There was something else, too. Maybe Marina described Hosty’s visits in a teasing, slightly provocative manner, or maybe Oswald merely took her description that way, but the visits evidently caused him to feel that his sexual hold over her was in jeopardy.
Thus the threat that the Hosty visits held for Oswald could scarcely have lain deeper than it did. It was a threat that was both heterosexual and homosexual in nature, for it entailed the threat of being found out and punished for his “sins,” on the one hand, and, on the other, the threat and promise of unification, of being joined with and becoming part of the symbolic father whom Oswald dreaded and loved at the same time.
The visits to Ruth and Marina by an obscure agent of the FBI appear to have been linked in Lee’s mind with the forthcoming visit by President Kennedy, which was now only ten days away. Since Hosty was an emissary of the government, his arrival was like a herald, or a precursor, of President Kennedy’s. And since Hosty’s status with the FBI made him a sort of stand-in for a father, his visits were a paradigm, an emotional equivalent, of the president’s.
Ironically, the visits to Irving by an agent of the United States government appear to have been a catalyst and a precipitating element of the events that lay ahead.[23]
— 35 —
The President’s Visit
Ruth Paine had a lot on her mind. She was teaching part time and, besides attending to her own children’s needs, she was busy ferrying Marina and her children to the dental and medical clinics where they had appointments. Lee’s presence throughout the long Veterans Day weekend had been a strain on her. And on top of that had been her discovery of Lee’s letter to the Soviet embassy and her perplexity about what to do.
Ruth now had two copies of Lee’s letter: the one she had made and the handwritten original that Lee had left on her desk, either out of carelessness or because he wanted her to see it. She decided to consult Michael. The next time he came to the house, probably on Tuesday, November 12, she handed him Lee’s letter. “I never knew he was such a liar,” she said, and she asked Michael to take a look.
Michael was sitting by the picture window in the living room, gazing outside and reading Time. He was daydreaming, he later said, of another job and another wife—“another fate and another mate.” The harder Ruth tried to claim his attention, the harder he resisted.[1] Finally, he glanced at the letter, but he read the opening not as “Dear Sirs” but as “Dear Lisa.” What on earth was Ruth doing, he thought, reading Lee’s mail? He resented her being so nosy. He read on, however, and saw that Lee was writing about an encounter with the FBI. Michael imagined that he was boasting of his fictional exploits to some friend.
“Yes, it is shocking that he’ll make up stories like that,” Michael said, handing the letter nonchalantly back to Ruth. He, too, thought the letter was an example of Lee’s “colossal lying.”
Ruth asked whether he thought they ought to do something about it.
“Let’s have another look,” Michael said.
“Oh, never mind.” Ruth was annoyed. “If you didn’t get it the first time, forget it.”
Michael’s lack of interest deflated Ruth. Had he responded, she might have taken the initiative and gone to the FBI herself. As it was, she did nothing, although if Hosty had come by again that week, she would probably have given him the letter.
Would it have made any difference? Between them the Paines knew a lot about Lee. He was not just an angry misfit; they both suspected there was more to it than that. Suppose they had been on better terms with each other and had pooled everything that between them they now knew or guessed about Lee. Suppose they had decided to give Lee’s letter to the FBI. Would it have changed anything?
The answer appears to be no. The FBI had opened its file on Lee Harvey Oswald in October 1959, at the time of his defection to the Soviet Union; when he returned to the United States in 1962, FBI agents interviewed him twice in Fort Worth. It was decided that he was not a security risk, and in August 1962, his case was closed. The FBI continued to gather such information about him as came its way, but there were no further investigations. As a Soviet citizen, however, Marina remained of interest to the FBI, and she, as a “pending, inactive case,” was assigned to Agent Hosty of the Dallas office. In checking on her whereabouts in March 1963, Hosty learned of her troubled marriage. When he reviewed Oswald’s file and found that he was subscribing to the Worker, a Communist publication, he recommended that his case be reopened.
From that time on, the FBI kept a check on Oswald, but it was consistently six weeks to three months behind his movements. He was traced to New Orleans, for example, but jurisdiction over his case was transferred to the New Orleans office only in September, as Oswald was getting ready to leave for Mexico. After the bureau learned through the CIA in October that he had been in touch with the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, it intensified its search for his whereabouts; but it was not until the end of that month that Marina was traced to the Paines’. When Hosty visited Ruth and Marina in the first week of November, he learned where Oswald worked in Dallas, but he still did not know where he lived, and jurisdiction over the case had not yet been transferred from New Orleans back to the Dallas office.
When jurisdiction had been transferred, and when he had learned Oswald’s home address, Hosty, who was usually assigned to watch right-wing activists and members of the Ku Klux Klan, meant to follow up on Oswald. But as far as he was concerned, Oswald was a small fish, about one of forty or so cases that he was carrying in November.[2] Moreover, the FBI’s primary interest was in subversion. As a malcontent who had defected to the Soviet Union and returned with a Russian wife, there was always the chance that Oswald had been recruited as a spy and posed a threat to the political security of the United States. Hosty had accumulated enough evidence to warrant watching him for security reasons, yet there was nothing to suggest that he might pose a threat to the life of the president. It never crossed Hosty’s mind to cite Oswald to the Secret Service, the agency specifically charged with protecting the safety of the president.
Even if Ruth and Michael had given the FBI Oswald’s letter to the Soviet embassy, the most they might have accomplished was to cause the FBI to step up its surveillance of Oswald as a possible security threat. Hosty had, in fact, received a note that he suspected was from Oswald, but it did not alarm him or attract his particular attention. For the all-important missing ingredient was violence. Oswald was not known ever to have uttered a threat against the president or vice president. He was not known ever to have shot at anyone. That secret—the secret of Oswald’s attempt on General Walker—was locked up inside two people, Oswald himself and Marina.
There was one last irony. During the week following Hosty’s visit to the Paine household, the Secret Service and the FBI were busy with President Kennedy’s forthcoming visit. The visit had been announced on September 13, nearly two months before, but final confirmation that the president was to be in Dallas on November 22 was published only on November 8. On November 12 the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service arrived in Dallas and, working with the FBI and the local police, began to investigate possible threats to the president’s safety, which were, of course, believed to come from the right. Final details of the president’s visit were made known only on November 19. Hosty was not aware until the night of November 21 that the president was to have a motorcade through Dallas the next day. And not until the afternoon of November 22 did he realize that the motorcade had passed beneath the windows of the Texas School Book Depository, the place where he had discovered that Lee Harvey Oswald worked.
23
On April 19, 1963, President Kennedy delivered a speech on Cuba, and on April 22, Robert Kennedy made remarks in New York on Cuba that were reported in the
As for Castro, his interviews with Jean Daniel, foreign editor of the French newspaper
There is no evidence that Oswald ever felt much animus against Kennedy because of his Cuban policies or that such animus played any part in his decision to kill Kennedy. To the contrary, Oswald gave every appearance of having lost interest in Castro by November 1963, and to have shot Kennedy for totally different reasons.
2
In his testimony before the Warren Commission in 1964, Hosty said that he was carrying twenty-five to forty cases in November 1963; but in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights in 1975, he said that he had been carrying forty to fifty cases.