The House of Kennedy(29)
Fellow Dallas resident and ex-marine marksman Lee Harvey Oswald is not one of those supporters. As a declared Communist, Oswald is exactly the kind of enemy Walker and his zealots seek to vanquish.
In 1959, twenty-year-old Oswald visits Moscow on a tourist visa with the intention to defect, but the KGB rejects him and his “outdated information,” and determines that he’s no double agent. “His intellectual training experience and capabilities were such that it would not show the FBI and CIA in good light if they used people like him.” But a top member of the Politburo intervenes and in 1960 puts him to work at a television radio factory in Minsk, where the KGB bugs his government-issue apartment.
John F. Kennedy is inaugurated president of the United States in January 1961, and that April, Lee Harvey Oswald marries Marina Prusakova after a six-week courtship.
In June 1962, the US and Soviet governments agree to allow the “re-defector” Oswald and his family to return to the United States.
On April 10, 1963, Oswald decides to use Walker as “target practice.” In the Marines, Oswald had earned a sharpshooter qualification, rated by the sergeant in charge of his training as “a slightly better than average shot for a Marine, excellent by civilian standards.” Now, he trains the telescopic sight of his high-powered Mannlicher-Carcano infantry rifle—mail ordered with his family’s grocery money under the alias A. Hiddell—on the former general as Walker sits at his desk inside his Dallas home.
He pulls the trigger—and misses.
“He couldn’t see [properly] from his position because of the light,” Walker later theorizes to the Warren Commission. “He could have been a very good shot and, just by chance, he hit the woodwork.”
Although Oswald tells his wife, Marina, “I shot Walker” immediately upon returning home late that night, it’s not until after the events in Dallas that the ammunition used is linked back to Oswald.
Prior to JFK’s visit in November 1963, Walker, an outspoken adversary of the president’s, has his extremist associates distribute five thousand flyers. The flyers show a stylized mugshot of Kennedy alongside seven accusations of treason, from the political—“Betraying the Constitution”—to the personal—“LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).”
Hours before the president’s plane touches down in Dallas, twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald takes off his wedding ring and leaves it on the bedroom dresser. (Fifty years later, that ring will sell for one hundred eight thousand dollars at auction.) In recent months, he’s become estranged from his wife, Marina, and she and their daughters are staying with a friend, Ruth Paine, in suburban Dallas, while Oswald has a room in a boardinghouse. But on Thursday night, November 21, he decides to stay at the Paine house, where he typically visits only on weekends.
“I was surprised to see him,” Ruth Paine remarks. The couple fought often, but that evening she has “the impression that relations between the young Oswalds [are] ‘cordial,’ ‘friendly,’ ‘warm’—like a couple making up after a small spat.”
They sleep in the same bed, but in the middle of the night he kicks her away when her feet touch him. “My, he’s in a mean mood,” Marina thinks. The next morning, he sleeps late, then gets a lift to his job at the Texas School Book Depository from a coworker, Buell Wesley Frazier, one of Ruth Paine’s neighbors. While they are driving to work, Frazier asks Oswald what’s in the elongated brown package he’s brought.
“Curtain rods,” Oswald tells him.
Chapter 19
It all began so beautifully. After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas,” Lady Bird Johnson observes in her diary of November 22, 1963.
The Texas native and wife of Vice President Lyndon Johnson will ride in the third car of the presidential motorcade that sets out from Love Field just before noon. The planned route is an eleven-mile drive through the city’s downtown at a slow crawl of twelve to fifteen miles per hour, ending at the Dallas Trade Mart for a scheduled 1:00 p.m. luncheon.
Fifteen minutes earlier, from inside Air Force One, Jack takes in the cheering crowd of two thousand gathered around the fenced perimeter of the airfield and remarks to Kenny O’Donnell, “It looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us.”
Earlier that morning, at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Jackie had felt uneasy upon seeing a hate-filled, full-page anti-Kennedy ad from the “American Fact-Finding Committee” in the Dallas Morning News. The ad was bordered in mourning black, and despite a headline proclaiming “Welcome Mr. Kennedy,” its tone was deeply belligerent.
On the spring day when Jackie first met Jack, she’d felt that he “would have a profound perhaps disturbing influence” on her life. Would angry Texans be the source of the disturbance she had sensed more than a decade before?
But her husband makes light of her fears, joking, “We’re heading into nut country today…You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president,” he tells her, remarking on how easy it would have been for someone among the anonymous masses lining the streets in Fort Worth with “a pistol in a briefcase…could have dropped the gun and briefcase and melted away into the crowd.”