Reading that, Lee roared with laughter. “Americans are so spoiled!” he said, proud of his escape. “It never occurs to them that you might use your own two legs. They always think you have a car. They chased a car. And here I am sitting here!” Once again he said that before any car left the scene, “my legs had carried me a long way.”[2]
Lee also laughed at the police identification of the badly smashed bullet.[3] “They got the bullet—found it in the chimney,” he said. “They say I had a .30 caliber bullet when I didn’t at all. They’ve got the bullet and the rifle all wrong. Can’t even figure that out. What fools!”
Low as his opinion of the police was, Lee was angry at himself and disappointed. “It was such an easy shot,” he said again and again. “How on earth did I miss? A single second saved him. I fired and he moved. A perfect shot if only he hadn’t moved!”[4]
That Thursday morning, only a few hours after his attempt on Walker’s life, Marina saw Lee thumbing through the blue looseleaf notebook in which he kept his typing lessons. She noticed that he stopped now and then to read a page.
“And what is that?” she asked.
“My plan.”
“And those pictures?”
“Walker’s house.”
He was sitting on the sofa with the notebook in his lap. Marina stood facing him across the coffee table. “May I see?”
He handed it to her. She saw photographs of a house from various angles, and the book was filled with lined sheets covered with handwriting. There were pages of typing, too, and Marina guessed—correctly—that some of the handwriting, all of which was in English, was the political justification for Lee’s act.
“I had it so well figured out,” he boasted. “I couldn’t make a mistake. It was only accident that I missed.”
Marina realized that he was proud of himself. “And what do you mean to do with this book?” she asked.
“Save it as a keepsake. I’ll hide it somewhere.”
“Some keepsake! It’s evidence! For God’s sake, Alka, destroy it.”[5]
She left the room so that he could make up his mind by himself.
The next thing she knew he was standing by the toilet with some sheets of paper in his hand and a box of matches. Slowly he tore the sheets in half, crumpled them into balls, and one by one touched a match to them. As each ball of paper caught the flames, he dropped it into the toilet. He did this thoughtfully, with great reluctance, as if it were the funeral pyre of his ideas. But apparently he destroyed only the details of his plan. He did not burn the handwritten pages that contained his political philosophy and program.
Afterward, they ate their lunch in silence. Lee was so sorry to part with his papers, and Marina so relieved, that neither could think of anything to say. Lee seemed withdrawn, and fearful for the first time that he might be caught. Marina had seen how reluctant he had been to burn his papers. “I wonder if he burned them,” she asked herself, “because he does not trust me?”
That night, twenty-four hours after his attempt on Walker’s life, Lee suffered anxiety attacks in his sleep. He shook all over from head to toe four times at intervals of a half hour or so, but without waking up.
The following day, Friday, he was still frightened, yet not too frightened to go downtown and file a claim for unemployment compensation. His claim was refused a few days later on grounds that his earnings at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall were too low for him to qualify, a ruling that was later reversed. That night he again suffered convulsive anxiety attacks in his sleep.
Marina, meanwhile, was grateful that she had chores to do, anything to keep her from thinking. She now knew that Lee took his politics far more seriously than she had ever, in her wildest dreams, supposed. She knew, for the first time, that he was capable of killing in cold blood, merely for the sake of his ideas. But her fears for the future started and ended with General Walker. She saw that Lee was bitterly disappointed by his failure to kill Walker, that he still was keyed up and tense, and that his desire to do the deed had by no means burned itself out. She was afraid, terrified, that he would take another shot at Walker. It never occurred to her, then or at any time thereafter, that he would try to shoot anybody else.
With her ear still cocked for the yelping of police dogs, Marina immediately began to beg Lee, and try to force him to promise, to never do such a thing again. She told him that when Walker moved his head at the last minute it had been a sign from fate. “If God saved him this time, He will save him again. It is not fated for this man to die. Promise me you’ll never, ever do it again.”
“I promise.”
His promise was not enough. “Look,” Marina said, “a rifle—that’s no way to prove your ideas. If someone doesn’t like what you think, does that mean he has a right to shoot you? Once people start doing that, no one will dare go out of doors. In Russia you used to say that there was freedom of speech in America, that everyone can say what he pleases. Okay, go to meetings. Say what you want to say there. Or are you afraid you have so little brains you can’t make anybody listen?
She scolded Lee on personal grounds as well. “Even if you didn’t think of me,” she said, “you ought to have thought about Junie.”
“I did,” he said coldly. “I left you enough money for a while.” And he added, with a touch of malice in his tone, “The Russians here like you. They’d have helped.”
Somehow Marina and Lee got through Thursday and Friday, but they still had one more ordeal. It occurred on Saturday, the eve of Easter, which happened to fall on the same day that year in both Western and Orthodox churches. They were not expecting callers and were getting ready for bed when they heard a sudden commotion at the door—the very thing they had been dreading. But instead of police dogs barking, it was George de Mohrenschildt, booming out a loud hello. Hugely relieved, Marina and Lee went downstairs to let the de Mohrenschildts in.
Jeanne came in first, dressed to the nines and clutching a pink plush rabbit for June. Handsome and hearty, George shouldered his way in behind her. The first words out of his mouth struck the Oswalds with the impact of a bomb.
“Hey, Lee,” he roared out in Russian. “How come you missed?”
Lee and Marina, standing at the foot of the stairs as their guests went up with their backs to them, stared at one another in horror. Which of them had told George about Walker? Each one supposed the other had.
Lee was the first to recover. “Shhh,” he said as they reached the landing. “Junie’s sleeping.”
“You always forget the baby,” Jeanne reproved her boisterous husband. “Let’s go out on the balcony.”
Luckily for Marina and Lee, it was dark out of doors and hard for the de Mohrenschildts to see their faces, or so they hoped. George and Jeanne had just come from a party. They were euphoric, on top of the world, and Marina reflected gratefully that they both seemed a little bit high. Maybe they would not notice her discomfort. Lee, for his part, rushed back and forth carrying chairs for all of them to sit on.
George seemed at first to have only one thing on his mind: the attempt on General Walker. He had read every morsel in the Dallas papers and was eager to discuss it with Lee. He knew so many of the details that Marina concluded that Lee, uncharacteristically, had taken George into his confidence.
3
The Walker bullet was never traced definitely to Oswald’s rifle, not even after the Kennedy assassination. (See Warren Commission Report, p. 562, and Exhibit No. 2001, Vol. 24, p. 39.)
4
Walker later denied the police theory that he moved his head at the last minute and accidentally saved his own life. Contrary to his own early testimony, he believes that Oswald fired a near-perfect shot. He was standing 120 feet away behind a stockade fence, but with a four-power sight, Walker appeared to be only 30 feet away, an easy target. Walker was not, however, sitting profiled in the window. Rather, he was well inside the room, facing out, “a side shot with a frontal angle,” he explains. Firing under nighttime conditions, Oswald was at the mercy of the lighting, and the angles of light and shadow, distorted by the lenses of his sight, could have thrown off his aim. He appears, however, to have had a perfect bead on his target; but with light flooding the room outside as well as in, he was unable to see the window frame. Thus the bullet was flying straight at Walker when it hit strips of window casing and was deflected. Walker at first thought that a firecracker had exploded directly above his head. Then he saw the hole in the window frame, felt bits of wood and glass in his hair, and saw bits of copper casing in his arm. (Testimony of Major General Edwin A. Walker, Vol. 11, pp. 405–410; letter from General Walker to the author, undated but postmarked May 15, 1974; and telephone conversation of General Walker and the author, August 19, 1975.)
5
Although Marina was in no way culpable for keeping silent after her husband’s attempt to kill Walker, advising him to destroy evidence might, under the Texas penal code of 1974, render her culpable on two counts: accessory to attempted murder; and accomplice to the crime of destroying evidence. The present code was not in effect in 1963, however, and, indeed, the code then in effect gave a spouse immunity from being convicted for a crime committed by his or her partner.