As a matter of fact, Michael was going to one that very night. It was a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a liberal organization to which he and Ruth belonged. It was to be held on the campus of Southern Methodist University, and he invited Lee to come along. Lee accepted. He whispered to Marina as they were leaving: “If only Michael knew what I wanted to do to Walker! Wouldn’t he be scared!”[11]
Michael asked Lee to the meeting because he sensed his bitterness. He wanted to “make him a little happier” and help him see that the gulf between what he desired and what might actually be achieved was not so unbridgeable as he supposed.[12] He also wanted to give Lee a sense of participation, a feeling that he, too, could be effective in bringing about change in quiet ways. And he wanted to encourage in Lee a more generous attitude toward those whom he conceived to be his “enemies.” In Michael’s view the world was complex. He hoped that Lee, too, would some day see it that way and accept the fact that “his enemies, the employers, were not so fully in control of the situation as he made out.”[13]
One of the speakers at the meeting happened to say that the mere fact of a man’s being a Bircher did not necessarily mean he was an anti-Semite. Lee rose. “I disagree with that,” he said, adding that he had been to a right-wing meeting two nights before at which spokesmen for the John Birch Society had made anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic statements. Michael said later that Lee spoke “loud and clear and coherently,” out of keeping with the mood of the meeting, but intelligibly nonetheless.[14]
After the meeting Lee talked with two of the men who had been there. One was a fellow worker of Michael’s, the other an older man. They talked about Cuba and civil rights. The president’s name came up, and Lee said, with what Michael’s friend subsequently considered to be a certain, special emphasis, that President Kennedy was doing a “real fine job” in civil rights.[15]
On the way home Michael and Lee talked about the people they had met. As the son of a Trotskyite who had tried to shield him from knowledge that could hurt him later, Michael had learned not to pry, not to ask another man outright what his opinions might be. And this is how he was with Lee. He was curious as to whether Lee might be a Communist, but he preferred to guess for himself from such signals as Lee chose to send out rather than ask him directly. A week or so earlier, Lee had hinted that he was a Communist. He showed Michael a copy of the Worker and said you could tell what “they” wanted you to do if only you read between the lines. Now Lee asked Michael whether, in his opinion, one of the men at the meeting was a party member. Michael did not think so. “I think he is,” Lee said, on the grounds that the man was pro-Castro. “If that’s the way Lee is meeting his Communists,” Michael said to himself, “then he hasn’t found the real group here in Dallas—supposing there is one.”[16] Michael concluded that Lee could not be a Communist after all, for his “communications,” his way of meeting like-minded people, were too tenuous.[17] Neither Lee’s judgment nor his way of going about things seemed to be those of a Communist.
During the same drive home, Michael explained what the ACLU was all about. He told Lee that its sole purpose was to defend civil liberties—free speech and other rights of the individual. Lee was amazed that any organization could exist merely to defend a value, as Michael put it later, and not to fight for a political objective. Lee remarked firmly that he could never join an organization like that—it wasn’t political enough.[18]
Another time Lee confessed to Michael, exasperated, that he could not fit him into a category. He wasn’t a Communist or a capitalist or a socialist or a Bircher or anything Lee could lay his hands on.[19] Soon, however, he did find a cubbyhole—Michael was religious. “He has religion, but he has no philosophy,” Lee confided to Marina with a superior air, which meant that he was now able to dismiss Michael.
As for Michael, he considered Lee’s style in relating himself to communism “Dick Tracyish.”[20] But being perceptive, Michael, out of three or four long conversations, subsequently put together a picture of Lee’s ideas that almost paraphrases the program and philosophy Lee himself had spelled out several months earlier, evidently as a historical justification of his attempt on General Walker. To this day Michael has never seen what Lee wrote, but he guessed from what Lee said to him that he did not believe in the goodness or dignity of man. Lee felt, to the contrary, that the majority of men are evil, conniving, and stupid. They are blind to their lot and prefer to remain that way. Their condition needs changing, yet they are fooled by the powers that be. Thus change, if it is to occur, is rotten and yet, paradoxically, strong because everything—the church, the power structure, the educational system—is all bound together to maintain things exactly as they are. Because of capitalism’s impermeable strength, peaceful change is impossible. Nothing but revolution will do. There would, Michael explains, in his paraphrase of Lee’s beliefs, “have to be an overthrow of the whole thing.”[21]
What Michael did not know was that Lee had already tried to change the system, both peacefully, in attempting to organize a Fair Play for Cuba chapter in New Orleans, and violently in attempting to shoot General Walker. And he had tried to become a revolutionary by going to fight for Castro.
Now knowing any of this, Michael was unable to piece together the whole of Lee’s “logic” at the time, but he was able to do so later on. And the rest of his reconstruction is this. Revolution was unlikely because the “power structure” was too strong. Thus the most the individual, acting alone, could do was to commit an act that would help destroy society not because of any sense it contained but because of its symbolic meaning.[22]
Lee had not yet followed his logic to its conclusion either, and he had no inkling that history was on the point of giving him an opportunity to act on it. But his logic, his experience since the Walker attempt, and his entire life, all were pointing him in the same direction, toward a decision to strike another violent blow, this one aimed at neither the right nor the left, but simply at the top—to decapitate the political process. Lee approved of and admired the man who happened to stand at the apex of American political life. But the better that man was, the more effective at making capitalism workable and attractive, then the more devastating the blow to capitalist society would be.[23]
Michael came to this fuller interpretation later on. What he did see in Lee that autumn was a quality that people had been noticing about him since his high school days and even now were noticing about him at work—his stoicism. During their discussions of October 1963, there were moments when Lee reminded Michael of nothing so much as Lawrence of Arabia holding his finger to a match. Lawrence said it was nothing—all you had to do was stand the pain. That was how Lee seemed to Michael, gritting his teeth and bearing pain.[24]
So, placed in what Michael calls “a duck-blind situation” in which he was unforeseeably granted a chance to alter the course of history, Lee, having despaired of peaceful change, would be able to act in only one way. But he would have to summon up all his stoicism to do it. He must not allow such kindly, personal feelings as he might harbor for the victim to stand in his way.[25]
11
In her testimony before the Warren Commission (Vol. 5, p. 396), Marina stated that after the meeting that night Lee told her, “Paine knows that I shot at Walker.” Marina later said her memory was in error. Lee made the remark, as quoted in the text, before the meeting.
17
Conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973; Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, pp. 418–419.
21
Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 401, and Vol. 11, pp. 402–403. It is ironic that of all people it was Michael Paine—who considered himself a failure with people, and who thought his father was a genius at drawing others out but despaired of ever being able to do so himself—who better than anyone else has explained Oswald’s intellectual justification for the assassination of President Kennedy. He did so, with brevity and clarity, in two of his three appearances before the Warren Commission. Had the Commission accepted Paine’s summary as a true statement of Oswald’s beliefs, and placed it side by side with Oswald’s writings, it might have presented the American people not with the whole of his motive by any means, but with a rational component—with what Oswald