Lee may still have hoped to get a job with the Militant or the Worker, and probably expected that he could form a more active link with either the Communist Party or the Socialist Workers Party in the Northeast than in Texas or Louisiana. And because the civil rights activities that were most heavily covered in the press, including the Militant, that summer—such as the highly publicized March on Washington in August and the unremitting racial turmoil in Cambridge, Maryland—had occurred in the Baltimore-Washington area, Lee may also have decided that it was in the Northeast that he would have the best chance of putting together a politically oriented life.
Lee acquired the Bulletin of the New York School for Marxist Study for the fall term of 1963. And he spent time composing a detailed résumé of his life, including his various activities: “Radio Speaker and Lecturer,” “Street Agitation,” “Organizer,” “Photographer,” “Marxist,” “Defector,” and “Resident of U.S.S.R.”[11] It was handwritten on looseleaf paper, and he evidently took it with him to Mexico. In one of the appendices included with the section called “Photographer” were the photographs he had taken of tax returns of Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, perhaps to prove to some intended recipient that his Marxist convictions were so strong he was not above rifling even the most private files of his capitalist employer.
It is fruitless to try to make the fragments of Lee Oswald’s mind fit together as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle. It is better to leave the puzzle loose, with fragments scattered here and there. But it is noteworthy that since his return form Russia, Lee had exchanged somewhere between fifty and seventy items of correspondence with the Soviet embassy in Washington (a necessity, since Marina was a soviet citizen), with the left-wing bookstore in Washington through which he subscribed to Soviet periodicals, and with left-wing newspapers and organizations in New York.[12] Much of the correspondence was routine—change of address cards, requests for speeches by Trotsky or for the words of the Communist hymn, “The Internationale.” But the volume of his correspondence was significant, and certain of his letters were very revealing. In October 1962, only five months after his return from Russia, Lee requested membership in the Socialist Workers Party, clearly his first choice. The party turned him down because it had no branch in Texas. He next applied for freelance photographic work in the Southwest for both the Militant and the Worker. Both responded politely, but nothing came of it. The FPCC, after one encouraging letter, proceeded to ignore him.
Obviously, these affiliations mattered to Lee. He had shot at General Walker partly to establish himself as a hero of the American left. And he was still trying to attach himself to left-wing causes. He needed a cause to belong to, something outside himself that was bigger than he was and could be reflected back into his inflated self-image to help sustain it. Yet the very same quality that required him to seek recognition also made any sort of real belonging wholly impossible. His self-image was so far out of line with reality that he was unable to see himself as others saw him or to deal with them on a real footing—as either an equal or a subordinate.
Lee had another difficulty, and it, too, arose out of his estrangement from reality. There was a flaw in his signal system, his antennae, his equipment for receiving messages. Lee picked up countless signals from newspapers and people and books, but somehow they were distorted in transmission. He was unable to understand what others were trying to say to him. Instead, he heard only what he wanted to hear. He lacked that capacity for communication that is at the heart of working with other people. The most he was capable of was a sort of pseudo-belonging to something very far away that existed only in his mind.
Yet here he was, on the eve of his departure for Cuba, trying, as he had been since boyhood, to belong to something—the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, one of their newspapers. And they scarcely knew who he was. Their letters were distant, polite, the sort of letter an organization writes to someone it is not actually rebuffing but with whom it has no relationship. To the American left, Lee Oswald did not exist. Yet this was the community he yearned to belong to and whose hero he hoped to become.
On Labor Day Lee called the Murrets and asked if he and his family could come for a visit. There, for the first time in two months, he saw his favorite cousin Marilyn. She had just returned from a two-month bus trip through Mexico, Central America, and Panama, and Lee soaked up everything she said.[13] He told no one that he intended to go to Mexico, let alone Cuba. The fact that three of the people he liked best, Marilyn and George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, had all been to Mexico, must have made an impression on Lee, but he gave no hint of that either.
The Murrets once again challenged Lee for discouraging Marina from learning English. His answer was as usual—he wanted to keep up his own Russian. His Aunt Lillian wanted to know why. “Do you intend to go back to Russia?” she asked.[14] Luckily for Lee, somebody broke into their conversation, and he was spared from having to meet his aunt’s perspicacity head on.
John Murret took Lee and Marina home that night. On the way he drove them past the church in which he was soon to be married and the large house in which his fiancée lived. Lee did not say anything, but Marina could tell that his fists were clenched in anger. Lee, she says, did not hate the owners of these houses, but he did hate the system that made it possible for anyone to be so wealthy. Stingy as he was, and forever saving up in little ways, Lee did not want a lot of money for himself. That was not where his ambition lay. Like virtually everyone who knew him, Marina, too, believes that her husband could not have been “bought.” What she sensed in him that night—an impression so strong that it was almost palpable—was his hatred of American capitalism.
It was less than three weeks before Marina would be leaving for Dallas and Lee for Mexico City. They might be parted for a short time, or forever, and those last weeks together in New Orleans contained episodes that were funny, touching, sad.
It was fearfully sultry and hot, and their only air-conditioning was an old kitchen fan. Lee went naked around the apartment a good deal of the time and sometimes spent the whole day lying on the sofa on his stomach, without a stitch on, reading a book. Marina warned him that it was bad for Junie to see him nude.
“Oh, she’s too young,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“By the time she’s that old, it will be too late.”
He played with Junie continually, took baths with her, and spent a good hour and a half putting her to bed every night. These were boisterous sessions, with Lee getting so much into the spirit that he sometimes leaped into Junie’s bed himself, as if the two of them were babies going to sleep together.
He behaved like a baby with Marina, too, competing with Junie for her attention. He might be lying on the sofa wearing a shirt. “Come here, girl,” he would summon Marina, and hold out one arm, then the other, to allow her to pull it off. It was the same way when he dressed. He would stick out one leg, then the other, and let Marina put on his underpants.
12
In the Hearings of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, Sessions One and Two on FBI Oversight, held on October 21, 1975, and December 11 and 12, 1975 (Serial No. 2, Part 3), it became apparent that the FBI had no regular mail cover on Oswald following his return to the United States. It therefore had no idea of the extent of his contacts either with the Soviet embassy or with domestic organizations on the left.
14
Testimony of Charles F. Murret, Vol. 8, p. 187; Testimony of Lillian Murret,