Reclaiming History (183 page)

Before settling in, Lee walked to a nearby grocery store and returned with some milk, peanut butter, sardines, and bananas. Mrs. Bledsoe discouraged him from using her refrigerator by pointing out it was small, but he put his milk in it anyway, which she didn’t like, then ate the rest of the food in his room, which she also didn’t like. But she said nothing because she “wanted to get along” with her new tenant.
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Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Lee went job hunting, but to no avail. On Tuesday, even Mary Bledsoe tried to help him get a job by making calls for him, because she felt he was a nice-looking young man and really wanted a job. “He was not lazy,” Marina would say.
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Worried about Marina’s health and little Junie during this period, Lee telephoned Marina twice a day.
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Friday, Mary Bledsoe noticed, Lee spent the whole day in his room.
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Even though Lee had just moved in, his habits started to wear on her. One day she heard him talking on the phone in a foreign language, and she didn’t like that at all. Also, his return from job hunting in the afternoons disturbed her naps, and she didn’t like his “big-shot” attitude, his eating in his room, and getting ice from her refrigerator. So she decided to put an end to the rental. On Saturday he appeared with his little overnight bag and said he was leaving for the weekend. She told him no, he was going to move. She would not rent the room to him for another week. She just didn’t like him anymore.
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That weekend at Ruth Paine’s house was much like the preceding one. Ruth had taken Marina to the hospital on Friday for a checkup, and everything seemed to be in order—Ruth was impressed by the quality of care Marina was being given. Lee wanted to use Michael Paine’s drill press to put a hole in a Mexican peso so Marina could wear it. Ruth didn’t want him to use Michael’s shop tools, but he persuaded her he knew how to do it. On Sunday, she agreed to give him a driving lesson in her car, and he climbed in and started it. Ruth, knowing he did not yet have a learner’s permit, did not want him to drive on the streets, but in the end she allowed him to navigate the three blocks to the parking lot of a closed shopping center, where he practiced starting, stopping, turning, backing, and other simple maneuvers. He was not particularly adept at it, and Ruth insisted on driving when they headed for home.
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He told her that weekend that he had received the last of the unemployment checks due him, and that it had been for less money than he usually got. She thought he was “very discouraged” that he hadn’t been able to find a job.
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On Saturday evening of that weekend, Lee and Marina shared a banana and she put her head in his lap, dozing off now and then while he watched old movies on television, two films back to back,
Suddenly
and
We Were Strangers
. She watched the latter film, but not the former,
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although she knew the first one involved “an attempt to kill a president at a railroad station with a rifle from a house.”
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Eerily, both movies involved political assassinations.

Suddenly
was a nine-year-old B-thriller starring Frank Sinatra and Sterling Hayden. Directed by Lewis Allen from a script by Richard Sale, Sinatra plays a psychotic ex-serviceman who has been hired to assassinate the president of the United States when he gets off the train in the small western town of Suddenly for a vacation in the nearby Sierras. Sinatra and two accomplices masquerading as FBI agents take over the house of an attractive young widow whose family they hold hostage. The house overlooks the train stop, and the upper windows provide a perfect location for a shooter with a high-powered sniper’s rifle mounted with a telescopic sight. From the window, one sees a dark limousine about two hundred yards away waiting for the president to arrive. In the end, the president’s train passes through Suddenly without stopping, and the would-be assassin eventually meets his death at the hands of the local sheriff, played by Hayden.

The second film,
We Were Strangers
, directed by John Huston and written by Peter Viertel, was even older, dating from 1949, and based on the overthrow of the Cuban dictator Geraldo “the butcher” Machado in 1933, but it was a better film, with splendid performances by John Garfield, Jennifer Jones, and a cast of psuedo-Cubans such as Pedro Armendáriz, Ramon Novarro, and Gilbert Roland. Garfield plays an American expatriate who takes up the cause of China Valdez (Jennifer Jones), who joined the Cuban underground after her brother was killed by the chief of the secret police. Garfield develops a plan, involving the building of a tunnel, to blow up the dictator and his entire cabinet when they congregate for a state funeral. His plot fails and Garfield dies a hero’s death, which sparks a popular uprising, and the film ends with the Cuban people dancing in the streets at the fall of the dictatorship.

The impact of these films on Lee’s fantasy life cannot be known. He never discussed them with anyone beyond remarking to Marina that the content of the Cuban film was similar to the actual situation then existing in Cuba and that he did not like the conspirators’ plans in
We Were Strangers
because, as he said, “that was the way they did it in the old days.”
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However, as to the movie
Suddenly
, with someone possessing the unbalanced and homicidal (remember the attempt on General Walker’s life) mind Oswald did, there is no way that his seeing the movie can casually and automatically be dismissed out of hand as having played no part in his forming the intent to kill Kennedy from his sniper’s nest window at the Texas School Book Depository the following month. Author John Loken, in his book
Oswald’s Trigger Films
(in which he includes
We Were Strangers
and
The Manchurian Candidate
, also starring Frank Sinatra, which the author speculates Oswald may have seen when it was shown in Dallas in late December of 1962), wonders about the effect
Suddenly
and
We Were Strangers
could have had on a psyche as combustible as Oswald’s, and said that if these movies “provided only five to ten percent of the stimulus for his act, their influence would still be momentous.”
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After all, it was a newspaper clipping about the murder, by gunshot, of the king of Italy that helped inspire the murder of President William McKinley in 1901.
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It is noteworthy that Marina told author Priscilla McMillan that while watching one or both movies, every now and then Oswald would sit up straight and strain toward the television set, greatly excited.
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One person we know felt there may have been a connection or at least a possible one between
Suddenly
and the assassination—Frank Sinatra. Sinatra had enough clout in the movie industry by 1963 to have
Suddenly
“taken out of distribution after hearing that President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had watched ‘
Suddenly
’ only days before November 22, 1963.”
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On Monday, October 14, Ruth had to take her Russian typewriter into Dallas for a repair, so she, with Marina and the kids, dropped Lee off near the unemployment office.
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Lee picked up his bag from Mrs. Bledsoe’s rooming house
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and later that day went back to the rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Avenue and rented a room from Mrs. Johnson for eight dollars a week.
*
The room was tiny, little more than a large closet—Mrs. Johnson called it her “library” because it once did serve as her library and “that’s what it was built for,” she said, but it had four windows and was light and airy. He told Mrs. Johnson that he would take it until a larger one became available, but by the time one did, he liked it so well he didn’t even bother to look at the other room. It was certainly an improvement over Mrs. Bledsoe’s. There was a television set in the main room for all the tenants, and when Lee asked Mrs. Johnson if he could put milk and lunch meat in the refrigerator, she said that would be fine with her. Oswald registered—as “O. H. Lee”—and moved in immediately.
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That same Monday afternoon, Ruth and Marina went to visit Ruth’s neighbor across the street, Dorothy Roberts, for coffee, and Lee’s problem of finding a job came up in the conversation. Linnie Mae Randle, another neighbor from a little farther down the street, was also there, and she mentioned the fact that her younger brother, Wesley Frazier, had recently found work at the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza. Wesley had mentioned that there might be another opening there. Marina asked Ruth if she would call the Texas School Book Depository, which she did.
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Roy Truly, superintendent of the Depository, was encouraging—he told Ruth he would be happy to talk to Lee if he applied in person,
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and when Oswald called that evening to speak to Marina, Ruth told him about the opening.
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The next day Oswald went to the Book Depository, where Truly gave him an application to fill out. Lee claimed to have lived in Dallas “continuously,” following a pattern of deleting from his records, where possible, all traces of his recent stay in New Orleans. He listed his last job as his three-year service in the Marine Corps, his reason for leaving being his “honorable discharge.” There was no point in giving references to Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall or the Reily coffee company, both of which had fired him. Roy Truly was favorably impressed. He had assumed he was interviewing a recently discharged veteran with a young family, and he didn’t bother to check Oswald’s application, which also claimed experience in clerical accounting from his military service, and with a kind of typing machine and filing system. He thought Lee quiet and well mannered—he was pleased that Lee addressed him as “Sir,” a southern custom that was no longer in evidence in Dallas by the 1960s.

Truly wanted to give him a chance. The job was temporary but Lee told Truly he was happy to have any kind of work. Truly told Lee he could start work the next day, Wednesday, October 16, the beginning of a two-week pay period. Lee would be filling book orders, which involved retrieving the required books from the warehouse stocks on various floors of the building and delivering them to the shipping department on the first floor. His hours were 8:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., with forty-five minutes off for lunch, and he would be paid $1.25 an hour. Lee filled out a form for withholding tax but asked for permission to leave the entry for the number of dependents blank for a few days, since he was expecting his second child any day.
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Both Lee and Marina were elated with the new job, however temporary and unskilled it might be. “Hurray, he has got a new job,” Marina rejoiced to Ruth.
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Lee liked, he said, “working with books,” and it was a lot cleaner than working on the greasy machines at the Reily coffee company. He liked Roy Truly too, but he still had his sight set on a better job, perhaps another one involving photography.
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For the next few weeks he turned up promptly every morning and did a satisfactory job,
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but he kept to himself—perhaps even more so than he had in his previous jobs—and none of his fellow employees got to know him. No one reported a real conversation with him.

“The boy…talked little to anybody…I never heard him talk to anyone,” Truly said.

“I don’t believe nobody knew him too well. You might say he wouldn’t have too much to say to anybody. He just stayed all to hisself,” a coworker, Jack Dougherty, said.

Geneva Hine, who worked at the credit desk on the second floor, would always say “good morning” to Lee when she’d occasionally see him at the beginning of the day, but he’d avert her glance and not respond. She never saw him smile or laugh, and asked his supervisor, William Shelley, “Who is that queer duck you have working down here?”

The janitor, Eddie Piper, saw Oswald all the time, but when asked by Warren Commission counsel, “Did you ever talk [with] him?” he replied, “No, sir.”

“Did he ever speak to you, say ‘Hello’ or anything of that sort?”

“No, sir. If he did, you hardly ever heard him.”

“Did you ever speak to him?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ever reply to you that you can remember?”

“If he did, I didn’t ever hear him. He’d mumble something and he would just keep walking.”
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Although Oswald had always been uncommonly reclusive and unsocial, at past places of employment he had struck up remotely passable associations with at least one employee(e.g., Dennis Ofstein at Jaggers). Now, if possible, he had withdrawn even deeper into his psychological funk hole, most probably because his Cuban dream had been shattered and he could see he was going nowhere with his life, with little hope of extricating himself from the nothingness of his existence.

Oswald soon met Linne Mae Randle’s brother, Wesley Frazier, at work. Frazier introduced himself to Lee and offered to give him a lift to and from Irving every day, but Lee said he wouldn’t be going there during the week. However, he did ask Frazier if he could take him there at the end of each workweek for the weekends. Frazier said he’d be happy to, and that Friday, October 18, after work Frazier drove him out to Ruth’s place,
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where a pleasant surprise awaited him. Lee turned twenty-four that day, and Marina and Ruth had prepared a small birthday party, with wine, table decorations, and a cake Ruth had baked. Michael Paine was there too—he usually came to dinner on Friday evenings. When they brought in the cake and sang “Happy Birthday,” Lee was so nervous, touched, and self-conscious that he cried and couldn’t blow out all the candles at once, even though there were fewer than the two dozen called for by the occasion.

Lee told them he wanted a special present—he wanted the baby to be born today, on his birthday. “I don’t like late birthday presents,” he joked. “I don’t accept them.”

“You won’t keep your baby?” Marina asked. “We’ll see.”
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