Reclaiming History (129 page)

On the day Lee’s probation was up and he was due in court, September 24, 1953, Marguerite rang Carro to explain that she was unable to appear and there was no need for it anyway, as Lee had made a “marvelous adjustment” and was now regularly attending his school classes. Apparently Marguerite told Carro—brazenly gilding the lily—that Lee had even been elected president of his class at P.S. 44. Indeed, Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler, misreading Carro’s summary report to the Children’s Court in 1953, said Carro’s report reflected that Oswald had been elected president of his class. But a closer reading of his report shows that Carro had only been told this by Marguerite, and Carro told the Warren Commission that Lee “had not become president of the class that I recall.”
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Marguerite’s fabrications and protestations didn’t work. Carro explained that Lee would still have to continue under supervision for a time, and suggested group therapy at the court’s own treatment clinic, an outpatient facility on 22nd Street, since intake had finally opened up there. Marguerite would have none of it. Later that day, a Justice Fogarty continued Lee’s probation another five weeks, to October 29.
¹⁹⁵
In mid-October, just before Lee’s fourteenth birthday, Carro was informed by Lee’s homeroom teacher at P.S. 44 that Lee’s attendance record had indeed improved—he had been absent only one day and three half days—but that his conduct was atrocious, and Marguerite was refusing to cooperate with the school authorities. “During the past two weeks,” Mr. Rosen reported to Carro, “practically every teacher has complained to me about the boy’s behavior. He has consistently refused to salute the flag during early morning exercises. In many rooms, he has done no work whatsoever. He spends most of his time sailing paper planes around the room. When we spoke to him about his behavior, his attitude was belligerent. I offered to help him,” Rosen said, but Oswald said, “I don’t need anybody’s help.” As indicated, notations on his report card said he was “quick-tempered,” “constantly losing control,” and “getting into battles with others.” On October 29, when Lee was again due in court, Marguerite rang Carro to explain she couldn’t be present owing to her work. The judge, his patience exhausted, told Carro to try to refer Lee to the Berkshire Industrial Farm or, if they were unable to take the boy, to Children’s Village.
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By the next court day, November 19, the situation seemed to be improving. Lee’s teacher told Carro that Marguerite had finally appeared at the school and that Lee was now getting along very well in school. He had even resumed saluting the flag. Marguerite asked a Justice Sicher to discharge Lee from the court supervision, as he was no longer a problem and she was capable of coping with him. Sicher didn’t buy it. He explained to Marguerite that Lee was in need of treatment and that it was in Marguerite’s interest to cooperate with whatever plan the court offered. He told Carro, who apparently was still unable to place Lee, to refer Lee to the court’s own psychiatric clinic, which Carro himself had earlier suggested to Marguerite, and at the same time try a referral to the Protestant Big Brothers organization.
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Marguerite, again, did not want Lee to get the recommended psychiatric treatment nor did she want him to get involved in the Big Brothers program. She told Carro, “Why are you bothering me? You’re harassing me. He’s back in school. Why do you want him to go to the clinic for? Why do we have to see the Protestant Big Brothers for? He has brothers. What does he need [more] brothers for? Leave me alone. I don’t like New York.”
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On the evening of January 4, 1954, when a Mr. Groetz, a member of the Big Brothers program, called on Marguerite and Lee at their apartment, Marguerite was as adamantly opposed to outside help for Lee as ever, and told the representative she had quit her job and was planning to leave New York for New Orleans. He advised that Lee was still on probation and could not be removed from the court’s jurisdiction without the court’s permission.
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When Marguerite testified to the Warren Commission ten years later, her story was different. According to her, Groetz had told her that absconding to New Orleans was a good idea. “So, I said, ‘Is it alright? They won’t arrest us and bring us back?’ He said, ‘No, there’s no extraditing’—that was his words.”
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When Carro heard about Marguerite’s plans, he wrote to ask her to come in to see him. The letter was returned with the notation “Moved, address unknown.”
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Marguerite was right about one thing: there was no “extraditing.” The Children’s Court had no extra-state jurisdiction, and, after ascertaining that the Oswalds were no longer in New York—although it had not been able to determine whether they were then in New Orleans, or, according to one story, in California—the court finally closed Lee’s case on March 11, 1954.
²⁰²

Carro, who had been sympathetic to Oswald’s plight at the time, remained sensitive to Oswald in his testimony to the Warren Commission in 1964. For instance, he was not inclined to make too much of the fact that the thirteen-year-old had been refusing to salute the flag, putting it down to little more than being “a little disruptive in class,” and he had even deliberately refrained from mentioning it to the press after the assassination for fear they would say, “See, fifteen years ago he refused to salute the American flag. This is proof.” Carro said he did not want to see that type of newspaper headline. He also told the Warren Commission he did not see Oswald exhibit any Marxist leanings.
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But something that Carro knew nothing about had happened to Lee. Many years later Lee told Aline Mosby, a reporter interviewing him in Moscow about his defection to the Soviet Union, “I became interested [in Marxism] about the age of fifteen. From an ideological viewpoint. An old lady handed me a pamphlet about saving the Rosenbergs…I looked at that paper and I still remember it for some reason. I don’t know why.”
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Actually, Lee left New York City with Marguerite when he was fourteen, and he was probably thirteen at the time of the incident, which most likely took place on Mother’s Day, May 10, 1953, just three days after he was released from Youth House. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted in March of 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage in providing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, were then on death row at Sing Sing in New York, awaiting execution on June 19. (Both were executed.) Oswald biographer Jean Davison determined from the files of the
New York Times
and the Communist Party’s
Worker
newspaper that women recruited by an ad in the
Worker
had passed out leaflets for the New York Committee for Clemency for the Rosenbergs on May 10. While the content of the leaflet is unknown, Davison wrote that the committee harped on two themes. First, the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of an unjust court—much as Lee, in his mind, probably thought he was a victim of Children’s Court. The other theme was linked to the use of women for the leaflet team and the choice of Mother’s Day for the demonstration—the fact that Ethel Rosenberg would leave behind two small boys orphaned if she were executed.
²⁰⁵

While it’s too much to assume that a single pamphlet turned a thirteen-year-old into a committed Marxist, Lee had probably found a metaphor for the outward expression of his disaffection with life, for the rage of a child who believed he had been abused and neglected, not only by his mother but also by the schools, the courts, the entire system. Here were others decrying persecution and exploitation, people who were potential friends and allies in what appeared to be a friendless world.

Lee’s Communism had always been an attitude rather than an activity. He never even found out how to join the Communist Party, either in the United States or in the Soviet Union—where, after all, it wasn’t much more difficult or dangerous to do than joining the Elks or Odd Fellows here in the states. He claimed to many that he had read
Das Kapital
by Karl Marx and
The Communist Manifesto
by Marx and Engels, but beyond its most fundamental principles and cosmetic generalities, such as rectifying inequality, which he undoubtedly sincerely believed in, there’s not too much more trace of Marx and Engels in his rhetoric, and no indication that he ever read, much less studied, other important Marxist authors like Trotsky, Gramsci, Marcuse, and Adorno. Much of his Marxism was in the vein of
Let’s Pretend
. However, it gave him the concept and theme he needed so badly to express himself. He was never comfortable talking about himself or his feelings, and it was only when he resorted to the political that he became fully animated and expressive.

Lee’s fantasy had once been nourished by the television series called
I Led 3 Lives
, about a man who had been a Communist for the FBI. Now he was about to become a Communist for Lee Harvey Oswald.

M
arguerite and Lee fled New York in early January 1954 and turned up in New Orleans, where, for the time being, they stayed with Marguerite’s sister Lillian and her family on French Street. Both of the Oswalds seemed happy to be back, after what Marguerite described in a May letter to her son John as “the ordeal in New York.” She wrote to him that “it was almost a tragedy, but a little love and patience did the trick.”
²⁰⁶
Lee enrolled in the eighth grade at Beauregard Junior High School on January 13.
²⁰⁷
Beauregard was at the far end of Canal Street—the city’s main thoroughfare—three stops from the end of the streetcar line, down by the famous cemeteries with the elevated graves owing to New Orleans’s high water level. The school drew its students from a pleasant, largely working-class, residential area called Lakeview.
²⁰⁸

The Oswalds stayed with the Murrets for only a few weeks before Marguerite found an apartment on St. Mary Street, which she rented from her old friend, Myrtle Evans, who gave her a bit of a break on the rent for old times’ sake.
²⁰⁹
The move put Lee in a different school district, but Marguerite continued to use the Murrets’ address to avoid moving Lee to yet another school when only four months of the term remained.
²¹⁰

Life in the “Big Easy,” the sweltering seaport on the Mississippi River, was not all that easy for the Oswalds, although Lee did seem to get along a little better at school there than he had in New York. But if he had been taunted for his southern accent in New York, here, in the city of his birth, his speech was thought to be offensively Yankee,
²¹¹
some of his fellow students at Beauregard even calling him “Yankee” as a nickname.
²¹²
*
His grades of 73 in English, 70 in mathematics and social studies, 78 in industrial arts, 72 in physical education, and 74 in science were above the passing grade of 70 at Beauregard, though below the average grade of 79–80,
²¹³
but his attendance improved—he was absent only a few days in what remained of the school year.
²¹⁴

Lillian saw Lee off and on during this sojourn in New Orleans. He liked seafood and knew she followed the Catholic practice of meatless Fridays, so he showed up on several Friday evenings for dinner. He sometimes came on Saturday mornings too, and Lillian would give him money to rent a bike in City Park. She and her daughter bought Lee new clothes.

“Why are you all doing this for me?” he asked.

“Well, Lee, for one thing,” Lillian said, “we love you, and another thing we want you to look nice when you go to school, like the other children.”

Lee was not gracious about it. “I don’t need anything from anybody,” he told her on one occasion.

She took issue with him. “Now listen, Lee, don’t you get so independent that you don’t think you need anyone, because we all need somebody at one time or another.”
²¹⁵

Lee made an attempt at team sports at Beauregard. He told Aunt Lillian that he wanted to get on the baseball team at school but had neither glove nor shoes, and Lillian not only gave him a glove one of her sons had used but also arranged to get a pair of cleated baseball shoes, which her son-in-law sent over from Beaumont, Texas. Lee got off the team as quickly as he got on, but he never discussed it with Lillian and she never found out what happened.
²¹⁶
Relations between Marguerite and her friend Myrtle Evans became strained, partly, it seems, because Marguerite had difficulty meeting even the reduced rent, and partly because of Lee, whose conduct Evans didn’t approve of. He was no longer the small boy she had once known, but a “difficult teenager,” and Evans was shocked at the way he would, on his return from school, demand to be fed. If Marguerite was downstairs visiting with her, Lee would come to the head of the stairs and shout, “Maw, how about fixing me something to eat?” Marguerite would “jump up right away and go running upstairs to fix something for him.” Lee, she said, was very spoiled because Marguerite “poured out all her love on him, it seemed like.”
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Myrtle’s husband Julian thought that Lee was “arrogant, and no one liked him.” He too noticed Lee’s impudence with his mother, but saw other unpleasant behavior as well. He once took Lee on a weekend trip to his sister-in-law’s place across Lake Pontchartrain, where there was a private pond for fishing. Lee went fishing with some other boys, but Julian noticed that he wouldn’t talk to them and fished by himself. Lee caught some fish, but then just threw them down on the bank of the pond, and when he had enough he just walked away and left them lying there. Julian, who felt you ought to eat the fish you catch or throw them back in the water, found that very hard to understand. He thought Lee was “a psycho.”
²¹⁸
Julian sympathized with Marguerite, whom he thought to be a “fine woman, intelligent, very soft-spoken, a beautiful woman with black hair streaked with a little gray” (hardly the short and stocky, very assertive woman the world would come to know years later when her son shot the president), but she was spoiling Lee, who was “real demanding” with her and “had absolutely no patience with her.” Marguerite, he said, “would do just about anything he wanted.”
*
Lee had a nice speaking voice, but he didn’t use it in his relationship with his mother. Julian said he was always “very loud and insolent,” and the Evans always knew when the Oswalds were at home upstairs. Lee made no effort to control his “foghorn” voice and it disturbed other tenants—there were twenty-seven units in the building.
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