Miss Johnson. It is correct. It does not reflect a second conversation with Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald.
Mr. Slawson. Now then, we can get back to your interview with Lee Harvey Oswald that evening. I have some questions here, but I want you to feel free to interject any comments of your own at any time. Of course we have as exhibits many of your previous statements and articles reflecting your thinking about this before coming here today, so we can both, I think, confine ourselves to elaborations or possible corrections or discussions around the points that you have already set down in the exhibits. The first thing I would like to bring up is a point you touched upon briefly already in the exhibits, that Oswald seemed to be greatly concerned with economics, and that you weren't, and that consequently a great deal of the time in the interview was taken up you might say with noncommunicative thought, or speech rather. I wonder if you would define what you mean by economics, and elaborate on that a little bit?
Miss Johnson. Well, since I liked Mr. Oswald, and since Mr. McVickar had pointed out to me that there was a narrow line between my duty as a correspondent and duty as an American, I hoped to establish some kind of communication with him, although I was really trying to write a story about him. I went outside my duty in the sense that I did try to establish some kind of communication. I rather quickly perceived that the best way to do this was to follow his lead and discuss economics. That is what interested him more than anything. He wasn't interested in talking about politics. He hadn't seen enough of Soviet society to discuss it very concretely, nor was I in a position to point out to him too much about its shortcomings, because I was a correspondent there, because my room wasn't a really private place for conversation, and so I tried really to point out its shortcomings in economic terms which seemed to be the surest way of reaching him, and it was the subject on which he had the most interest.
My notes therefore don't really reflect a great deal of that part of the conversation, because it meant nothing to me storywise at the time.
It wasn't what I was going to write about. And I wasn't too interested in it really. I was just trying to talk with him. And so when I talked to him, what I said wasn't recorded in the notes, and the gist of his reply was—of his replies were—that is about the exploitation of the worker. I tried to point out to him that in the stage of primary accumulation any society has to take more from the workers. They have to be paid less than they really create. So there is poverty and injustice everywhere. It was by way of trying to say to him that things were not so good in the Soviet Union if he just would look, because I wanted him to think before he did it. I assumed his act was irrevocable and I was very sorry for him. So all this was couched in economic language, which takes up time, and in which I wasn't really too interested. I did feel that when he left that if I only understood economics more—had only taken more interest in it when I studied it, I had only studied it a bit more—that I could have answered him, talked with him in terms that he could really respect, and that it might have caused him to think more about his action and might even have caused him to hesitate, and might have built up his respect for me sufficiently that I could become someone whom he would have come back to talk to and could have been some help to him.
And I felt that I had failed him in the sense that I could not talk to him in the one language that he really wanted to talk in and was interested in. I did as much as I could along those lines, but I felt that it had been inadequate in the situation in my own desire to help him.
Mr. Slawson. You used the term "economics." Do you mean by that, economics in the sense of a Marxist versus Capitalist discussion, terms like you used, "primary accumulation," "exploitation," and so on?
Miss Johnson. Yes, a little better than exploitation, more in primary accumulation, and comparing the two systems. If I had been good at comparing the two systems and using economic verbiage—I guess that what I am saying is that if I had had long words about economics, been able to throw them around with some authority, he would have respected me. He did respect words, long words, language, and if I had seemed to have a key to some occult science that he didn't know about but was interested in, that this would have compelled his respect and might have brought him back. But I had taken a course in Soviet economics at Harvard where they had waived the requirement that you had studied the American economic system, and I had done all right in the course, but that really was where my economic training began and ended, and I just barely sustained my interest through the course.
I regreted very much after that conversation not having ever really studied economics formally, at least not knowing the terms.
I am so uninterested in it that if somebody tells me the words I forget them. It was that bad with me. This was the only real occasion where I was very sorry.