Envy is another of the emotions Lee appears to have harbored toward his friend. George had been born to a title, where Lee only felt entitled. George, unlike Lee, had known and loved his father and had grown up close to him. And George, the possessor of a powerful physique, had called Lee “puny” and treated him as if he could be trifled with. At the request of George Bouhe and Anna Meller, he had intervened in Lee’s private affairs and “liberated” Marina a few months before. The de Mohrenschildts noted at the time that Lee “boiled and boiled,” then meekly gave in. But Lee was not meek, and he was not the man to forget. Now he was saying to George what he had forborne to say in November, that, armed with weapons, he was as powerful as any man. Belatedly, he was expressing resentment at George’s interference and warning him not to try his physical superiority again—not on him and not on Marina.
Lee was making still another statement. He was saying that in politics as in physical strength, he was as good a man as George, a better one, in fact. “You talk—I act,” Lee seems to have been saying. He had even made an attempt to act out George’s ideas for him. And now he was declaring that no matter where it might lead, even to death, the plebeian son was prepared to go his aristocratic father one better.
In addition to the many meanings implicit in the photograph, George may have played other roles in Lee’s fantasy life. George was the only person Lee knew who had connections “at the top,” to President and Mrs. Kennedy. By virtue of his acquaintance with Jacqueline Kennedy and her mother, George had written to the president and asked him to provide a preface for his book about his adventures in Mexico. He supposed that these adventures fitted admirably with the president’s physical fitness campaign. Throughout the winter when Lee and George knew one another, George was awaiting a reply. Thus it is possible that George was an emotional lightning rod linking Lee’s fantasies about the presidency—clearly, he had such fantasies, since he wanted his “son” to be president and even wanted to be president himself—to the real human being who was president. Anything George said about the Kennedys in Lee’s presence, although Marina recalls that it was very little, could have helped bring the president within Lee’s emotional range.
Finally, it is conceivable, although mere speculation, that the feelings Lee had for George were an emotional profile, a shadow, a clue, to feelings that he was later to develop for the president. For there were resemblances between the two. Both Kennedy and de Mohrenschildt were dashing and well-born men. Both had fathers who had loved them. Both were masters at keeping others at a distance. As George himself vanished from Lee’s life to recede into the jungles of Haiti, Lee may, without being aware of it, have taken the feelings he had for George and displaced some of them onto President Kennedy.
George’s stunning and insightful “How come you missed?” was the true end of the Walker affair for Lee because it stripped away the layers of rationalization and hit him full in the face with what it was he had really been after. Lee’s bullet had missed General Walker—but it had found its mark. Something George had said on the evening of February 13 caused Lee to feel that George had given him the sanction he required to go ahead and shoot General Walker. Now, on April 13, George had given him the recognition, the token of admiration Lee desired. By his uncanny remark as he came in the door on that excruciating Easter eve, George had shown that a part of him understood “who did it, and why, and how.” That was what Lee had wanted.
And so the next day, Easter Sunday, April 14, just after supper but before dark, Lee returned to his hiding place by the railroad tracks, dug up his rifle, and carried it home. The publicity and the manhunt that followed the attempt had subsided anyhow, with disappointing speed as far as Lee was concerned.
Marina knew her husband well. She saw that he still was keyed up and tense and that, because of the failure of his attempt, he had a reservoir of unexpended inner energy and was casting about for a way to use it. She was afraid that he would take another shot at Walker. When he came home that night, she begged him to sell the rifle. “We need the money for food,” she said.
“Money evaporates like water,” Lee answered. “I’ll keep it.”
Marina felt helpless to change his mind, and she did not nag him. She was correct in her fear that Lee might be dangerous still, but what she did not understand was that his mind was like a stove: he might have one pot bubbling away on the front burner, taking up nearly all his attention, but he generally had another pot or two simmering away at the back; and when his obsession with the front pot eased or when he met resistance, he was quite capable of moving one of those pots up front. That is what he briefly did now.
Cuba, as always, was in the news, with calls for a new invasion and the overthrow of Castro being sounded by the nest of exiled leaders in Miami and their powerful supporters in Congress and at intermediate levels of the Pentagon. These calls from the right to which Lee was steadily exposed in the two Dallas dailies were mirrored on the left by two of the weeklies he subscribed to, the Militant and the Worker, which were demanding a “hands-off” policy toward Cuba on the part of the Kennedy administration.
Lee, moving his preoccupation with Cuba from the back of his mind to the front, decided to act. In his little “office” he fashioned a placard: “Hands Off Cuba! Viva Fidel!” He hung it around his neck and went out, quite possibly on the day after digging up his rifle, to stand on a street corner and hand out pro-Castro leaflets. He wrote with pride to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), a pro-Castro organization based in New York, that he had distributed all his leaflets—some fifteen or so—in forty minutes. “I was cursed as well as praised by some,” he reported and asked to have forty or fifty more pamphlets sent to him at his Dallas address. The committee mailed them at the end of the week, on Friday, April 19.[13]
Thus, only days after his attempt on General Walker, Lee had once again invited the attention of the Dallas police—and in a manner that must have seemed guaranteed to obtain it. Once again he failed. Not a clue came to light that linked him to the Walker affair, and his demonstration on behalf of Castro went unnoticed.
Marina did not know about the picketing. But she heard Lee talk in his sleep again that week, and she watched as he scanned every edition of the Dallas papers looking, as she knew, for his name. He longed for publicity and attention. From this, from the reluctance with which he had burned his papers about the Walker attempt, and from his refusal to get rid of the rifle that might incriminate him, she also understood that Lee had wanted to be caught.
Marina was now aware that Dallas was a dangerous place for Lee, dangerous because it was full of temptation, and by “temptation” she meant General Walker. If she had failed in her effort to make Lee get rid of his rifle, she could try to do the next best thing—get him out of town. Just as quickly as she could, she would remove him from proximity to his target. She told him that she longed to move to New Orleans. New Orleans was a port city, she pointed out, and she had been raised in one, too—Archangel. “I’d like to see the city you were born and grew up in,” she said, adding that she had heard a lot about his relatives there, especially his “good” aunt Lillian Murret, and was eager to meet them.
13
It is possible that Oswald handed out pro-Castro leaflets