Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy (63 page)

There is no question that John F. Kennedy’s visit to the “Southwest hate capital of Dixie,” as Dallas has been called, is fraught with complications.

The president will discuss this issue, along with other details of the trip, with John Connally next week at the White House. In yet another confirmation that Lyndon Johnson has no place in John Kennedy’s future plans, the vice president has been neither invited to that meeting nor even told it will take place.

One statistic about the Texas trip is most glaring of all: more than 62 percent of Dallas voters rejected John Kennedy in 1960.

But JFK loves a challenge. If Billings, Montana, can be won over, then why not the “Big D”?

*   *   *

Meanwhile, at the exact same time President Kennedy is speaking in Montana, Lee Harvey Oswald is already on his way to Texas—and beyond. Dressed in casual slacks and a zippered jacket, Oswald rides Continental Trailways bus 5121 bound for Houston. From there he will change buses and travel due south to Mexico City. Unlike the American forces (which included among them a young Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee) that took a year to make that journey during the Mexican-American War of 1846, Oswald will make the trip in just one day.

Oswald is traveling like a man who is never coming back. He has no home, because he has just abandoned his squalid New Orleans apartment. When the landlady came around demanding the seventeen dollars in back rent, Oswald put her off with a lie and later sneaked out in the dead of night.

The sum of Oswald’s worldly possessions are now divided among his wallet and the two cloth suitcases stowed in the bus’s luggage bay.

As for a family, Oswald no longer has one. Two days ago he sent the very pregnant Marina and their nineteen-month-old daughter, June, back to live with Marina’s friend Ruth Paine outside Dallas. Marina has been Oswald’s unwitting pawn these past few months, her Soviet citizenship vital to his goal of returning to the Soviet Union. It is unclear if she knows he is traveling to Mexico—or that he had to leave the country to travel at all.

But Oswald has hatched a clever new scheme—one that doesn’t require Marina. So just as he abandoned their apartment, now he also abandons his family. Every mile that Trailways 5121 travels past the pine thickets and swampland of the Texas coastal highway puts Lee Harvey Oswald one mile farther away from the shackles of his turbulent and bitter marriage.

Oswald has temporarily abandoned plans to return to the Soviet Union. Instead, he dreams of living in the palm tree–fringed workers’ paradise of Cuba. But it’s impossible to attain a Cuban travel visa in the United States because the United States and Cuba have severed diplomatic relations. Thus Oswald is taking the bus to Mexico City in order to visit the Cuban embassy there.

Lee Harvey Oswald never fits in, no matter where he goes. He is not an outcast because that would mean allowing himself to join a group before being rejected by it. Instead, he is something far more unpredictable—and ultimately more dangerous: he is a parallel member of society, a thin-skinned loner operating by his own rhythms and rules, constantly searching for that place where he can hunker down, for that identity that will allow him to be the great man he so longs to be.

Oswald believes that Cuba is such a place. And in his mind he has done plenty to impress the Cuban dictator, Castro. Oswald’s time in New Orleans passing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was his way of proving his loyalty to Fidel. Marina Oswald will later claim that Lee Harvey even planned to hijack an airplane that would take him directly to Havana.

At 2:00
A.M
. on the morning of September 26, Lee Harvey Oswald changes buses in Houston, switching to Continental Trailways 5133. One day later, he arrives in Mexico City. Throughout the journey he is chatty, even boastful, desperate to impress his fellow passengers. He regales them with tales of his time in the Soviet Union and his work with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He even makes a point of showing them the Soviet stamps in his passport. Whenever the bus stops for a food break, the rail-thin Oswald devours heaping platters of Mexican cuisine. He doesn’t speak Spanish, which he’ll need to learn for his new life in Cuba. So, for now, he orders by jabbing a finger randomly at a menu item and hoping for the best.

In his wallet, Oswald carries close to two hundred dollars, a Mexican tourist card that allows him one fifteen-day trip to that country, and two passports—one from his Soviet days and the other brand-new, recently issued by the U.S.government. In his blue athletic bag, Oswald has wedged a Spanish-English dictionary, newspaper clippings that prove he was arrested while agitating on behalf of Cuba, his Russian-language work permit from his time in Minsk, and proof of his marriage to a Soviet citizen. Oswald also carries a pad containing notes explaining that he speaks Russian and is a devoted friend of the Communist Party.

Like all true Communists, Lee Harvey Oswald is an avowed atheist, so he does not pray for his journey’s success. Instead, he puts his faith in that thick stack of documents he now carries.

But Oswald knows that the journey is a gamble. He might get all the way to Mexico City and be denied. If that happens, the precious dollars spent on travel, food, and lodging will have been squandered. But it is a risk he must take.

The bus arrives in Mexico City at 10:00
A.M.
Oswald once again drifts, immediately separating himself from his new acquaintances. He checks in at the Hotel de Comercio, just four blocks from the bus station, at a rate of $1.28 per night. And though exhausted after the grueling twenty-hour bus ride, he walks immediately to the Cuban embassy.

*   *   *

John Kennedy is traveling west. Lee Harvey Oswald is traveling south. And Jackie Kennedy is traveling east. She and her sister, Lee, are off for Greece. There they will spend two weeks aboard the yacht
Christina
, owned by the shadowy womanizer Aristotle Onassis, a man who has been under surveillance by the FBI for almost twenty years due to his unscrupulous business practices. Among other things, Onassis has been investigated for fraud against the American government and for violation of U.S. shipping laws in the mid-1950s. It’s no wonder that, back in 1961, when the First Lady went abroad alone on a goodwill tour, President Kennedy issued very firm instructions to Jackie’s Secret Service detail: “Whatever you do in Greece, do not let Mrs. Kennedy cross paths with Aristotle Onassis.”

The swarthy Greek shipping magnate is more than twenty years older than Jackie, and three inches shorter. He’s also one of the richest men in the world. His yacht has been the scene of many a society function, and men such as JFK and Winston Churchill have been aboard it. The last time the First Lady was on board the 325-foot-long
Christina
, which is renowned for such opulent features as solid-gold faucets, was almost ten years ago, as a guest with JFK. At that time, Jackie Kennedy thought the boat vulgar and was particularly disgusted by the bar stool covers made of whale scrotums. But now her sister is pursuing Onassis romantically, even though the portly Greek is having an affair with opera star Maria Callas. Understanding the situation, Jackie is coming along to offer emotional support.

The First Lady would never dare be photographed in a bikini on U.S. soil. The image of her in a revealing bathing suit would be scandalous, and perhaps even politically damaging for her husband. But Greece is half a world away from the restrictions and cares of being the First Lady.

Jackie needs a break from all that. For the next two weeks she wants nothing more than to be pampered and free-spirited. The First Lady has lost all of her baby weight. It would be a shame not to flaunt her newly slim figure in the privacy of her opulent surroundings. So she makes sure her staff puts a bikini in her suitcase before she boards the TWA 707 for Greece on October 1.

It has been exactly fifty-two days since she endured the tragedy of baby Patrick’s death. It is exactly fifty-two days until she will endure another unspeakable tragedy.

17

O
CTOBER 6
,
1963

C
AMP
D
AVID
, M
ARYLAND

10:27 A.M.

The president of the United States is furious. John Kennedy steers a golf cart to Camp David’s military mess hall for Sunday Mass. The paved path meanders through a thick wood, taking him past the Hawthorn, Laurel, Sycamore, and Linden guest cabins on his three-minute journey. With him are five-year-old Caroline and John Jr., who will turn three next month. But it is not politics that is on the president’s mind—his trip to Texas is set. (After meeting with Governor John Connally two days ago, the much-needed political foray is a done deal.) Nor is it the pressures of the office. And it is certainly not his children who have JFK annoyed—the president is excited to be spending time alone with Caroline and John. He has even asked legendary
Look
magazine photographer Stanley Tretick to take some informal photos of them at play.

No, what’s making the president so angry is the First Lady. She won’t come to the phone.

Despite her husband’s objections, the First Lady spent two weeks as a guest on Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis’s yacht
Christina
in 1963.
(Associated Press)

It’s bad enough that Jackie Kennedy is cavorting around the Mediterranean with Aristotle Onassis, a man whom the president does not trust. But it’s far worse that pictures of her Greek adventures are front-page news around the world, leading many to ask why the president is allowing his wife to spend time with a man who has been investigated for fraud against the U.S.government. Perhaps worst of all, however, Aristotle Onassis is a known philanderer.

A simple phone conversation with Jackie might lessen Jack’s tension. But the First Lady is now unreachable. Even when the president plans ahead and accounts for the time change, the most powerful man in the world cannot speak to his wife. JFK doesn’t know whether she’s avoiding him or if the
Christina
truly lacks modern communication technology.

The situation is not just making Kennedy angry—it’s making him jealous.

*   *   *

Four months. Four long months. That’s how long it will take for Lee Harvey Oswald to obtain a Soviet visa, which it turns out he needs before Cuban officials will grant him travel documents.

But Oswald doesn’t have enough money to wait four months. He needs to go to Cuba now.

And so he stands toe-to-toe with consul Eusebio Azcue at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, arguing with him over the Soviet visa. The conversation long ago stopped being civil. Oswald is “highly agitated and angry,” in the eyes of one employee of the Cuban consulate. Instead of being deferential to the man who controls his entry into the Communist country, Oswald is yelling at him.

Finally, Azcue has had enough. The diplomat in him is gone, and he speaks candidly with the American. “A person like you,” Azcue tells Oswald in fractured English, “in the place of aiding the Cuban Revolution, are doing it harm.”

Azcue concludes by telling Oswald that he will never get the paperwork to enter Cuba.

The consul turns and strides back to his office, leaving Oswald crushed: his dream of escaping to Cuba is over. A consular employee hands Oswald a scrap of paper with her name and the embassy’s contact information on it, should he ever want to try again.

A despondent Oswald stays the weekend in Mexico City, loading up on the local food and taking in a bullfight. But his despair is growing.

He then takes the bus back to Dallas, where he rents a room at the YMCA and looks for work. He sheepishly phones Marina, who is still living with family friend Ruth Paine and is due to deliver the Oswalds’ second baby any day. Paine is a Quaker housewife who was introduced to the Oswalds by George de Mohrenschildt, the well-educated Russian with possible CIA connections whom Oswald met in the summer of 1962.

Ruth Paine speaks a smattering of Russian, which helps to make Marina feel more at home. All Marina’s possessions are stored in Paine’s garage. Among them is a green-and-brown rolled blanket in which Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle is concealed. Ruth Paine, being a peace-loving Quaker, would never allow the gun in her garage, but she has no idea it’s there.

Oswald regales Marina with tales of Mexico, but also admits that his trip was a failure. Marina listens, and believes that there is a change for the better in her husband. But she refuses to live with him. So, while looking for work, Oswald phones his wife when he can and sometimes hitchhikes from Dallas out to the Paine residence to see her.

Finally, thanks to a kindly reference from Ruth Paine, he finds a job. It is menial labor for a man with Oswald’s relatively high IQ of 118, and involves nothing more than placing books into boxes for shipping. But he and Marina are happy nonetheless. Maybe it’s a sign of a new beginning.

At 8:00
A.M.
on Wednesday, October 16, Lee Harvey Oswald reports for his first day on the job at the Texas School Book Depository. The seven-floor redbrick warehouse is located on the corner of Elm and North Houston and overlooks Dealey Plaza, named for a onetime publisher of the
Dallas Morning News
. Most fortuitously, Parkland Memorial Hospital is just four miles away, should Marina go into labor with the new baby while Oswald is at work.