"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (2 page)

For my own book I drew freely from information and ideas in order to create a combination of collage and mosaic, rendered in words rather than visual images. Though no one theory completely convinced me, elements of each influenced the creation of the singular conclusion I reach. Again, though, I present that as nothing more than a possible 'take' on what occurred during those horrific moments that day when shots rang out in Dallas.

Of all the volumes (a selected bibliography appears at the end, though dozens of books, as well as hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles were devoured and digested), two in particular stood out. Edward J. Epstein's
Legend
struck me as the most objectively intelligent; Norman Mailer's
Oswald's Tale
the most appealingly outrageous and purposefully subjective.

Often, Mailer appears on the edge of slipping into a nonfiction novel approach. Perhaps that explains why his wrap-up seems so
frustrating and disappointing. After coming close to creatively dramatizing what happened, he refuses to come down one way or another: Oswald did it alone; Oswald did it as part of a conspiracy; Oswald didn't do it. Achieving that, making a call based on all of his
previous actions and public statements, was the incentive for my own volume.

Certain incidents involving Oswald appear in so many previous reports, even what supposedly was said, that I felt free to include them here. The majority of my lines of dialogue are invented. Yet even these have a certain sense of historicity: I did not allow my imagination to run free but attempted to guess at what they would most likely have said or done, considering the circumstances they found themselves in.

Mailer's book, like so many of the others, is akin to watching the movie classic
Citizen Kane
(1941) for the first time only to have someone snap off the projector a moment before the object that allows us to understand ‘Rosebud' is revealed. Only by moving from nonfiction to the novel can this occur, even if that novel happens to be composed, by at least 97%, of facts. It's the three percent that makes all the difference and endows this version of those events with its reason to exist.

 

Douglas Brode August 8, 2012

 

"Sometimes history can be so difficult to believe that we require fiction to make it seem plausible."
—an old Sicilian saying

A FACE IN THE CROWD

 

“Hell is other people.”

—Jean Paul Sartre

PROLOGUE: AS I LAY DYING

(PART ONE)

 

“I'm a patsy ... A patsy!”

—Lee Harvey Oswald, November 24, 1963; 11:21 A.M.

 

As he returned, albeit briefly, to a state of semi-consciousness, Lee Harvey Oswald, age 24 and with less than ten minutes left to live, vaguely recalled saying those words into a TV camera. He couldn't be certain as to when. Minutes ago? Perhaps. Years, maybe. A lifetime earlier or a split-second, if the concept called ‘time' existed, something Lee had long since come to doubt.

Once those words were out, everything had suddenly gone dark, as if for a fade-out between a fifteen minute chapter on a television show and the commercials to follow.
Funny, isn't it?
Lee thought, if thinking correctly describes what the swiftly dying man's mind was capable of during those final moments. For now, thoughts and emotions could no longer be separated. The combination of the two tore through Lee's tight frame and his human consciousness, or what remained of it. With end-game right around the corner, Lee Oswald attempted to understand his own self—however racked with pain—as well as the nightmare-world that had come to enclose him during his less-than-a-quarter-century on earth. Meanwhile, everything around him came in and out of focus whenever Lee managed to flicker his eyes. Bizarre shapes and odd shadows registered, if little else.

At this moment, life—or what Lee could in his agony still perceive of everyday existence—resembled an old black-and-white movie. That made sense, for nothing had ever meant as much to Lee as The Picture Show, as his mother Marguerite long ago had so quaintly referred to it: the one and only place where he had ever been able to set aside the ugliness of his daily reality and discover a few treasured hours of respite in a finer world.

Funny, all the same. For Lee Harvey Oswald had always, ever since he could remember, desired to be famous. Adored by the masses, those very people he had over the years come to hold in contempt. Bizarre how he needed, hungered for their attention, even admiration, perhaps adulation. And, in the early stages of the second-half of the 20th century, that he inhabited for at least a little longer, fame had come to mean television. Appear on TV and your life is fulfilled. The whole world is watching, even as you always believed they ought to be doing.

I was about to tell all ... everything! ... but as I recall only the first words were out ... the prologue, so to speak ... “I'm a patsy!” ... then, before I could continue ... Wham! ... the noise, like thunder clapping ... or a pistol firing . . yes, that must have been it ... I do know the sound of a pistol ... rifles, too ... no, no, I can't let myself laugh. Hurts too much ... so let's try to remain calm, concentrate ... alright, I had spit those words out ... and repeated the last two, just so all would be sure to hear me, loud and clear ... and then I ... inflated ... like a little kid's balloon some mean man pops with his cigarette while passing by on the carnival midway ... no good reason to do so ... just to be mean ... oh, wait a minute, there was a reason ... they had to silence me ... of course! ... ‘they' ... them! ... all of them working together.

*

An idea crossed Lee's mind, drawn up from some deep level of consciousness as if torn from the bowels of the brain by a mechanical claw. Like one of those games Lee had so loved to play at the sleazy entertainment palaces of his youth. When he'd grown uncomfortable with observing the freak shows, perhaps because those twisted, misshapen things—“not men, not beasts, things!” as Bela Lugosi had put it in an old film Lee watched on TV as a child and which simultaneously terrified and mesmerized him—reminded the insecure youth of his own self.

So off instead to games of chance. You slipped in a quarter, seized the handle, then controlled the claw, trying to grab hold of some stuffed toy or other object that momentarily appeared to have value if only because it seemed so far out of reach, near and yet tantalizingly distant on the other side of that glass and steel enclosure.

The process of winning your object of choice seemed easy, so very easy, until you tried and failed. Others could dump whatever the prize might be into the wide slot, at which point it rolled out and became yours, much to the amazement of all who stood about, eavesdropping at this moment of truth.

Lee had never won at such a game. People considered him with disappointed eyes, as they always had, in his earliest memories of life as hell right here on earth.

Someday,
he had silently vowed,
it will all be different. I'll show ‘em. Just wait and see. I'll dazzle you!

But ... when? And how?

*

Unlike those ragged dolls, worthless except in context, now the idea he had furtively been grasping for rose to the surface. Something some artist had said—
Oh, I remember now. Warhol
.
Andy Warhol. The guy who took Campbells soup cans, signed his name on the label, then sold them as “art,” demanding large amounts of money from those who relished the privilege of being duped, at least as Lee Harvey Oswald saw it. One more aspect of the decadence that America, and the world, had fallen into during the first half of the 1960s.
The Sweet Life
. La Dolce Vita! The Sexual Revolution. All the rest of it. Old-fashioned values that had sustained the nation through the better part of two centuries suddenly abandoned now. Gone with the wind so to speak, their absence destroying the nation Lee so loved.

Not that he had any reason to. God, how America and Americans had kicked and spit on him, pretty much from day one. That didn't matter. Lee took solace from a line in a film, one of many he'd seen and never forgotten. Those great movie lines, experienced over and over again when he watched his favorite films on their later TV airings, branded into his memory buds as if with a hot iron. In this case, an exchange of dialogue that sustained him through the worst of times and inspired him during the best. Or, more accurately stated, the least of the bad.

A Frank Sinatra film, of course. Nothing meant more to Lee than Sinatra: the man, the music, and most of all The Movies.

It hadn't been Frank, the magnet that drew Lee to that picture for the first time at age thirteen,
From Here to
Eternity,
who spoke the line
.
Montgomery Clift, playing Sinatra's best pal, 'Robert E. Lee Prewitt,' had been the one. Right there, in that character's very name, Lee felt entranced by his experience with the movie. His own father, who died shortly before Marguerite gave birth to Lee, had been named after that same glorious Southern general. Could this be a coincidence, or perhaps fate? Was that film, apparently meant for everybody, secretly speaking to Lee Harvey Oswald on some deep, secretive level? In case that were so, then he had better pay close attention to everything in it.

Monty was cast as a soldier at Pearl Harbor, right before the sneak attack. A great lightweight boxer, he resisted joining the Company team for deeply personal reasons. Once, while sparring in the ring with a pal, he'd accidentally blinded the man. Afterwards, 'Prew' took an oath to never box again. The Company Captain, a corrupt, cynical son of a bitch, wanted the championship trophy. Unofficially, he instructed his non-coms to put pressure on the kid. Making his life miserable, first with extra latrine duty and endless drills up and down a mountain while carrying his M1. Later, when that didn't work, ordering men beat Prew mercilessly

“You must hate the army,” Prew's girlfriend, a whore played by Donna Reed, sobbed after her lover explained to her what he's been put through; ‘The Treatment.' as it was referred to in the military.

“No,” Prew laughed in that wonderfully crazy kind of way only Monty Clift could manage. Not even Sinatra himself able to pull off
that
little acting trick. “I love the army.” 'Alma' was stunned: “How could you?” she wanted to know, “after all it's done to you?” Prew thought that over before answering: “Just because you love something,” he finally explained, “doesn't mean it has to love you back.”

Lee had never forgotten those words. Whenever he watched
From Here to Eternity
again, first in run-down bijous that played old movies on their second or third go-around, later on TV after Marguerite decided they could finally afford one, Lee Harvey Oswald, son of Robert E. Lee Oswald, spoke them out loud simultaneous with Montgomery Clift as Robert E. Lee Prewitt. At such moments Lee felt that he, in his remote little corner of the world, and the hero up there onscreen were one and the same.

Lee loved America, as Prew had the army, though it had never yet loved him back. As to that dream figure in glorious black and white? That's the man he wanted to be. Or, if he could never be conventionally handsome like Clift, perhaps come to resemble Frank Sinatra as lovable little 'Angelo Maggio,' the scrawny, short guy everyone in the Company so adored.

Lee was short and scrawny. Why didn't people love him? He'd have to figure that out, transform from a caterpillar into a beautifully colored moth, to be accepted. Always, Lee tried to work on that. So far, it hadn't clicked. Someday, he'd figure out how to do it. Then, the moment of transcendence would occur.

*

Anyway! That artist on TV, speaking late at night on a small indie channel that carried
Open End
with host David Susskind. What was his name again? Warhol! That was it. He'd said something too, another of those phrases that greatly impacted on Lee's life. The gathered panel of experts—
how I so want to be interviewed on TV someday myself
!—had been speaking about the quickly changing fabric of life in our modern age.

“
Post
-modern,” Warhol had called it, whatever that meant. How the new media, particularly television, altered everything. “In
our time,” Warhol announced, “everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”

At the time, Lee scoffed at that statement. Marguerite, sitting on the couch beside him, said in that lilting voice of hers, with her
faux
Southern aristocrat-accent she'd picked up from watching Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone With the Wind
as many times as Lee had
From Here to
Eternity,
that she believed it to be true. Then again, Lee's mother always did accept everything she heard on television. “If it weren't true," she would insist, "they couldn't put it on TV.”

Over time, Lee rolled that notion around and around again until it began to make sense. Everyone, after all, did include himself. Lee Harvey Oswald, the boy who so hungered for fame ever since he could recall: a lonely if almost beautiful baby, quickly turning into a homely boy before everyone's eyes. A child who grew up on the streets, without benefit of lasting friends or any sense of family. ‘Everyone' included
him
. The lowest of the low, at least as other people apparently saw him.

Still, deep inside, L.H.O. held to a notably different vision of himself. The boy who'd been taunted by other kids until they tired of that, then ignored him. The invisible man, just like Claude Raines in the old movie, excepting that the character had willed invisibility on himself whereas he, Lee, had it imposed by others. Like the African-American character in that wonderful novel he had read by Ralph Ellison, all the while associating with the black man who went unseen in the eyes of whites passing by.