Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (9 page)

General Walker—that’s a very important story, and it’s often overlooked, especially by the people who want the assassination to be a plot. I learned all this after the assassination, as did the rest of the world. Nobody knew about it until after the assassination, except Marina. Lee had written her a note, and he left, not saying where he was going; he had a whole plan diagrammed. He’d taken photographs of the home where Edwin Walker lived. This was in April, less than a month after he got his mail-order rifle.

He actually thought he had hit Walker—he broke the glass, but Walker had moved just at that point. Lee apparently hid the rifle and either walked home or took a bus or something. Then he made fun of the people who said they saw cars speeding away. He said, “Everybody in America thinks you have to have a car.” But Marina was very distressed, didn’t know what to do. She was very dependent on her husband, so she hid the note he’d written: “Here’s the key to the post office. If I am arrested, this is where the jail is. Don’t keep my clothes, but keep my papers. You can get help from the embassy”—a variety of things that said he didn’t expect to come home or that he might not. She hid the note in a book, telling him that if he ever showed crazy ideas like this, she’d tell the police or something.

I didn’t know the note was in the book, but I was sending things to Marina those days after she left, things for the babies that she called and asked for or letters that came for her, money—people were very generous to help this woman who was a stranger in our land. One of the things I
sent was this book. When Oswald was shot on Sunday, an Irving police officer arrived at the front of my house in a car. He came into the house and wanted to close all the curtains and peer out, not knowing what else might be going on. I convinced him that he didn’t have to close the curtains. I was afraid he’d scare my kids. But I was sending things through the Irving police. I’d take things to their police officer out in front of my house and say, “Can you get this to Marina?” and I’m sure they did.

The book was one of the things that went to Marina. This was almost two weeks after the assassination. Two Secret Service guys showed up at my house and showed me the note that was in the book; it was in Russian. Whoever wrote it didn’t know the word for “key,” because he transliterated it. The Russian speaker, who apparently was trying to see what language I knew, did all the talking.

He said, “Mrs. Paine, you sent this note.”

I said, “No, I’ve never seen this note.”

“Do you recognize the handwriting?”

“No, I don’t recognize the handwriting.”

He was back and forth. I was saying, “I don’t know a thing about this,” and he was saying, “You did this.” So I finally got polite and talked to the English speaker and said, “He’s telling me that I sent this note, and I’m telling you I didn’t.”

The other guy said, “Well, it was in a book.”

I said, “I sent a book.”

We might never have found out about that attempt except for the accidental discovery through the book. Because the Oswalds’ things were
in my garage, they could’ve come and gone after the assassination, the book included, and that note would never have come to light. I’m distressed that it doesn’t get more attention, that people don’t recognize the importance of Lee’s having tried to kill General Walker.

I was watching television and saw Lee shot. It was around noon, and there was quite a while when I couldn’t manage lunch. I did feel some relief in a sense, like a closure. It was only later that I realized we’d lost a lot of information—what he could’ve told us about why, or what he thought.

He was already a fragile personality, and he might’ve come apart while in prison. He had done an odd thing, like telling us how to call him if the second baby came while he was in Dallas but not telling us the name to ask for. He was using an assumed name. So I had only just the week before seen that he wasn’t really glued together very well. There were gaps, and I think he would’ve deteriorated in custody.

Some time later, Marina invited me to meet her at a friend’s house in Dallas, and I went over. She wanted to reassure me that the interview with the old men at the Warren Commission would be all right and that they were nice people. She was just being careful, friendly, to tell me that. She’d been through a great deal of course.

She’s never tried to reach out to me again. I was following the lives of Marina and the children for a while through Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who interviewed Marina at length and was close to her. But recently I don’t know the story of their lives. I knew at one point that she was persuaded by the plot people to think that it could’ve not been Lee. I suppose, in her place, one would prefer it not to be Lee.

It comes up very little today. Very few people know unless I tell them. It will come up because I had to say where I was going today. I feel very lucky that most of the people who are sure there was a plot don’t even look me up. I’m spared that for the most part. I don’t think there was plot. I think he did it, and I think he acted alone. The Walker incident really illustrates how he could plan something and carry it out and that he was willing to try to kill somebody.

Why he did it? That’s the hardest thing of all. I don’t understand it all. I think he had no particular anger at Kennedy. I feel like he was shooting at the office, not at the man, that he wanted to do something big, which he did. In the meantime, he cared something about his wife and family, but what could he have done that was worse for them?

History has been poorly served by all the plot stories that came out. A book was written, within a month or shortly after the assassination, by Mark Lane, who made quite a living talking to people about what he thought. But he wouldn’t talk to the Warren Commission. All these people seem unwilling to think a single disgruntled person could do this. The Secret Service has learned what kind of personality to watch. There was a program about that, and, boy, they nailed it. They said: a person who could do planning, was reasonably intelligent, but was angry, dissociated from other folks, and had the opportunity—and that was Lee.

The emotions really don’t fade. It’s like any form of grief. It’s always there. You go on; you do other things. I’ve lived a couple of lives since then; that’s the way it feels to me. I went back to school, became a school psychologist, taught, and so on. But the pain doesn’t go away. I don’t think my faith was changed, really. My belief in trying to help other people and to do what I can to make the world better just goes right on.

Lawrence Schiller

In November 1963, twenty-six-year-old Los Angeles photojournalist Lawrence Schiller was on assignment for the
Saturday Evening Post,
arriving in Dallas on the press flight in time to photograph Lee Harvey Oswald after his arrest. He later landed Jack Ruby’s final interview. He became close with the Rubenstein family, as well as the family of Lee Oswald. Marina and her children vacationed with him in California a number of times. He later produced
The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald
and other feature films. For many years Schiller was Norman Mailer’s research associate, and he persuaded the KGB to release its voluminous Oswald file to the duo for their book
Oswald’s Tale.

G
rowing up as I did on the West Coast, I didn’t have a sense of Eastern politics. The first time that I really got into politics was when, as a photographer, I was asked to photograph Eisenhower as president. Then I became really aware of the political system. Of course when I read Norman Mailer’s piece, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” I became aware of John F. Kennedy.

I was very young, in my twenties, when John F. Kennedy was elected president. I’m a kid coming out from the surf of La Jolla, California. I remember the first images I saw of him with these crowds and his hands out. Then reading that he was Catholic, I said, “He’s the pope who came off the wall and got in the gutter with the rest of the sinners.” He was so lovable, he was so likable. I couldn’t find a flaw in him, looking or hearing him or even feeling him. He was young. He was almost like an athlete in some ways. I didn’t know he had back problems and things like that, but he seemed almost like a gazelle in the wild. He didn’t look like Eisenhower. As years went on, I photographed many of the Kennedys. They
understood grassroots like nobody else did. They understood that they had to communicate with the people.

I was taking a shower in my home in California when my wife ran in and said, “It’s on the radio that they think somebody’s shot John F. Kennedy.” I jumped out of the shower, took the third drawer of the dresser, flipped it over into the suitcase, and grabbed my cameras—I was one of five staff photographers for the
Saturday Evening Post
at that time. I didn’t even say a word to Judy. I got in the car and drove directly to LAX airport. I didn’t even call the magazine or anything. I arrived at the airport, and of course it was just inundated by the media. I didn’t realize at the time that Los Angeles was the closest media center to Dallas. Chicago was farther away, and there was nothing in Atlanta in those days. I remember the rush to get on an American Airlines flight. Only when we were in the air did the pilot inform everybody that John F. Kennedy had died.

I was thinking as a journalist and understanding the magnitude. I can’t say that Lincoln’s assassination came into my mind, but I remember seeing an incredible image out of Japan of a politician being assassinated, stabbed in the back, just months before. Another event in my life a month before went through me. It was chills, because I had flown to Rome with Madame Nhu and hid out with her and her husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu. His brother had been assassinated. Many people thought the CIA was involved in that assassination in Vietnam, and the first thought that went through my mind was:
Is the death of Kennedy linked to the assassination one month before?

The first thing you do when you go into a strange city is try to find somebody who knows that city inside out. The first thing I do when I go
into a small town is I hire a taxicab driver 24/7. I went immediately to the Dallas police station and asked, “Where do the cops hang out?” They told me the third floor. I went up to the third floor and said, “Is there anybody off-duty here who wants to be hired?” Believe it or not, I was able to hire an off-duty police officer who worked for me for three days.

Marina Oswald’s first contact with the media—I believe after she was interrogated by the police and Secret Service—was with Richard Stolley at
Life
magazine, a very fine editor. But as time went on, the
Saturday Evening Post
was looking to buy rights. At the same time, I was deeply involved in looking into Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Through Earl Ruby, his brother, and Eva Grant, his sister, I started to get to know everybody. One day, quite honestly, I just called Marina Oswald up and said, “I’m Larry Schiller from the
Saturday Evening Post
; I’d like to come out and see you. I want to introduce myself to you.”

Years later, she came to California and vacationed with me and my second wife. She even wrote very personal letters about whether she should get a divorce from Mr. Porter and remarry. As time went on, Norman Mailer and I decided to do a book,
Oswald’s Tale,
about the years Lee Harvey Oswald spent in the Soviet Union. It was very important that Marina introduce us to certain people, which she did. Mailer and I spent five days interviewing her in Dallas at an Embassy Suites hotel. She had, like a pendulum, been moving back and forth. At first she was thoroughly convinced that her husband had done it, but as time went on she moved in the opposite direction, that he was part of a conspiracy. Where her head is at today, I don’t know.

Marina screamed and hollered at me, telling me I was worse than the Secret Service, that my interrogation of her in Dallas for those five days
was horrible; I should be ashamed of myself. I said, “The difference is, I know more about you now, thirty years later, than they knew eighteen hours after.” She was very upset that we knew that much about every aspect of her life. Mailer and I had spent an entire year and interviewed 114 people in the Soviet Union. We had followed people who emigrated all over the world—into Argentina, into Chicago. The people who lived above Marina and Lee moved to Chicago, and we went and saw them. She was furious that we knew so much about her life in Leningrad and how she had been sent into internal exile in Belarus.

What Norman and I discovered after a year working in Minsk, Belarus, was that there was no connection between Oswald and the KGB. They didn’t try to turn him. They thought, as a defector, he was a new channel into the Soviet Union. When he came back, he did get involved with some White Russians.

I’ll say one thing: If Lee Harvey Oswald had succeeded in killing General Walker, which he attempted prior to shooting Kennedy, I think John F. Kennedy would be alive today. Oswald was looking for acknowledgment, a certain gratification, a certain sense of accomplishment, which he didn’t seem to have in his life. This is evident from the investigation Mailer and I did for over a year in the Soviet Union and the access we had to the KGB files. When Oswald came back to the United States, that’s what was driving him. He needed to be accepted. He needed a sense of accomplishment.

I don’t know specifically what might have motivated him to take a shot at General Walker, but Walker was very right wing, completely on the opposite side of where John F. Kennedy was. Marina Oswald described to me in a detailed interview how her husband sat on the porch of their house at that time, on the second floor, with the gun, the same Mannlicher-Carcano, propped up in the corner, listening to the radio for news that Walker had been killed or Walker had been shot. He became more and more depressed when there was nothing on the news. They kept it very quiet. In fact, the bullet missed Walker by something like six inches. He missed Walker, and he went into a tremendous depression. Sad to say, if Walker’s life had been taken, John F. Kennedy, in my opinion, would still be alive.

Oswald was a lone assassin. The psychological profile that Mailer and I developed during our year in the Soviet Union told us that. Mailer went to the Soviet Union thoroughly convinced that Oswald was part of a conspiracy, and Mailer came back saying that he had done it alone. We wrote
Oswald’s Tale
because we were looking for a pattern in the Soviet Union with his relationship with Marina, his wife, and other people. What were the triggers that got him upset? What were the triggers in the Soviet Union? Could you take that pattern, that grid, and place it in Dallas at the time of Kennedy? Could you find the same triggers? One of the triggers that would get him upset in Minsk was his wife saying, “Get your dirty feet off the pillow”; he’d get furious. We know he went crazy over things like that because all of that was bugged by the KGB; we had access to those transcripts.

But we couldn’t find anything that was outside of a sense of accomplishment. One of the biggest mysteries was that Marina had had relationships with other men before marrying Lee Harvey Oswald, but when he walked into the radio factory he brought in a piece of sheet with blood on it in—a Russian tradition—and walked around, showing that his wife was a virgin. We were looking at all of those events to see what was inside this man’s head. In the end result, he just wanted to be accepted, and he wanted to accomplish something that nobody else had accomplished.

In the United States, Marina was a fish out of water. She didn’t know what to do. The interrogations by government sources were beyond her comprehension. I just think she was afraid to move. She had two children. She was a woman without any resources. She had left the Soviet Union and had no connections here. Her Aunt Valya, who was still living in Minsk at that time, eventually came to the United States to live with her for a short period of time. The friends she did make weren’t going to give her enough security to walk away from Lee Harvey Oswald.

There are many questions that have no answers, but that doesn’t mean somebody’s withholding an answer. We have to accept that fact. Any two people can come up with different things that I’d like to know. Yes, there are things that I would like to know about Lee Harvey Oswald. The
night before the assassination, really, his leaving the wedding ring when he leaves the house that morning? Marina still can’t explain that. There are things about Oswald we’ll never know. But the effect of what he did will never leave us.