Nor did Marguerite provide for the sons who were helping provide for her. She skimped on food; John, who weighed 130 to 140 pounds when he came back from military school, dropped to 118 pounds and regained his normal weight only after he had left home for good. When it came to clothing, Marguerite dressed her boys so shabbily that they were taunted by the neighborhood children. A neighbor who was a witness of their life is harsh in his judgment of Marguerite. He says that she was “selfish,” did not care if her boys “were embarrassed about their dress,” and plainly considered them a “burden.”[20]
John and Robert felt like strangers to Marguerite, as if she did not know them very well and as if they, too, were unaccustomed to her. They missed Captain Herbert D. Farrell, the head of their military school, whom they looked up to and whose discipline they had readily accepted. But their alienation went deeper. They had left home at the ages of six and eight, and apart from one interruption, they had been away for eight years. Exposed to values vastly different from hers, they had adopted them and acquired a detachment that was to protect them from her and her claims. By the time they came home, they were lost to Marguerite forever.
Robert had noticed from an early age that “our family was not like other families.” When the parents of other children came to visit at his boarding school, Robert saw that they enjoyed their children. But his mother did not enjoy him. “We learned, very early, that we were a burden. By the time we were teenagers, she felt that we should take over some of her burden.” The idea even crossed Robert’s mind that his mother might want to put him and John up for adoption; anything to be rid of her burden. “Mother felt the world owed her a living,” Robert says. “She felt that her life was harder than the lives of most people. All of us could feel that she wanted to be free of the responsibility—wanted to let someone else face it.”[21]
John speaks even more sharply about his mother’s obsession with money. “Money was her God,” he says, adding that her one thought was to “get as much out of me and as much out of Robert as she could.”[22] He saw that his mother’s obsession, her placing money where other values ought to have been, had turned their family life upside down. No decision had ever been made on the basis of the children’s well-being, but only on the basis of what was cheapest and best for Marguerite. Instead of the more common sight of a mother making sacrifices to feed and clothe her children and give them an education, he and Robert were sacrificed to give their mother the feeling of financial security she would not have had if they had all been millionaires. Thus Marguerite’s exploitiveness caused her to lose the one thing that might have given her a better life—her children’s love. She embittered them and turned them against her.
Nor was she content to pocket their money and treat her older sons as men. She tried to control their lives to the last detail. She forbade them friends, once locked Robert out for going to a movie, and shrieked at him that he was “on dope” when she found cigarettes in his pocket. And when he was at an age to feel it most poignantly, she destroyed a romance of Robert’s because the girl was Italian and crippled.
Somehow Robert and John survived. They shrugged off their mother’s tirades. And they took similar paths. Both quit high school for a year to help support her. Both insisted, over her objections, on returning to school. Battling her every inch of the way, John graduated, and both left home early to enter the service. John at eighteen joined the Coast Guard, and Robert at eighteen the Marine Corps. Both genuinely felt that by leaving home they would be relieving their mother of a burden. But the real reason Robert and John left was that Marguerite had given them no choice. If they were to salvage anything of themselves, they simply had to get away.
Lee’s reaction to Marguerite was different. His mother’s ire did not fall on him often, but when it did, he was unable to shrug her off as his brothers had. Instead, he would “sulk or pout,” “get upset,” brood, or go off by himself to watch television or play with the dog. The one thing he did not do was talk back. He was under his mother’s thumb. Robert’s departure for the service in July of 1952 left Lee face to face with his mother. He now had no brothers to intercede for him. Twelve-year-old Lee was on his own.
Robert had been gone about a month when Marguerite piled Lee and their possessions into her car and drove to New York. John was living there now. He was still in the Coast Guard, he had an eighteen-year-old bride and a baby, and Marguerite moved right in. On the first day they were there, Marguerite came out of her room crying because Lee had slapped her, and John immediately saw that Lee was no longer the docile child he had known. All of a sudden he was boss.[23]
One day John’s wife, Marge, spoke to Lee about his rudeness to Marguerite. He gave her a sharp reply and after that treated her as rudely as he treated his mother. A few days later he was watching television and Marge asked him to turn down the volume. He took out a knife, opened the blade, and moved menacingly toward her. Marguerite entered the room and told him to put the knife away. Lee hit her.
When John came home that night, he listened to both sides of the story. Marguerite, as she had done before, played the episode down. Lee had been whittling, she said, and Marge, seeing the knife in his hand, thought he was threatening her. It was just a misunderstanding. John asked Lee his side of the story, and Lee refused to speak to him. “I was never able to get to the kid again,” John recalls.[24] It was true. Lee did not speak another word to John for ten years.
Marguerite and Lee moved up to the Bronx after that. Marguerite went to work and Lee went to junior high school. But he did not find it easy. His classmates made fun of him for his blue jeans and his Texas drawl. Lee was intelligent, but without knowing it he suffered from the reading disability (dyslexia) that must have caused him to feel frustrated from his earliest days in school, as if something impalpable, something he could at most only sense, was holding him back and keeping him from doing as well as others less intelligent than he.[25] By the time he was thirteen and in the Bronx, Lee had largely compensated for the disability, but his years of undiagnosed struggle had, typically, left him with a legacy of low self-esteem and disruptive behavior that might have plagued him even had his home life been a happy one.
By January of 1953, when he had been in school less than four months, Lee had played truant two days out of three. With his mother working full time and coming home late, he spent some days at the Bronx Zoo, which he loved, and other days riding the subway as far as he could on a single fare. He got to know the city well, especially the area around Times Square. At home he sat glued to the television set watching dramas of mystery and violence. One of his favorites was I Led Three Lives, the story of Herbert Philbrick, an FBI agent who posed as a Communist spy.
Truant officers caught up with him, and in the spring of 1953, Lee was remanded to Youth House, a detention home on the Lower East Side, where he was sent for psychiatric observation. He was found to be “seriously withdrawn, detached, and very hard to reach,” the troubled relationship with his mother apparently the core of his problems.[26] A social worker named Evelyn Strickman, later Mrs. Siegel, interviewed Lee and Marguerite. Miss Strickman found that Lee did have some ability to relate to others, an ability she found surprising in view of his solitary existence and his emotional starvation at home. Lee said his mother never punished him. She told him to go to school, but she did not make him do so, and he wished she would. “He just felt his mother ‘never gave a damn’ for him. He always felt like a burden she had to tolerate.” Lee added that he had to “be my own father” and that he and his mother were “very much” alike, since neither of them talked very much. He admitted to having fantasies of being powerful and killing people but declined to talk about them. Miss Strickman concluded that Lee had “suffered serious personality damage,” which might be partially repaired if he could get help soon.[27]
25
After Oswald’s death, Dr. Howard P. Rome of the Mayo Clinic diagnosed his difficulty from his writings and wrote a letter about it to the Warren Commission (Exhibit No. 3134, Vol. 26, pp. 812–817).