Reclaiming History (174 page)

But Oswald pled guilty to a charge of disturbing the peace and was sentenced to pay a fine of ten dollars or serve ten days in jail. Oswald paid the fine.
¹³¹⁴
Bringuier, himself an attorney when he was in Cuba, pled not guilty and undertook a defense of himself and his two companions. He showed the judge the
Guidebook for Marines
and pointed to Oswald’s name on the first page, clear proof that Oswald was an agent provocateur trying to infiltrate the Cuban Student Directorate. The judge, no doubt eager to see the last of all four of them, dismissed the case against the Cubans.
¹³¹⁵

Johann Rush, a young cameraman for New Orleans television station WDSU, started filming Oswald walking down the stairs from the second-floor courtroom after the court session. Oswald seemed startled by the TV cameras.

“So you’re interested in this, huh?”

“Yes, we are,” Rush said.

When Oswald learned he would be seen on WDSU-TV that evening, his interest was piqued. Rush spotted the gleam in his eye, handed him his business card, and suggested that Oswald give him a ring at the station whenever he planned further demonstrations. Rush was eager to film a good, old-fashioned street brawl. Oswald was noncommital but clearly interested, and Rush was pretty sure he would go for it. The Cubans watched the conversation from a distance, and raged. As soon as Oswald left, they assailed Rush. He ought not be talking at all with a Communist like that, much less giving him publicity. Rush shot footage of them too, and they were temporarily appeased.
¹³¹⁶

Lee, who had been waiting two months for a reply from Vincent Lee of the national Fair Play for Cuba Committee, felt that the recent events would finally evoke a response from the New York headquarters, and later in the day he wrote to Vincent Lee:

Dear Mr. Lee

Continuing my efforts on behalf of F.P.C.C. in New Orleans I find that I have incured the displeasure of the Cuban exile “worms” here. I was attacked by three of them as the copy of the enclosed summons indicates I was fined ten dollars and the three Cubans were not fined because of “lack of evidence,” as the judge said. I am very glad I am stirring things up and shall continue to do so. The incident was given considerable coverage in the press and local T.V. news broadcast. I’m sure it will all be to the good of the Fair Play for Cuba committee.

Sincerley yours

Lee H. Oswald
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Vincent Lee, already disturbed by Oswald’s undisciplined efforts on the committee’s behalf, was not inspired to reply.
¹³¹⁸

That day, August 12, or the next, Rush’s friend Bill Stuckey, who had a weekly program on the radio side of WDSU, phoned Bringuier and asked him if he had Oswald’s address. Stuckey had hitchhiked around Latin America for awhile after he mustered out of the Marine Corps, and he spoke Spanish pretty well. His program on WDSU dealt with Latin American affairs, and he knew many of the anti-Castro leaders in the city. Within the week Bringuier got the address for Stuckey from the court papers and asked Stuckey why he wanted it. Stuckey, who had heard about the national Fair Play for Cuba Committee but nothing about any local chapter, wanted to interview Oswald. Bringuier protested vehemently—Stuckey shouldn’t give a Communist like Oswald airtime when there were plenty of people in town who really knew what was going on in Cuba. Stuckey offered to do a radio interview of Bringuier too, but Bringuier didn’t like that idea either. Bringuier suggested a debate.
¹³¹⁹

When Stuckey didn’t take him up on the idea, Bringuier acted on his own. Rush found himself dispatched to Casa Roca to film Bringuier’s hastily organized press conference. Bringuier presented two Cuban exiles who had just returned from a raid on their homeland, and he served as their interpreter since neither of them spoke English. The two freedom fighters agreed that conditions in Cuba were now worse than ever. They were angry that the U.S. government, since the missile crisis, no longer supported Cuban exile raids on the island.
¹³²⁰

Meanwhile, the August 13 edition of the
Times-Picayune
published an account of the street incident under the caption “Pamphlet Case Sentence Given.” It read, in its entirely, “Lee Oswald, 4907 Magazine, Monday was sentenced to pay a fine of ten dollars or serve ten days in jail on the charge of disturbing the peace by creating a scene. Oswald was arrested by First District police at 4:15 p.m. Friday in the 700 block of Canal while he was reportedly distributing pamphlets asking for a ‘Fair Play for Cuba.’ Police were called to the scene when three Cubans reportedly sought to stop Oswald. Municipal Court charges against the Cubans for disturbing the peace were dropped by the court.”
¹³²¹

It wasn’t much, but New Orleans’s main newspaper had taken notice and Oswald, delighted, made the most of it. He wrote to Arnold Johnson, information director of the U.S. Communist Party, that same day, August 13:

Dear Mr. Johnson:

I wish to thank you for the literature which you sent me for our local branch of the “Fair Play For Cuba Committee,” of which I am the secretary-President. As you can see from the enclosed [newspaper] clipping I am doing my best to help the cause of [a] new Cuba…Please accept an honourary New Orleans branch membership card as a token of esteem.

Thank You

Lee H. Oswald
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Johann Rush did not have long to wait on his invitation to Oswald. Oswald left a message for Rush at the TV station to alert him that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee would again distribute literature, this time in front of the International Trade Mart at noon on Friday, August 16. Other newspaper and television stations were also informed, although the papers ignored the event, and only one other cameraman, WWL’s Mike O’Connor, showed up.
*
It was Oswald’s best-organized effort. He provided some substance for his phantom FPCC chapter by getting two other young men to help distribute the literature. One of them, a short, young Cuban, only passed out a few of the handful of leaflets Rush saw Oswald give him on the street after talking to him and his taller companion. The short man, who has never been identified, seemed embarrassed by the entire affair, grinning a lot, and soon left with his companion, who seemed to purposefully keep his back to Rush’s camera throughout the entire incident. The other leaflet distributor was a kid named Charles Hall Steele Jr., whom Oswald had recruited at the unemployment office, where Steele was waiting for a friend who was taking a test. Oswald offered two dollars for fifteen or twenty minutes of work. It sounded good to Steele, who asked no questions. He didn’t even bother to read the literature he passed out. Carlos Bringuier was tipped off, but he got the news too late and failed to get to the scene on time. This time there were no Cuban exiles and no fracas, but the footage of Oswald passing out leaflets in front of the New Orleans Trade Mart shot by Rush and O’Connor was broadcast on television that evening anyway.
¹³²³

Someone brought one of the leaflets Oswald was passing out to Bringuier’s store, and Bringuier noticed that although it was the same leaflet, on yellow paper, from the week before, this time it bore a different address. The original leaflet from August 9 was stamped with the name A. J. Hidell and a post office box number; today’s was stamped with Oswald’s name and the Magazine Street address. A friend, Carlos Quiroga, came up with an idea to run a counterspy operation on Oswald. That evening, posing as a Castro sympathizer, Quiroga called on Oswald and spent an hour on Oswald’s screen porch discussing Cuban affairs with him. Oswald suspected that the Cuban was an agent of Bringuier’s or possibly even the FBI and told him nothing in particular,
¹³²⁴
but while Quiroga was there, little June came out on the porch and—to Quiroga’s astonishment—Lee spoke Russian to her. He tried to cover the blunder by telling Quiroga that he was studying Russian at Tulane University and was teaching it to his daughter, but the cat was out of the bag. Quiroga went straight back to Bringuier with the news that Lee Oswald might well have some connection to Soviet Russia.
¹³²⁵

Early the next morning, Saturday, August 17, Bill Stuckey finally made use of the address he had gotten from Bringuier. He went to Magazine Street at eight o’clock to catch Oswald before he left for the day. Oswald appeared on his front porch wearing nothing but a pair of U.S. Marine fatigue pants but looking trim and very “neat and clean.”
*
Stuckey had expected something more bohemian, a beard and sandals perhaps, more like a folk singer. Stuckey invited Oswald to appear on his radio program,
Latin Listening Post
, that night. If Oswald would come down to the WDSU studios at five, they could record an interview out of which four and a half minutes would be edited for broadcast the same evening at 7:30.

Oswald was more than ready to oblige. The two men talked long enough on the screen porch for Stuckey to form the opinion that Oswald was intelligent, articulate, and serious-minded, the type who could attract some followers to his ideas. Oswald could not invite Stuckey in for a cup of coffee, because, he said, his wife and child were still asleep. Lee probably wanted to avoid the debacle of the evening before when Quiroga heard him speak Russian to his child. He showed Stuckey his membership cards in the FPCC, including the one that designated him secretary of the local chapter. He pointed out that he was only the secretary; A. Hidell was the president of the chapter—a chapter, we know, that was entirely fictitious, not being authorized by the national office of the FPCC. Lee also gave Stuckey some of the literature he had collected, including two speeches by Castro, “The Revolution Must be a School of Unfettered Thought” and “Bureaucracy and Sectarianism.” There was a pamphlet by the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre,
Ideology and Revolution
, and Corliss Lamont’s
Crime against Cuba
.

Oswald agreed to meet Stuckey at WDSU at five.
¹³²⁶

Stuckey was intrigued enough by Oswald to want to record an interview much longer than the four and a half minutes he could cram into his program. If it went well—from his estimation of Oswald, he thought it would—he would approach station management about running it complete, a half hour or so. He drew up a long list of questions.

Oswald came in about five, dressed as he had dressed for his two street demonstrations—neatly, in a short-sleeved white dress shirt, tie, and slacks. Under his arm he carried a blank looseleaf notebook. He handed Stuckey a reprint of an article about the treatment of the Cuban Revolution in the American press from the 1961 summer edition of
Liberation
magazine.
¹³²⁷
Stuckey and Oswald sat down before microphones in a studio and began the taped (not live) interview, while the recording engineer, Al Campin, listened to every word. Campin was as intrigued as Stuckey had been. He hadn’t encountered anyone with Oswald’s views, and he too was curious as to how Oswald thought and why. Oswald obviously already had fully prepared “answers” to Stuckey’s questions, which made Stuckey’s questions almost irrelevant. Stuckey realized “how adept [Oswald] was at taking a question, any question, and distorting it for his own purposes, saying what he wanted to say while making you think that he was answering your question. He was an expert in dialectics.” Stuckey let the conversation run to thirty-seven minutes.
¹³²⁸
Of course, he had never heard most of Oswald’s take on things before, which lent them a freshness they didn’t have; Oswald’s views had not developed much from the time he had been interviewed in Moscow by Priscilla Johnson and Aline Mosby.

Lee told one of his characteristically pathetic little lies when asked about his background—he claimed that he had worked his way up through the ranks of the Marine Corps to the grade of “buck sergeant.” Notably absent from his account of himself were his recent stay in Dallas, and, naturally, his pilgrimage to the Soviet Union. He didn’t even refer to the latter when asked if he knew of any black market in Soviet Russia.
¹³²⁹

Most of the rest of the interview was unremarkable, true as far as it went, though lacking any sort of insight into or special knowledge of conditions in Cuba, where Oswald had never been, or the nature of the severely strained Cuban-American relations. On a few occasions Oswald stumbled but displayed some agility in recovering.

He suggested that the suspensions of civil liberties in Cuba were similar to those imposed in the United States in 1950 with the outbreak of the Korean police action: “We adopted an emergency law which restricted newspapers, broadcasters, radio and TV from giving any opinions, any comments which [were] not already checked out by certain administrative bureaus of the United States Government.” Such restrictions and administrative bureaus were, of course, figments of Oswald’s imagination, and Stuckey, who had earlier been a columnist for the
New Orleans States-Item
, called him on it: “Mr. Oswald, this is very interesting to me to find out about the restrictions of newspapers in 1950 because I was in the newspaper business at that time and I do not recall seeing any such government bureau established…to tell us what to print. Exactly what do you have reference to?”

Oswald backpedaled—lamely: “Well, I have reference to the obvious fact that during wartime, haphazard guesses and information are not given by anyone. In regards to military strategical comments, such as comments or leaks about new fronts or movements and so forth, news was controlled at that time to that extent, as it is always controlled during a war or national emergency, always.”
¹³³⁰

He then claimed that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee had “often approached” the local
Times-Picayune
and
States-Item
newspaper syndicate with information or comments that the paper had “consistently refused” to print because of its anti-Castro position. Stuckey recognized this as claptrap and asked Oswald for the names of people at the paper he might have approached—people Stuckey knew well.