She kept Lee. He had a shifting babyhood, both in terms of where he lived and who took care of him. He stayed part of the time with Marguerite’s easygoing sister Lillian, who was married to Charles Murret and had five children of her own. Mrs. Murret remembers Lee as beautiful, friendly, and affectionate, and she kept him on and off for two years. But the arrangement was occasionally interrupted either by one of Marguerite’s squabbles with her sister or by little Lee himself. For as soon as he was big enough, Lee acquired the habit of running away in his nightclothes and slipping through the Murrets’ iron gates, only to surface a while later, clad in pajamas, sitting cheerfully in some neighbor’s kitchen.
And so Marguerite took him back and had a succession of babysitters—neighbors and even the milkman, Bud, and his wife. Once she hired a live-in couple for $15 a month, but after two months she noticed that two-year-old Lee had big red welts on his legs. The couple said he was a “bad, unmanageable child.” He had thrown a toy gun at the wife, and they were whipping him to keep him in line.[5] At that, Marguerite quit her job briefly to take care of him.
Marguerite tried to put Lee in the Bethlehem Home with his brothers when he was two, but she was turned down because, as she knew very well, the minimum age was three. Marguerite says, “I waited patiently for age three.”[6] She returned to work and moved close to the Murrets, leaving Lee with Lillian by day and taking him home with her at night. Finally, on December 26, 1942, the day after Christmas, Lee, aged three years and two months, joined his brothers at the orphanage.
Lee seemed happy there, but he still did not have a steady environment because his mother would take him out for two or three weeks at a time and either keep him herself or farm him out to the Murrets. He had been at the orphanage just over a year when Marguerite moved to Dallas, taking Lee, but not his brothers, with her. She was engaged in an on-again, off-again courtship with an older man, a “Yankee” named Edwin A. Ekdahl, and was planning, on balance, to marry him. She hesitated, however, and married Ekdahl only a year later, in May of 1945. Meanwhile, five-year-old Lee saw a good deal of Ekdahl and became attached to him. Tall, white-haired, and “very nice,” with a history of heart trouble, Ekdahl was an electrical engineer earning $1,000 a month. Relatives thought that money was a motive on Marguerite’s side.
After the marriage, the older boys were sent to the Chamberlain-Hunt Military Academy in Port Gibson, Mississippi, while Lee went by car with his mother and stepfather to such exotic places as Boston and the Arizona desert. They settled in Benbrook, Texas, outside Fort Worth, in a big stone house with plenty of trees around it. Ekdahl treated the boys “real swell… like his own children,” John says.[7] One Christmas he showered them with candies and Cokes while their mother voiced loud opposition. Robert says, “We was on Mr. Ekdahl’s side,”[8] adding that, “All of us liked Mr. Ekdahl, but I think Lee loved him most of all.”[9] John thinks, “Lee found in him the father he never had.”[10]
But the marriage was as rocky as it could be, and Lee, the only child at home, got the worst of it. His spirits rose and fell with the ups and downs of his mother’s marriage, and his life was unsteady, too. He entered the first grade in Benbrook, but Marguerite left Ekdahl for a few months; settled in Covington, Louisiana; then returned with Ekdahl to Fort Worth. As a result, Lee touched down in three schools and took two years to finish first grade, although his grades were all A’s and B’s. Robert remembers “loud arguments” between his mother and stepfather, and it seemed to John that they had “a fight about every other day.” One summer evening John brought home the good news that they had made up after one of their fights. He recalls that the news “seemed to really elate Lee.”[11] Like the older boys Lee wanted nothing better than for the marriage to work out.
But it did not. The couple was divorced in June of 1948, and Marguerite resumed the name of Oswald. John was forced to testify against his stepfather, but Lee got out of it on the grounds that he was under age, being only eight and a half years old, and would not know “right from wrong and truth from falsehood.”[12]
Once again, money was thought to be the cause of the breakup, for Marguerite, who was better off financially than she had ever been, nonetheless complained that Ekdahl was not nearly as generous with her financially as she had hoped.[13] One couple who knew the Ekdahls saw it differently. They thought it was Marguerite’s preference for her youngest child, Lee, that precipitated the divorce. She refused to discipline Lee or allow Ekdahl to do so. The wife says that after Lee’s father died, Marguerite “dumped all her love on Lee. She loved him to death and she spoiled him to death. She was too close to Lee.” It got so he “demanded so much of his mother’s attention” that she and Ekdahl “never could be alone.”[14] Even Ekdahl, a sweet-tempered, patient man, complained.
The divorce was a disaster for all the boys. The first thing Marguerite did was drive to Port Gibson, Mississippi, and drag John and Robert out of the Chamberlain-Hunt Military Academy. They were heartbroken; they had been happy there and might have stayed on scholarships. But Marguerite wanted them home so they could help support her. It was downhill all the way after that—a succession of grubby houses in Fort Worth. “We were back down in the lower class again,” John recalls.[15] As for Lee, so cramped was the family for space that he shared a double bed with his mother from the age of eight to ten and a half, literally moving into Ekdahl’s place.
Lee was apparently Marguerite’s favorite. In any dispute among the boys, she always sided with Lee. One night a neighbor was paying a call when Lee came hurtling through the kitchen door, chasing John and brandishing a long butcher knife. He hurled the knife at his brother; it missed and hit the living room wall. “They have these little scuffles all the time,” Marguerite said calmly.[16] Not only did she excuse Lee and overlook the injury he might have done to John, but she sanctioned violent behavior by Lee when he was only eight years old.
By the autumn of 1948, all except Lee were working. Marguerite was a saleslady in a department store; Robert, aged fourteen and in the ninth grade, worked in a grocery store on Saturdays and on weekdays after school; and Marguerite demanded that John, who was sixteen and about to enter the eleventh grade, give up school and go to work full time. Burning with resentment, John complied and got a job as a stock boy in a department store.[17]
It was at this moment of rebellion and sacrifice that John began to turn against his mother. He saw that part of the family’s joyless struggle against poverty had its existence only in his mother’s head. She was a tough and tenacious businesswoman, and John observed that no matter how poor she claimed to be, she always had enough “to buy and sell a house.”[18] Each time she did so, she made a profit, and she had by now bought and sold a good many houses. Still, the struggle against poverty went on. Trying to create a family life for themselves at home, the boys would be having a “friendly time” when their mother came in late from work. Then, says John, “we all got into that depression rut again.”[19]
5
Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 19; Robert Oswald,
17
When Lee Oswald got into truant difficulty in New York, Marguerite told the social worker, Evelyn Stickman Siegel, that John had also been a truant and that she allowed him to go to work until he decided to return to school (Siegel Exhibit No. 1, Vol. 21, p. 493). However, according to John, he was bitterly hurt when his mother forced him to leave school. He went back over her opposition and even had to forge her signature on his report cards, excuse slips, and other school documents (Testimony of John Edward Pic, Vol. 11, p. 33).