Lee’s eyes filled with tears. He threw down his leaflets and read Johnson’s letter aloud. “See this?” he said, waving it in front of her. “There are people who understand me and think I’m doing useful work. If he respects what I’m doing, then it’s important. He’s the Lenin of our country.”
Lee had already told Marina that American Communists were not like Russian ones.[1] The Communists in Russia are careerists, he said. They join for a job or an apartment. Here it’s like Russia in the old days. The members are people of principle. They work underground, in conditions of persecution. Knowing Lee’s respect for the American Communists, Marina was routed. “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead and stamp your papers if it makes you happy.”
On Friday, August 16, wholly unchastened by his arrest just a week before, Lee waited with unaccustomed patience for Marina to iron his favorite shirt. He had already called the local TV stations to tell them that there would be a Fair Play for Cuba demonstration that day in front of the Trade Mart building in downtown New Orleans.[2]
Lee hired two recruits, a nineteen-year-old boy named Charles Hall Steele Jr. and another young man who has never been identified, to help him hand out his leaflets. The fifteen- or twenty-minute demonstration went off without trouble, and pictures of Lee were shown on the television news that night.
Marina refused to go to the Murrets’ to watch the broadcast. “I see you every day at home in all forms. I don’t want to see you on TV. Besides, how come you’re not ashamed to telephone the stations yourself?” Marina was appalled that her husband had sought publicity. To her it was very poor form. But it was just what Lee wanted, and there was more to come.
At 8:00 A.M. the next day, Saturday, August 17, William K. Stuckey, a young reporter with a weekly radio show on station WDSU, drove up to the Oswalds’ in search of Lee, whose name and address he had obtained from Carlos Bringuier. New Orleans was a hotbed of right-wing political activity, and now that a bona fide left-wing organization had appeared, Stuckey wanted to cover it on his program, “Latin Listening Post.” He expected to find a “folk-singer type,” a fellow in sandals and beard, and was startled when a clean-cut young man appeared, clad only in Marine Corps fatigues—no shirt—and invited him onto the porch. He would like to ask Stuckey in for coffee, Lee said, but his wife and child were still asleep.
Stuckey explained who he was and invited Lee to record a five-minute interview for his show that night. If Lee would come to the station about 5:00 P.M., well before the 7:30 broadcast, they could have a long interview and Stuckey could cut it to the required few minutes. Lee accepted.
He showed up punctually and recorded an interview of nearly forty minutes. Then, in Lee’s presence, Stuckey cut the tape to four and a half minutes. Lee was pleased as he heard the tape being played back.[3] He felt he had “scored a coup.” He had not allowed himself to be lured out of his depth or led into talking about subjects he did not wish to pursue. Nor was anything said about his years in Russia, since Stuckey knew nothing about them.
Stuckey, too, was pleased, and he used the edited tape on his program that evening. He found Oswald highly “articulate,” a man who seemed “deliberate” about every word he spoke and every gesture he made, the sort who would inspire confidence because of his self-control.[4] He was more than a little amused that such a man should have materialized as a pro-Castro organizer in kooky, anti-Communist New Orleans. Hoping to persuade the news director of his station to let him run the entire thirty-seven-minute tape, he asked Lee to call him on Monday.
The news director would have none of it. Indeed, he said, there had been an angry public reaction already. Rather than run the uncut tape, he urged Stuckey to schedule a radio debate with some local anti-Communists to refute Oswald.[5]
With his usual imperturbable punctuality, Lee telephoned Stuckey on Monday and was asked to take part in a debate on Wednesday, August 21. The other participants were to be Carlos Bringuier—“to add a Cuban flavor,” Stuckey said—and Edward Scannell Butler, director of the Information Council of the Americas, a propaganda organization that taped interviews with Cuban refugees and refugees from Iron Curtain countries and distributed them to radio stations south of the border. Lee agreed to the debate.
Meanwhile, Stuckey had decided to do some checking on Oswald. That same Monday he made the entire thirty-seven-minute tape available to the local FBI office, where the stenographer pool made a transcript, then returned the tape to Stuckey along with a copy of the transcript.[6] While he was talking to an FBI source over the telephone that day, Stuckey, as he remembers it, was put through to the chief or deputy chief of the New Orleans bureau, and this man read aloud to him over the phone portions of Oswald’s FBI file, including the facts that he had been to Russia, tried to renounce his US citizenship, stayed there nearly three years, and married a Russian woman. Stuckey went to the FBI office and was permitted to examine the file, as well as newspaper clippings from Moscow at the time of Oswald’s defection.[7]
While Stuckey was at the FBI office, Edward Butler received a visit from Carlos Bringuier and a fellow Cuban exile, Carlos Quiroga, who had done some investigating of their own. On the evening of the demonstration in front of the Trade Mart, Quiroga, posing as a Castro sympathizer, had paid Oswald a call to see what he could find out. Oswald, who suspected that Quiroga was an agent either from Bringuier or from the FBI, told him nothing. But while the two men were talking on the porch, June came running out and spoke to her father in Russian. Bringuier and Quiroga reported the incident to Butler and told him they had information that Oswald had been to Russia and had a Russian wife. Butler tried to reach someone in Washington by telephone.[8] Later in the day he informed Stuckey that he, too, had learned of Oswald’s Russian background—from someone at the “House Un-American Activities Committee.”[9]
Stuckey and Butler agreed over the telephone that they would bring Oswald’s Russian past to light on the program, expose him as a Communist sympathizer, and destroy his organization.
On Wednesday Lee arrived at the station first, wearing a heavy flannel suit that was totally wrong for the New Orleans heat, and looking nervous because he knew that this time he faced opposition. He had been practicing at home all day. He wrote down what he wanted to say on scraps of paper, then he strode around the living room delivering his remarks with what he thought were appropriate gestures.
When Stuckey arrived, Lee joshed him a bit about inviting people “to gang up on me.” Bringuier was the next to appear; Lee went up to shake hands, and Bringuier remarked humorously that if ever Lee wanted to join his side, the anti-Castro side, he would have nothing against him personally. Lee answered good-naturedly that he believed he was right and was doing his best.
The debate was taped for broadcast that evening, and it was a disaster for Lee. Stuckey started off by announcing that Oswald had a Russian past, had tried to renounce his US citizenship, and had concealed it on their interview only a few days before. The rest of the “debate” amounted to a verbal pummeling: did not Oswald’s self-proclaimed Marxist faith and his residence in the USSR signify that the FPCC “chapter” of which he was “secretary” had to be Communist? Lee had been sandbagged, and there was little he could do but keep his temper, which he did.
1
In a document that was apparently written in February or March 1963, before the Walker attempt, Oswald wrote: “The Communist Party of the United States has betrayed itself!” He criticized the party as “willing, gullible messengers” of the Kremlin, “in servile conformity to the wishes of the Soviet Union” (Warren Commission Document No. 97, Vol. 16, pp. 422–430). His anger and contempt had now given way to other feelings, and he was still trying to strengthen his links to the party on the very last night of his life.
2
In his August 17, 1963, “Latin Listening Post” interview with William K. Stuckey, Oswald said that he had telephoned the city editor of the New Orleans
7
Letter from Stuckey to the author, January 24, 1976. The FBI’s contact with Stuckey at this stage, while alluded to in Stuckey’s testimony, does not appear in FBI reports on its surveillance of Oswald in New Orleans as published in the twenty-six Warren Commission volumes. Warren Commission Exhibit No. 826, a report filed by Special Agent Milton R. Kaack in October 1963, which summarizes most of Oswald’s political activities in New Orleans, states erroneously that Stuckey’s first contact with the FBI on the subject of Oswald did not occur until August 30, 1963. It is possible that Kaack’s superior did not tell him of the contact with Stuckey, and thus it failed to appear in the file on Oswald in New Orleans.
9
Letter from Stuckey to the author, January 24, 1976. Butler, in a strange omission, was never called as a witness before the Warren Commission nor asked to give a deposition.