“Why are you rigged out like that? And where on earth did you get those guns? From Intourist?” One of the chief aims of Intourist, the Soviet travel agency, is to impress foreigners. Marina thought that her husband was trying to impress her.
“Take my picture,” Lee said. He was serious.
Marina stopped laughing. “Are you crazy? I’ve never taken a picture in my life. I’m busy, and I don’t know how. Take it yourself.”
Lee had two cameras, one a Soviet Smena-2, the other a duo-lens American Imperial Reflex. The Smena-2 could be set automatically, so you could be in the picture and take it, too. But Marina remembers that Lee could not buy film for it in the United States. So he had to recruit her to snap the shutter of his Imperial Reflex.[19]
He showed her how to do it. Marina thinks it was about 4:00 P.M., for she recalls that Lee was worried about the shadows. She also thinks that she held the camera incorrectly, at eye rather than waist level. She snapped the shutter, he reset it, and she snapped it again. It was over in a minute. Not until months afterward did she realize, on being shown a pair of photographs, that she had snapped the shutter not once, as she first remembered, but twice.
Marina was puzzled by Lee’s performance. “If that’s his idea of a good time,” she said to herself, “then I hope he enjoys it. Just so he leaves me alone.” But before going back inside, she asked him why he had to have his picture taken with guns, of all stupid things? He explained that he was going to send the pictures to the Militant to show that he was “ready for anything.”
Marina did not know it, of course, but Lee had a special reason for sending his picture to the Militant. In the photograph he was holding two newspapers, the Worker of March 24, the one that had most recently arrived, and, thrust forward a little more prominently, the Militant of March 11, the issue containing a letter from Dallas that was signed “L.H.” Hoping to go down in history, Lee wanted the Militant to know exactly whom it had had the honor of publishing, and that the author had meant every word when he said that he “questioned” the system. He was, indeed, “ready for anything.”
“What a weird one you are!” Marina exclaimed. “Who on earth needs a photograph like that?”
Lee probably developed the photographs at work the following day, April 1. He handed one of them to Marina and told her to keep it for the baby. On it he had written: “For Junie from Papa.”
“Good God!” Marina was appalled. “Why would Junie want a picture with guns?”
“To remember Papa by sometime.”
— 24 —
Walker
Things at last came to a head at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. One day during a slack moment John Graef had noticed that Lee was reading the Russian humor magazine, Krokodil. “I wouldn’t bring anything like that down here again,” Graef warned him quietly, “because some people might not take kindly to your reading anything like that.”[1] Graef had also noticed that Lee’s appearance was going downhill markedly. He used to dress well for work, but now he was wearing nothing but a white T-shirt with his slacks. Nor had the quality of his work improved. Lee worked fast, everyone agreed on that, and he tried almost desperately to work well. But in the course of a normal day, many more of his jobs than average had to be done over because they failed to meet company standards. Graef hated to fire any trainee, but, he said, “I reached the opinion that he would never be the kind of employee I was looking for, giving him every chance.”[2]
Graef did not have his own office, so he spoke to Lee in the most deserted spot he could find, a place in the darkroom where he could lower his voice and break the news without embarrassing Lee. He told him that business was pretty slow, “ ‘but the point is that you haven’t been turning the work out like you should. There has been friction with other people and so on’… I told him, ‘I think you tried to do the work, but I just don’t think you have the qualities for doing the work that we need.’”
Graef recalled that Lee made no outburst, no protest. “He took this the whole time looking at the floor, I believe, and after I was through he said, ‘Well, thank you.’ And he turned around and walked off.”[3]
The date of this conversation must have been Monday, April 1, for on the top of his time sheet that day, Lee wrote: “Please note new mailing add. P.O. Box 2915.”[4] Until almost the very end, the company had had no address for Lee but that of Gary Taylor, the one he had been using when he found the job six months before.
Lee worked at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall the rest of that week, through April 6. He did not tell Marina he had been fired. He kept to himself his disappointment at losing the only job he had ever really liked. His failure had almost certainly been caused by the emotional troubles that became apparent in mid-January. Those troubles must have made it exceedingly taxing for him to do precise work requiring concentration. And they destroyed his capacity to get along with the other men. For example, he had become unable to tolerate the presence of anybody near him in the close confines of the darkroom. It was a vicious circle, for Lee’s frustration and sense of failure on the job, which are vividly described by everyone who worked with him, must have made his emotional trouble worse. Next there was his indecision in February about whether and when to kill Walker, and the accompanying torment that nearly erupted in murderous violence at home. Then in March, with his mind made up and his energies released, he took on a crushing schedule—long hours at work, constant checking at the post office, typing classes, and late hours at night while he painstakingly prepared his documents and his plan of attack. Graef said later that Lee took the news more quietly than most men would have; the subdued response was typical of him.
Lee’s timing was uncanny. Somehow he managed to be fired between the date when he received notice that his weapons had arrived and the date when Walker was expected back.[5] This coincidence, together with Lee’s own behavior, gives rise to doubt as to what it was he wanted most. In March he had written confidently to his brother Robert that he had become “adept” in his work and was expecting a raise. Yet he flaunted a Russian newspaper, which contributed greatly to his being fired. And when, after he was fired, his colleague Dennis Ofstein gave him the names of other printing plants where he might look for work, Lee merely laughed his wry laugh and said that if he failed to find anything else, he could always go back to Russia.[6]
The truth appears to be that Lee, even now, needed a final push to go through with his plan to shoot Walker. The arrival of his guns was a portent, but by itself it was not enough. By maneuvering matters, or helping maneuver them, in such a way that he was fired, Lee handed himself a part of the “trigger” he required. All his life he had responded to being hurt, or rejected, by whirling around and hurting someone else. The firing was a catalyst—it would help galvanize him into making his characteristic response. And the rest of the push he needed would be supplied by the return of the Evil Man himself.
19
It has been stated that Sunday, March 31, 1963, was overcast and that conditions were not bright enough for Marina to have taken the photographs of Oswald with his guns. According to weather charts supplied by the National Climatic Center, Asheville, North Carolina, that described conditions at Love Field Observatory, 5½ miles northwest of downtown Dallas, there were high thin clouds during much of that day, but there would have been no difficulty taking pictures at any time that afternoon.
5
There is another reason Oswald may have wanted to be fired, although there is no evidence that he thought of it. On the day after shooting General Walker, he would be the most hunted man in Dallas and it might have been dangerous for him to show up for work. On the other hand, he had never missed a day at work, and failure to show up might have been dangerous, too.