Sharing the front pages with the Kennedy visit that weekend was another story in which Lee was interested. It concerned Frederick C. Barghoorn, a Yale political science professor who had been arrested for “espionage” during a visit to the USSR. The story broke on November 12. Two days later, on Thursday, President Kennedy made the Barghoorn case the centerpiece of what was to be his last press conference. The president asserted vigorously that Professor Barghoorn was not a spy, and he broke off the cultural exchange negotiations with the Soviet Union that were then in progress until Barghoorn was released. On Saturday, November 16, one of the Dallas dailies featured on its front page an AP story reporting Barghoorn’s release, together with the White House announcement that the presidential motorcade would loop through downtown Dallas.
Lee told Marina about Barghoorn’s arrest, apparently over the telephone, shortly after the story broke on November 12, adding that he had read about it in the newspapers and heard about it on the radio as well. He was sorry for Barghoorn. “Poor professor,” Lee said. “He’s the victim of a Russian provocation. It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.”
Nor was it the first time Lee had taken an interest in the plight of Americans caught in the USSR. He had followed the case of Francis Gary Powers. First Powers and now Barghoorn were accused of being spies, both were imprisoned in Soviet jails, both attracted worldwide publicity, and both touched the politics of the presidency. Lee felt that he, too, had been trapped inside Russia, but he was different from Powers and Barghoorn in that no publicity surrounded his name, and no one had come to his rescue. President Kennedy went all out for Barghoorn. No one cared about the fate of Lee Oswald.[6]
On Sunday, November 17, Lee failed, uncharacteristically, to call Marina. She missed him, and when she saw Junie playing with the telephone dial, saying “Papa, Papa,” she decided impulsively, “Let’s call Papa.”
Marina was helpless with a telephone dial, so it was Ruth who made the call. She dialed the number Lee had given her weeks before while they were awaiting Rachel’s birth, and a man answered.
“Is Lee Oswald there?” Ruth asked.
“There is no Lee Oswald living here.”
“Is this a rooming house?” Ruth wanted to know.
“Yes.”
“Is it WH 3–8993?”
“Yes.”
Ruth thanked the man and hung up. “They don’t know a Lee Oswald at that number,” she said. Marina looked distinctly surprised.[7]
The next day, Monday, November 18, Lee called as usual at lunchtime. “We phoned you last evening,” Marina said. “Where were you?”
“I was at home watching TV. Nobody called me to the phone. What name did she ask for me by?”
Marina told him. There was a long silence at the other end. “Oh, damn. I don’t live there under my real name.”
Why not? Marina asked.
Lee said he did not want his landlady to know he had lived in Russia.
“It’s none of her business,” Marina retorted.
“You don’t understand a thing,” Lee said. “I don’t want the FBI to know where I live, either.” He ordered her not to tell Ruth. “You and your long tongue,” he said; “they always get us into trouble.”
Marina was frightened and shocked. “Starting your old foolishness again,” she scolded. “All these comedies. First one, then another. And now this fictitious name. When will it all end?”
Lee had to get back to work. He would call later, he said.
Marina, of course, told Ruth about the alias. She was tired of it, she said, tired of Lee’s fears and suspicious, tired of his attempts to cover up the fact that he had lived in Russia. It wasn’t the first time she had felt caught between “two fires,” loyalty to Lee and a conviction that what he was doing was wrong.
Ruth could make nothing of the alias, either.
Lee called back that evening while Ruth was fixing supper. It was she who picked up the telephone. Marina did not want to talk to him, but Ruth said she could not tell Lee that his own wife refused to speak to him. Reluctantly, Marina came to the telephone.
Lee started right off by addressing her as devushka or “wench,” a word that in Russian has such an insulting ring that a man might use it to a servant, perhaps, but not to his wife. When spoken by a husband to a wife, it suggests that everything is over between them. It is a word designed to annihilate intimacy.
“Hey, wench,” he said, “you’re to take Ruth’s address book and cross my name and telephone number out of there.”
“I can’t,” Marina said. “It’s not my book, and I have no right to touch it.”
“Listen here.” Lee was angry. “I order you to cross it out. Do you hear?”
“I won’t do it.”
Lee started to scold Marina in as ferocious a voice as she had ever heard. She hung up the telephone.
Marina told Ruth what Lee had asked her to do. The two of them were puzzled: why had Lee given them a number they weren’t supposed to use? And why was he using an alias? Marina said he had mentioned the FBI. “I don’t think it’s worth living under an assumed name just for that,” Ruth said in a mystified tone.
Until their argument on the telephone, Lee and Marina had been on good terms, and the significance of this quarrel, only one of hundreds they had had, seems to have lain in its timing—after Hosty and before Kennedy. Because of his fear of the FBI, Lee had been living under an alias since October 14. Now he had been found out. Hosty was closing in on him, and Marina had discovered his alias. With Ruth in on the secret as well, it would be no time before the FBI tracked him to his lair. Most significant of all, after the Hosty visits and their shattering impact on his emotions, any falling out with Marina was bound to have an amplified, and destructive, effect on Lee.
But how was Marina to know? She, too, was furious—furious at her discovery that Lee had an alias and was again living a lie. After the string of surprises Lee had been springing on her ever since their arrival in the United States, Marina had been continually anxious. Despite her hopes of a more peaceful life, she had not, since Walker, had an easy moment. It did not now cross her mind that he might be up to his old tricks, to anything like a new Walker attempt—that was too frightening even to think about—but the alias obviously meant no good. It might even mean danger.
Lee did not call Marina the next day, Tuesday, or the day after. “He thinks he’s punishing me,” she said to Ruth.
Lee went to work as usual on Tuesday, November 19. That day, for the first time, both Dallas papers, the Morning News and the afternoon Times-Herald, published the route of the presidential motorcade. The president would go from Love Field via various lesser streets to Main Street, then “to Houston, Houston to Elm, and Elm under the Triple Underpass to Stemmons Freeway, and on to the Trade Mart.”[8] President and Mrs. Kennedy, along with Governor John Connally and his wife, would pass under the windows of the School Book Depository Building, which lay at the northwest corner of the intersection between Houston and Elm.
Lee learned of the route either on Tuesday, November 19, the day it was published, or Wednesday, November 20, when he might have entered the domino room first thing in the morning and read the announcement in the previous day’s paper. Whenever he learned of it, it was the most important day of Lee’s life. He now knew, if he had not pieced it together from the weekend’s reports, that history, fate, blind accident—call it what you will—had placed him above the very route that John F. Kennedy would take two or three days hence.
6
In the
Publicity about Professor Barghoorn continued in newspapers, on radio, and on television through Wednesday, November 20, at which time the exact route of the Kennedy motorcade through Dallas was known. Some writers on the assassination have alleged with cruel inaccuracy that Barghoorn told Kennedy in the Oval Office following his release that he was a spy. Professor Barghoorn denies the allegation. Moreover, he never met President Kennedy and never saw him in the Oval Office—that week or any time. (Letter from Frederick C. Barghoorn to the author, August 11, 1976.)