Lee scarcely uttered a word. He continued to jump up and down and kept running in and out with cups of coffee. “Oh, yes,” he at last remarked with apparent detachment, “wouldn’t it be fascinating to know who did it and why and how?”
Marina thought that Lee’s behavior was fairly composed under the circumstances. George said later that even in the dark Lee “shriveled,” was “tense” and wore a “peculiar” look.[6] But it is not clear how much George really noticed. Even by his soaring standards he was unusually ebullient, and the conversation soon shifted to another topic. George had just returned from a trip to New York, where he had clinched a new job in Haiti, prospecting for oil and other resources for “Papa Doc” Duvalier in return for the right to live in the government compound in highest luxury and operate a sisal plantation for such profit as he could reap from it. He and Jeanne would be leaving within the month for Port-au-Prince. After being down for so long, the de Mohrenschildts were on their way up again.
Sitting in the dark, still numb with shock, Marina was scarcely able to follow the conversation. Even years later, remembering how close George had come with his opening remark, she shook all over with fear. Finally, at about ten o’clock, the de Mohrenschildts got ready to leave, and Marina went into the backyard, picked an armful of roses, and handed them to Jeanne.
The instant they were out the door, Lee turned to her. “Did you telephone them and tell them it was me?”
“Of course not,” Marina said. “I thought you did.”
“You’re out of your mind,” he said. “But isn’t it amazing how he guessed? It’s a lucky thing he couldn’t see my face. I was hardly able to speak. Maybe he was only kidding, but he sure hit the nail on the head.”
Lee believed Marina’s disclaimer, she believed his, and they were both right. No one had told George that it was Lee who shot at General Walker. He had simply guessed.
George later denied any responsibility for influencing Lee’s actions and explained why he had made his remark. “I didn’t want him to shoot Walker,” he said. “I didn’t want him to shoot anybody. But if somebody has a gun with a telescopic lens, you see, and knowing that he hates the man, it is a logical assumption, you see.”[7]
That evening was the last time Lee Oswald ever saw George de Mohrenschildt. On April 19 the de Mohrenschildts left Dallas; made their round of farewells in New York, Washington, and Philadelphia; and returned to Dallas at the end of May. There they commenced packing; they were taking some of their belongings with them to Haiti, and the rest were going into storage in Dallas. They wanted to see the Oswalds one more time but heard that they had already left town. Jeanne was to remember, however, that before their departure in early June, they received something in the mail from Lee, and that it bore a New Orleans address.[8]
The de Mohrenschildts did not return to Dallas for more than three years. They came back in 1966, and when they got around to retrieving their possessions from storage, in early 1967, they had an enormous surprise. There, among all the boxes and bundles, they found one that they could not recall having received at all. It was wrapped in brown paper and contained a stack of records that they had loaned to Marina in an effort to help her learn English. They were unable subsequently to remember whether the bundle bore a postmark or not.
But the greatest surprise was still to come. It was not the bundle of records itself, but something that had been laid neatly and purposefully on top—a photograph of Lee with his guns and dressed in black, one of the two Marina had taken.[9] The back of the photograph bore two inscriptions. Across the top, in Russian, were the words: “Hunter for the Fascists—ha-ha-ha!!!” Under the inscription, which was bold and clear, was a small sketch of a terrier, of the kind the de Mohrenschildts owned. Marina today, fourteen years later, has no recollection of having written it. But the writing and the sketch both appear to be hers. And in the lower left-hand corner, catty-corner and in English, was another message in handwriting that appears to be Lee’s. It read: “For my friend George from Lee Oswald.” Beneath the inscription was the date written, as Lee might have done it, in a combination of Latin and Arabic script: “5/IV/63.” The date was probably supposed to be May 4, 1963, and Lee had, as nearly as can be guessed, mailed the records—and the photograph—from New Orleans.[10]
What happened, apparently, is that after George’s lucky guess on April 13, Marina, half idly, and half as a warning to Lee that he must not go around shooting people or he would be found out, simply took one of the photographs and wrote on it, mocking Lee, “Hunter for the Fascists,” a word she had heard both Lee and George use, and “ha-ha-ha,” an expression that was characteristic both of her and of George. The sketch of a little dog links her inscription to George’s remarkable guess. She must have done it, characteristically, to warn Lee and simultaneously to mock him, to laugh him out of further dangerous adventures.
Lee’s choosing a copy of the photograph that had this inscription on it to send to George was itself a message that contained a whole world of meaning. George, and George alone, had made a guess that it was Lee who tried to kill General Walker. Those who knew them both, notably Samuel Ballen, had observed “a mutuality,” “an emotional complicity,” between Lee and George, and of course Ballen was right.[11] Each of them, Lee and George, during that winter of 1962–1963, knew perfectly what the other was thinking politically. And Lee wanted to seal their understanding. As the days following the Walker episode passed without discovery and Lee realized that there was going to be no evidence, not even a clue, to link him to the attempted killing, he decided to let George know that his uncanny guess had been on the mark. It was to George that Lee made his confession.
Why should it have been the loudmouthed George to whom Lee chose, above all other men, to confess? The answer is simple. Lee had done the deed for George. George was the one friend he had, the one person whose respect, admiration, even affection, he coveted—and it was George whom he had wanted to impress. George had been Lee’s “constituent” in the sense that Lee believed he had been acting as George himself might have wanted to do, and in a manner that would win George’s approval.
In his attempt on General Walker, Lee had other constituents as well. He told Marina that he was sending a copy of his photograph to the Militant, to show that he was “ready for anything.” In the picture, he was holding the issue of the Militant that contained the letter from him, signed “L.H.” He had expected that by the time the editors received the photograph, Walker would be dead and the initials “L.H.” would be famous. They would then see how right they had been to print his letter; they would see that their intrepid Dallas correspondent had indeed been “ready for anything.”
De Mohrenschildt and the Militant, then, were Lee’s two chief constituents when he fired at General Walker, with de Mohrenschildt, the flesh-and-blood friend whose approval he desired, far and away the more important. But Lee appears to have had still other inner, or emotional, constituents: the American Communist Party, whose newspaper, the Worker, he was also holding in the picture; and possibly the Soviet Embassy in Washington, whose help he desired for himself and Marina.
In the photograph Lee was dressed in black, the color of death, and he was bristling with guns. If there was in the picture a message to George of boastfulness, love, and pride, there was a message of a very different sort as welclass="underline" a message of hate. George had allowed himself to become a father to Lee. Yet without a scruple of remorse, without a twinge of regret, indeed, with insulting jubilation, he was leaving Dallas, leaving Lee. Like his father and like Edwin A. Ekdahl, the stepfather Lee genuinely cared about, George was abandoning him. And now Lee wanted to avenge himself on everyone who had ever let him down in that way.[12] One means of doing so was to leave town before George did—abandon George, rather than be abandoned by him. Another way was to send the photograph. For the photograph, with its black and its guns, conveyed the message that in addition to the profoundly favorable feelings Lee had for George, he had murderous feelings as well.
9
A description of the bundle, the way the photograph was placed in it, and the inscription was given to the author by Pat S. Russell, Jr., de Mohrenschildt’s attorney, in a telephone conversation on April 21, 1977, after de Mohrenschildt’s death, and a copy of the photograph, with inscriptions, was subsequently sent to the author by Mr. Russell. Some persons have questioned the authenticity of de Mohrenschildt’s “find,” suggesting that he placed the inscriptions there himself. There appears to be no truth to this. De Mohrenschildt immediately told friends about his discovery. In a letter of April 17, 1967, George de Mohrenschildt wrote to George McMillan, husband of the author, that he had come into possession of some “very interesting information” about Oswald since his return to the United States, and on June 22, 1968, he invited George McMillan and the author to visit him in Dallas to discuss “some interesting material on Oswald plus a
10
On May 4, 1963, Oswald was in New Orleans and Marina was staying with Ruth Paine in Irving, Texas. Marina does not drive a car and has no recollection of returning a bundle to the de Mohrenschildts with or without Ruth. Indeed, the de Mohrenschildts were out of town. Oswald, however, had taken all the family’s belongings with him to New Orleans, except for Marina’s clothes and the baby’s things. The package thus appears to have been mailed by Oswald from New Orleans.
12
In a paper presented at the Midwestern meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Chicago, November 15–17, 1968, Dr. James W. Hamilton, a psychiatrist at the Yale University Medical School, notes the parricidal overtones of the Walker attempt and points out that Walker’s first name and initial, “Edwin A.,” were the same as those of Oswald’s stepfather, Edwin A. Ekdahl, whom Hamilton described as the “paternal surrogate who disappointed him.”