Marina liked the de Mohrenschildts. While she was married to Lee, it was she whom they apparently liked better at first, and later on they preferred Lee. But they never seemed critical of her until a year or so after the assassination, when, during an interview on a nationally broadcast television program for which they were paid, they said that Marina had been bitchy to Lee and that her goading helped drive him to kill the president. Very soon after that, and thirteen years before de Mohrenschildt actually died, Marina dreamt that both George and Jeanne committed suicide.
All these years, however, Marina has praised the de Mohrenschildts. She agrees with George’s friend, Samuel Ballen, that George represented sunshine and life and warmth to Lee. And while she does not go as far as Ballen, who felt that if George had been in Dallas in November 1963, the assassination might not have taken place, she does believe with Ballen that George had, on the whole, a good influence on Lee. True, she thinks that something George said prompted Lee to shoot at General Walker, but she is certain that it was not intentional. George was a “peaceful” man, she says. He had lost his own birthright by violence, and he of all men would have thought it “uncivilized” to foist his views on anybody else, much less to do so by killing. And indeed, long after Kennedy was dead, George showed no sign of feeling guilty about his relationship with Lee. A friend who visited him in Haiti shortly after the assassination reported, “George went around planting his seed in many women. If he planted a seed, another kind of seed, in Lee Oswald, I don’t think it bothers him very much.”[3]
But when George returned from Haiti in the late 1960s, his life had changed once again for the worse. He had failed to pull off the big coup in sisal or oil that he had counted on. His book on his Central American adventures had been refused by several publishers. And as always, George was feeling financial pressure. Having spent his life among tycoons, he had never been able to earn as much as he felt he needed. His relations with Jeanne became bitter. They divorced, but they went on living together, estranged from everyone they knew. Jeanne had a job, while George taught French at a small black college in Dallas. His sole remaining tie to the once-familiar world of the rich and famous was his link with the Kennedy assassination, which existed by virtue of his and Jeanne’s emeritus “stray dog,” Lee Oswald. A decade or so after the assassination, as his spirits sank into depression, George started to feel guilty in retrospect, his relationship with Lee apparently assuming even greater importance in his mind than it had had in reality.
Sam Ballen, who saw him in Dallas only one month before he died, found George “beating himself pretty hard.” He berated himself for friendships he had lost and opportunities he had tossed aside and said that his life had been a failure. He had been an “idiot,” he said, to act in a joking and cavalier fashion in his appearance before the Warren Commission. And he was worried about the people he had injured, especially Lee Oswald and the young rancher, Tito Harper.[4] But it was Lee Oswald about whose “sick mind” George was worried most. He had allowed Lee to make a hero and a father of him. He had known it, had basked in it, had tolerated it for a while. But now he thought it “frivolous” and “irresponsible” to have done so. And he was seized with guilt over whether something he had done or said, something “childish” and “sophomoric,” might have influenced Lee in what he did.[5] George was “gripped by remorse.”
Ballen, who had not seen de Mohrenschildt in years, came away from their meeting feeling sad. For all his faults, of which the greatest was his “utter irresponsibility,” George was, Ballen believed, “one of the world’s great people.” He tried to reassure George. He invited him to come to Santa Fe and offered him the kind of rough, outdoor work that seemed likely to help George the most. Afterward Ballen looked back with the feeling that he had been dining with “Hemingway before the suicide.”
If de Mohrenschildt belatedly, and in illness, began to wonder what his responsibility might have been, what about Marina? She, too, has been alone for years with the question, Why? Why did Lee do it? For the overwhelming fact, the fact she mentions again and again, was that Lee liked President Kennedy. He frequently said that for the United States at this moment of its history, Kennedy was the best possible leader, just as Khrushchev was for Russia. Whenever Marina pointed out how handsome the president was, Lee agreed with her. And when she mentioned how beautiful Mrs. Kennedy was, he agreed again. He agreed, moreover, without the special edge of reserve that told her he was thinking something else. And when the Kennedys’ baby died in the summer of 1963, he had been as upset as she.
Yet Lee had killed Kennedy, and Marina intuitively felt that he had done it the moment she heard the School Book Depository mentioned as the place from which the shots had originated on the afternoon of November 22. She felt it again when the rifle proved to be missing from the Paines’ garage, and she saw guilt in Lee’s eyes when she visited him in the Dallas police station. But she could not understand Lee’s motive, and it was nearly a year before she unequivocally accepted not only that Lee had killed Kennedy, but that he had intended to do so. Indeed, she came closer to accepting his intention at the beginning than she was to do later. During her first appearance before the Warren Commission in February 1964, Marina gave it as her opinion that Lee had killed the president, that his act had had a “political foundation,” and also that he had wanted to make himself famous. On her second appearance, in June of 1964, she again gave it as her view that Lee killed the president, but mentally she kept the reservation that perhaps he had meant to kill Governor Connally instead. She did not mention this because she thought that the commission did not care to hear her speculations. Finally, in September 1964, shortly before the Warren Report was to be issued, Marina threw the commission into confusion by testifying that Lee had liked the president so much, she thought it must have been Connally he was aiming at. (Lee’s remarks about Connally had been mixed, but he had also said that he liked Connally and that he would vote for him.)
After her last appearance before the commission, some Secret Service men took Marina to dinner. They told her that while President Kennedy had been sitting directly behind Connally at the moment the first shot was fired, this was no longer the case by the time of the final, fatal shot. Kennedy had been wounded by then and was leaning toward his wife. He was no longer in alignment with Governor Connally. Thus the man who fired the final shot could only have been aiming at Kennedy. Marina then accepted the fact that Lee not only had killed the president, as she had thought all along, but that for some reason that she has difficulty compassing to this day, he had actually intended to do so.
Marina did have a key that helped her to understand the reason. It went back to November 21, the day before the assassination, when, as she was to recall later, Lee had done everything in threes. That afternoon he tried to kiss her three times, and the third time she reluctantly acceded. But the memorable thing had been his asking her, three times, to move in to Dallas with him “soon.” If she agreed, he would find an apartment “the next day.” And three times Marina refused.
5
Because of de Mohrenschildt’s friendship with Oswald, and his acknowledged affiliation with at least one intelligence service in the past (French Intelligence during World War II), the question has arisen whether de Mohrenschildt might have been working for the CIA in Haiti, and from there might have played a part in the assassination. The available evidence does not support either of these speculations.
According to Warren Commission Document No. 1012, dated June 3, 1964, and declassified May 31, 1977, Richard Helms, formerly the CIA’s deputy director of plans, advised Lee Rankin, general counsel of the Warren Commission, that in 1942 the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, considered de Mohrenschildt for employment but did not hire him because of allegations that he was a Nazi agent. According to the Helms memo, the CIA first established contact with de Mohrenschildt in December 1957, after he returned from a mission in Yugoslavia for the International Cooperation Administration. The CIA had several meetings with de Mohrenschildt at that time and maintained “informal, occasional contact” with him until the autumn of 1961.
The rest of the memo, as well as another Helms memorandum, Warren Commission Document No. 1222, dated July 6, 1964, and declassified June 1, 1977, constitutes reports on de Mohrenschildt in Dallas, Haiti, and elsewhere, reports from which it appears that he could not conceivably have been a CIA employee at any time, nor have had any connection with it during the Haiti period.
As for de Mohrenschildt’s remorse over the “frivolity” of his behavior toward Oswald, to some it appeared that it was more serious, resembling that of Ivan Karamazov toward his father’s murderer, Smerdyakov.