Relationship With Wife
The relations between Lee and Marina Oswald are of great importance in any attempt to understand Oswald’s possible motivation. During the period from Oswald’s return from Mexico to the assassination, he and his wife spent every weekend but one together at the Irving, Tex., home of Mrs. Ruth Paine, who was then separated from her husband. The sole exception was the weekend of November 16-17, 1963, the weekend before the assassination, when his wife asked Oswald not to come to Irving. During the week, Oswald lived in a roominghouse in Dallas, but he usually called his wife on the telephone twice a day.[C7-407] She testified that after his return from Mexico Oswald “changed for the better. He began to treat me better. * * * He helped me more—although he always did help. But he was more attentive.”[C7-408] Marina Oswald attributed that to their living apart and to the imminent birth of their second child. She testified that Oswald “was very happy” about the birth of the child.[C7-409]
While those considerations no doubt had an effect on Oswald’s attitude toward his family it would seem that the need for support and sympathy after his recent rebuffs in Mexico City might also have been important to him. It would not have been the first time that Oswald sought closer ties with his family in time of adversity.[C7-410]
His past relationships with his wife had been stormy, however, and it did not seem that she respected him very much. They had been married after a courtship of only about 6 weeks, a part of which Oswald spent in the hospital. Oswald’s diary reports that he married his wife shortly after his proposal of marriage to another girl had been rejected. He stated that the other girl rejected him partly because he was an American, a fact that he said she had exploited. He stated that “In spite of fact I married Marina to hurt Ella [the girl that had rejected him] I found myself in love with Marina.”[C7-411] Many of the people with whom the Oswalds became acquainted after their arrival in the United States thought that Marina Oswald had married her husband primarily in the hope that she would be able to leave the Soviet Union. Marina Oswald has denied this.[C7-412]
Marina Oswald expressed one aspect of her husband’s attitude toward her when she testified that:
* * * Lee wanted me to go to Russia, and I told him that if he wanted me to go then that meant that he didn’t love me, and that in that case what was the idea of coming to the United States in the first place. Lee would say that it would be better for me if I went to Russia. I did not know why. I did not know what he had in mind. He said he loved me but that it would be better for me if I went to Russia, and what he had in mind I don’t know.[C7-413]
On the other hand, Oswald objected to the invitation that his wife had received to live with Mrs. Ruth Paine, which Mrs. Paine had made in part to give her an alternative to returning to the Soviet Union.[C7-414] Marina Oswald wrote to Mrs. Paine that: “Many times he [Oswald] has recalled this matter to me and said that I am just waiting for an opportunity to hurt him. It has been the cause of many of our arguments.”[C7-415] Oswald claimed that his wife preferred others to him.[C7-416] He said this about members of the Russian-speaking group in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, whom she said he tried to forbid her from seeing,[C7-417] and also about Mrs. Paine.[C7-418] He specifically made that claim when his wife refused to come to live with him in Dallas as he asked her to do on the evening of November 21, 1963.[C7-419]
The instability of their relations was probably a function of the personalities of both people. Oswald was overbearing in relations with his wife. He apparently attempted to be “the Commander” by dictating many of the details of their married life.[C7-420] While Marina Oswald said that her husband wanted her to learn English,[C7-421] he made no attempt to help her and there are other indications that he did not want her to learn that language. Oswald apparently wished to continue practicing his own Russian with her.[C7-422] Lieutenant Martello of the New Orleans police testified that Oswald stated that he did not speak English in his family because he did not want them to become Americanized.[C7-423] Marina Oswald’s inability to speak English also made it more difficult for her to have an independent existence in this country. Oswald struck his wife on occasion,[C7-424] did not want her to drink, smoke or wear cosmetics[C7-425] and generally treated her with lack of respect in the presence of others.[C7-426]
The difficulties which Oswald’s problems would have caused him in any relationship were probably not reduced by his wife’s conduct. Katherine Ford, with whom Marina Oswald stayed during her separation from her husband in November of 1962, thought that Marina Oswald was immature in her thinking and partly responsible for the difficulties that the Oswalds were having at that time.[C7-427] Mrs. Ford said that Marina Oswald admitted that she provoked Oswald on occasion.[C7-428] There can be little doubt that some provocation existed. Oswald once struck his wife because of a letter which she wrote to a former boy friend in Russia. In the letter Marina Oswald stated that her husband had changed a great deal and that she was very lonely in the United States. She was “sorry that I had not married him [the Russian boy friend] instead, that it would have been much easier for me.”[C7-429] The letter fell into Oswald’s hands when it was returned to his post office box because of insufficient postage, which apparently resulted from an increase in postal rates of which his wife had been unaware.[C7-430] Oswald read the letter, but refused to believe that it was sincere, even though his wife insisted to him that it was. As a result Oswald struck her, as to which she testified: “Generally, I think that was right, for such things that is the right thing to do. There was some grounds for it.”[C7-431]
Although she denied it in some of her testimony before the Commission,[C7-432] it appears that Marina Oswald also complained that her husband was not able to provide more material things for her.[C7-433] On that issue George De Mohrenschildt, who was probably as close to the Oswalds as anyone else during their first stay in Dallas, said that:
She was annoying him all the time—“Why don’t you make some money?” * * * Poor guy was going out of his mind. * * *
We told her she should not annoy him—poor guy, he is doing his best, “Don’t annoy him so much.” * * *[C7-434]
The De Mohrenschildts also testified that “right in front” of Oswald Marina Oswald complained about Oswald’s inadequacy as a husband.[C7-435] Mrs. Oswald told another of her friends that Oswald was very cold to her, that they very seldom had sexual relations and that Oswald “was not a man.”[C7-436] She also told Mrs. Paine that she was not satisfied with her sexual relations with Oswald.[C7-437]
Marina Oswald also ridiculed her husband’s political views, thereby tearing down his view of his own importance. He was very much interested in autobiographical works of outstanding statesmen of the United States, to whom his wife thought he compared himself.[C7-438] She said he was different from other people in “At least his imagination, his fantasy, which was quite unfounded, as to the fact that he was an outstanding man.”[C7-439] She said that she “always tried to point out to him that he was a man like any others who were around us. But he simply could not understand that.”[C7-440] Jeanne De Mohrenschildt, however, thought that Marina Oswald “said things that will hurt men’s pride.”[C7-441] She said that if she ever spoke to her husband the way Marina Oswald spoke to her husband, “we would not last long.”[C7-442] Mrs. De Mohrenschildt thought that Oswald, whom she compared to “a puppy dog that everybody kicked,”[C7-443] had a lot of good qualities, in spite of the fact that “Nobody said anything good about him.”[C7-444] She had “the impression that he was just pushed, pushed, pushed, and she [Marina Oswald] was probably nagging, nagging, nagging.”[C7-445] She thought that he might not have become involved in the assassination if people had been kinder to him.[C7-446]
In spite of these difficulties, however, and in the face of the economic problems that were always with them, things apparently went quite smoothly from the time Oswald returned from Mexico until the weekend of November 16-17, 1963.[C7-447] Mrs. Paine was planning a birthday party for one of her children on that weekend and her husband, Michael, was to be at the house. Marina Oswald said that she knew her husband did not like Michael Paine and so she asked him not to come out that weekend, even though he wanted to do so. She testified that she told him “that he shouldn’t come every week, that perhaps it is not convenient for Ruth that the whole family be there, live there.” She testified that he responded: “As you wish. If you don’t want me to come, I won’t.”[C7-448] Ruth Paine testified that she heard Marina Oswald tell Oswald about the birthday party.[C7-449]
On Sunday, November 17, 1963, Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald decided to call Oswald[C7-450] at the place where he was living, unbeknownst to them, under the name of O. H. Lee.[C7-451] They asked for Lee Oswald who was not called to the telephone because he was known by the other name.[C7-452] When Oswald called the next day his wife became very angry about his use of the alias.[C7-453] He said that he used it because “he did not want his landlady to know his real name because she might read in the paper of the fact that he had been in Russia and that he had been questioned.”[C7-454] Oswald also said that he did not want the FBI to know where he lived “Because their visits were not very pleasant for him and he thought that he loses jobs because the FBI visits the place of his employment.”[C7-455] While the facts of his defection had become known in New Orleans as a result of his radio debate with Bringuier,[C7-456] it would appear to be unlikely that his landlady in Dallas would see anything in the newspaper about his defection, unless he engaged in activities similar to those which had led to the disclosure of his defection in New Orleans. Furthermore, even though it appears that at times Oswald was really upset by visits of the FBI, it does not appear that he ever lost his job because of its activities, although he may well not have been aware of that fact.[C7-457]
While Oswald’s concern about the FBI had some basis in fact, in that FBI agents had interviewed him in the past and had renewed their interest to some extent after his Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities had become known, he exaggerated their concern for him. Marina Oswald thought he did so in order to emphasize his importance.[C7-458] For example, in his letter of November 9, 1963, to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, he asked about the entrance visas for which he and his wife had previously applied. He absolved the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City of any blame for his difficulties there. He advised the Washington Embassy that the FBI was “not now” interested in his Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities, but noted that the FBI “has visited us here in Dallas, Texas, on November 1. Agent James P. Hasty warned me that if I engaged in F.P.C.C. activities in Texas the F.B.I. will again take an ‘interrest’ in me.”[C7-459] Neither Hosty nor any other agent of the FBI spoke to Oswald on any subject from August 10, 1963, to the time of the assassination.[C7-460] The claimed warning was one more of Oswald’s fabrications. Hosty had come to the Paine residence on November 1 and 5, 1963, but did not issue any such warning or suggest that Marina Oswald defect from the Soviet Union and remain in the United States under FBI protection, as Oswald went on to say.[C7-461] In Oswald’s imagination “I and my wife strongly protested these tactics by the notorious F.B.I.”[C7-462] In fact, his wife testified that she only said that she would prefer not to receive any more visits from the Bureau because of the “very exciting and disturbing effect” they had upon her husband,[C7-463] who was not even present at that time.[C7-464]
The arguments he used to justify his use of the alias suggest that Oswald may have come to think that the whole world was becoming involved in an increasingly complex conspiracy against him. He may have felt he could never tell when the FBI was going to appear on the scene or who else was going to find out about his defection and use it against him as had been done in New Orleans.[C7-465] On the other hand, the concern he expressed about the FBI may have been just another story to support the objective he sought in his letter.
Those arguments, however, were not persuasive to Marina Oswald, to whom “it was nothing terrible if people were to find out that he had been in Russia.”[C7-466] She asked Oswald: “After all, when will all your foolishness come to an end? All of these comedies. First one thing and then another. And now this fictitious name.”[C7-467] She said: “On Monday [November 18, 1963] he called several times, but after I hung up on him and didn’t want to talk to him he did not call again. He then arrived on Thursday [November 21, 1963].”[C7-468]
The events of that evening can best be appreciated through Marina Oswald’s testimony:
Q. Did your husband give any reason for coming home on Thursday?
A. He said that he was lonely because he hadn’t come the preceding weekend, and he wanted to make his peace with me.
Q. Did you say anything to him then?
A. He tried to talk to me but I would not answer him, and he was very upset.
Q. Were you upset with him?
A. I was angry, of course. He was not angry—he was upset. I was angry. He tried very hard to please me. He spent quite a bit of time putting away diapers and played with the children on the street.
Q. How did you indicate to him that you were angry with him?
A. By not talking to him.
Q. And how did he show that he was upset?
A. He was upset over the fact that I would not answer him. He tried to start a conversation with me several times, but I would not answer. And he said that he didn’t want me to be angry at him because this upsets him.
On that day, he suggested that we rent an apartment in Dallas. He said that he was tired of living alone and perhaps the reason for my being so angry was the fact that we were not living together. That if I want to he would rent an apartment in Dallas tomorrow—that he didn’t want me to remain with Ruth any longer, but wanted me to live with him in Dallas.
He repeated this not once but several times, but I refused. And he said that once again I was preferring my friends to him, and that I didn’t need him.
Q. What did you say to that?
A. I said it would be better if I remained with Ruth until the holidays, he would come, and we would all meet together. That this was better because while he was living alone and I stayed with Ruth, we were spending less money. And I told him to buy me a washing machine, because two children it became too difficult to wash by hand.
Q. What did he say to that?
A. He said he would buy me a washing machine.
Q. What did you say to that?
A. Thank you. That it would be better if he bought something for himself—that I would manage.[C7-469]
That night Oswald went to bed before his wife retired. She did not speak to him when she joined him there, although she thought that he was still awake. The next morning he left for work before anyone else arose.[C7-470] For the first time he left his wedding ring in a cup on the dresser in his room.[C7-471] He also left $170 in a wallet in one of the dresser drawers. He took with him $13.87[C7-472] and the long brown package that Frazier and Mrs. Randle saw him carry and which he was to take to the School Book Depository.[C7-473]