“This times it’s sure to be a boy. Our David is going to be president!”
Marina, too, wanted a boy, but to please Lee, not because she wanted any son of hers to be president. She thought politics was sick, and that anyone engaged in politics had to be sick as well. “Don’t make me laugh,” she said. “You can hardly support a family, much less give our son the education he needs to be president. A president has to go to college.”
“Not all presidents have been to college,” Lee said.
Marina’s feelings about having the child were still mixed. She was reluctant and ashamed, anxious to conceal from the other Russians that Bouhe’s prophecy had been fulfilled. Since it had happened, however, she told herself that there was merit in having two children close together. They would both be in school that much sooner. Then she would go back to work and support Lee so he could go to college.
Lee was not thinking about college. Sitting in the kitchen that first week of March, he asked Marina to fetch him his Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Marina was overjoyed. He was going to buy a present for her and June. She brought him the catalogue, then crept behind his chair to see what he was going to buy. Abruptly, he snapped the catalogue shut. Next time she got a better look. It was not dresses or toys he was looking at. He was reading the section on rifles.
Lee’s life appears to have been fairly normal that first week of March. He signed in and out of work at regular hours and seems to have attended typing class as usual. Mrs. Gladys A. Yoakum, his teacher, has described him as a young man who liked to “slip in, unobserved,” while her “back was turned.” Instead of sitting up front by the keyboard chart with the other beginners, where she could help him, Lee “gravitated” from the outset to the back-row seat beside the window. Thus Mrs. Yoakum never had occasion to give him individual attention. Nor did she see what he was typing. She noticed, however, that each night he brought his textbook wrapped in brown paper or a brown paper bag, unwrapped it, propped it up in front of him, and typed from it, or from something he placed inside it, throughout class. Mrs. Yoakum says that he could easily have been typing something of his own without her noticing it. She recalls that she “never once saw him talk to anyone else, or come in or leave with anyone else.” She also noticed that he sometimes left a little early. She assumed that Lee, like some of her other students, was taking the course to escape an unhappy marriage.[2]
It is not known what he was typing in class, but it may have been drafts of a letter to the Militant that Lee almost certainly wrote, and that appeared in the March 11 issue under the heading: “News and Views from Dallas,” signed with the initials “L.H.”[3] The author of the letter praised the paper as “the most informative radical publication in America” but criticized it for failing to publish more about reform movements inside the Democratic Party, especially in California and New York, and about an Independent campaign for the US Senate in Massachusetts. The writer then described the case of a Mrs. Marie Ortiz, of Dallas, who had been left ill and unable to work with six children, and who had also suffered a fire. “Would it not be better to fundamentally reform the social conditions which are presently the cause of unemployment… than to rely on the sympathy of a few of the rich at Christmas…?”
The letter has several features that help trace it to Lee. Among the most telling are the caustic reference to Christmas and the sarcastic remark that “some kind person” had suggested to Mrs. Ortiz that “she turn her children over to an orphanage,” but “she replied that she did not wish to live without her children.” The remark appears to reflect Lee’s own bitterness over having been sent to an orphanage and his desire that his mother, like Mrs. Ortaz, had refused “to live without her children.”[4]
Sunday, March 10, marked the first known deviation from Lee’s routine that month. He rode a bus to the vicinity of No. 4011 Turtle Creek Boulevard, the home of General Walker, and took photographs.[5] Five survive: one shows the alley behind Walker’s house; two show the rear of the house itself; and two a set of railway tracks running through woods about half a mile from the house.[6] Lee probably took more than five photographs, for Marina recalls that he later told her that “he wanted to leave a complete record so that all the details would be in it. He told me that the entries [in a notebook he kept] consisted of the description of the house of General Walker, the distances, the location, and the distribution of windows in it.”[7] These entries were almost certainly accompanied by photographs.
Lee probably developed the photographs at work the following evening, March 11, and something—his study of Walker’s house or the photographs—convinced him that a different crime was possible from the close-up, virtually suicidal act he had had in mind in January when he ordered his revolver. This crime could be committed at a distance. From it he had a chance of escape.
Thus, on March 12, using not the Sears catalogue but a coupon clipped from the February issue of American Rifleman magazine, Lee went to the main post office and ordered a high-powered Italian carbine, called a Mannlicher-Carcano, from Klein’s Sporting Goods Company, a mail-order house in Chicago. He sent the coupon air mail with a postal money order for $21.45 ($12.78 for the rifle, $7.17 for the scope, to be mounted by a gunsmith employed by Klein’s, and $1.50 for postage and handling). The rifle was to be delivered to “A. Hidell, Post Office Box 2915, Dallas, Texas.”[8]
About the same day Lee ordered the rifle, he received a letter from his brother Robert, whom he had last seen four months before. Robert wrote that his company had promoted him and transferred him to Malvern, Arkansas. He asked Lee and Marina to visit, adding that occasionally he came to Dallas and would like Lee’s home address so he could stop in and see the family or, if Lee was not at home, at least visit June and Marina.[9]
Lee’s reply is revealing.[10] It hints at the affection he felt for his brother, and yet he refused to give Robert his home address. Instead, he sent only his post office box number, on the grounds that “I shall always have it.” Lee had rented the Neely Street apartment for a purpose, and he did not think he would be there long.
The intensity with which Lee was thinking about his plan is underlined by the extraordinary hours he put in on the day he mailed his answer to Robert. It was Saturday, March 16, a day for which he would receive overtime pay, and he contrived to work for ten hours. He was eager for every penny he could earn.
Marina, meanwhile, had received an answer to her letter of February 17 to the Soviet Embassy. With utmost politeness the embassy explained that in order to return to the USSR she would have to furnish a long list of documents and photographs, all in triplicate, plus letters from her relatives in Russia. The embassy said that the process would take five or six months.[11] Marina was elated. Faced by the mountain of red tape that she had lived with all her life, she knew it would take the bureaucracy of her country not five or six months to clasp her to its bosom once again, but more like five or six years. So on Sunday, March 17, when Lee forced her to sit down a second time and fill out the embassy’s forms, she was not as catastrophically affected as she had been the month before.[12]
2
Letters from Mrs. Gladys A. Yoakum to the author, April 6 and May 6, 1973, and May 24, 1975.
4
Other features that suggest the letter was written by Oswald include the tone of condescending flattery, even as the writer tells the paper what stories it ought to print; use of the term “gross error,” a direct translation of a phrase used frequently in Russian; use of quotes around the word “sensational,” a sarcasm characteristic of Oswald, when the writer really means that the Ortiz case was typical and not unusual or sensational; the lack of a transition between the remarks about reform politics and the story of the Ortiz case; the fact that Oswald’s pretext for leaving the Marine Corps was an injury that had left his mother “unable” to work; and the writer’s interest in “fundamentally transforming” the system, typical of Oswald’s beliefs.
Those who contend that Oswald did not write the letter have suggested that he would not have known or cared about reform movements in the Democratic Party, or about the campaign of H. Stuart Hughes in Massachusetts. But the handwritten document that he left behind and that is described in this chapter reflects his interest in using even elements of the Republican Party to bring about reform. In addition, the September 7, 1962, issue of
There are also those who concede Oswald’s link to the letter but believe that he lacked the skill to write it. They think that he must have had help and that such help points to his being part of a “conspiracy” in the spring of 1963–see Albert H. Newman,
5
Exhibit No. 1351, Vol. 22, p. 585, pinpoints the dates of the photographs. From the progress of the construction of a large building in the background of the photos, it was the weekend of March 9–10, and since Oswald worked Saturday until 4:00 P.M., he must have taken the photographs on Sunday, March 10.
8
Oswald’s time sheet on March 12 is evidence that he probably lied sometimes about his hours. On the day he ordered the rifle, he signed in from 8:00 A.M. to 5:15 (Exhibit No. 1855, Vol. 23, p. 605). The US postal inspector in Dallas, Harry D. Holmes, later testified that Oswald’s money order for the rifle was issued “early on the morning of March 12.” This appears to have been the case, for the order was imprinted on Klein’s cash register March 13. Since the post office window opened only at 8:00 A.M., Oswald probably lied when he signed in then. Thus the time sheets have to be used with caution.
10
Exhibit No. 322, Vol. 16, pp. 886–888. Oswald had other reasons for keeping his brother at a distance. He did not want Robert to come when Marina was alone and learn from her the facts of his treatment of her. Nor did he want Robert to see the revolver on its shelf and the clutter of maps and photographs in his “office” and possibly guess his plan. Finally, Oswald had some insight into himself and may have understood that he was like a gun that is loaded, cocked, and about to go off. His target was General Walker. But if someone else came by for whom he harbored strong emotions–and he had strong feelings for both Robert and his mother–he might kill that person instead. He