Kennedy's Last Days: The Assassination That Defined a Generation Read Online Free PDF Page B

when Oswald enters the hospital for an adenoid operation. Marina visits him constantly, and by the time Lee is discharged, he knows he “must have her.” On April 30, they are married. Marina almost immediately becomes pregnant.

This photograph of Marina Oswald was in Lee Harvey Oswald’s wallet when he was arrested. [© Corbis]
    Very quickly, life is complicated for Lee Harvey Oswald. The former bachelor now has two people to provide for, and he has to figure out if he can take a Soviet citizen with him back to the United States.
    This marriage is important to Oswald. It makes him feel adult and in charge. But he doesn’t really know what a good marriage is. Oswald hasn’t seen one close up in his life. His father dies before he is born and his mother sends him to an orphanage when he is four years old. When she finally takes him back for good, he is twelve. They move from New Orleans to New York City, where Marguerite Oswald works all day in a dress shop. Lee drifts around the city, traveling by subway, when he should be in school.
    One day he picks up a flyer about two people who are about to be executed for spying for Russia. Oswald writes in his diary: “I was looking for a key to my environment, and then I discovered socialist literature. I had to dig for my books in the back dusty shelves of libraries.”

Young Lee at a zoo in New York. [© Corbis]
    Oswald never finishes school. He joins the Marines when he is seventeen and is trained in marksmanship. But he can’t seem to fit in. He is court-martialed twice, once for having an illegal pistol and once for attacking a sergeant. Very soon, he is learning Russian and making plans to defect to the Soviet Union. He lasted three years in the Marines and has been in the Soviet Union for two. It seems that Lee Harvey Oswald hasn’t found a place to belong.

 
    CHAPTER EIGHT
    APRIL 17, 1961
    Washington, D.C./Bay of Pigs, Cuba 9:40 A.M.
    J OHN F . K ENNEDY ABSENTMINDEDLY buttons his suit coat. He is seated aboard Marine One , his presidential Marine Corps helicopter, as it lands on the South Lawn of the White House. He has just spent a most unrelaxing weekend at Glen Ora, the family’s rented country retreat in Virginia.
    Kennedy is preoccupied with Cuba. A battlefield is taking shape there. Kennedy has authorized a secret invasion of the island nation, sending 1,400 anti-Castro exiles to do a job that the U.S. military, by rule of international law, cannot do itself. The freedom fighters’ goal is nothing less than the overthrow of the Cuban government. The plan has been in the works since long before Kennedy was elected. Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff representing the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have assured the president that the mission will succeed. But it is Kennedy who has given the go-ahead, and it is he who will take the blame if the mission fails.

    In the days leading up to the scheduled invasion, President Kennedy reviewed the CIA’s plan. He wanted the invasion to seem as if it had been generated solely by Cuban exiles, thereby masking American government involvement. This required an out-of-the-way landing area where men and supplies could go ashore quietly, then slip into the countryside unnoticed.
    The CIA suggested a location, known as Bahía de Cochinos—loosely translated as the “Bay of Pigs.” The landing would take place at night.
    On April 14, just two days after giving a press conference in which he promised there would be no intervention by U.S. forces in Cuba, Kennedy gave Operation Zapata, as the Bay of Pigs invasion was known, the official go-ahead.
    April 14 was a Friday. After launching the invasion, there was nothing for the president to do but wait. So he flew to Glen Ora to be with Jackie and the kids, where he endured a gut-wrenching weekend waiting for news from Cuba. When word finally came, almost none of it was good.
    It started on Saturday morning, when eight B-26 bombers piloted by