evidence suggests that Oswald used his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to shoot at Walker while the general was sitting at his desk at home. Aiming from a nearby parking lot, Oswald fired a bullet that passed through a wooden window cross strip as well as a masonry wall,
and it fell harmlessly onto some papers. Marina testified that Lee wasn’t sure if he had hit Walker and seemed disappointed the next day when he learned from newspapers that the general was unharmed. Some assassination researchers do not believe that Oswald ever attempted to kill Walker. Mark Lane, for example, points to a photograph of Walker’s house, later found in Oswald’s belongings, which allegedly changed over the course of the JFK investigation. Marina said that when she first saw the photograph, it included an image of a license plate that was later covered over with a “black spot,” which raises the question of whether the FBI, which at one point gained possession of the photo, tried to hide the identity of the true assassin.
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In the unlikely event the FBI undertook such a deception, we would be forced to discount a good deal of Marina’s other testimony about the Walker matter—much of it compelling and accompanied by circumstantial evidence such as Oswald’s note to his wife.
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Marina claimed that Oswald had told her that, contrary to Volkmar Schmidt’s belief that he had planted the idea in Lee’s mind, he (Lee) had been planning the Walker murder for two months and that he had waited until a church next door to Walker held services so that his comings and goings would attract less attention. Further, while the FBI could not absolutely say that the bullet found in Walker’s home came from Oswald’s rifle, the grooves on the bullet were consistent with Oswald’s rifle.
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Marina shared a second tale with the Warren Commission that is quite revealing. Several days after the Walker incident, she said, Lee was reading the morning newspaper when he suddenly decided to change into a “good suit.” When Marina saw him tucking a pistol into his belt, she asked him where he was going. “Nixon is coming,” Lee replied, indicating that the former vice president was going to be in Dallas. “I want to go and have a look.” Marina immediately called her husband into the bathroom and tearfully “told him that he shouldn’t do this, that he had promised me.” “I remember that I held him. We actually struggled for several minutes and then he quieted down. I remember that I told him that if he goes out it would be better for him to kill me than to go out.”
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Actually, Nixon was not in Dallas, and the reasons for Oswald’s bizarre behavior remain unclear. Marina guessed he staged the incident to torment her.

This episode suggests again that Oswald had entered a violence-prone phase, with his deep-seated personal anger being directed at political figures from General Walker to former vice president Nixon. These were two conservatives, while Kennedy was—in the context of the times—a moderate to liberal Democrat, and possibly more acceptable to Oswald ideologically, though the Kennedy administration’s posture toward Castro may have negated any advantage JFK had. Over the next six months, it is not much of a stretch to
imagine that Oswald’s inner fury about the course of his life, and the threatening resentment he was manifesting toward those in positions of influence, could have expanded to include anyone at society’s pinnacle, certainly a president.
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It is difficult to get a good read on Oswald’s views and state of mind, especially in his final months, because he mainly kept to himself. Wesley Buell Frazier, Oswald’s co-worker at the Book Depository and car pool companion, never noticed anything unusual about his friend’s behavior at the office. “Lee was a very professional guy,” Frazier told me. “[But] he wasn’t the type of person to come up and initiate a conversation. If you asked him something, he would answer you. The only time he would initiate something at work was when he was reading the invoice and he wasn’t quite sure about the book or where it was. Then he’d come ask me.” Frazier also noted that some co-workers made fun of Oswald’s chilly demeanor, and that his occasional attempts to fit in, by playing cards or the like, often fell flat.
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The Nixon incident and the attempt on Walker’s life, however, are two of the most convincing indicators that Oswald was capable of considering or trying to carry out high-level political murder. Yet such a conclusion does not address the larger concern about possible accomplices for Oswald from governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations in more than one city. New Orleans, as well as Dallas, has provided tales of JFK assassination conspiracies. Not long after the attempted Walker murder, Oswald traveled to the Crescent City, planning to move his family there. While looking for a job and residence in New Orleans, Oswald moved in with his uncle, Charles “Dutz” Murret, a small-time hustler and bookie for Carlos Marcello, New Orleans’s premier Mafia boss. According to an FBI informant (a businessman code-named SV T-1), Oswald received money from a man who was later identified as Joseph Poretto, one of Marcello’s chief lieutenants. Had the informant misidentified, or correctly recognized, Poretto and Oswald? Was SV T-1 even telling the truth?
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Murret testified before the Warren Commission that he was the only one who had lent his nephew money. In any case, we know that Oswald had enough to rent a $65-per-month apartment shortly after arriving in New Orleans. He also found a job at the William B. Reily Coffee Co., which paid him $1.50 per hour to grease the fittings on its machinery.

In early May, Marina and the Oswalds’ infant daughter joined Lee. Ruth Paine drove them down from Dallas in her station wagon. After Paine left, Oswald wrote to the national headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro organization, requesting permission to set up an FPCC chapter in New Orleans. Too impatient to wait for an answer, Oswald went to a local print shop and ordered a thousand handbills with the words “Hands
Off Cuba! Join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, New Orleans Charter Member Branch” printed on them. Oswald first distributed his handbills on June 16, 1963, but stopped after a policeman ordered him to move on. As his activities continued later in the summer, Oswald became a minor news curiosity in New Orleans, was filmed by New Orleans TV news, and even debated U.S.–Cuba policy on a local radio show.
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But gradually, continuing a pattern seen before, Oswald lost interest in the FPCC and his life in the Big Easy. He was unable to hold onto his job at the Reily Coffee Company for long; according to his supervisor, Oswald frequently played hooky at a nearby service station called the Crescent City Garage. In 1978, fifteen years after JFK’s assassination, the garage’s owner, Adrian Alba, came forward with an account about a man he believed was an FBI agent from Washington. According to Alba, the man flashed bureau credentials and requisitioned a green Studebaker. Alba’s garage maintained some of the FBI’s unmarked cars. The next day, Alba claimed he saw the Studebaker pull up in front of the coffee company. “Lee Oswald went across the sidewalk,” Alba testified, “He bent down as if to look in the window and was handed what appeared to be a good-sized envelope, a white envelope. He turned and bent as if to hold the envelope to his abdomen, and I think he put it under his shirt. Oswald then went back into the building, and the car drove off.” Alba also said that the man met Oswald a second time and returned the Studebaker a few days later. When asked why he hadn’t come forward with the information earlier, Alba said that he had forgotten about it until he saw a television commercial one day that featured a man leaning in a car window.
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Alba’s tardy yarn could be easily dismissed, save for the considerable evidence linking Oswald to the FBI and other secretive organizations. In late July 1963, having lost his coffee job and learning that the Marines had rejected his request to have his honorable discharge reinstated, Oswald resumed his role as a New Orleans street preacher for Fidel Castro.
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At the same time, he made an attempt to infiltrate the enemy camp by posing as an anti-Castro activist. On August 5, 1963, Oswald walked into a store owned by an anti-Castro militant, Carlos Bringuier, and claimed to be a former Marine willing to train anti-Castro Cubans for combat. The next day, Oswald gave Bringuier a copy of a Marine Corps manual as proof of his credentials. A few days later, however, Bringuier learned from a friend about Oswald’s previous role in handing out pro-Castro leaflets. Enraged by the deception, Bringuier immediately left his shop and went to confront Oswald. The two men caused a scene on a city sidewalk that drew a crowd. Oswald and Bringuier (and two of Bringuier’s fellow Cubans) were arrested for disorderly conduct.

While still in jail, Oswald demanded to speak with the FBI. In what many
say is a suspicious response, the agency granted his request and, within a matter of hours, sent Special Agent John Quigley to see him. How Oswald was able to summon an FBI agent and whether he had a “special relationship” with the agency, as some have suggested, are unanswerable questions. Perhaps Quigley was merely conducting a routine interview with a person he knew had defected to the Soviet Union (the FBI admits it kept an extensive file on Oswald prior to 11/22). Though it is much more of a stretch, some JFK assassination conspiracy backers think the confrontation with Bringuier could have been an orchestrated ruse designed to shore up Oswald’s Communist bona fides before he murdered Kennedy. The narrative becomes even more complicated because of Bringuier’s CIA-tinged background. Bringuier was the New Orleans representative of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE for short), an anti-Castro student group with ties to the CIA.
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Perhaps one could make the argument that Lee Oswald, in an attempt to live up to his imagined importance, sought out exciting figures in society’s shadows. Maybe also, by coincidence, the CIA and FBI had a presence everywhere Oswald happened to be in the early 1960s. It could be that Oswald was just a Forrest Gump–like character who popped up at interesting moments wherever he happened to live. But just as conceivably, whether related to the Kennedy assassination or not, Oswald actually had secretive contacts with the CIA, the FBI, or both.
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Consider the address found on some of Oswald’s pro-Castro literature—544 Camp Street. According to assassination researcher Jim Marrs, “It was at 544 Camp Street in an old, three-story office building that the paths of Lee Harvey Oswald, the FBI, the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, and organized crime figures all crossed.” The Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), another anti-Castro organization sponsored by the CIA, rented an office at 544 Camp Street right before Oswald moved back to New Orleans. Guy Banister, a former FBI agent who kept files on New Orleans’s left-wing organizations, rented space at the same location. According to Delphine Roberts, Banister’s secretary and mistress, Oswald met with her boss on several occasions in New Orleans. “He seemed to be on familiar terms with Banister and with the office,” she said. “As I understood it he had the use of an office on the second floor, above the main office where we worked. I was not greatly surprised when I learned he was going up and down, back and forth. Then, several times, Mr. Banister brought me upstairs, and in the office above I saw various writings stuck up on the wall pertaining to … Fair Play for Cuba.” Roberts may or may not be revealing the full story. She has previously received money for this information and once told an interviewer that she did not consistently tell “all the truth.” Yet there are other witnesses who say that Banister and Oswald knew each other. For example, William Gaudet, “a CIA asset in
New Orleans of many years,” told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he saw Banister and Oswald chatting on a street corner.
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