When he got out of the hospital, he came across my path once in a while, lit it up briefly, then disappeared, very often for months at a time. I was one of hundreds of friends in his life; he was unique in mine. Because he was unique, I thought about him a good deal. Aside from his humor and Irish irascibility, the characteristic of Jack’s that I saw most was his wide-ranging curiosity. He was forever bombarding me with questions. Should we give aid to Yugoslavia? With whom was I going skiing that weekend? Why had So-and-so been defeated for state office the week before? At what age did I expect to get married? And would I expect my husband to remain faithful? He treated everyone to an endless flow of questions, and I imagine that they, too, were as amused and flattered as I was.
But in spite of all the questions, I noticed that Jack held his curiosity within limits. Even in the hospital, when he had plenty of time and no certain future at all, it seemed to me that he did not allow his questions to roam freely, wherever they might lead. He kept them on a fairly tight course, to those whose answers might prove useful. Eager as he was for information, then, he did not allow himself the luxury of genuine intellectual curiosity. Perhaps he did not think he had time.
Kennedy had a rebellious streak, and it showed through in many delightful and eccentric things he did. But he had on the whole accepted the ambition that had been thrust upon him, the ambition to become president of the United States. Only, I thought, he had done it at a cost to his capacity for empathy and imagination. He had a candor and a breathtaking detachment about himself, but I wondered how well he understood other people, especially those who lacked his kind of ambition, or those who happened to be failures.
Marina and Lee was my attempt to draw upon all I knew and learned of the personalities at the center of this most defining American tragedy in an effort perhaps to put at least some of the most maddening questions to rest. But, of course, the matter will not rest. Since the book first appeared in 1977, I have been asked many times whether I still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed President Kennedy.
My answer is, emphatically, yes. No new evidence has surfaced, no conspiracy theory has appeared to fundamentally alter the picture of Oswald, his ideas and his last-minute actions that I have laid out here. It is the picture of a lonely, secretive man who at the age of nineteen acted on his anger toward the United States by defecting to its archrival, the Soviet Union; who behaved increasingly violently toward the person closest to him, his wife; and who on April 10, 1963, seven months before he killed President Kennedy, shot at and narrowly missed killing an imagined political opponent, General Edwin A. Walker, head of the right-wing John Birch Society. Presented unexpectedly and after a decade of failed dreams with a target who could be seen as the embodiment of US capitalism, this man chose to commit the world-changing deed he had dreamt of all his life.
Important as it was to Lee Oswald to destroy the symbol of American capitalism, it was equally important to let the world know why he had done it. When Marina Oswald paid a short, tearful visit to him in the Dallas city jail the day following the assassination, Lee tried to comfort her by telling her that there was a lawyer in New York he was counting on. That lawyer, whom he started calling immediately after Marina left, was John J. Abt, whom he had read about in the left-wing newspapers he subscribed to, the Worker and the Militant. Asked why he did not want a Dallas attorney to represent him, Oswald explained to Police Chief J. W. Fritz that Abt had defended “victims” charged under the Smith Act—the 1940 law making it a crime to advocate violent overthrow of the US government. He did not tell Fritz that Abt was attorney for the American Communist Party.
No one answered the telephones at Abt’s office or his apartment in New York City that Saturday afternoon. John Abt and his wife Jessica had left the day before, as they did most Fridays, for their country house in Kent, Connecticut. By the time Lee started trying to reach him, however, Abt had already heard. A reporter from CBS-TV woke him early that morning to ask whether he would be willing to represent Oswald; Abt replied that he would have to be asked by the defendant himself before he could consider it. During a transfer inside the jail, the reporter said, Oswald had shouted to newsmen, “Get hold of Abt to be my lawyer.”
John Abt received a barrage of calls that weekend, among them a message from Vincent Hallinan in San Francisco, a left-wing attorney and onetime Progressive Party candidate for president, asking to help defend Oswald. Abt also heard from Arnold Johnson, head of the American Communist Party, that he had had a letter from Oswald a few months before, asking how to join the party. Abt never did speak to Oswald, however, for the man who wanted him to be his attorney was shot in front of millions of television viewers the very next day, as he was being transferred to the county jail.
Oswald’s murder of the president was an act with many determinants. The first and indispensable one was the presidential route, laid out to pass directly under the Texas School Book Depository, the building where Oswald worked. He may have learned of the route the weekend before the president’s visit or he may have learned it only on Tuesday, November 19, when the route was published in the Dallas Morning News. There were signs, starting the next day, Wednesday, that something might be changing Oswald’s plans. Thursday, on his way to work, he ate an unusually self-indulgent breakfast, and at the end of the day, he made an unscheduled trip to Irving, Texas, to the house where Marina and his two children were staying, to say goodbye perhaps, but also to fetch his rifle, never giving any hint as to what he might be up to.
If the route of the presidential motorcade was the trigger, the target himself was another matter. Oswald rather liked President Kennedy, or what he knew of him as a man. Kennedy, like Oswald, was the father of two young children and excelled at the very endeavors Oswald wanted to excel at, too. Kennedy had been a naval hero; Oswald had been a Marine. Kennedy had written books; Oswald aimed to be a published author. Oswald approved President Kennedy’s record on civil rights, a cause on which he himself had taken a stand as early as the age of fourteen. And during the summer just past, Kennedy had made a speech urging better relations with the USSR and had signed a weapons treaty with the Russians as well. On the other hand, Kennedy’s forces had attacked Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs. Castro was a hero to Oswald, and Oswald had even wanted to go to Cuba to show his soldiers how to handle firearms better—until he was blocked only the month before by Cuban consular officials in Mexico City who refused him a visa. Oswald’s feelings toward Castro at the end of November seem therefore to have been ambiguous.
But for Oswald, the overwhelming fact about President Kennedy was that he was head of the US capitalist system, for which he, Lee Oswald, had professed hatred all his life. How could he have shown his feelings more eloquently than to have defected to Russia at the age of nineteen, announced that he hated the United States, and asked to stay in the Soviet Union for the rest of his life? The opportunity that presented itself now, though, dwarfed anything he could have imagined. Oswald might have shot at any political leader who happened to be passing by the School Book Depository that day, but the leader who was coming was President of the United States. The two together—the route and the target—amounted to a command: He had to do it. And his personal feelings toward Kennedy, even fear for his own life, could not enter in.
The world would have to know why. It would have to know that he, Lee Oswald, a lifelong Marxist, had chosen this way to bring justice, to remove inequality from American life. And he would have to have the Mother of all show trials….