As to whether or not he was susceptible to influence, a few months before in Dallas, eager for George de Mohrenschildt’s approval, he does appear, without his or de Mohrenschildt’s being aware of it consciously, to have been influenced to shoot at General Walker. But after April he had no George de Mohrenschildt. With the possible exception of Marina, there was no one in his environment whose love and approval he craved. Even if there was an attempt to influence him by someone who might have known him casually—and there appears to have been no such person in his life—the metaphor of the pool hall seems appropriate. Someone desiring to influence Lee might shoot a ball, an idea, at him, but there was no way to predict how it might come caroming off.
Judging by the eagerness he had shown to be off for Mexico, one might expect that Lee would have left on Monday, the 23rd, the same day that Ruth and Marina left New Orleans. He did not leave until Wednesday, the 25th, and his movements over the next two days have given rise to conflicting testimony, even among eyewitnesses, as well as to much controversy.[1]
On Sunday, while Lee was loading Ruth’s station wagon, Jesse Garner, spotting nearly all the Oswalds’ belongings in the car, asked him if he was leaving.[2] Lee, who owned two weeks’ rent, said no. His wife was going to Texas to have her baby and would return. He was staying there. He did stay in New Orleans for two more days, but his movements were so furtive that neighbors could not agree on when they saw him actually leave the apartment. Two of them reported later that they saw Lee racing to catch a bus on the corner, carrying a piece of luggage in each hand, at five or six in the evening. But one of them thought it was Monday, the other that it was Tuesday evening. On Wednesday Jesse Garner entered the Oswalds’ apartment and found it empty. Lee was gone.
Whether or not he stayed in the apartment Monday or Tuesday night, Lee was obviously trying to cheat the Garners out of the rent. That appears to have been the only secret activity in which he was engaged during those two days. Moreover, money was also the reason he waited until Wednesday to leave for Mexico City. He had only about $150 for his trip, and by staying in New Orleans on Tuesday, he was able to visit the Louisiana Employment Commission and file claim for the next to last of the thirteen unemployment compensation checks to which he was entitled from the State of Texas. He filed the claim, and the check was forwarded to him the following week in care of Michael Paine in Irving.
By waiting until Wednesday morning, Lee was also able to go to his post office box at the Lafayette Square substation and pick up the $33 unemployment compensation check for which he had filed a claim the week before. While there, he popped a change-of-address card in the mailbox, and it was stamped at the main post office at 11:00 A.M. According to postal officials, this meant that Lee had picked up his check at the Lafayette Square post office station no later than 10:20 that morning. He then went to the Winn-Dixie store on Magazine Street (on his street, but not the branch store he generally patronized) and cashed the check sometime before noon. He had, in all probability, already deposited his baggage at the bus terminal, which gave him freedom to complete all his business on Wednesday morning without risking a return to the apartment and a confrontation with Mr. Garner. And by cashing his $33 check at a store where he was not known, he also hoped to avoid being seen or recognized by his neighbors. He owed Mr. Garner for fifteen or sixteen days, one-half of his monthly rental of $65. He therefore saved almost exactly $33, the same amount as his unemployment check.
Lee’s departure from New Orleans resembled his departure nearly five months earlier from Dallas. Both times Ruth and Marina left ahead of him, and both times he stayed at the apartment and checked his luggage at the bus terminal prior to his departure. Lee probably left New Orleans at 12:20 P.M. on Wednesday by Continental Trailways Bus No. 5121, bound for Houston. There were no eyewitnesses to his arrival there, but after that he blazed a fairly conspicuous trial.
That night in Houston, a woman named Estelle Twiford, the wife of a merchant seaman named Horace Elroy Twiford, received a telephone call at her home from a man who identified himself as Lee Harvey Oswald. He said that he was on his way “by air” to Mexico, would be in town a few hours, and would like “to discuss ideas” with her husband. Mrs. Twiford told him that her husband was out of town. Lee left his name and said that he was with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Mrs. Twiford relayed the message to her husband the next time he was home.
Twiford was a member of the Socialist Labor Party. Earlier in the summer, in response to a request for literature from Oswald, the Socialist Labor Party in New York had passed on Oswald’s name to Twiford. He then mailed Oswald at least one issue of a small paper he put out called the Weekly People. That was the only knowledge the Twifords had of Oswald, and his telephone call was their only contact.[3]
Lee left Houston about 2:35 on Thursday morning, September 26, aboard Continental Trailways Bus No. 5133, transferred to Mexican Red Arrow Bus No. 516 at Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and arrived in Mexico City about 10:00 A.M. on Friday, September 27. He made no secret of his identity or the reason for his trip. He told Dr. and Mrs. John B. McFarland, an English couple who were fellow passengers, that he was secretary of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans. He was going to Mexico to evade the American ban on travel to Cuba, he said, and was on his way to Cuba to see Castro if he could.[4]
Lee also got into conversation with two Australian girls on the bus. He asked if they had been to Russia, took out his old US passport to show them his Soviet visa, and said he had lived there two years. While he acted very much the world traveler, the girls noticed that he was at a loss with the Spanish menus. Thus, every two hours, when the passengers disembarked for a food and rest stop, Lee was unable to pick and choose—he just pointed at something on the menu and had to eat a full meal. He told the girls he loved Mexican food. Their nickname for him was “Texas.” Although “Texas” ate every meal alone, he did make an exception for the McFarlands, with whom he had breakfast as they were approaching Mexico City on Friday morning.[5]
Less than an hour after his arrival, Lee was installed in Room 18 of the Hotel del Comercio, four blocks from the bus terminal. The room cost $1.28 a day, and the maid was impressed not only by the paucity of his personal effects but by the fact that he did his own laundry, leaving a few items to dry in the bathroom each time he went out.[6]
He lost no time getting about his business and spent most of Friday and Saturday bouncing back and forth between the Soviet and Cuban embassies, which were located at some distance from his hotel but within a few blocks of one another.[7] At the Soviet embassy he told the consular official with whom he spoke, probably Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov, that his wife, a Soviet citizen, had applied several months earlier to return to the USSR with their child. He said that he had been in touch with the Soviet embassy in Washington about a reentry visa for himself, and he displayed various pieces of evidence of his prior residence in the USSR and his membership in a pro-Castro organization in the United States.
1
The controversy arises from a statement by a woman named Sylvia Odio that a man resembling Oswald, and using the name “Leon Oswald,” visited her in Dallas on the evening of Wednesday, September 25, in the company of two anti-Castro Cubans to discuss a plot to kill President Kennedy. Her statements were taken seriously by some staff lawyers for the Warren Commission and checked extensively during the Commission’s investigations and later by conspiracy theorists. The Warren Commission found no corroboration for her story. Moreover, had Oswald had any reason to be in Dallas in September 25, he could have driven there with Ruth and Marina, kept his appointment, and gone to Mexico City by bus from Dallas instead of New Orleans.
3
Mrs. Twiford remembers that she received the call sometime between 7:00 and 10:00 P.M. on the evening of the 25th, and she assumes that it was a local call. Her recollection could be in error, for Oswald probably did not arrive in Houston until nearly 11:00 P.M. that evening. Or he may have made the call about 8:10 P.M. from Beaumont, Texas, a stop en route to Houston from New Orleans. There is no evidence that Oswald traveled by air either to or from Houston. (Sources include, besides the 1963 bus schedules, Affidavits of Horace Elroy Twiford and Mrs. Estelle Twiford, Vol. 11, pp. 179–180; letters to the author from Edward L. Ramsdell, assistant traffic manager of Continental Trailways in Boston, Massachusetts, January 13 and 16, 1976; letter to the author from Harold E. Donovan, public relations supervisor, New England Telephone Co., January 23, 1976; and conversation with Ms. Sandra Young, Public Relations Department, Southwestern Bell, Houston, Texas, January 16, 1976.) Oswald had told Ruth Paine that he had a contact who might help him find a job in Houston. Like most of his lies, this had a germ of truth in it. He did have a Houston contact, Twiford, but it was a political contact and had nothing to do with a job.
5
Testimony of Pamela Mumford, Vol. 11, pp. 215–224; Exhibit No. 2194, Vol. 25, pp. 20–24; and Warren Commission Document No. 78, p. 6.
6
Warren Commission Document No. 963, p. 13. The document appears to have been declassified November 5, 1973.
7
The account of Oswald’s relations with the Soviet and Cuban embassies is drawn from the following sources: Warren Commission Report, pp. 733–736; Exhibit No. 2464, Vol. 25, pp. 636–637; Warren Commission Document No. 994, dated May 28, 1964, with appended translation, pp. 5–7; Warren Commission Document No. 651, March 11, 1964, declassified October 2, 1975, p. 30; Warren Commission Document No. 426, February 21, 1964, declassified January 14, 1971, p. 4; 111-page Memo to J. Lee Rankin from William T. Coleman Jr., and W. David Slawson, February 14, 1964, entitled “Oswald’s Foreign Activities: Summary of Evidence Which Might Be Said to Show that There Was Foreign Involvement in the Assassination of President Kennedy,” declassified March 13, 1975, pp. 91–96.