McVickar turned out to be right. At the Hotel Metropole I stopped by Oswald’s room, which was on the second floor, the floor below my own. I knocked, and the young man inside opened the door. Instead of inviting me in, he came into the corridor and stood there, holding the door open with his foot. I peeked into his room and saw that it was exactly like mine, right down to its shade of hotel blue. To my surprise he readily agreed to be interviewed and said that he would come to my room at eight or nine o’clock that evening. Good as his word, he appeared, wearing a dark gray suit, a white shirt with a dark tie, and a sweater-vest of tan cashmere. He looked familiar to me, like a lot of college boys in the East during the 1950s. The only difference was his voice—he had a slight Southern drawl.
He settled into an armchair, I brought him tea from a little burner I kept on the floor, and he started talking fairly easily. He spoke quietly and unemphatically and only rarely betrayed by a gesture or a slight change of tone that what he was saying at that moment meant anything special to him. He began by complaining about Richard Snyder and his refusal to accept on the spot his oath of renunciation. I had no idea what he was talking about, since I had not discussed him with Snyder or McVickar, nor heard about the stormy scene at the embassy two weeks before.[14]
During our conversation Lee returned again and again to what he called the embassy’s “illegal” treatment of him, which he termed a “prestige and labor-saving device.” He spread out two letters on my desk: one his letter of protest to the American ambassador, Llewellyn Thompson, and the other his letter from Snyder, which said that he was free to come to the embassy at any time and take the oath. Well, I said, all you have to do is go back one more time. He swore he would never set foot there again. Once he became a Soviet citizen, he said, he would allow “my government,” the Soviet government, to handle it for him.
Lee’s tone was level, almost expressionless, and while I realized that his words were bitter, somehow I did not feel that he was angry. Moreover, he did not seem like a fully grown man to me, for the blinding fact, the one that obliterated nearly every other fact about him, was his youth. He looked about seventeen. Proudly, as a boy might, he told me about his only expedition into Moscow alone. He had walked four blocks to Detsky Mir, the children’s department store, and bought himself an ice cream cone. I could scarcely believe my ears. Here he was, coming to live in this country forever, and he had so far dared venture into only four blocks of it.
I was astounded by his lack of curiosity and the utter absence of any joy or spirit of adventure in him. And yet I respected him. Here was this lonely, frightened boy taking on the bureaucracy of the second most powerful nation on earth, and doing it single-handedly. I wondered if he had any idea what he was doing, for it could be brutal to try to stay if the Russians did not want you—futile and dangerous. I had to admire Lee, ignorant, young, and even tender as he appeared, for persisting in spite of so many discouragements.[15]
I was sorry for him, too, for I was certain he was making a mistake. He told me that he had been informed that morning that he did not have to leave the country. So I supposed that he would soon be granted citizenship, vanish into some remote corner of Russia, and never be heard from again. He would not be allowed to see any Americans, much less reporters, and he would be unable to signal his distress. Like every Westerner in Moscow, I had heard innumerable tragic stories about foreigners who had come to Russia during the 1930s, crossed the Rubicon of Soviet citizenship, and never been allowed to leave. I assumed that Lee would regret his choice and that he, like the others, would be trapped. As young as he was, he would have a lifetime to be sorry.
Our evening was like a seesaw, with me trying to get Lee to talk about himself and Lee trying to talk about his “ideology.” I would say that Lee won. But occasionally our purposes coincided, as when he spoke of “exploitation” in the United States. His mother, he said, had been “a worker all her life, having to produce profit for capitalists,” and I thought I heard his voice tighten. I supposed he must love his mother very much.
What about his father, I asked. Lee said that his father died before he was born. I asked what his father’s work had been. “I believe he was an insurance salesman,” Lee said, and his “believe” had a cold sound indeed. I wondered if he was angry at his father, ashamed of him, or what.
Lee made it clear that he would not be talking to me or to anyone else, except that the American embassy had told the press of his defection and he wanted to give me his “side of the story.” Now that he had been informed that he did not have to leave Russia, he supposed it was “safe” to speak out—he would not be endangering his chances of remaining. He told me repeatedly that his decision was “unemotional,” and this seemed important to him. But he added—a hint, perhaps, that he felt he was unusual—that he did not recommend defection for everyone. It meant coming to a new country, adjusting, and “always being the outsider.” But at least he would never have to go home, and that was the big thing to him. “I believe what I am doing is right,” he said. He also said that he had talked to me because he wanted to give the American people “something to think about.”
Before he left, at two o’clock in the morning, he told me that he had never talked so long about himself to anyone. I felt another twinge of pity, for if this was his idea of openness, then I thought that he must never have talked about himself to anyone at all. As for me, I felt that I had failed. I had reached out, and my fingers had not touched anyone.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll be writing my story about you tomorrow. Do you want to come up and look it over? There might be some mistakes you’ll want to correct.”
“No,” he said, “I trust you. It’ll be okay.”
I made him promise that before he left the Metropole to be swallowed up in Soviet life forever, he would at least come up to say goodbye.
The following night I had supper with John McVickar. We talked about Oswald, of course, and McVickar told me a little about the angry scene at the embassy. As vice-consul, McVickar daily saw former Americans who were fruitlessly trying to go home. He thought that if someone at the embassy had had time to listen to Oswald, it might have helped defuse him. He was afraid that, instead, the encounter had pushed him further toward the tragic step—Soviet citizenship—that would make it impossible for him ever to go home. I was puzzled over Oswald’s refusal to return to the embassy. If he had come five thousand miles just to renounce his citizenship, why allow pique to stand in his way? Partly to comfort McVickar, I wondered aloud whether Oswald might be leaving himself a loophole, a crack in the door, just in case he decided some day to go home.[16]
Years later I asked McVickar if he had told me about Oswald in the hope that I would try to talk him out of defecting. That, in a bugged hotel room and with my own visa hanging by a thread, would have been risky indeed. “Oh, no,” McVickar laughed. “I hoped you would listen him out of it.”
I made one more effort to see Lee. Later in the week, with my story about him written and on its way to New York, I was trudging upstairs in my hotel and found myself on the second floor, Lee’s floor. I went up to the dezhurnaya, a tiny woman in white who sat on the landing and presided over a huge desk filled with keys. “How about Number 233?” I asked. “Is he in?” She inspected her drawer of keys, and her arms flew into the air. “Out!” she said.
14
Oswald told many lies and was very reticent with all the Americans who spoke to him in Moscow—Snyder, Aline Mosby, and myself. As a result, we thought he had arrived in Russia shortly before the scene at the embassy, and at the time of my interview, I assumed he had been in Moscow two weeks, not a month. Except for Oswald himself, Rimma Shirokova, and Soviet officials, no one knew of Oswald’s suicide attempt until after he was dead and his “Historic Diary” was published.
15
I have been asked by Warren Commission lawyers and others since 1963 whether, during my brief time with Oswald, I detected any signs that he was being manipulated by outsiders. In 1959 travel arrangements to the USSR could be time-consuming and complicated. If the would-be visitor went to the Soviet Embassy in one European capital, it might take four days to obtain a visa; in another city it might take three months; and in still another there might be no reply to the request at all. Aware of this, I asked Oswald how he learned the mechanics of entering Russia and defecting, and he was either evasive or mysterious in his replies. He said that it had taken him two years to learn the mechanics but it had not been “hard.” He refused to name any “person or institution” that had helped him. And he added that he had never met a Communist Party member until his arrival in the USSR and that officials there were not “sponsoring” him.
He was saying, I think, that he had no ties with the US Communist Party; but he seemed also to have been trying to create an impression that he was shielding someone, when in fact he could have learned what he wanted to know from a travel agency or from the Soviet embassies in Washington or Tokyo.
My own strong impression at the time was that, far from being manipulated from the outside, Oswald was, to a degree I found shocking, responding only to signals from within. Rather than being alive to, or stimulated by, his new environment, he was at pains to seal himself off from it. At first I attributed this to a feeling of foreignness or strangeness. Then I saw that he was motivated by another kind of fear: fear that if he took a hard look at the society around him, he might question his decision. Thus the feeling he gave was that he was wholly occupied by his inner preconceptions and by promptings from within, and that he did not want to be bothered by outside forces or facts.
16
McVickar wrote a memorandum about our conversation (Exhibit No. 911, Vol. 18, pp. 106–107), which is sometimes cited as evidence that I might have been working for the State Department, even though McVickar states in the memorandum that he had to point out to me that in addition to my duty as a correspondent, I also had a “duty as an American.”
In 1956, three years before my meeting with Oswald, I worked briefly for three embassies—the American, British, and Canadian—as a translator during the 20th Soviet Communist Party Congress in Moscow. The American ambassador, Charles Bohlen, tried to have my thirty-day employment extended, but the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, refused because I lacked a security clearance. Neither before nor since have I been employed by any agency of any government.