Reclaiming History (156 page)

It soon became apparent, however, that Oswald did not really appreciate the help of these new friends, even resented and got angry about it, saying he didn’t need any help to take care of his family.
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He went out of his way to offend them. Jeanne de Mohrenschildt described him as “very, very disagreeable,” and said he was “sort of withdrawn within himself…His greatest objection was that people helped him too much, they were showering things on Marina. Marina had a hundred dresses given to her…He objected to that lavish help because Marina was throwing it into his face…He could never give her what the people were showering on her. So that was very difficult for him.”
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In Lee’s view, the Russian community was helping Marina in order to humiliate him. “It’s not that I don’t want to buy you things,” he bristled, “but I can’t. I haven’t any money to spare. Besides, they’re spoiling you.” When Marina questioned why they shouldn’t spoil her since he couldn’t, he slapped her hard across the face. “Don’t ever say that again. I’ll be the one to spoil you—when I can. I don’t want you depending on other people anymore.”
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On several occasions Lee embarrassed and shocked their guests by verbally abusing Marina in their presence,
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and some of the visitors noticed the telltale bruises of his physical abuse, although it would be a while before any of them attempted to intervene.

O
n September 30, 1962, a mob of segregationists, believed by the authorities to have been instigated by former major general Edwin A. Walker, rioted against federal troops and marshals protecting James Meredith, a twenty-nine-year-old black student who tried to enroll in the all-white University of Mississippi at Oxford, and Walker was arrested for insurrection. (Walker had resigned from the army in West Germany in 1961 after charges that he had indoctrinated his troops with the ultra-right-wing philosophy of the John Birch Society.) Since his resignation in 1961 and the University of Mississippi incident, Walker, a national icon of the conservative right, was in the news speaking out against Communism and urging a U.S. invasion of Castro’s Cuba. When Walker, who was based in Dallas, was released on bond on the Ole Miss riot charges and arrived back in Dallas at Love Field on October 7, he was greeted by two hundred cheering supporters.
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That same day, a Sunday afternoon, Oswald announced to the group of visitors in his home that he had lost his job at Leslie Welding in Fort Worth, the rent was overdue, he was moving to Dallas, and he needed another job fast.
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Marguerite was there, as well as a good many from the Russian community—George Bouhe, Anna Meller, Elena Hall and her former husband John, the de Mohrenschildts, their daughter Alexandra, and Alexandra’s husband Gary Taylor.
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Lee’s story was not true—he “hated” his job at Leslie Welding and was planning to walk away from his employment there in a day or so without even giving notice—but none of his friends knew that, and they immediately addressed the problem. The group agreed that Dallas was a better place for Lee to seek employment since it was a much larger city than Fort Worth, and Elena Hall saw a way to make that possible. She invited Marina and the baby to live with her on Trail Lake Drive in Fort Worth until Lee found work in Dallas.
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John Hall interjected that he would call his father, who was with the Murray Gin Company in Dallas, where Lee might find work in the machine shop.
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It was agreed that Marina could stay in Dallas for the first couple of days with the Taylors, since she was scheduled to have six teeth, rotted to the roots, extracted at the Baylor University Dental Clinic in Dallas on Monday and Wednesday. (George Bouhe paid the fee of sixteen dollars or so for Baylor University senior-class students, who practiced on people who could not afford a regular dentist, to perform the dental work on Marina.)
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In the meantime, the Oswalds’ skimpy belongings would be stored in Elena Hall’s garage in Fort Worth.
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Marina and Lee accepted the invitation, and she and the baby left with the Taylors for Dallas that night.
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The next night, Monday evening, Robert Oswald helped his brother remove Lee and Marina’s belongings from Mercedes Street, and the Halls drove the belongings over to Elena’s home in a pick-up truck that belonged to the dental laboratory where Elena worked. That night, October 8, Lee took a bus to Dallas.
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For Oswald the move would be a new beginning. He would not see his mother again until after the assassination, which was more than a year in the future. He would shun his brother Robert too. He would never say or write anything about his real reasons for closing out one phase of his life and starting yet another, but the news about General Walker, who lived in Dallas, may have had something to do with it.

Oswald’s last day of work at the Leslie Welding Company was October 8, 1962. The following day he simply failed to appear on the job. The company had no idea what happened to him until it received his letter stating that he had moved permanently to Dallas.
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As indicated, the story he had told Marina and their friends from the Russian community about losing his job was not true. His foreman at Leslie Welding, Tommy Bargas, regarded him as a good employee, one who might have turned out to be a pretty good sheet metal man, and Bargas never had any intention of terminating him.
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Why did Lee lie about being laid off? He may have felt that Marina’s Russian friends would be more likely to relieve him of the need to support her while he engineered the move. He didn’t really need to lie, as the emigré circle would no doubt have helped her anyway, whatever their distaste for her husband, but he probably wanted to ensure their help in taking care of Marina and June until he could get on his feet in Dallas. In other words, while continuing to sneer at their materialism, he may have now been consciously reaching out to them in making a move to Dallas he could not have pulled off without them.
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The first day in Dallas, October 9, Oswald rented a box at the main post office on Ervay Street, number 2915, giving his address as 3519 Fairmont Street in Dallas, the address of Alexandra (George de Mohrenschildt’s daughter) and Gary Taylor, though he never lived there.
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He had asked Gary Taylor for permission to do this, and Gary had said all right.
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Two days later he submitted a change-of-address form asking that mail addressed to Mercedes Street in Fort Worth be forwarded to the box in Dallas.
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At some time between October 9 and 11, Lee was interviewed for a job by Samuel Ballen in Dallas. Ballen, a close friend of George de Mohrenschildt’s, was a financial consultant, a senior officer in several corporations, and the head of an electric log reproduction service company. De Mohrenschildt had called Ballen and asked him if he could help Lee with a job. Ballen spent two hours with Lee, and told the Warren Commission that although “I started out being attracted somewhat toward him…and I also started out feeling very sorry for the chap…and wanting to help him…I just gradually came to the feeling that he was too much of a rugged individualist for me, and that he was too much of a hardheaded individual, and that I probably would ultimately regret” employing him at Electrical Log Services, one of his firms, feeling that he “probably would not fit in” with his coworkers.
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On October 9 and 10, Lee also appeared at the Dallas office of the Texas Employment Commission, where he was interviewed by an employment counselor in the clerical and sales division, Helen Cunningham. She was expecting him because Anna Meller’s husband, Teofil, had called her, explaining the Oswalds’ predicament, and told her that he and other friends had been trying to help the young family. Lee scored well on a battery of aptitude and other tests. A note on his application form states that he had “outstanding verbal-clerical potential,” and further, that he was “well-groomed and spoken, business suit, alert replies—expresses self extremely well.”
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Lee told the counselor at the commission that he hoped to qualify in the future for a work program at Dallas College or Arlington State and get a BBA, but because of financial problems and family responsibilities, these plans would have to be delayed.
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The next day he was referred to a graphic arts firm, Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, which was looking for a photo print trainee. There he made a good impression on John Graef, head of the photographic department, and was hired. The next day he started training to make prints of advertising material at $1.35 an hour, decent wages at the time. He had been out of work less than a week.
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He did not, however, send for Marina in Fort Worth because he really did not have the money, in spite of his penny pinching. According to the Warren Commission’s meticulous reconstruction of his income and expenses, he had at most $22.34 to his name at the end of September, less if he had bought anything not covered by the Commission’s estimates.
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In the four months he had been in Fort Worth he had earned or otherwise had taken in about $476, but he had also repaid about $140 of the $200 Robert had lent him, plus $60 of the State Department loan.
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He did not have enough money for the first month’s rent on even a very modest apartment.

On October 15, three days after starting at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, he moved into the YMCA,
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where he stayed through October 19 at $2.25 a night. In a goofy, spur-of-the-moment flash of inspiration, he gave “Toro, California” as his place of residence.
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He could hardly have expected that the YMCA would bother to check on his residence, so he was muddying a trail that no one was following. Moreover, his
Let’s Pretend
spy tradecraft left something to be desired: the childish deception, as with many more he would devise in the coming months, still left an arrow pointing back to him in his one-time duty station at El Toro in a way that giving any one of thousands of other American towns and cities would not have.

Although Lee left the Y after the night of October 19, it would be nearly two more weeks before he and Marina moved in together again. Nobody, including Marina, who merely recalls that Lee “rented a room in Dallas,” knows where he stayed between October 19 and November 3 when he wasn’t with her,
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although he worked through that period at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. The separation from Marina was not a result of the quarrels between them, however much some of the Russians hoped it might be.
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Lee kept in touch with Marina during the three days she was at the Taylors in Dallas, visiting her there,
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and during the month and a half she returned to Fort Worth to live with Elena Hall, visiting and telephoning her as well as sending her letters there.
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Thinking about this period later, Marina wrote, “No matter how much we quarreled, I knew he loved me and the family, and I trusted him. We quarreled only because he had a difficult character and because that was the only way he could love. But he did not think that these quarrels could break up the family, so I forgave him everything.”
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As for the Russian community, once Lee secured a job, he apparently felt free to be as directly insulting to them as he liked, despite the fact they were continuing to help Marina. For instance, on the first evening after he started work at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, Lee rang Bouhe, the one who had helped Lee and Marina the most, from a pay telephone, and informed him that he was “doing fine,” with no word of thanks, no small talk, nothing, though he did, only in response to Bouhe’s question, say he was doing some type of photographic work before he quickly hung up. To underline his contempt for Bouhe, he repeated the childish stunt of calling Bouhe, saying, “I am doing fine. Bye,” and promptly hanging up several times over the next few days. Bouhe had had enough. He resolved to do nothing more for Oswald, a conclusion reached by the other emigrés as well. They would continue to do what they could for Marina, but Lee—probably to his perverse satisfaction—they wrote off. He was incorrigible.
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Around this time, Lee started receiving copies of the
Worker
through his new post office box. The front page of the October 2 and 7 issues focused on “the fascist character of Gen. Edwin A. Walker” and warned “the Kennedy administration and the American people of the need for action against him and his allies.” Two weeks later the
Worker
asserted that Walker’s financial backers were “extreme right-wing groups.”
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Lee was settling down to work at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. For the first couple of days, he did little but follow John Graef—the man who hired him—around to learn the ropes. The company’s business involved producing special photographic effects, principally for advertising. The work was meticulous, demanding not only in terms of correct measurements and angles but also in the use of many different development processes as well as grades and contrasts of printing paper. The company expected the on-the-job training to take two or three months.
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Since Graef could not work with Oswald full-time, some of the burden of training Oswald fell on another employee, Dennis Ofstein, who was Oswald’s age and also a military veteran. Ofstein had started at Jaggers about seven months earlier and had already begun to work with the complicated cameras on simpler jobs, and he showed Lee, he said, “how to operate the cameras, and how to opaque negatives and make clean prints, and just the general work around there.”

Ofstein found his new colleague difficult. Oswald barely got along with the people who worked alongside him, speaking to them only enough to learn what he had to do, and his relations with them worsened as time went on. Space in the darkroom was tight, and a worker might have to squeeze by a colleague working with tongs over a developing tray, but Oswald would just burst through head-on. He would take over the Bruning machine, which produced proofs of their work, with no regard for whoever might still be using it or the jobs they were trying to finish. He never asked anyone to go to lunch with him, nor did anyone ever eat lunch with him, although Ofstein, at least, asked him. Both Ofstein and Graef offered him rides home or to catch a bus after work, but Oswald never accepted.
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