Mrs. Siegel concluded her report with the statement that:
Despite his withdrawal, he gives the impression that he is not so difficult to reach as he appears and patient, prolonged effort in a sustained relationship with one therapist might bring results. There are indications that he has suffered serious personality damage but if he can receive help quickly this might be repaired to some extent.[C7-80]
Lee Oswald never received that help. Few social agencies even in New York were equipped to provide the kind of intensive treatment that he needed, and when one of the city’s clinics did find room to handle him, for some reason the record does not show, advantage was never taken of the chance afforded to Oswald. When Lee became a disciplinary problem upon his return to school in the fall of 1953, and when his mother failed to cooperate in any way with school authorities, authorities were finally forced to consider placement in a home for boys. Such a placement was postponed, however, perhaps in part at least because Lee’s behavior suddenly improved. Before the court took any action, the Oswalds left New York[C7-81] in January of 1954, and returned to New Orleans where Lee finished the ninth grade before he left school to work for a year.[C7-82] Then in October of 1956, he joined the Marines.[C7-83]
Return to New Orleans and Joining the Marine Corps
After his return to New Orleans Oswald was teased at school because of the northern accent which he had acquired.[C7-84] He concluded that school had nothing to offer him.[C7-85] His mother exercised little control over him and thought he could decide for himself whether to go on in school.[C7-86] Neighbors and others who knew him at that time recall an introverted boy who read a great deal.[C7-87] He took walks and visited museums, and sometimes rode a rented bicycle in the park on Saturday mornings.[C7-88] Mrs. Murret believes that he talked at length with a girl on the telephone, but no one remembers that he had any dates.[C7-89] A friend, Edward Voebel, testified that “he was more bashful about girls than anything else.”[C7-90]
Several witnesses testified that Lee Oswald was not aggressive.[C7-91] He was, however, involved in some fights. Once a group of white boys beat him up for sitting in the Negro section of a bus, which he apparently did simply out of ignorance.[C7-92] Another time, he fought with two brothers who claimed that he had picked on the younger of them, 3 years Oswald’s junior. Two days later, “some big guy, probably from a high school—he looked like a tremendous football player” accosted Oswald on the way home from school and punched him in the mouth, making his lip bleed and loosening a tooth. Voebel took Oswald back to the school to attend to his wounds, and their “mild friendship” stemmed from that incident.[C7-93] Voebel also recalled that Oswald once outlined a plan to cut the glass in the window of a store on Rampart Street and steal a pistol, but he was not sure then that Oswald meant to carry out the plan, and in fact they never did. Voebel said that Oswald “wouldn’t start any fights, but if you wanted to start one with him, he was going to make sure that he ended it, or you were going to really have one, because he wasn’t going to take anything from anybody.”[C7-94] In a space for the names of “close friends” on the ninth grade personal history record, Oswald first wrote “Edward Vogel,” an obvious misspelling of Voebel’s name, and “Arthor Abear,” most likely Arthur Hebert, a classmate who has said that he did not know Oswald well. Oswald erased those names, however, and indicated that he had no close friends.[C7-95]
It has been suggested that this misspelling of names, apparently on a phonetic basis, was caused by a reading-spelling disability from which Oswald appeared to suffer.[C7-96] Other evidence of the existence of such a disability is provided by the many other misspellings that appear in Oswald’s writings, portions of which are quoted below.
Sometime during this period, and under circumstances to be discussed more fully below, Oswald started to read Communist literature, which he obtained from the public library.[C7-97] One of his fellow employees, Palmer McBride, stated that Oswald said he would like to kill President Eisenhower because he was exploiting the working class.[C7-98] Oswald praised Khrushchev and suggested that he and McBride join the Communist Party “to take advantage of their social functions.”[C7-99] Oswald also became interested in the New Orleans Amateur Astronomy Association, an organization of high school students. The association’s then president, William E. Wulf, testified that he remembered an occasion when Oswald
* * * started expounding the Communist doctrine and saying that he was highly interested in communism, that communism was the only way of life for the worker, et cetera, and then came out with a statement that he was looking for a Communist cell in town to join but he couldn’t find any. He was a little dismayed at this, and he said that he couldn’t find any that would show any interest in him as a Communist, and subsequently, after this conversation, my father came in and we were kind of arguing back and forth about the situation, and my father came in the room, heard what we were arguing on communism, and that this boy was loud-mouthed, boisterous, and my father asked him to leave the house and politely put him out of the house, and that is the last I have seen or spoken with Oswald.[C7-100]
Despite this apparent interest in communism, Oswald tried to join the Marines when he was 16 years old.[C7-101] This was 1 year before his actual enlistment and just a little over 2½ years after he left New York. He wrote a note in his mother’s name to school authorities in New Orleans saying that he was leaving school because he and his mother were moving to San Diego. In fact, he had quit school in an attempt to obtain his mother’s assistance to join the Marines.[C7-102] While he apparently was able to induce his mother to make a false statement about his age he was nevertheless unable to convince the proper authorities that he was really 17 years old.[C7-103] There is evidence that Oswald was greatly influenced in his decision to join the Marines by the fact that his brother Robert had done so approximately 3 years before.[C7-104] Robert Oswald had given his Marine Corps manual to his brother Lee, who studied it during the year following his unsuccessful attempt to enlist until “He knew it by heart.”[C7-105] According to Marguerite Oswald, “Lee lived for the time that he would become 17 years old to join the Marines—that whole year.”[C7-106] In John Pic’s view, Oswald was motivated to join the Marines in large part by a desire “to get from out and under * * * the yoke of oppression from my mother.”[C7-107]