The questions Oswald allotted to the newspapermen reveal his central concern. He was still afraid that by one or more of his acts he had broken laws of the United States. And he was fearful that his answers might incriminate him. Indeed, the questions he sketched out are accusatory, the answers defensive. He was even prepared to deny that he was a Communist. In response to the question, “Are you a Communist?” he drafted two replies. (In the excerpts that follow, errors of spelling and punctuation have been corrected.)
First draft: Yes, basically. Although I hate the USSR and (the) socialist system, I still think Marxism can work under different circumstances.[9]
Second draft: No, of course not. I have never even known a Communist outside the ones in the USSR, but you can’t help that.[10]
Besides the two sets of questions and answers, which were really scripts for the anticipated press conference, Oswald wrote two long pages, again on Holland-America Line stationery, explaining why he had taken money from a source he believed to be the Soviet secret police. It was the question he dreaded most:
…I accepted the money because I was hungry and there were several inches of snow on the ground…. But what it really was was payment for my denunciation of the US in Moscow…. I didn’t realize all this, of course, for almost two years… I have never mentioned the fact of these monthly payments to anyone. I do so in order to state that I shall never sell myself intentionally or unintentionally to anyone again.[11]
There is no way of knowing how many sheets of Holland-America Line paper Oswald covered with handwriting, only to toss them into a wastebasket on the Maasdam. But it is clear from what has survived that he spent part of the voyage working up this imaginary colloquy with the press, and an even longer time drafting a statement of his political beliefs.[12] Again, he apparently thought that he would be questioned on these matters.
I have often wondered why it is that the communist, capitalist, and even the fascist and anarchist elements in America always profess patriotism toward the land and the people, if not the government, although their movements must surely lead to the bitter destruction of all and everything.
I am quite sure these people must hate not only the government but the culture, heritage and very people itself….
I wonder what would happen if somebody was to stand up and say he was utterly opposed not only to the governments, but to the people, to the entire land and complete foundations of his society?…
Where can I turn? To factional mutants of both systems [communism and capitalism], to oddball Hegelian revisionists out of touch with reality, [to] religious groups, to revisionists or to absurd anarchism? No!
To a person knowing both systems… there can be no mediation….
He must be opposed to their basic foundations….
And yet it is immature to take the sort of attitude which says “a curse on both your houses.”
There are two great representatives of power in the world… the left and right….
Any practical attempt at one alternative must have as its nucleus the traditional ideological best of both systems, and yet be utterly opposed to both….
For no system can be entirely new. That is where most revolutions… go astray. And yet the new system must be opposed unequivocally to the old. That is also where revolutions go astray.
Oswald then launched into criticisms of capitalism: “runaway robot” automation, “a general decay of classes into shapeless societies without real cultural foundations,” the “regimentation” of “ideals,” and, finally, war.
The biggest and key fault… of our era is of course the fight for markets between the imperialist powers… which lead to the wars, crises and oppressive friction which you have all come to regard as part of your lives. And it is this prominent factor of the capitalist system which will undoubtedly eventually lead to the common destruction of all the imperialistic powers….
Oswald next considered what he called the “mistakes” of Engels and Marx,[13] chiefly the notion that the abolition of classes would lead to a withering away of the state. He cited with bitterness his own visa experience to illustrate that even with Khrushchev’s decentralization, the state did not wither away. To counter the argument that the state had to become strong and highly centralized before it could wither away, he called for “social democracy at a local or community level.” Oswald believed that “true democracy can be practiced only at the local level.”
Four other long sheets of Holland-America Line stationery have survived, covered with Oswald’s scrawl, mutilated and nearly illegible because of scratched-out phrases and words. They are a vaguely programmatic document,[14] apocalyptic in that Oswald apparently expected an armed confrontation between two camps at any moment and suggested that afterward he hoped to set up a peace organization that would break with the traditions of both Communist and capitalist systems, which “have now at this moment led the world into unsurpassed danger… into a dark generation of tension and fear.”
How many of you have tried to find out the truth behind the cold war clichés?
I have lived under both systems. I have sought the answers and, although it would be very easy to dupe myself into believing one system is better than the other, I know they are not.
For an American who was only twenty-three, Oswald’s experience was unique. He had, as he had written, lived in each of the opposing world camps, more or less as an ordinary citizen. Now, suspended between the two on the voyage home, he was looking at both, weighing both, trying to puzzle out a system that would combine the merits of each. And as he had done so often in his life before, he was doing it, once again, alone. He had not been to college, nor had he been part of any political or intellectual milieu in the United States. In Russia he had been cut off completely from such currents as might be stirring young people back home. Yet the political solution he reached, from his own experience, from reading, and from talking to his friends in Minsk, was similar to the solution proposed by a generation of American activists in the later 1960s: participatory democracy at a community level. Oswald was a pioneer, if you will, or a lonely American antihero a few years ahead of his time.
The trouble lay not with his ideas but with the emotions underneath. Oswald had been disappointed by Russia, which he had thought to be a Marxist society where each person’s needs were met. It was not the thing Oswald expected and found, a system of authority, that drove him from the USSR. It was what he came seeking and failed to find.
His disappointment, and above all the anxiety he felt on returning to the country of his birth, are evident in the confused style and erratic spelling of his shipboard writings. But his was not a new wound. It had been inflicted long before he went to Russia, and it stemmed from his relationship with his mother. For somehow Marguerite had failed her son. His need for his mother’s love had not been met when he was young. Not only was his need unmet, he had been unable to extricate himself from it. He remained enmeshed with his mother, needing her, yet resenting her and hating himself for his dependence. For his need was an enormous threat to him, and once in a while, in order to convince himself that he was free and a man, he had to pull himself together and act. And the action he took very often was one of rejection.
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