Mr. Jenner. That seems to be so.
Mr. De Mohrenschildt. Because Mr. Gregory is a very fine person—very fine person, who is an elderly man, who is nice to a poor person.
Mr. Jenner. Your impression is that he, to use the vernacular a little bit—he was sort of eating on himself, he wanted to amount to something, and he appeared to be unable to, and was constantly groping.
Mr. De Mohrenschildt. Yes. That is his main—his makeup—trying to do something. One conversation I had with him—I asked him "Would you like to be a commissar in the United States," just teasing him. And he said—he sort of smiled—you could see that it was a delightful idea. To me it was a ridiculous question to ask. But he took me seriously. I laughed with the guy. Sometimes I would laugh, I would tease him. And it was amusing. But I tried not to offend him, because, after all, he was a human being. And in addition to that—in my case we had a point of contact which was the fact that he lived in Minsk, where I lived when I was a child also, where my father was this marshal of nobility. And later on in life I lived in Poland, very close to that area. I was interested in how the peasants were getting along, what does he find in the forest there, what kind of mushrooms you find, that type of conversation went on sometimes.
Mr. Jenner. Did he appear to have knowledge and recollection of things in which you were interested in the community, the countryside?
Mr. De Mohrenschildt. Very much so. That was a likable characteristic he had. For instance, he liked animals. My dog was sort of friendly with him. When he would come, my dog would not bark. He liked walking. He told me that around Minsk he used to take long walks in the forest which I thought was very fine. Those are contacts that possibly brought a certain understanding between us. He spoke very interestingly about the personalities of fellow workers there at his factory.
Mr. Jenner. I want you to keep ruminating in this fashion, because these things will come to you. What did he say about his work there?
Mr. De Mohrenschildt. Well, he said that the work was all right, not too hard, not too well paid, that it was very boring. That later, after the work, he had to be present at all sorts of meetings, political meetings. He said he got bored to death. Every day he had to stay for an hour at some kind of a meeting, the factory meeting. And this is a thing I thought was very intelligent, because that is one of the points that is really hateful in a Communist country—the meetings after work. That I noticed through my own experience in Yugoslavia, that the engineers and the plain workers just hated that—a political meeting after working 8 hours. And Lee Oswald also resented that in Russia. And I thought it was a rather intelligent—-one of the intelligent remarks that he made. And he repeated that very often—that is the thing he hated in Russia; resented, rather than hated.
Well, he described the personalities of some of the people that he knew there which I do not recall anymore. But some of them nice, and some of them less nice, and some of them very much interested in the United States, some of them unfriendly—that sort of vague recollection.
Mr. Jenner. Did you engage him in conversation respecting Communism as a political ideal and his reactions to that?