Reclaiming History (170 page)

Gus Hall and Ben Davis were the Communist Party officials for whose defense committee Oswald had offered to create a poster in December (see earlier text). Even if his letter did not bring the hoped harvest of CPUSA literature, he may have thought it might well provoke a reply from the party that he could add to his bonafides for his eventual arrival in Havana.

Although Oswald’s commitment to the FPCC cannot be seriously challenged—he had passed out its literature even in Dallas—surely, being a leaflet peddler on the streets of New Orleans could never satisfy someone of such grandiose dreams. It appears that Oswald was starting to move fast, that he had other plans, but before they came to fruition he intended to pursue his small-bore FPCC endeavor. One can reasonably infer that his real goal at the time was to forge a new life for himself in Cuba. I say that because on June 1, only three days after he placed his printing orders for the FPCC materials, he had himself photographed.
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We can fairly presume this was for a passport because a week later, on June 8, he prepared an “International Certificate of Vaccination or Revaccination Against Smallpox,” a World Health Organization document for international travelers that he had probably picked up at a government passport office.
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*

Priscilla McMillan, who, along with Ruth Paine, knew Marina as well as anyone, and through Marina, knew Lee, has this analysis of what Lee was up to during this period: “Four years earlier [in the Marines at El Toro] he had thought about gaining Castro’s trust and joining his revolution. Now, in the summer of 1963, he was thinking about the same thing. His effort to establish a chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans appears to have been two-pronged, both an attempt to change American policy toward Cuba by peaceful political action at the grass-roots level, and an attempt to win the trust of the Castro government.”
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And we do know what Marina told the Warren Commission: “I only know that his basic desire was to get to Cuba by any means, and that all the rest of it was window dressing for that purpose.”
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On June 11, Oswald returned to the post office where he had his mailbox list A. J. Hidell and Marina Oswald as people authorized to receive mail there.
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On June 16, Lee made his debut as New Orleans’s leading Fidelista. He took some of the leaflets he had printed and some of the pamphlets he had received from the New York headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee—one-page flyers protesting the recent decision by the government to prevent Americans from traveling to Cuba—and went down to the Dumaine Street Wharf, where an aircraft carrier, the USS
Wasp
, was docked, to pass them out to naval personnel and civilians who were leaving the carrier. The ship, which normally operated out of Boston, had arrived with six other ships several days before and was allowing visits by the public, so Lee expected a good crowd. He attracted the attention of the ship’s officer of the deck, who sent an enlisted man to find an officer of the Harbor Police. Patrolman Girod Ray, thus alerted, located Oswald, took two copies of the leaflets he was handing out, and asked him if he had permission to distribute literature on the wharf. Oswald told him he did not, but he was an American citizen and had a right to distribute literature anywhere he wanted. Ray told him that he was mistaken about that. The wharves and buildings along the Mississippi River, encompassing the port of New Orleans, were under the jurisdiction of the Harbor Commissioners, and Oswald could not distribute leaflets on their property without their permission. Oswald objected, insisting he saw no reason why he could not distribute whatever literature he chose wherever he liked, and Ray warned he would be arrested if he did. Oswald finally conceded the point and left the Dumaine Street Wharf.
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During the same period that Lee was busy organizing his political group and hopefully setting in motion his political career, he did not completely neglect implementing his other decision—to send Marina and his beloved Junie back to Russia. He had already sent a change-of-address card to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., giving Magazine Street as his new address.
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Although Marina knew nothing of this communication, she knew he had not given up on the plan. He told her she was “in his way.” He was planning to go to Cuba, then China, he told her, and she would have to wait for him in Russia. “I love to travel,” he said, “and with you I can’t.”
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On Saturday morning, June 1, Marina, pushing June in her stroller, walked with Lee to the nearby Napoleon branch of the New Orleans Public Library with the hope of finding some books in Russian that she could read. There were none, but Lee checked out Deane and David Heller’s
The Berlin Wall
and Hermann Bacher Deutsch’s
The Huey Long Murder Case
for himself. Walking home, Marina started to feel faint. “Don’t go so fast,” she told him, “I don’t feel well.” She stopped and leaned against a storefront. Thinking Marina was joking, he kept walking. She passed out and found herself lying on the sidewalk when she came to. He carried her into a store, where strangers revived her with ammonia. She was eventually able to walk the rest of the way home but she took to her bed, and Lee, finally alarmed, was particularly caring for the rest of the day.
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Before the week was out Marina received a letter from Comrade Reznichenko on behalf of the consular’s section of the Russian embassy in Washington. The letter essentially reiterated what he had written on April 18, asking Marina to give him her reasons for wanting repatriation to the USSR.
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She noticed that the letter had not been forwarded from Dallas; it was sent directly to Magazine Street, and only Lee could or would have informed the consulate of their new address. To her it was additional proof that his insistence on her returning to Russia had continued and was deadly serious. The threat was constantly on her mind.
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The Murrets and the Oswalds exchanged visits from time to time during this period, providing temporary, marginal relief to Marina for her anxieties. Marina thought Lee’s relatives were very kind. Lee, she said, liked them very much, but he disliked their religiosity and said they were “bourgeois,” a term to describe the tastes and values of the middle class and their emphasis on materialism, social respectability, and a secure, conformist existence.

A week after Marina fainted in the street, Lee took her to the New Orleans Charity Hospital for a medical examination. It was nearby and largely free, but as a state institution it was permitted to treat only patients who were legal residents of Louisiana. The Oswalds had not been in the state long enough to qualify. Oswald argued heatedly with the staff for an hour but failed to move them. He was furious and complained that it was just one more proof that nothing but money counted in America. He made no further attempt to get appropriate medical attention for his wife, though he was now working and not completely indigent. Marina would be back in Dallas in her ninth month of pregnancy before she finally saw a doctor for the first time.
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Ruth Paine, in Dallas, worried when she heard nothing from Marina for a time and tried to get the names of the secretaries of the Quaker and Unitarian churches in New Orleans to enlist their help. She wrote to ask them to find people who spoke Russian who might call on Marina, but her efforts came to very little—just one visit from Ruth Kloepfer, clerk of the Quaker Meeting in New Orleans who spoke no Russian and had to rely on Lee’s interpreting to chat with Marina. One of Kloepfer’s daughters was studying Russian but was presently out of the country, and Mrs. Kloepfer never made a serious attempt to locate real Russian contacts for Marina.
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Right from the beginning, Marina had felt more isolated than at any time in her life, and for one reason only. She was trapped behind her language barrier. Other than Lee, she had virtually no other human being to talk to. Dallas had been bad enough, but at least there she had the occasional contact with one or more members of the Russian emigré community who spoke her native language. But in New Orleans, if she wasn’t talking to Lee or her baby June, she simply wasn’t talking. Several times she told Lee she would appreciate it if he would try to become acquainted with some Russian-speaking people in New Orleans so she could have friends and someone with whom to converse, but he had not done this, and he continued to speak to her, and their daughter June, only in Russian.
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Lee kept up unrelenting pressure on Marina to write the letter required by the Soviet consulate. Every evening when he came home from work he asked her whether she had written it yet. She cried every day and stalled as best she could. Finally she told him she would go back to the USSR if he would give her a divorce. Lee, angry, told her, “There will be no divorce, I may want to come to you some time…You’re my wife and you’ll stay my wife. The children are mine. You’ll wait for me just as long as I want.” He told her “the conversation is over,” but in fact it wasn’t. Marina learned that insisting on divorce was a way to get him to ease up, at least for the time being, his insistence on her writing the letter. For Marina, a day’s postponement was a day’s hope that their relationship might change just enough to forestall a terrible event in her life.

Another weapon at her disposal was, curiously, Anatoly Shpanko. Lee had never gotten over his chagrin at learning of Marina’s alleged infidelity while he was in Moscow, and the letter she had written to Anatoly he had intercepted. Any mention of the putative lover’s name, whether by Marina or Lee, was enough to change the subject of any argument. But one way or another, the name came up in virtually every fight, and if Marina ever spoke about some incident in Minsk, Lee would assume that Anatoly had been a part of it. “Stop it,” he would tell her in her reminiscence of the event. “I can’t stand it.” And if she herself brought up Anatoly’s name, he would tell her, “Shut up. I don’t want to hear about your boyfriends.” But Marina, on at least one occasion, told Lee, perhaps in sweet revenge for all of his beatings and mistreatment of her, that if Lee spent his whole life trying, he would never learn to kiss as well as Anatoly. Marina often daydreamed about Anatoly. He had been kind to her and she imagined he always would be. If Lee did force her to go back to the USSR, Anatoly was the man she would want to marry. Oddly, Marina thought Anatoly resembled both President Kennedy and actor José Ferrer, and Lee may have somehow inferred this association in her mind between her phantom lover and President Kennedy, who, she told Lee once, was “very attractive as a man.” Lee appeared jealous of Kennedy and said, “You mustn’t like any other man but me.”
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Marina taunting Lee, Lee beating up Marina, Marina running away, Lee begging her to return, blissful moments making up and reuniting, each desperately needing each other, then Lee trying to send Marina back to Russia, more beatings, inducement of jealousy, and so on. Though their marriage, as Marina said, was a succession of arguments and reconciliations, so are many marriages. But Lee and Marina’s fell into the much smaller category where both parties always seem to be just beyond the other’s reach, both unable, for whatever perversion in their makeup, to give the other what they know the other needs. It seemed that Lee and Marina were each taking turns playing Carmen to the other’s Don José, the problem being, as we shall see, that this game they were playing out with their small, ordinary hands would change history for years and years to come.

O
n June 24, Lee went to the passport office and applied for a new passport. He gave his occupation as “photographer” and his proposed itinerary as “England, France, Poland, USSR, France, Finland, Poland.” He said he had intended to travel during the period from October to January.
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Absent from the itinerary was Cuba. Recent laws
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prohibited travel to the small island nation, and indeed, the passport that was issued the next day was stamped with a warning that a person traveling to Cuba was liable to be prosecuted.
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The speed with which the passport was processed by the State Department—and even the fact that it was issued at all—became an essential suspicion of conspiracy theorists, but in fact the State Department had no legal grounds for denying any American a passport since the Supreme Court had ruled in 1958 that travel abroad was a right of all citizens.
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The FBI had not placed Oswald on the watch list for those seeking passports because, the agency would later say, its “investigation of Oswald had disclosed no evidence that Oswald was acting under the instruction or on behalf of any foreign government or instrumentality thereof.”
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Oswald also benefited from the recent installation in the New Orleans passport office of a Teletype system to Washington that markedly sped up the issuance of passports, their being granted in “24 hours in most cases.”
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Both the legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State, Abram Chayes, and the assistant chief of the Legal Division of the Passport Office of the Department of State, Carroll Hamilton Seeley Jr., told the Warren Commission that based on Oswald’s background he had a right to a passport and he could not legally be denied one.
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Seeley added that another former defector, Paul David Wilson, had applied for a passport and received it as a “routine issuance.”
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On June 26, a confidential informant for the FBI in New York reported the arrival of Oswald’s June 11 letter at the
Worker
. That same day the FBI’s New York office sent the post office box information on Oswald to its New Orleans office, but it wasn’t until August 5, 1963, after some legwork, that the New Orleans office verified that Oswald was living in New Orleans and at 4907 Magazine Street. The information was forwarded to Special Agent Hosty in Dallas,
*
but as of that point New Orleans became the “Office of Origin” for Oswald’s case file, and Hosty wouldn’t have anything to do with the Oswald case until October of 1963.
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