Lee’s increasing inability to control himself both at home and at work suggests that emotionally he was in turmoil. What cannot be known is whether his deterioration was the result of a cumulative process that had been taking place for months, or whether in January he suffered some sort of precipitous “breakdown,” triggered perhaps by Marina’s letter to Anatoly on January 7, her brief pregnancy scare on the 10th with its hint of added responsibility, and her subsequent confession of infidelity. The previous fall, in his correspondence with the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party, Lee had made tentative moves toward the peaceful expression of his political views. Signing up for night school on January 14 fitted in with that plan; but it may also have been an indication that he had conceived another plan—a violent, destructive expression of his political views that would require a cover. Ordering a revolver on January 27 under a false name, and his hints to Marina starting the same day that he was thinking of sending her back to Russia without him, both suggest that he was leaning further toward violence. And during the first week of February, he twice misdated his time sheets at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. It was the sort of error he made when he was under stress and in conflict. Gradually, with what appears to have been pain, he was reaching a decision to use the gun.
On Wednesday, February 13, Lee and Marina went to a dinner party at the de Mohrenschildts’. The party had been organized around a showing of the de Mohrenschildts’ film about their adventures in Mexico. Lee had seen the movie before, so he simply ignored it. The other guests, and there were six or eight of them, remember Lee and another young man standing in the center of the room all evening locked in conversation. Each of them stood out: Lee for the informality of his attire (he was wearing slacks and an open-collared shirt while the rest of the men were in business suits), the other for his blond, unmistakably German good looks. He was Volkmar Schmidt, twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, a bachelor, and a geologist for Dallas’s Magnolia Laboratory of Standard Oil of New York. Schmidt had arrived only recently from Germany and was going back there in a week or two on holiday.
Presumably Lee was interested in Germany, and Schmidt in Lee’s account of his experiences in Russia. But George de Mohrenschildt must have been astonished by the rapport between these two young men whose politics, he knew, ought rightly to have set them at war. Lee was a liberal. Schmidt was not. George happened to like Schmidt, but he teased him for being a rabid reactionary, and it was one of his many jokes to call him “Messer Schmidt,” after the Nazi fighter plane of World War II.[4]
It is not known what Lee and Schmidt discussed, although Schmidt did say later their conversation lasted “several hours” and had been about politics. Schmidt remarked that Lee was “very frank” and “very articulate in his descriptions of US and Russian societies.” He felt that he had a “burning dedication to political truth.” He also felt that the young American had enormous ambition but was resigned, because of his limited education, to being unable ever to fulfill it. Summing up his impression of Lee, Schmidt said: “Oswald did not express any views which would indicate violent future action but appeared to be a violent person.”[5]
George drove Lee and Marina home after the party, and the talk at first was of nothing but Volkmar Schmidt. George was at the wheel of his convertible, with Lee and Marina in the back seat. Marina remembers Lee’s intense concentration on every word George said, and the use by both of them, for the first time in her hearing, of the word “Fascist,” which is the same in both Russian and English.
“Just imagine.” George leaned back toward Lee and spoke in Russian. “Such a young man! Yet a Fascist from his brains to his bones!”
“Oh, I liked him,” Marina said. “Fancy meeting a real, live Fascist! Are there really any in America?”
“A whole organization,” George explained, in Russian again, and he described the John Birch Society. Schmidt’s ideas, he added, were much like those of the Birchers. “He has such frightful ideas it would make your hair stand on end.”
Then they began to speak in English, a sign that George and Lee were talking politics. Marina could not follow what they were saying, but she has always felt that this evening was a turning point in Lee’s life. She believes that Lee pounced on some remark George made, a remark that affected his later actions. She suspects that George said something that inadvertently, in her words, “influenced Lee’s sick fantasy,” and that Lee, having seized the idea, squirreled it away out of sight so that neither she nor George would guess where it came from.
Not only did George hate the John Birch Society, he was also convinced that a group of Birchers and FBI men had together broken into his apartment while he was in Mexico and rifled his papers. He and Lee had often discussed the John Birch Society and its most visible spokesman, General Edwin A. Walker. Just what it was that George may have said or implied about them on this occasion, or in some earlier discussion, is a matter for speculation. Samuel Ballen, who was George’s closest friend at the time, says that in conversation with Lee as with everybody else, “unconventional, shocking, humorous and irreverent ideas would have been coming out of George all the time.” Asked whether he might have said something like this to Lee about Walker—“Anybody who bumps that bastard off will be doing this country a favor”—Ballen answers, “Exactly.”[6] Marina and the Fords agree that these words, or words very like them, were probably spoken by George to Lee on the night of February 13 and possibly on other occasions as well.
What George did not know was that Lee already was thinking of killing Walker. He had ordered his weapon and had been studying maps for two weeks. But he was not yet wholly committed to the deed. Had he been, and had his pistol arrived, he could have shot at Walker that very day, for he had given a well-publicized speech that afternoon on the campus of Southern Methodist University, not far from where de Mohrenschildt lived. Lee was still hesitating.
The evening of February 13 may have been the catalyst Lee required. First there was his talk with Schmidt, who was rumored to be the son of an SS officer and who may have reminded Lee of the attempt on Hitler’s life by officers of his own staff in 1944, which, had it been successful, might have ended the war early and saved the lives of many Germans. Then there was his talk with George, who may again have equated the John Birch Society and General Walker with the “Fascist threat” in the United States. Lee was later to say that “if someone had killed Hitler in time, many lives would have been saved.” He was not original in the way he phrased things, and in this case even his words may have come from Schmidt or de Mohrenschildt. It hardly matters. With or without them to say it for him, it is clear that Lee looked on Walker as the “Hitler” of tomorrow.
So did George, and in this consonance of views with a man whom he admired and whom he very much wanted to impress, Lee may have found the sanction—the permission—he needed to go ahead with his plan. He would at one stroke win George’s respect and even awe, save the United States from fascism, and prove to the world that Lee Harvey Oswald was a dedicated idealist willing to make any sacrifice for the sake of his political beliefs.
As it happened, on the next day the Dallas Morning News announced that Walker would join the well-known right-wing evangelist Billy James Hargis in a cross-country speaking tour to warn against the dangers of communism. The tour, to be called “Operation Midnight Ride,” was to begin February 27 in Miami and end in Los Angeles on April 3. Dallas was not on the itinerary.
5
Schmidt was never called to testify before the Warren Commission. The material in the paragraph above is all the FBI file on Schmidt in the National Archives contains about the conversation.