Michael had another thought. He did not resent Lee lying on his floor, watching his television, and crowding his house a bit. But he did feel that for a man who professed to be a revolutionary, Lee had an awful lot of time on his hands. To be a revolutionary, Michael thought, is a perfectly good and valid thing. But if Lee wanted to be a revolutionary, he ought to go out and be one. To lie around watching television all day, Michael said to himself, “is one hell of a way for a revolutionary to be spending his time.”[14]
Late in the afternoon Ruth gave Lee his third driving lesson—backing, parking, and a right-angle turn. She thought Lee really got the feel of parking that day.
In the evening she decided to rearrange the living room furniture, and she asked Lee and Michael to help. Preceding them into the room, she saw Lee’s letter still in full view on her desk. She popped it inside the folding front and the three of them moved the furniture around. When they were through, she put the letter gingerly back where it had been before.[15]
At the end of the evening, Ruth was still upset by the letter and knew that it would be a while before she could get to sleep. She sat on the sofa next to Lee, who was watching a spy mystery, hoping to ask him about the letter. She wanted to say, “What is this I found on my desk?” But she did not want him to think that she was watching him, and she was fearful. Mostly, the letter made her think that something was wrong with Lee mentally. But supposing he was a spy. Would it not be better in that case just to give the letter to the FBI? Ruth did not know what to do.
Suddenly, Lee turned sweet with her. “I guess you are real upset about going to the lawyer, aren’t you?” he asked sympathetically, knowing that Ruth was to see a divorce lawyer in a day or two.
Ruth was disarmed. It had been thoughtful of Lee to ask. She watched the mystery a moment longer, then left him and went to bed.[16]
It was the Veterans Day weekend, and Lee did not have to go to work on Monday. Ruth was gone the first part of the day and parked her children with a neighbor, leaving the Oswalds to themselves. Lee was pensive and withdrawn. He sat alone in the backyard on the children’s swings. Then he came into the house and went back to work on his letter. He told Marina that he was writing the Soviet embassy in Washington to complain about the FBI. He even asked her to sign it. She refused. She was sorry he was fussing with the embassy again, but somehow she felt that she was never going to have to go back to Russia.
She noticed that Lee was nervous. He typed the letter twice before he got it right and had to do the envelope at least four times.[17] Once he put the return address where the embassy’s address ought to be and other times he simply left letters out of the address.
Lee’s letter is similar but not identical to the draft version Ruth had seen. In one significant change in the next to last paragraph of the final version, he betrayed his newly made promise to Marina that they would never return to Russia. The paragraph read: “Please inform us of the arrival of our Soviet entrance visa’s as soon as they come.”[18]
That Monday afternoon, while they were hanging up diapers again, Lee and Marina had another talk about the FBI. After Christmas the two of them expected that they would have saved enough money to find an apartment of their own. Lee insisted that their new address should remain a secret from the FBI. But Marina told him that after all Ruth had done for them, she could and would not turn her back on Ruth and keep their address a secret. How, then, to keep it secret from the FBI?
“I know,” said Lee. “Ruth is too honest. If you ask her not to say a certain thing, she won’t be able not to. She doesn’t know how to lie. She’ll tell them where we are living and how. And I don’t want the FBI to know anything about me.”
Marina repeated that it would be a “swinish” trick not to give Ruth their address. She liked Ruth and wanted to remain her friend.
“I’ll think of something,” said Lee.
And he did.[19]
The next morning, Tuesday, November 12, he kissed Marina goodbye while she was still in bed. He lifted Rachel’s foot and kissed it, too. “She’s so warm. And I’ve got to go to work.” Then he either left his letter to the Soviet embassy for Ruth to mail along with her letters, or he dropped it into a mailbox opposite the house of Wesley Frazier, with whom he was riding into town. The letter bears the postmark: “Irving, Texas, 5:00 P.M., November 12.”[20]
Lee reported for work at the book depository, and during the noon hour, taking Ruth’s advice, in a way, he went to the main FBI office at 1114 Commerce Street, not far from the depository. He walked up to the receptionist, Nanny Lee Fenner, looking “awfully fidgety,” with what she later said was “a wild look in his eye” and an unsealed envelope in his hand. He asked if Agent Hosty was in, and she told him Hosty was out to lunch. “Well, get this to him,” he said and tossed the envelope on her desk. He turned and walked back to the elevator.
Soon afterward Hosty stopped by. “Some nut left this for you,” Mrs. Fenner said and handed Hosty the letter. The envelope, a 10-inch white business envelope, had one word written across it—“Hasty.” It contained a single sheet of eight-by-ten-inch bond paper. It had no greeting, no signature, and no return address. There were only two handwritten paragraphs. One stated that Hosty had been interviewing the wife of the author without permission, and the author did not like it. If you want to see me, come to me. Don’t bother my wife, it said. In the next paragraph the writer warned that if Hosty did not stop talking to his wife, he would be forced to take action against the FBI. He did not say what that action would be.[21]
Since the note was not signed, Hosty was not certain who had left it. He surmised that it might be Oswald or one other person who had been giving him trouble. Either way the complaint seemed “innocuous,” the kind he got a good many of, and it did not appear to require action. He put it in his work box and left it.[22]
Oswald’s letter to the Soviet Embassy and his warning note to the FBI are the work of a man who had come a long way in only a few days down the road of his own delusions. It is true that Oswald had suffered an accumulation of disappointments in the year and a half since his return from Russia and had lately suffered a serious blow at the hands of Castro’s chief consul in Mexico City. The letter to the Soviet embassy confirms what Marina had noticed: an ebbing of her husband’s enthusiasm for Cuba and a revival of his faith in the USSR. But what apparently completed his inner undoing, and in little more than a week, were the visits of FBI Agent James P. Hosty to the Paine household on November 1 and 5.
The FBI is, indeed, an organization with an exceptional capacity to magnetize, then crystallize, the fears and longings of many people. And Oswald’s feelings toward the FBI did contain an element of longing, did have their favorable side. In a New Orleans jail only a few months earlier, he had asked to see an agent of the FBI, and his request had been granted. The FBI’s attention elated him then, for it was proof of his importance. Moreover, his summoning the FBI into his life that summer, two months after he had for the first and only time paid a visit to the grave of his father, suggests that for Oswald as for others, the FBI was a symbolic father whose approval and protection he craved.
Now it was altogether different. Oswald’s state of mind was no longer what it had been in August. And this time, unlike the last, it was the FBI that was coming after him. To Oswald this apparently meant only one thing—he was about to suffer retribution for all his sins, both those he had actually committed and those that existed only in his imagination. It was not simply a loving father who had found him out, but an avenging one. It was this he had been dreading; it was for this he had been waiting, all his life.
14
Testimony of Michael R. Paine, Vol. 2, p. 412; and conversation with Michael Paine, August 23, 1973.
17
In her testimony before the Warren Commission, Vol. 1, p. 45, Marina stated that he had to do the envelope “ten times,” but in conversation with the author she said it was more like four.
19
Interestingly, Oswald’s solution, his visit to FBI headquarters, incorporated Ruth’s advice that he go straight to the FBI. It did not, of course, incorporate the rest of her advice, that he tell them everything they wanted to know.
20
According to the Warren Commission Report, pp. 439–440, the FBI in Washington became aware of Oswald’s letter to the Soviet embassy on November 18 and routinely informed the Dallas office. Hosty learned of it only on the afternoon of November 22.
21
No one in the Dallas office of the FBI in November 1963 recalls on what day the note was delivered, although Mrs. Fenner’s memory and other evidence suggest that it was delivered on the earliest possible date, November 12.
In his letter to the Soviet embassy mailed that day, Oswald claimed that he had already made his protest to the FBI. This was false, for he knew of Hosty’s second visit when he wrote the embassy, and he only learned of that visit on Friday, November 8. Because of the long holiday weekend, Tuesday, November 12, was the first day Oswald could have left the note. He would have to have been severely upset to go to the FBI offices at all. In fact, he picked a time when he could be almost certain that Hosty would be out. But when he was severely upset, he had a tendency to act quickly. All of this suggests that he delivered the note on November 12. The question has arisen whether he delivered it during the week of November 18, the week of the assassination itself. It is unlikely that Oswald would have called attention to himself by going to FBI headquarters with such a note at a time when he was thinking of killing the president. Thus Mrs. Fenner’s recollection that the note was delivered ten days before the assassination in itself is evidence that Oswald was not yet considering the act.
Testifying before the US House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights (
James Hosty’s description of the way the note was folded inward, with the writing inside, is in contradiction with Mrs. Fenner’s description, and his account of the contents also is at variance with hers (Hearings,
22
On November 22, 1963, on his return from interviewing Oswald in the Dallas County Jail, Hosty was confronted at the FBI office by Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin with the note that Oswald had left several days earlier. Shanklin, who appeared “agitated and upset,” asked Hosty about the circumstances in which he had received the note and about his visits to Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald. On Shanklin’s orders Hosty dictated a two- to four-page memorandum setting forth all he knew, and he gave the memorandum, in duplicate, to Shanklin.
Between two and four hours after Oswald’s death on November 24, Shanklin summoned Hosty. Hosty recalls that Shanklin was standing in front of his desk and that he reached into a lower right-hand drawer and took out both the memorandum and Oswald’s note. “Oswald is dead now,” he said. “There can be no trial. Here, get rid of this.” Hosty started to tear up the documents in Shanklin’s presence. “No,” Shanklin shouted. “Get it out of here. I don’t even want it in this office. Get rid of it.” Hosty then took the note and memorandum out of Shanklin’s office, tore them up, and flushed them down a toilet at the FBI. A few days later Shanklin asked Hosty whether he had destroyed Oswald’s note and the memorandum, and Hosty assured him that he had. (Hosty’s testimony appears in Hearings,
Meanwhile, on November 23, Ruth Paine had given Hosty Oswald’s handwritten draft of his November 9–11 letter to the Soviet embassy (Oswald having left it on Ruth’s desk when he left the house on November 12, as if he wished her to find it), and a day or so later, she gave another FBI agent the copy she had made in her own hand on November 10. Hosty and the second agent, Bardwell Odum, told Shanklin about the letters, and again, from his remarks, they thought he was ordering their destruction. The two agents concluded that Shanklin was on the edge of a nervous breakdown; instead of destroying Oswald’s letter, they sent both copies to the FBI in Washington (Exhibits No. 15 and 103, Vol. 16, pp. 33–34 and 443–444).
Hosty’s testimony makes it appear that his answers on an internal FBI questionnaire were subsequently falsified either by Shanklin or by someone in FBI headquarters in Washington to admit “poor investigative work” in the Oswald case. Hosty received letters of censure from J. Edgar Hoover, was placed on probation, was reprimanded for his Warren Commission testimony, and demoted to Kansas City. Years later a promotion that was recommended for him was blocked by Clyde Tolson, chief deputy of J. Edgar Hoover. Except for Shanklin and two others, every FBI agent who had anything to do with the Oswald case in 1962 or 1963 was censured, transferred, demoted, or barred from promotion, while Shanklin received several letters of commendation from Hoover. The treatment of Hosty appears extraordinary, since it was he who saw that Oswald might warrant looking into and had recommended that the case be reopened in March 1963, after it had been closed for several months.
The statements of several witnesses before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights were at variance, particularly those of Hosty and Shanklin. Shanklin under oath denied that he had told Hosty to destroy the note and did not recall the rest of the incident as Hosty recounted it. Members of the subcommittee warned Shanklin, who is now retired, that he might be exposing himself to prosecution under federal perjury statutes. But prosecution has not been brought.