Marina knew that her husband attributed an altogether magical significance to the number three and was obsessed by it. She remembered that one year earlier, on November 11, 1962, when the de Mohrenschildts took her away from Lee because of his violence toward her, then, too, he had begged her three times not to leave him, but after the third time he gave up. And on the bottom right-hand corner of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee card on which he had asked her to forge the name “A. J. Hidell” the previous summer, he had written the number “33,” to signify that he was the thirty-third member of his fictitious chapter—still another sign of the power he attached to the number three.[6]
Marina had known of the peculiar importance that her husband attached to the number three from the outset of their marriage when Lee often used to sneak off to see the film version of the opera based on Pushkin’s short story, “The Queen of Spades.” In Minsk he played music from the opera every night and, while listening to his favorite aria (“I would perform a heroic deed of unheard-of prowess for your sake… ”), he fell into a reverie and imagined that he was the hero, Hermann. A young Russian Guards officer during the 1820s, Hermann thought that his life was determined by the powers of fate and was obsessed by the number three. Avid for money, he obtained what he believed to be the secret of three cards that, played one after the other, would win him a fortune at the gaming table. Hermann played the three cards, staked his love and his whole life on them—and lost.
Marina believes that on the evening of November 21 Lee was again seized by the fantasy that he was Hermann. That is why he asked her three times if he might kiss her and three times if she would move in with him to Dallas. Like Hermann, he staked his life on three cards. And like Hermann, he lost.
The more Marina thought about it, the more she had to conclude, although she came to it reluctantly and with pain, that Lee had not fully made up his mind what he was going to do when he came to see her that evening, but as a result of what passed between them—her three “no’s”—he had done so by the time he left. Or perhaps he had made up his mind and asking her to veto his decision. He was begging her to move in to Dallas with him so he would not have to go through with the terrible deed. Lee was asking Marina to save his life for him. And she, by refusing what he asked of her, failed to save him from his fate.
But Marina had no way of knowing what Lee was thinking, for he had given her no hint. It was her ignorance, and her helplessness before it, that she was to ponder afterward. If Marina can be said to have failed Lee, it is not, as some people thought later, that she ought to have known what he was thinking and sent him frivolously to his death. It is rather that she, too, was fated—by her lifelong conviction that she was unworthy and by uncertainty over his affections—to refuse his request. Preoccupied by worries such as these, she failed altogether to realize what Ruth Paine called “her own great power over Lee.”
The way Lee saw it, perhaps fate did have a hand. To such a man, the uncanny selection of a route that would carry the president right under his window could mean only one thing. Fate had singled him out to do the dangerous but necessary task that had been his destiny all along and that would cause him to go down in history. If Lee really felt this way, really felt the outcome was fated, then Marina’s power on November 21 was not great, since he was destined to put his questions to her in such a way that she was destined to refuse.
But Lee was more than Pushkin’s Hermann, playing a role marked out for him by fate. He was a Marxist, and as a Marxist he was also enacting a part that had been determined ahead of time. For Marxism is a determinist philosophy, which says that the course of history is decided in advance and such choices as an individual may make have little to do with the outcome. According to Marxism, it made no difference what Lee did on November 22—history would grind on and turn out in more or less the same manner anyhow. Lee was a poor Marxist in another way as well, for Marxist philosophy repudiates the kind of terroristic act he had in mind.[7] But Lee took his Marxism selectively. And according to his Marxism, history would be moved forward by his deed and the Marxist cause would be advanced.
It is ironic, yet in keeping with Lee’s rigid nature, that he had chosen not one but two determinist philosophies by which to live and to die. According to one, he was Pushkin’s Hermann, who staked his life on the toss of three cards, and according to the other, he was the implacable engine of history. Both as Hermann the fatalist and as Lee Harvey Oswald the implausible Marxist, Lee had no choice but to do as he did. It happened that the two roles came together at the same moment to demand the same thing of him.
Yet accident did play a role, in the timing, for example. Lee had already attempted one assassination. But he did not go around killing every day, nor was he capable of it all the time. By chance, the president’s visit came at a moment when Lee was insane enough so that he needed to kill someone and coherent enough to succeed.
And the president came to him. Compared to the route, no other determinant mattered at all. Everything that had ever happened to Lee Oswald could have happened it exactly the way it had, his whole life could have been exactly what it had been, and it would not have made any difference. President Kennedy could have come and gone from Dallas in perfect safety. But the choice of a route that would carry the president past his window could mean only one thing to Lee—fate, duty, and historical necessity had come together in this time and place and singled him out to do the deed.
The tragedy of the president’s assassination was its terrible randomness.
That was not the only tragedy. The death of the president was a complex thing, made up of opposites. There was the tension between determination and accident, fate and chance. And for the assassin there appears also to have been a conflict between love and duty. As Lee saw him, the president embodied a social and historical evil that had become his duty to destroy. But Lee had not created his opportunity, and in some respects he did not relish his task. He did not leap to a decision immediately upon learning the route, and as late as the evening before, he gave a veto power of some sort to his unknowing wife.
Yet he went ahead despite his doubts, and in so doing he acted like another hero of his, Will Cain, the sheriff in the movie High Noon, who stands up to a band of outlaws, alone, because it is his duty, even though he is risking his own life and the love of his wife, who is opposed to violence. Lee may have felt that he had something in common with Will Cain, whose song he had sung so many times in Russia, and whose refrain—“Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’”—Marina had heard again and again as Lee was writing his diary.
Lee may have seen himself, too, as torn between “love”—Marina and his children—and “duty,” which required that against his kindlier instincts and at the cost of his life, he must kill the president of the United States.
When he said goodbye to Marina at the Paine house on the morning of November 22, Lee left his wedding ring behind. It was a stunning repudiation of Marina and the family “love” she represented. And it was an act of retaliation, the sort of vengeful response to her rejection of the night before that had characterized Lee all his life. But it was much else besides. It was a way of dissociating Marina from the deed he was about to commit and the guilt he would incur for it. And it was a way of showing his scorn and relegating her, too, to the everyday herd of men and women who would be too stupid and cowardly to understand the great and heroic deed he was performing for their sakes. Lee’s leaving his wedding ring was an elegant gesture of contempt, an equivalent of Will Cain’s tossing his sheriff’s badge in the dust. Cain, too, is expressing his contempt. He is saying that the people for whom he has risked everything, love and life itself, are not worthy of what he has done for them. But their unworthiness did not alter his duty, and he would have been diminished as a man if he had failed to do it.
6
The number three is, indeed, conceded to have a universal symbolic meaning, since it crops up in nearly every form of human expression: in religion, mythology, folklore, and literature. In psychoanalysis the number is frequently taken to be a castration symbol. Freud called it “symbolic of the whole male genitalia.” In the Christian religions the number signifies a splitting apart, the separation of a whole into three parts and unification into one, as in the Holy Trinity, “the Three in One, the One in Three.” Still another example, one closer to Oswald, perhaps, is the “thesis, antithesis and synthesis” by which the German historian Hegel, the forerunner of Marxist philosophy, believed the forward movement of history is determined.
7
8
Sung in the Stanley Kramer production,