Yet Lee did not want to lose Marina, just as Cain does not want to lose Amy. In Irving on the evening of November 21, Lee in effect had asked Marina, as Cain asks Amy, “What will I do if you leave me?” Twice on the day after he shot the president, in the direst situation he was ever to know, Lee begged Marina not to forsake him, first during their brief visit in the city jail and later, that same evening of November 23, when he telephoned Ruth and virtually commanded that Marina return to her house so that she would be available to him at whatever hour he might call. If Lee saw himself as Will Cain, he may also have expected his personal drama to end the way High Noon does. Cain not only earns the thanks of the townspeople, he also wins back the love of his wife.
There may have been still another voice speaking to Lee before the assassination and telling him what he ought to do—that of John F. Kennedy. A few months earlier Lee had read Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, and since the book, like High Noon, was a product of the McCarthy era, it is not surprising that the message they carry is identicaclass="underline" a celebration of the brave and lonely hero who will stand up against the wrong-headed crowd and the climate of his time to do what he believes to be right. Kennedy’s book is addressed to the ordinary citizen, and its subject is political courage. When he read the book in the summer of 1963, Lee apparently took its message to heart, both as a citizen and the great man he supposed himself to be. Kennedy, in the book, defined the man of political courage as the one who will do the thing he knows in his heart to be right, whether the people understand that it is right for them or not. He cannot expect their approval. It is to history that he must look for vindication. “A man does what he must,” Kennedy wrote, “in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures.” These words, or words very like them, may have been in Lee Oswald’s head when he took aim and fired just after high noon on November 22.[9]
Oswald may also have thought that by acting as Kennedy had enjoined him to do and as his conscience told him he must, he would be achieving in life and in death a oneness with the man he was destroying. For it is clear that Oswald’s motives were not purely political. In addition to the conflict between love and duty and the polarity between accident and determinism, there was something else at work—the tension, the attraction, that the assassin felt for his victim.
Of all the bonds between this assassin and the victim, the strongest, perhaps, lay in a similarity the two of them shared. Both Oswald and Kennedy were attracted to death, and both had tempted it often. Oswald had tried suicide at least once and had made a murder attempt that could easily have led to his own death. One of his fictional heroes, Will Cain, had placed himself in a position from which he could barely escape alive. Another, Hermann in “The Queen of Spades,” had stabbed himself to death.
Even more frequently than Oswald, Kennedy had placed his life at hazard. He was a reckless driver, and he had often taken a risky charter flight in foul weather so as not to miss a political appointment.[10] During World War II in the Pacific, he was known not merely for his bravery but for the frightening, and some said needless, risks he had taken with his own life, with his PT boat, and perhaps with the lives of his crew.[11] As for literature, his favorite verses were said to be from a World War I poem by the American, Alan Seeger:
Marina has said sadly of her husband that he “did not value his own life at all.” And Kennedy, on the morning of his death, actually pantomimed an assassination attempt that he thought could have been carried out against him the evening before.[13] As greatly as he enjoyed life, and as much as he helped others to enjoy it, Kennedy exuded fatalism, a “come and get me” air. And Oswald, with his own fatalism, may have been peculiarly attuned to pick this up.
The Kennedy fatalism was a profound matter, with implications for others besides Oswald. Thus the president may have been attracted to death, in part, because he had already lost a beloved older sister and older brother in tragic air accidents. All of this had been publicized a good deal and had become part of the family mystique. But in becoming part of the mystique, it had also become a family taint. Already, in 1963, it was as if the Kennedys had had more than their share of untimely deaths. Each of these heightened the association in the public mind between the Kennedys and death, each made the taint greater, and each increased the vulnerability of the rest of the family, and especially of its head, the president.
To a person whose stability was as fragile as Oswald’s, even a tenuous connection, such as occurred in June 1963, when President Kennedy spoke on civil rights from the White House and a black leader, Medgar Evers, was murdered a few hours later only two hundred miles from where Oswald lived, could have strengthened some half-conscious association in Oswald’s mind between the president and death. And the death of the president’s newborn son in August, at a time when Oswald, too, was hoping for a son, may further have strengthened the association. Marina has said that her husband was upset by the Kennedy baby’s death, and it was on that day that he became engaged, for the first time, in a pro-Castro street fracas and was tossed into jail, almost as if he was impelled to sidetrack his own thoughts. Lee Oswald was fascinated by death, President Kennedy was fascinated by death, and of the ties between them in Oswald’s mind, this was the greatest of all.
But it was not the only one. For President Kennedy, like Lee Oswald, was a young husband and father. At the time of his election, he was handsome and in his early forties, his wife was thirty-one and beautiful, and they had been married only seven years. It was obviously true of Kennedy—as is not always the case with an older president who has been married for many years—that this president had an ongoing sex life, and there were infant children as proof. Both the president and his wife had, moreover, an extraordinary capacity to project themselves into the yearnings and fantasies of millions, and some of these fantasies were sexual. Their photographs were frequently displayed on the covers of movie magazines, which exist to exploit such fantasies. And since the Kennedys had close ties with Hollywood, members of the family were seen constantly with film stars and other celebrities. The symbolism surrounding such celebrities also tends to be sexual, and the presence of the Kennedys in their company contributed to a dangerous eroticization of the presidency.
9
Much of the suspense in