The talk turned to Castro. Hosty remarked that from what he had read in the American papers, he thought Castro was a threat to the interests of the United States. Marina said she doubted that the American press was being fair. Hosty said he knew of Lee’s activities passing out pamphlets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans and asked whether he was doing anything similar in Dallas. Marina thought of the series of childhood diseases her husband had lately been passing through and said cheerily: “Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s just young. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He won’t do anything like that here.”
Before Hosty left, Marina begged him not to interfere with Lee at work. She explained that he had had trouble keeping his jobs and thought he lost them “because the FBI is interested in him.” (He had, in fact, blamed the loss of his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall on the FBI, but not the loss of his job in New Orleans.)
“I don’t think he has lost any of his jobs on account of the FBI,” Hosty said softly.
Ruth and Marina urged the visitor to stay. If he wanted to see Lee, they said, he would be there at 5:30. But Hosty had to get back to the office; and since he did not have a second man present (as is the FBI custom during an interview), and since the New Orleans office had jurisdiction over the case until it was established that Oswald had a residence in Dallas, he was not eager to see Lee. But he asked Ruth to find out where he was living. Ruth thought that would be no problem; she would simply ask Lee.
Hosty had another reason for not being anxious to see Lee. The FBI had learned of his visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and was now worried about him as an “espionage case.” The bureau did not want to give away to him either what it knew of his trip or the techniques by which it had acquired knowledge. “We would be telling him more than he would be telling us,” Hosty said.[4]
Hosty’s visit ended as it began, on a friendly note. Marina was all smiles. She would be glad to have such a pleasant visitor any day. Hosty wrote out his name, office address, and telephone number for Ruth to give to Lee. Since Ruth was sure Lee had nothing to hide, she expected that he would go straight to the FBI himself.
Lee arrived late that afternoon in a fine, outgoing frame of mind. But when Marina told him about Hosty’s visit, his face darkened. He wanted to know everything—what Ruth had said, how long the man stayed, and what he had said. Marina explained that she had not understood much, and Lee scolded her. Marina was astonished at how nervous he had suddenly become, and at the effort he was making to conceal it.
While they were at supper Ruth, too, told Lee about Hosty’s visit. “Oh,” said Lee, elaborately casual, “and what did he say?” Ruth described their conversation and handed Lee the slip of paper with Hosty’s telephone number and address.
Ruth realized that both Lee and Marina were afraid. She had heard that fear of the FBI was typical of many people coming out of Russia, especially if they were Russian. To reassure them and show that she was not afraid, she told them of her experience during World War II, when her brother and many of his friends were conscientious objectors. Ruth had been only a high school student, but she realized that the FBI was visiting the neighbors and asking about her brother and his friends. So far from threatening their rights, she concluded that the FBI had protected them. She told Lee and Marina that the FBI men she had seen were “careful and effective.”
Ruth was certain that Lee was not an agent and knew nothing of interest to a foreign power. It seemed clear to her that he was “neither bright enough nor steady enough to have been recruited” by anyone.[5] Since he had nothing to hide, she thought by far the best thing he could do was go to the FBI office, preempting their initiative, and tell them everything they wanted to know. Only in this way would they, too, see that he had nothing to hide.
Marina was watching Lee’s reactions. To her eye he was a changed man. He was sad and subdued throughout supper, and he scarcely spoke a word all evening long. For the first time since his return from Mexico, there was no sex at all between them that weekend, not even the limited sex that had been possible since Rachel’s birth. The next day he again asked Ruth about the visit. Marina could tell that he was straining to catch every word, yet at the same time trying not to betray his nervousness.
He put diapers in the washing machine for Marina, hung them on the line, and tried to carry on his family life as usual. No one but Marina understood how distraught he really was. During the afternoon he watched a football game on television, and his spirits seemed to improve. Then he drew Marina aside and instructed her that the next time the FBI came she was to study the car with care, note what color it was, what model, and write down the license number. They might send a different agent, he explained, but the car would still be the same. He even told Marina where to look for it. If the car was not across the way from Ruth’s, he said, it would be down the street in front of the neighbors’. Marina was puzzled by his behavior. Again she could see that he was calculating at great speed, trying to think of everything, yet at the same time hide his anxiety. Still, telling her what to do seemed to calm him.
On Sunday Ruth gave Lee his second driving lesson—parking. He wanted to take June along, but Marina forbade it. “If you want to break bones, break your own,” she said.
He came back to the house pleased with himself. “I haven’t practiced much,” he boasted, “and look how well it’s going.”
His elation was momentary, however, and for the rest of the weekend Lee was withdrawn, taken up with thoughts of his own. Marina tried to leave him in peace, but by now she, too, was annoyed at the FBI. Not at Mr. Hosty—she knew he was only doing his job—but at the astonishing change his visit had wrought in Lee and in their relationship. Everything between them had been wonderful, or nearly wonderful, for a month. Now he would hardly speak to her.
Lee went to work on Monday morning, and on Tuesday, November 5, Hosty came again. He was on his way to Fort Worth with another agent, and he decided to stop at the Paines’ to see if Ruth had Lee’s address. He says the interview was brief: “I didn’t go in the house. I just went in the front door.” Ruth met both men at the doorstep and said that Lee had been there over the weekend but she had not gotten his address. Lee had told her he was a Trotskyite, and Ruth said to Hosty, with a trace of amusement, that she considered him “a very illogical person.” Hosty asked Ruth whether in her opinion there might be anything wrong with Lee mentally. She answered, in a fairly light way, that she did not understand the thought processes of anyone who claimed to be a Marxist.
Hosty says he did not see Marina on this visit; Ruth says he did. Marina appeared toward the end of the visit, and both Ruth and Hosty were surprised to see her. Marina, for her part, remembers this visit as being the longer, and more charming, of her conversations with Hosty about her “rights.” She was no longer afraid. On the contrary, she was glad to see Hosty because, as she puts it, he had “a nice personality.” At the end of their conversation, however, she did appeal to him not to come again because news of his first visit had upset Lee very badly.
Ruth had thought, while she and Hosty were talking, that Marina was in her bedroom taking care of Rachel. So she was, but at some point—it could have been while Hosty and the other agent were at the doorway before they came in the house—she slipped out of the bedroom, into the kitchen and dining area, out of the kitchen door, and around the house.[6] She had no trouble finding Hosty’s car, and without the smallest feeling of being in a hurry—“I am a sneaky girl,” she laughs—she walked around and around it, trying to figure out what make it was. This she was unable to do because she could not read English. But she studied the color and memorized the license number. Then she came back inside the house. Once Hosty had gone, she wrote the number on a slip of paper and left it for Lee on their bureau.[7]
4
Testimony of James P. Hosty before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights,
6
The floor plan, rear and front views, of the Paine house, are Commission Exhibits No. 430–437, Vol. 17, pp. 158–162.
7
As of this day, so many years after the assassination, Marina still does not know that the question of how she got the license number is a matter of acute debate among students of the event. They say that she could not have seen the license number from her position inside the house. In his testimony before the House Hearings (cited in note 3 above), p. 163, Hosty says he thinks he parked in the Paine driveway and that Marina could easily have taken down his number as he drove slowly up and down the street before and after the interview. Neither he nor anybody else realizes that Marina went outside and studied the car. J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI, said later that the number she took down was “incorrect in only one digit” (Testimony of J. Edgar Hoover, Vol. 5, p. 112).