As a frequent visitor to the Oswalds, it was hard to miss Lee’s physical abuse of Marina. I witnessed facial bruises and black eyes. Marina was sporting a prominent blue bruise under her eye. I was about to ask what had happened when Marina gave me a warning glance that signaled “none of your business.” I would later learn that Lee’s abuse became more frequent and even public.
***
Pete Gregory, Robert Oswald, and the Secret Service were preparing to drive Marina and Marguerite to a hiding place outside Forth Worth. A Secret Service agent whispered to Robert and Pete that Lee had been shot.
***
The Politburo’s secret records show that their real concerns lay elsewhere. Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in Washington understood that U.S. authorities would demand information on Oswald. Of concern was that Oswald had written the Soviet Embassy with a request for a visa just two weeks before November 22. Oswald used regular mail; hence, the FBI would know of the letter. When ultimately asked for Oswald’s letter to the Washington Embassy, Soviet authorities declared it a forgery, a “clear provocation: it gives the impression we had close ties with Oswald and were using him for some purposes of our own.”
***
The reams of material declassified in 2017 and thereafter are rich with nuggets of new information drawn from the FBI and CIA. The FBI surveilled and wiretapped Marina, Robert, and the fleet of opportunists who glommed onto Marina. I was surprised to learn that I remained on the FBI’s radar. When the FBI learned that Marina’s business manager had bought an air ticket to Oklahoma City, their agents checked whether he had come to Oklahoma to see me. (No.) On the more lascivious side, FBI wiretaps caught Marina gossiping about her dreams and sexual obsession for her business manager and inquiring about medications to dampen her sex drive.
***
Conspiracy theorists have latched on to Pete’s hunch that Oswald spoke Russian with a Polish accent. Perhaps it was a sign of special language training or of some other conspiratorial plot. Although Pete grew up with Russian as his mother tongue, he would have had no substantive experience in distinguishing one accent from another. Many citizens of the USSR spoke Russian as a second language. A Russian encountering Lee probably would have guessed that he hailed from a Baltic state.
***
In looking around the apartment, I could not help noticing that Marina and Lee lacked an essential instrument of Russian parenthood: a baby carriage, or kolyaska, as it is called. The typical Russian mother spends an inordinate amount of time parading with her infant in the fresh air. Lacking a baby carriage meant not only missing the Russian promenade but also having to carry June everywhere. Marina must have been annoyed by the lack of a kolyaska. Even in Russia, where people have little, mothers at least have a kolyaska, but Lee could not provide her with one—another sign of failure and humiliation for him.
***
Later I realized that the gift (of his dictionary) was probably an act of one-upmanship in front of Marina, an intimation by Lee that “I have mastered the difficult Russian language. I do not even need a dictionary anymore. This Gregory kid needs it, and he thinks he is better than me.” With Lee, you never knew.
***
To my shock, Lee began to scream at Marina, who was lying face-up. I feared she was unconscious and needed to be hospitalized. Lee rushed to pick up June and continued to rant at Marina for her clumsy mistake. As Marina slowly regained her senses, Lee raced inside for the baby book. Marina made it to her feet, and they began frantically leafing through the pages to find the right information. All the while Lee continued to curse and rage at Marina.
As I drove, I wondered what my father and the Dallas Russians, especially the fastidious George Bouhe, would have thought if they’d witnessed Lee’s behavior that evening. I chose not to tell my father about the incident. Had he known, he would have had no further dealings with Lee Harvey Oswald. Some sixty years later, I ask whether I made a mistake by keeping quiet.
***
As we were meeting in 1962, I considered him a poseur Marxist, who had taken on a radical leftist persona to divert attention from his many failings. However, his essay on the Soviet socialism he experienced in Minsk (aptly dubbed “The Collective”) reveals him as a keen observer, a fact obscured by misspellings and grammatical errors. His extensive scribbled musings on ideal forms of socialism, composed on the SS Maasdam underway to America, are confusing and rambling, but they show at least someone groping for answers to big issues.
***
Both ignored my offers to bring materials that would help Marina learn English. I had English-Russian flash cards. Marina could have used them by herself to build up a small English vocabulary. When I made such suggestions, however, Lee remained silent, and Marina promised this was something she would do “soon.” Marina knew that defying Lee was not something to be done lightly. She would have feared the consequences of crossing him.
***
A suspicious Lee joined us. Marina proudly informed him that, if she knew English, she could get a job in this nice Apteka. Unsaid was the fact that she would probably earn much more than he. Lee dismissed Marina’s excitement with a shrug.
I could see that Lee was not happy with what had just transpired. In a rare show of emotion, he threw a look of irritation across his face as if to say to me: What trouble have you caused me now? What thoughts had this privileged kid, who knows nothing of the real world, put into his wife’s head?
Anna had picked the very question that Lee detested above all others.
His lips had turned white and his face pale when asked the same question twice by the FBI. Here, at a supposedly social dinner party, people were taking advantage of him to ask this hated question! The evening ended. George and Anna drove Lee and Marina home. Lee must have thought to himself: Now these people know exactly where we live. They are going to be trouble.
After his unsuccessful attempt on Walker’s life, the restless Lee started assuming a new persona as a Marxist organizer one step ahead of the ruthless FBI. Cuba beckoned. According to Marina, Lee had even considered skyjacking a plane to Havana, but had abandoned that idea in favor of pursuing a Cuban visa. As a part of his Cuban designs, Oswald requested a Soviet visa from the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
According to his self-description in his visa applications, Oswald was a dedicated Marxist, an activist, committed to the cause. The visas were urgent. The FBI was closing in on him.
That Oswald would begin a new job at a facility on the president’s motorcade route could not have been a part of a concerted plot. At that time, plans for JFK’s Texas trip were still in embryonic form. The Secret Service and Dallas police did not settle o the motorcade route until November 18—about a month after Oswald began work at the book depository.
***
The phone rang at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday. Pete heard a woman’s voice on the verge of tears: “Mr. Gregory, I need your help. The reporters, the news media, are badgering me.” [Marguerite Oswald, Lee’s mother] sobbed before continuing: “I wonder if some of your friends, or you, could provide a place for me to hide from them?” Pete asked, “Who are you?” The caller answered, “I’d rather not tell you who I am, but I will identify myself by saying that I am one of the students in your Russian class in the library.” Pete responded, “I do not talk to people who do not identify themselves.”
***
The parallels between the biographies of Lee and Marguerite Oswald are striking. They both were convinced they had been dealt a bad hand in the cards of life. Both exhibited a tenuous relationship with reality. Both were underdogs, through no fault of their own. Both craved the limelight, which Marguerite refused to share with others. Both had a loose relationship with the truth. When caught in a lie, Marguerite dug un her heels and insisted she had told the truth. Her life had been a series of slights and mistreatments by those positioned above her.
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