It was one of Oswald’s character traits that he seemed pathologically unable to learn from his mistakes because he was later disciplined while stationed in the Philippines; this time for discharging his rifle into the jungle without good cause while on sentry duty one night.
Oswald reeked ‘unreliable’ from every pore, an impression exacerbated by his pipsqueak voice and querulous, suspicious manner. But then it was his inherent unreliability which made him so expendable and from Galen Cheney’s perspective that more than compensated for his obvious shortcomings as a potential assassin.
Had it not been for the oddity of Oswald’s known background he would not have touched the mixed up young misfit with a proverbial barge pole. Nothing would be so important in the coming months as laying false trails; ideally false trails which further confused the already muddy waters around the genesis of the resistance and the manner in which the recent, failed rebellion had been mounted. For this purpose at least, if not for the one the self-important little fool imagine himself perfectly suited, a man like Oswald might be invaluable in the coming weeks.
This was because Oswald had a gold plated, well documented link to Russian, Communism and the Soviet Union.
Within a month of his compassionate discharge from the Marine Corps, Lee Harvey Oswald had travelled the Soviet Union.
It had been a long planned, uncharacteristically carefully thought through journey. Oswald had taught himself Russian during his time in the Marines, saved $1,500 and secretly determined to seek Soviet citizenship. He was desperately seeking his moment in the limelight but it never happened. Although Associated Press had reported his defection to the Soviet Union, his ‘defection’ was unreported in the majority of syndicated papers and even the papers which picked it up, only gave it a few column inches on inside pages. Oswald had believed that he would be famous, in the event hardly anybody anywhere, including in the Soviet Union — where the authorities thought he was an attention-seeking crackpot, an embarrassment to be quietly tolerated and thereafter, ignored — had been overly interested. Perhaps, the best comment on the affair was that made by the Marine Corps; it amended his discharge papers to read: ‘Undesirable’.
Galen Cheney did not understand why his government had allowed Oswald to come back to the United States after he got bored in Russia; or for that matter why it had not charged him for betraying secrets to the Soviets on his return. And as for granting him a $400 repatriation loan, well, decisions like that told one everything one needed to know about the government!
Oswald and his wife Marina — a nineteen year old pharmacology student when they married — and their baby daughter June, born in February 1962, had returned to America in the June before the October War. By all accounts Oswald was mortified that his return, or rather, his ‘reverse defection’, had attracted absolutely no interest in the printed or in any other media. Typically, while he was an older, much travelled man now fluent in Russian he was no wiser for his experiences. Nor had he turned into any kind of responsible family man. Incapable of holding down a regular job for more than a month or two, he was constantly disappointed with the low esteem in which he was held by those around him. His failures were always somebody else’s fault; the whole World was a conspiracy to prevent him fulfilling his destiny. It was not that he was stupid, just that he was a narcissistic deadbeat; prime material for Galen Chaney’s purposes with readily identifiable psychological buttons which might be punched at any time to point him in the desired direction.
“Do you want to be famous?” Galen Cheney asked the younger man, knowing it was the only thing Lee Harvey Oswald had ever wanted to be.
“What are you talking about?” The younger man asked suspiciously.
“You didn’t do what you were told to do when you tried to kill General Walker the first time in April. When you listened to what I told to do last month you put an end to him. I need to know if you’ve learned that lesson.”
The Brotherhood of Liberty had had no particular beef with Major General Edwin Anderson Walker. The man’s time had passed and he had become an embarrassment to the Army. If he had been less strident, less obviously unstable his views and political commitment might have been useful to the Brotherhood; regrettably Walker had courted publicity and drawn the unwelcome attention of the Justice Department down upon himself and would have been a liability in the present crisis.
Walker was a decorated war hero unable to separate his right-wing conservative beliefs from his duties as an Army officer. Dwight Eisenhower had been forced to publicly criticize him for mixing politics with soldiering but had refused to accept his resignation in 1959. However, sent to Germany to command the 24th Infantry Division Walker had transgressed again. Having described Eleanor Roosevelt and former President Harry S. Truman as being ‘pink’ — communists by any other name — and attempting to compel troops under his command to vote according to his wishes, he was formally censured by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and when he offered his resignation on this, the second occasion, President Kennedy had readily accepted it. Walker had run for Governor of Texas and lost in 1962; after that he had completely gone off the rails. Arrested in October 1962 for leading riots against the admittance of a black student to the all-white University of Mississippi, the United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had briefly had him committed to a psychiatric hospital.
It was unclear to Galen Cheney why exactly Oswald had become so fixated on Walker; but it was serendipitous that his obsession had provided an opportunity to hone the blunt instrument he had represented into something a little sharper, keener and malleable.
Oswald’s first cack-handed attempt on General Walker’s life had been a pot shot at the man through a window. Oswald’s single ill-directed shot had struck the window frame and showered his target with wood splinters.
Cheney’s people had taken Oswald up country for a couple of weeks, made sure he practiced hard enough to shoot straight and then encouraged him to put an end to Walker. This time he had hit Walker with two of his three shots at a range of approximately three hundred yards while Walker ranted to a crowd of red necks in Randol Mill Park in Arlington. One bullet had clipped the victim’s shoulder, the other had blown away the top half of his head
Cheney had planned to leave it longer before he returned to well, to leave the young man a while to bask in the glory of his first ‘kill’.
However, opportunities to assassinate the President of the United States of America were few and far between; that was why he had encouraged Oswald to apply for the job at the Texas School Book Depository.
“Okay. I got it right the second time,” Lee Harvey Oswald growled as deeply as his somewhat squeaky voice permitted. “Now what?”
“Now we know we can trust you go after bigger fish.” Cheney’s mouth twitched into a chilly, fleeting smile that was gone in a moment. “You never know, maybe you’ll be famous after all, son.”
Chapter 36