Oswald's Tale (48 page)

5

Macho Teenage Marxist

What is insufficiently appreciated about manhood is that it is an achievement, not a gift of gender. To be bold, forthright, competitive, individual, courageous, and innovative does not come as a gratuity that is included with a male infant’s penis and scrotum. No, such male qualities have to be earned through brave acts, the honoring of one’s private code, and through fierce attachment to one’s finest habits.

Of course, more than a few women would assert that the virtues listed above belong to the female sex as well. It is hardly the purpose of this book to jump—as Lillian Murret would put it—into a roar-up on such a matter; let it suffice that we are dealing with the psychological realities of the late Fifties, when some enormous majority of Americans still believed that men and women had highly separate roles and that the first obligation incumbent on a male was to behave like one. It is almost certain that Lee Oswald at fourteen and fifteen shared this point of view—how else can one account even in part for his dedicated reading of the Marine Corps manual, and his dreams, as we shall soon see, of daring deeds?

When we encounter him again, after the debacle of New York, he has changed to some degree from the terrified twelve- and thirteen-year-old who wept during his mother’s visit to Youth House. Having passed though vats of shame and fear, he seems to take on strength as he enters into adolescence. New York has done something for him after all: Back in New Orleans, he is more ready for combat.

MRS. MURRET.
. . . Now, at the Beauregard School at that time, they had a very low standard, and I had no children going there and never did. My children went to Jesuit High and Loyola University, but they did have a very bad bunch of boys going to Beauregard and they were always having fights and ganging up on other boys, and I guess Lee wouldn’t take anything, so he got in several scrapes like that . . .

MR. JENNER.
Did you have the impression that Lee Harvey was doing well in school, or what was your feeling along that line?

MRS. MURRET.
I think he was doing very poor work in school most of the time. Then he got to the point where he just didn’t think he ought to have to go to school, and that seemed to be his whole attitude, and when I mentioned that to Marguerite, that seemed to be the beginning of our misunderstanding. She didn’t think her child could do anything wrong, and I [couldn’t] say that Lee ever showed that he liked school.
¹

Well, no, he wasn’t about to like it. He had dyslexia. At that time, it had not been recognized in most schools as an affliction which so distorted your spelling that it was guaranteed to make a teacher think you were close to moronic. And then of course there were always students around to beat up on him in twos and threes. He didn’t like school.

Still, it could not be said that he gave up all at once.

MRS. MURRET.
. . . I remember one morning he came over to the house, and he said that he wanted to get on the ball team, but he didn’t have any shoes and he didn’t have a glove, so I said, “Well, Lee, we can fix you up,” and I gave him a glove [and] Joyce’s husband sent him a pair of shoes from Beaumont, a pair of baseball shoes, and I told Lee, I said, “Lee, when you need anything, just ask me for it, and if there’s a way to get it for you, we will get it.” So then he got on the team, I think, but he got off as quick as he got on. I don’t know why. He never discussed that with us as to why that was, and we never found out.

. . . I don’t think he was the type of boy who was too good an athlete.
²

Not good in school, not special at sports, and no money to date girls . . .

MRS. MURRET.
. . . Most of the boys had money, you know, and went out on the weekends with girls and so forth, but Lee couldn’t afford those things, so he didn’t mix, but he did like to visit the museums . . . and go to the park and do things like that, and you very seldom can get a teenager to do that kind of thing these days, not even then. They don’t all like that type of life you know, but that’s what he liked.
³

[One time] we went to the store and we bought Lee a lot of clothes that we thought he might need so he would look presentable to go to school, you know, whatever a boy needs, and when we gave them to him, he said, “Well, why are you doing all this for me?” And we said, “Well, Lee, for one thing, we love you, and another thing we want you to look nice when you go to school, like the other children.” So that was that.

MR. JENNER.
Did he wear this clothing to school?

MRS. MURRET.
Oh yes; he wore the clothing that we bought him [but] he was very independent. Like one time I remember asking him a question about something, and he said, “I don’t need anything from anybody,” and that’s when I told him, I said, “Now listen, Lee, don’t you get so independent that you don’t think you don’t need anyone, because we all need somebody at one time or another,” . . .

MR. JENNER.
Do you think that a little of this independence might have rubbed off from his mother? . . .

MRS. MURRET.
Well, she was independent herself all right . . .
⁴

Marguerite was doing her best. She might be living above a pool hall on Exchange Alley at the wrong end of the French Quarter, but even in a bad neighborhood you could maintain some modicum of style.

MRS. MURRET.
. . . A lot of people would be surprised, because . . . it looks like a pretty rough section, but she had a real nice apartment . . . she fixed it up real nice . . .

Of course, they had these poolrooms and so forth in that section but I don’t think that Lee ever went into those places, because he never was a boy that got into any trouble. For one thing, he never did go out . . . The average teenager who was going to school at Beauregard would have probably been in there shooting pool and things like that, but he didn’t do that. His morals were very good. His character seemed to be good and he was very polite and refined. There was one thing he did: He walked very straight. He always did, and some people thought that was part of his attitude, that he was arrogant or something like that, but of course you can’t please everybody.

MR. JENNER.
But he did have a good opinion of himself, did he not?

MRS. MURRET.
Oh, yes; he did.
⁵

It is only fair to give Marguerite Oswald much of the credit for this:

MARGUERITE OSWALD.
. . . Lee continued reading Robert’s Marine Corps manual . . . He knew it by heart. I even said, “Boy, you are going to be a general if you ever get in the Marines.”
⁶

People with a good opinion of themselves tend to enjoy a double life. While living on Exchange Alley, he started to read Karl Marx as well as the Marine Corps manual. Life at school, however, was another matter. A schoolmate speaks:

MR. VOEBEL.
. . . I don’t exactly remember when I first saw him . . . but I really became acquainted with him when he had this fight . . . with a couple of boys . . . the Neumeyer boys, John and Mike [which] started on the school ground, and it sort of wandered down the street in the direction naturally in which I was going [and] it kept going on, across lawns and sidewalks, and people would run them off, and they would only run to the next place, and it continued that way from block to block, and as people would run them off one block, they would go on to the next.

MR. JENNER.
That was fisticuffs; is that right?

MR. VOEBEL.
Right.

MR. JENNER.
Were they about the same age? . . .

MR. VOEBEL.
I don’t know; I guess so . . .

MR. JENNER.
How about size?

MR. VOEBEL.
I think John was a little smaller, a little shorter than Lee . . .

MR. JENNER.
All right, what happened as this fight progressed down the street?

MR. VOEBEL.
Well, I think Oswald was getting the best of John, and the little brother sticking by his big brother stepped in too, and then it was two against one, so with that Oswald just seemed to give one good punch to the little brother’s jaw and his mouth started bleeding . . .

MR. JENNER.
The little boy?

MR. VOEBEL.
Yes, sir. Mike’s mouth started bleeding, and when that happened the whole sympathy of the crowd turned against Oswald for some reason, which I didn’t understand, because it was two against one, and Oswald had a right to defend himself. In a way, I felt that this boy got what he deserved, and in fact, later on I found out that this boy that got his mouth cut had been in the habit of biting his lip. Oswald might have hit him on the shoulder or something, and the boy might have bit his lip, and it might have looked like Oswald hit him in the mouth, but anyway, somebody else came out and ran everybody off then, and the whole sympathy of the crowd was against Lee at that time because he had punched little Mike in the mouth and made his mouth bleed . . . [then] a couple of days later we were coming out of school in the evening and Oswald, I think, was a little in front of me and I was a couple of paces behind him, and . . . some big guy, probably from a high school—he looked like a tremendous football player—punched Lee right square in the mouth, and . . . ran off.

MR. JENNER.
He just swung one lick and ran?

MR. VOEBEL.
Yes; that’s what they call passing the post . . . That’s when somebody walks up to you and punches you . . . I think this was sort of a revenge thing on the part of the Neumeyer boys, so that’s when I felt sympathy toward Lee for something like this happening, and a couple of other boys and I . . . brought him back to the restroom and tried to fix him up, and that’s when our friendship, or semi-friendship, you might say, began . . . I think he even lost a tooth from that . . .

MR. JENNER.
Well, you had a mild friendship with him from that point on, would you say?

MR. VOEBEL.
Right.

MR. JENNER.
Tell me about that.

MR. VOEBEL.
. . . sometimes I would stop off at Lee’s and we would play darts and pool. Lee’s the one who taught me . . . He lived over the top of the pool hall . . . on Exchange Alley . . .

MR. JENNER.
Did you find him adept at playing pool?

MR. VOEBEL.
You see, I had never played before and he showed me the fundamentals of the game, and after a couple of games I started beating him, and he would say, “Beginner’s luck,” so I don’t think he was that good . . .

MR. JENNER.
. . . was he a drinker?

MR. VOEBEL.
Well, you see, we were only at the age of about fourteen or fifteen, and smoking and drinking just wasn’t of interest to a lot of people of our age at that time . . .

MR. JENNER.
All right, those are the things I am interested in . . . I’m trying to get a picture of this boy as he became a man . . .

MR. VOEBEL.
Right. Now I want to make one thing clear. I liked Lee. I felt that we had a lot in common at that time. Now, if I met Lee Oswald, say, a year ago, I am not saying that I would still like him, but the things I remember about Lee when we were going to school together caused me to have this sort of friendship for him, and I think in a way I understood him better than most of the other kids . . . and if he had not changed at all, I probably would still have the same feeling for Lee Oswald, at least more so than for the Neumeyer brothers . . .

MR. JENNER.
. . . Would you say there were other boys of the type of the Neumeyer brothers at Beauregard School? . . .

MR. VOEBEL.
Oh, yes . . . it was almost impossible [not to get] involved in a fight sooner or later. You take me, I am not a fighter but I had to fight at that school.

MR. JENNER.
You did?

MR. VOEBEL.
Well, no; I will say this: I would back down from a fight a lot quicker than Lee would. Now, he wouldn’t start any fights, but if you wanted to start one with him, he was going to make sure that he ended it, or you were really going to have one, because he wasn’t going to take anything from anybody. I mean, people could call me names and I might just brush that off, but not Lee . . . You couldn’t do that with Lee . . . he didn’t take anything from anybody . . .
⁷

MR. JENNER.
And you also . . . had an interest in guns; is that right?

MR. VOEBEL.
. . . we had guns around the house all the time . . .