Jeanne later claimed that Marina’s confidences were made in front of Lee, in front of all of them, and that she ran him down sexually to his face. Marina denies this vigorously, and her denial has the ring of truth. For one thing, her only other sexual confidences to friends were made in private. For another, she knew that Lee would beat her terribly if she dared say any such thing.
Like his wife, George avoided personal confidences. He had already interfered in Lee’s private life by encouraging Marina to leave him when they first moved to Dallas. He had seen Lee’s capacity for violence, he knew that Lee had beaten Marina, and he may have been fearful for her safety. But he respected the private lives of others, and he was not going to interfere again. Besides, George had a certain delicacy. He was discreet about his own sexual exploits and evidently did not readily lend an ear to those of others. What was more, he approved of Marina’s return to Lee. Maybe she had gone back too soon, as Jeanne and the other Russians thought, but she had made the right decision. George considered Lee a good fellow, and he hoped the marriage would stick.
The subject that George really liked to talk about with Lee was politics. He was later to claim that once they had exhausted the topic of Russia, he and Lee had little to say to each other.[14] That, apparently, was not true. The two talked politics all the time. Sam Ballen and Declan and Katya Ford thought this was the real bond between them, and Marina remembers their talking politics every time they met. They spoke in English, and Marina missed most of what they said. Anyway, it was her job to keep the baby out of the way so that Lee could make the most of his moments with George. But when it came to his political ideas, she feels certain that her husband had no secrets from George. In this sphere alone, and with this one man, Lee was comparatively frank. Except for Alexander Ziger and Pavel Golovachev, Lee’s friends in Minsk, Marina thinks George knew her husband’s political views better than anybody else—and that he read Lee like an open book.
Domestically, the subject closest to them both was civil rights. Lee told George that “it was hurting him, the fact that colored people did not have the same rights as white ones.” They agreed that President Kennedy was doing a good job, doing more for the black man than any president had before him. “Yes, yes,” Lee would say, “I think he is an excellent president—young, full of energy, full of good ideas.”
The Cuban missile crisis may have tempered Lee’s opinion of Kennedy, although in spite of himself he may well have admired Kennedy’s bravura display. Lee did not say much about the crisis, but when he did talk about it, it was to George—perhaps in the week of the crisis, and certainly many times thereafter. Those who saw George at the time recall that on this occasion, and this occasion only, he was critical of Kennedy and that he was, as always, highly sympathetic to Castro. George sided with the underdog on principle, while Lee had long admired and even hero-worshipped the Cuban dictator, so the two were in strong agreement about Castro.
Another topic they discussed was the integration of Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Four times that fall, in September and early October, federal marshals and officials of the US Department of Justice had tried to enroll James Meredith, a black man, in the university; and four times they desisted because of opposition from Governor Ross Barnett and because an angry crowd, egged on by retired US Army Major General Edwin A. Walker, threatened to erupt into ugly violence. Finally, President Kennedy called out the National Guard and sent US army troops to nearby Memphis, and Meredith was allowed to register, but at the cost of a riot in which two men lost their lives.
Ironically, the same General Walker who exhorted the segregationists at Ole Miss had been ordered by President Eisenhower in 1957 to lead one thousand paratroopers into Little Rock, Arkansas, in the battle to integrate Central High School. He was then sent to Germany, where he used his post to disseminate extreme right-wing propaganda to the troops. Because of congressional objections, he was removed from his command. He retired from the army to live in Dallas and soon became a leading figure in the John Birch Society. For his provocative role in the demonstrations at Ole Miss, Walker was arrested on charges of insurrection and seditious conspiracy, sent to the US prison and medical center at Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric observation, and later released on $50,000 bond.
The John Birch Society, based in Massachusetts, had risen to national prominence while Lee was out of the country. But he had read about it, and about Walker, in the news magazines his mother had sent to Minsk. He talked frequently about the “Birchers” and the “Minutemen” with Gary and Alexandra Taylor when he first moved to Dallas. And the fact that Walker, who seemed to carry about in his very person the threat of “fascism” in the United States, actually lived close at hand in Dallas seems to have stirred Lee a good deal. He and George had endless discussions about the Birchers, Walker, and the danger of fascism. George was well aware from their conversations that Lee “disliked,” even “hated,” General Walker, and by his own remarks George may not only have helped fuel Lee’s hatred but, in an odd way, may have given his approval.
The fundamental bond between Lee and George, then, was politics; and despite the differences between them as human beings, their political views were strikingly alike. Both were rebellious and contumacious toward authority. Both were seekers. Unknown to either of them, however, what they were seeking was not a better world that lay ahead but a better world that lay behind, buried in the past of each. For each had lost his birthright, had lost something he considered rightly his. George had at one stroke lost his country, his mother, and his place in a secure social order. And the effect on him was magnified by the fact that the father he loved was suffering the very same losses. In later life George was to wander from country to country and never really feel at home in his adopted land, the United States. Yet his loss had at least been palpable, measurable, while Lee’s was infinite. For Lee had never known his father. He even attributed his character to this one fact and had written that his father’s early death had occasioned in him “a far mean streak of independence brought on by neglect.” What George and Lee had in common, then, was not just their politics but something deeper that they shared—a lifelong drama of dispossession. It was this that gave depth to their relationship, this that gave consonance and resonance to everything that passed between them.
Politically each was a sounding board for the other, but any account of the echoes that bounced back and forth is incomplete without reckoning in the wives, each of whom was likewise a sufferer in the drama of dispossession. Jeanne’s father had been killed by Communists and, in exile from her homeland, China, she had taken first a French and then an American identity. Marina was illegitimate, had never been at home in any of her Russian “homes,” and, like the other three, had left the country of her birth. All four were rebels. Thus the influence that George had on Lee may have been amplified by the women and especially by Jeanne, who was far out and vociferous in her opinions and was the only woman whose political views Lee respected.
But the differences were crucial, too. George, for example, had innumerable avenues through which he was able to express the central drama of his life, that of yearning to be “in,” yet having to be thrown out. He and Jeanne had countless harmless ways in which they could shock and outrage. As for Marina, she abhorred “politics.” It was Lee who was different. Unlike the de Mohrenschildts, Lee had no hobbies, no eccentricities, no minor ways of expressing himself. His only outlets were major ones. He had already expressed his political ideas on a grand scale twice, by abandoning first America, then Russia, all before he had reached the age of twenty-three.