Dr. Hartogs recommended that Oswald be placed on probation on condition that he seek help and guidance through a child guidance clinic. There, he suggested, Lee should be treated by a male psychiatrist who could substitute for the lack of a father figure. He also recommended that Mrs. Oswald seek “psychotherapeutic guidance through contact with a family agency.” The possibility of commitment was to be considered only if the probation plan was not successful.[C7-59]
Lee’s withdrawal was also noted by Mrs. Siegel, who described him as a “seriously detached, withdrawn youngster.”[C7-60] She also noted that there was “a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him.”[C7-61] She thought that he had detached himself from the world around him because “no one in it ever met any of his needs for love.”[C7-62] She observed that since Lee’s mother worked all day, he made his own meals and spent all his time alone because he didn’t make friends with the boys in the neighborhood. She thought that he “withdrew into a completely solitary and detached existence where he did as he wanted and he didn’t have to live by any rules or come into contact with people.”[C7-63] Mrs. Siegel concluded that Lee “just felt that his mother never gave a damn for him. He always felt like a burden that she simply just had to tolerate.”[C7-64] Lee confirmed some of those observations by saying that he felt almost as if there were a veil between him and other people through which they could not reach him, but that he preferred the veil to remain intact. He admitted to fantasies about being powerful and sometimes hurting and killing people, but refused to elaborate on them. He took the position that such matters were his own business.[C7-65]
A psychological human figure-drawing test corroborated the interviewer’s findings that Lee was insecure and had limited social contacts. Irving Sokolow, a Youth House psychologist reported that:
The Human Figure Drawings are empty, poor characterizations of persons approximately the same age as the subject. They reflect a considerable amount of impoverishment in the social and emotional areas. He appears to be a somewhat insecure youngster exhibiting much inclination for warm and satisfying relationships to others. There is some indication that he may relate to men more easily than to women in view of the more mature conceptualisation. He appears slightly withdrawn and in view of the lack of detail within the drawings this may assume a more significant characteristic. He exhibits some difficulty in relationship to the maternal figure suggesting more anxiety in this area than in any other.[C7-66]
Lee scored an IQ of 118 on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. According to Sokolow, this indicated a “present intellectual functioning in the upper range of bright normal intelligence.”[C7-67] Sokolow said that although Lee was “presumably disinterested in school subjects he operates on a much higher than average level.”[C7-68] On the Monroe Silent Reading Test, Lee’s score indicated no retardation in reading speed and comprehension; he had better than average ability in arithmetical reasoning for his age group.[C7-69]
Lee told Carro, his probation officer, that he liked to be by himself because he had too much difficulty in making friends.[C7-70] The reports of Carro and Mrs. Siegel also indicate an ambivalent attitude toward authority on Oswald’s part. Carro reported that Lee was disruptive in class after he returned to school on a regular basis in the fall of 1953. He had refused to salute the flag and was doing very little, if any, work. It appears that he did not want to do any of the things which the authorities suggested in their efforts to bring him out of the shell into which he appeared to be retreating.[C7-71] He told Mrs. Siegel that he would run away if sent to a boarding school. On the other hand he also told her that he wished his mother had been more firm with him in her attempts to get him to return to school.[C7-72]
The reports of the New York authorities indicate that Lee’s mother gave him very little affection and did not serve as any sort of substitute for a father. Furthermore she did not appear to understand her own relationship to Lee’s psychological problems. After her interview with Mrs. Oswald, Mrs. Siegel described her as a “smartly dressed, gray haired woman, very self-possessed and alert and superficially affable,” but essentially a “defensive, rigid, self-involved person who had real difficulty in accepting and relating to people” and who had “little understanding” of Lee’s behavior and of the “protective shell he has drawn around himself.”[C7-73] Dr. Hartogs reported that Mrs. Oswald did not understand that Lee’s withdrawal was a form of “violent but silent protest against his neglect by her and represents his reaction to a complete absence of any real family life.”[C7-74] Carro reported that when questioned about his mother Lee said, “well I’ve got to live with her. I guess I love her.”[C7-75] It may also be significant that, as reported by John Pic, “Lee slept with my mother until I joined the service in 1950. This would make him approximately 10, well, almost 11 years old.”[C7-76]
The factors in Lee Oswald’s personality which were noted by those who had contact with him in New York indicate that he had great difficulty in adapting himself to conditions in that city. His usual reaction to the problems which he encountered there was simply withdrawal. Those factors indicated a severe inability to enter into relationships with other people. In view of his experiences when he visited his relatives in New Orleans in the spring of 1950, and his other solitary habits, Lee had apparently been experiencing similar problems before going to New York, and as will be shown below, this failure to adapt to his environment was a dominant trait in his later life.
It would be incorrect, however, to believe that those aspects of Lee’s personality which were observed in New York could have led anyone to predict the outburst of violence which finally occurred. Carro was the only one of Oswald’s three principal observers who recommended that he be placed in a boy’s home or similar institution.[C7-77] But Carro was quite specific that his recommendation was based primarily on the adverse factors in Lee’s environment—his lack of friends, the apparent unavailability of any agency assistance and the ineffectualness of his mother—and not on any particular mental disturbance in the boy himself.[C7-78] Carro testified that:
There was nothing that would lead me to believe when I saw him at the age of 12 that there would be seeds of destruction for somebody. I couldn’t in all honesty sincerely say such a thing.[C7-79]