MARINA OSWALD. . . . I was so afraid after this attempt on Walker’s life that . . . there would be evidence in the house such as this book.
MR. LIEBELER. Did you talk to Lee about it?
MARINA OSWALD. Oh, yes . . . I suggested to him that it would be awfully bad to keep a thing like that in the house.2
It appears that this is one time when he did listen to his wife.
McMillan: . . . next thing she knew he was standing by the toilet with some sheets of paper in his hand and a box of matches. Slowly he tore the sheets in half, crumpled them into balls, and one by one touched a match to them. As each ball of paper caught the flames, he dropped it into the toilet. He did this thoughtfully, with great reluctance, as if it were the funeral pyre of his ideas. But . . . [he] did not burn the handwritten pages which contained his political philosophy and program . . . Marina had seen how reluctant he had been to burn his papers. “I wonder if he burned them,” she asked herself, “because he does not trust me?”3
A few days earlier, however, he had been in a manic mood:
McMillan: The Dallas papers of Thursday, April 11, ran front-page stories about the attempt on Walker’s life. Lee left the apartment to buy both morning and afternoon editions . . .
Reading [them], Lee roared with laughter. “Americans are so spoiled!” he said, proud of his escape. “It never occurs to them that you might use your own two legs . . .”4
. . . Lee was astonished at how easily he got off and at the ineptness of the police. They had the bullet, yet they identified it wrongly and wrongly identified the rifle from which it was fired.5
Here, Patricia Johnson McMillan offers a salient perception:
He had tried something cataclysmic—and he had not been caught. He had not even been touched.
Thus by far the greatest legacy Lee carried out of the Walker attempt was the conviction that he was invulnerable, that he stood at the center of a magic circle swathed in a cloak of immunity. It was a feeling which fitted dangerously with the feeling he already had that he was special, that he had particular prerogatives. He and he alone was entitled to that which was forbidden to everybody else.6
McMillan seems to assume that such beliefs, once arrived at, are as permanent as concrete, whereas the likelihood is that Oswald frequently wavered in his idea of himself, prey at any given moment to puncture or depression. Those of his actions that seem most irrational or needlessly ugly have to be attempts to defend his faith in his powers. He would slap Marina for a small remark because if he accepted her last reductive statement—whatever it was; it could be no more than “You are stupid” or “You are a baby”—his ego would be punctured. Depression would come in a flood. We have to keep reminding ourselves of the great weight he bore. He believed he was the only man alive who could make a profound difference in how the future would be shaped; yet he was dyslexic and half in love with a woman who did not respect him; worse, she was ready, as he saw it, to go over to the enemy. On top of that, he had just lost the only job he ever liked.
Yes, he is in a most changeable state in the first few days after the attempt on Walker, and into the middle of this come the De Mohrenschildts again. An odd little business occurs:
From an FBI report: MARINA said that a few days after the assassination [attempt,] GEORGE DE MOHRENSCHILDT was in their home on NEELY Street and made a joking remark to OSWALD to the effect, “How is it that you missed General WALKER?”7
Naturally, the Warren Commission had to take this up. To their question on this point came the following answer:
MARINA OSWALD. De Mohrenschildt—as soon as he opened the door—he said to Lee, “How could you have missed, how could you have missed him?” . . . Lee could not speak that evening. [Later he] asked me if I had told De Mohrenschildt about it and when I said I didn’t, he said, “How did he guess it?”8
Even thirteen years later, George was still counting his losses on that particular statement by Marina. In his Warren Commission testimony, he would go so far as to admit that he had said, “Did you take a pot shot at General Walker, Lee?” but that is not quite the same as “How could you have missed?” In 1977, De Mohrenschildt would write, “This innocuous remark of mine influenced our lives.”
It is enough to account for his animus toward Marina. By 1967, he would lose his sinecure in Haiti, and would attribute part of the damage to her.
Let us try to follow it through. We can begin with George’s testimony in 1964:
MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. And Jeanne told me that day, “Let’s go and take a rabbit for Oswald’s baby.”
MR. JENNER. This was on Easter Sunday?
MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. . . . I don’t remember if it was Easter Sunday . . . Maybe my wife will remember the date exactly. And so we drove over quite late in the evening and walked up—I think they were asleep. They were asleep and we knocked at the door and shouted, and Lee Oswald came down undressed, half undressed, you see, maybe in shorts, and opened the door and we told him that we have the rabbit for the child. And it was a very short visit, you know. We just gave the rabbit to the baby and I was talking to Lee while Jeanne was talking to Marina . . . Oswald and I were standing near the window looking outside and I was asking him, “How is your job?” or “Are you making any money? Are you happy?” some question of that type. All of a sudden, Jeanne who was with Marina in the other room told me, “Look, George, they have a gun here.” And Marina opened the closet and showed it to Jeanne, a gun that belonged obviously to Oswald.
MR. JENNER. This was a weapon? Did you go in and look?
MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. No . . . Jeanne was looking at it, the gun, and . . . Marina said, “That crazy idiot is target shooting all the time.” So frankly I thought it was ridiculous to [go] target shooting in Dallas, you see, right in town. I asked him, “Why do you do that?” [and he said,] “I like target shooting.” So out of the pure, really jokingly, I told him, “Are you then the guy who took a pot shot at General Walker?” And he . . . sort of shriveled, you see, when I asked this question . . . and didn’t answer anything, smiled, you know, made a sarcastic—not sarcastic, made a peculiar face . . . Changed the expression on his face.
MR. JENNER. [Do you recall that] as soon as you opened the door, you said, “Lee, how is it possible that you missed?”
MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. Never. I don’t recall that incident . . . I remember very distinctly saying, “Did you take the pot shot at General Walker?”9
The likelihood is that he and Jeanne have prepared a story. As Jeanne will establish, their visit was at ten o’clock on Saturday night, April 13, three days after the attempt. The gun, however, was not in the closet at that time.
According to Marina, the rifle was only retrieved from Lee’s hiding place near the railroad tracks on Sunday, but if, indeed, the weapon was back by Saturday night, it was still not in the closet because, according to Marina, Lee hid it again after he brought it back. Saturday, after all, was the day when Marina, in panic, had convinced him to destroy his Walker papers. But even if Marina’s testimony is incorrect and the gun was in the closet, would Marina, of all people, have been so careless as to offer Jeanne a look at it so soon after the shooting?
The larger possibility is that Jeanne De Mohrenschildt had paid another, and earlier, visit to Marina, on April 5, five days before the attack on Walker. On that occasion, George was in New York, working out some final details concerning their trip to Haiti, and Jeanne, having quit her job in preparation for departure, had enough free time in the afternoon to drive over to Neely Street and drop in on Marina. While she was in the Oswalds’ apartment, Marina, according to McMillan, opened a clothes closet and showed Lee’s rifle to Jeanne:
McMillan: “Look at that!” Marina said. “We have barely enough to eat and my crazy husband goes and buys a rifle.” She told Jeanne that Lee had been practicing with it.
Jeanne’s father had been a gun collector . . . Instantly she spotted something: . . . Lee’s gun had a telescopic sight . . . [When] Georg
e got back from New York, she seems to have told him that poor as the Oswalds were, Lee had bought a rifle with a scope and had been practicing.10
McMillan’s description of the event, since it offers no citation, had to have come from Marina. During Jeanne’s Warren Commission testimony, she claims not to be able to recognize a telescopic sight, but then her story is hardly convincing, since she admits she loves skeet shooting. While that is hardly the same as target practice with a rifle and scope, still the likely supposition is that after the visit on April 5, Jeanne has decided to admit neither to this visit nor to the telescopic sight. For if she did, it would then seem logical to any interrogator to ask whether she did not tell George all about it when he returned from New York, and that would mean that George knew before there was an attempt on General Walker that Oswald was in possession of a high-powered rifle with scope. Such knowledge would almost certainly have to be imparted quickly to his case officer.
Let us look at Jeanne’s testimony and see if we can locate the lies and the blurring of detail that she is obliged to offer up in order to conceal her visit on April 5 to Marina. It is crucial that the Warren Commission not discover that she and George knew about the rifle in advance:
MR. JENNER. Now, something occurred in Easter, 1963, when you went to visit them?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes.
MR. JENNER. Was this Easter Sunday or the day after?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. No, to my best recollection it was Saturday before Easter. By the way, the first time [the FBI] talked to us about it, I completely mixed all the dates. I thought it was in the fall. But it was the day I [now] remember when we came over with the big pink rabbit for the baby.
MR. JENNER. Did you arrive there during the day?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. No; it was in the evening. I think we were playing tennis, and then we were somewhere, and then I decided we will be busy tomorrow, and I wanted to take the rabbit to the baby . . . 11
Already she has established that her memory is so poor that she cannot separate fall from spring. Yet she also recalls that it was Saturday night before Easter Sunday. Her difficulty is that she does not know how much Jenner or the Warren Commission knows, or how precise Marina has been in her testimony. Given such doubt, it is best to blur her recollections wherever she can:
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. . . . and we came over late at night. It was 10 o’clock or maybe later. And I remember they gave us something to drink.
MR. JENNER. You arrived there. Were they—had they retired for the night?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. I think they were halfway in bed already, because the house was dark. I remember we banged on the door. It was dark.
MR. JENNER. And Lee came to the door?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. I don’t remember who came to the door, Marina or Lee . . . 12
It is more likely that the De Mohrenschildts are arriving late on purpose. They wish to wake the Oswalds up. They want to catch them by surprise. If De Mohrenschildt knows already that Lee has a rifle and scope, then we can assume there may have been a directive from George’s case officer to find out, if he could, whether Oswald had taken a shot at Walker.
So, when the question of an earlier visit comes up, Jeanne does her best to deny that she was there on Neely Street before April 13, yet she is careful not to commit herself altogether.
MR. JENNER. Had you been there before?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. No.
MR. JENNER. That is the first time you had ever been there?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. I don’t remember. Maybe I was. I don’t think so.
MR. JENNER. All right.
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. I don’t think so.
MR. JENNER. You got there. No, just relax—
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. I am trying to think hard because every little fact could be important.
MR. JENNER. But you are excited. Relax, and tell me everything that occurred, chronologically, as best you can on that occasion. You came to the door and either Marina or Oswald came to the door, and you and your husband went in the home?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. That is right.
MR. JENNER. Then, go on. Tell me about it.
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. And I believe from what I remember George sat down on the sofa and started talking to Lee, and Marina was showing me the house—that is why I said it looks like it was the first time, because why would she show me the house if I had been there before? Then we went to another room and she opens the closet, and I see the gun standing there. I said, what is the gun doing over there?13
Now come the disclaimers on the telescopic sight. She admits to shooting skeet and loving to use a rifle in an amusement park, because she knows that one of the émigrés might mention as much, yet she maintains her fiction concerning the telescopic sight:
MR. JENNER. And then other things that arrested your attention, as I gather from what you have said, is that you saw a telescopic sight?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. Yes; but I didn’t know what it was . . . It was not a smooth, plain rifle. That is for sure.
MR. JENNER. . . . were you concerned about it?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. I just asked what on earth is he doing with a rifle?
MR. JENNER. What did she say?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. She said, “Oh, he just loves to shoot . . . he goes in the park and he shoots at leaves and things like that.” But it didn’t strike me too funny, because I personally love skeet shooting . . .
MR. JENNER. Didn’t you think it was strange to have someone say he is going in a public park and shooting leaves?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. But he was taking the baby out. He goes with her, and that was his amusement . . . 14
Not only has Marina led her to the gun, but now Lee is using it to shoot leaves! In a public park! If June is with him, presumably other children are in the park as well! Jeanne is doing her best to diminish Oswald’s potential for violence in her eyes and, collaterally, in her husband’s eyes. Indeed, she will go further than George. She pretends that Oswald did not have a large reaction to her husband’s now embattled remark:
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. . . . George, of course, with his sense of humor . . . said, “Did you take a pot shot at Walker by any chance?” And we started laughing our heads off, big joke, big George’s joke . . .
MR. JENNER. Were you looking to see whether [Oswald] had a change of expression?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. No; none at all. It was just a joke . . .
MR. JENNER. But did you not look at him to see if he reacted?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. No; I didn’t take it seriously enough to look at him.15
The De Mohrenschildts would leave Dallas on April 19 for New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. In the capital, George would shepherd his patron, Clemard Charles, president of the Banque Commerciale de Haiti, into a meeting with CIA staff officer Tony Czaikowski on May 7, 1963. The indication from a CIA liaison officer named Sam Kail was that “Charles might prove useful in ongoing efforts aimed at overthrowing Castro . . .”16
MR. JENNER. You returned to Dallas in May?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. End of May.
MR. JENNER. Did you call the Oswalds?
MRS. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. No; we didn’t. We heard that they were already gone . . . we had a card from them in New Orleans with their address. But I don’t think we ever wrote to them . . . We were going to send them a Christmas card.17
From Marina’s narrative: . . . In the meantime, I decided that if Lee did not have a job, it would be better to go to a different city. I was also afraid that in Dallas Lee would be very tempted to repeat his attempt on Walker. I suggested that we leave for New Orleans—Lee’s home town. There he had relatives. I thought he would be ashamed to do the same things there as he had done in Dallas. I wanted to get as far as possible from the occasion of sin.18
George gives one more disclaimer:
MR. DE MOHRENSCHILDT. I repeat again that they were out of my mind completely—after the last time we sa
w them.19
It is worth repeating: The nearest we have come to a smoking gun is Edward Epstein’s discovery that the CIA contact reports on De Mohrenschildt for April and May of 1963 were removed from the file. Would those contact reports have failed to mention De Mohrenschildt’s probable conclusion that Oswald was the man who shot at Walker?
In the notes to his book Legend, Edward J. Epstein gives us, without citation, this terse piece of information:
. . . in 1964, George De Mohrenschildt told a friend in Houston, Jim Savage, that he had inadvertently given Marina the money Oswald used to buy the rifle. Marina said to him that spring, “Remember the twenty-five dollars you gave me? Well, that fool husband of mine used it to buy a rifle.”20
Let us add up the damage from the CIA’s point of view:
1. A contract agent, George De Mohrenschildt, serving as handler for Oswald, knew in advance that Oswald had a rifle with scope and notified the Agency before April 10.
2. After the Walker episode, De Mohrenschildt was all but convinced that Oswald had been involved in the shooting, and he so notified the Agency. His handlers at Langley now possessed the knowledge that a man in Dallas who had once defected to the Soviet Union had probably taken a shot at General Walker.
3. If De Mohrenschildt also admitted to his case officer that he had given Oswald the money to purchase a rifle with a telescopic sight, then the Agency, in the event this was disclosed, would be damned in the eyes of the media for doing nothing about a putative assassin in Dallas whom they were, at one remove, responsible for arming.