The Day Kennedy Was Shot Read Online Free PDF Page A

had busied herself in the kitchen with Mrs. Paine, fed the babies and him, and chilled all his Russian entreaties. In bed she had turned away from him. She was tired. She didn’t want to talk.
    It is possible that Marina Oswald misjudged Lee. She saw the current situation as another dispute. She might have relented in her own time. The punishing wife was conscious of the needs of her children. But the ring and the money showed that Lee Harvey Oswald was at the end of his tether. Day by dayhis affection had turned more toward June, and, according to the inexorable law of transference, away from his wife.
    He needed someone more helpless than himself. His personal inadequacy was known to him. In school he had shunned the friendship of boys. He played by himself. For years he had submitted to the scourging of his mother’s domination and, like John and Robert before him, had left her as soon as the U.S. Marine Corps would take him. The military gave him training, discipline, foreign service and a marksman’s medal.
    At the age of fifteen, books taught him what the United States symbolized as a democracy, and he chose the role of dissenter. Furthest removed from what his country stood for was the Soviet Union, and he chose that, with reservations. In time, his studies of Karl Marx made Oswald feel equipped to explain it in theoretical terms, but he could draw the attention only of those who did not understand it at all. Friends who had studied political science exposed him in conversation as superficial and for using communist terminology without understanding it.
    He had left the Marine Corps as a “hardship discharge” to take care of his mother in Texas. He gave her three days of his time and left for New Orleans and a long trip to Russia. Marina, a shrewd, intelligent girl, was not a helpless person, but he could make her so by returning to the United States. She would be dependent on him just so long as she did not speak English. But she was not compliant. At Texas parties given by Russians, she asserted herself and agreed with those who said that life in the United States was far better than “at home.”
    Oswald threatened to send her back to Russia and ordered her to write notes to the Soviet Embassy asking for repatriation. His frustrations mounted as he lost job after job. Recently he had taken a bus to Mexico and had appealed to the Cuban Embassy for a visa. He had formed a Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, been arrested, told his story on radio, and tried to “enlist” in the Castro forces. They did not want him.
    The young man who seldom responded to a friendly “good morning” found himself at the end of his particular blind alley. He was friendless, homeless, “hounded by the FBI,” as he said, and now he knew he was a cipher. He aspired above all other things to be big, to be known, to be respected or feared (equal values).
    The coffee cup went into the sink. He went out into the garage and turned the ceiling’s naked bulb on. He opened a rolled blanket on the floor, slipped a rifle out without disturbing the convolutions of the blanket, and closed the flap. He took some wrapping paper, placed the rifle in it, and wrapped it in such a way that one end appeared to be thick, the other thin. He went back into the kitchen, forgetting to turn the light off. Oswald left quietly.
    The President, standing in the green tile bathroom, finished toweling himself and began to shave. He could hear someone rolling up his special hard mattress in the bedroom and, without looking, he knew that the black leather chair with the thick backrest would leave with it. Wherever he went, they went. He saw his plump, slightly jowled, and tan face in the mirror. It was a good strong face—many would call it handsome—but a man seldom dwells on features as he shaves. The pull of the razor is automatic, done without conscious thought, furrowing the white mantle of shaving