ME: How?
STONE: Let’s fill in the years between Lee’s Civil Air Patrol summer and the summer of ’63. This is the trajectory everybody knows. Marine sharpshooter qualification at seventeen. Working at the U2 base in Japan, two courts-martial for self-destructive accidents. First marine to defect to Russia . . . marrying Marina while in the USSR. Disillusioned by the reality of Russia, Lee returned to America without being arrested or even debriefed—which we still can’t explain, I’m afraid—and settled in Dallas. Marina fell in with the Russian émigré community, but those people couldn’t stand Lee. During this time, he mail-ordered the pistol and rifle he would later use on November twenty-second. With those weapons he promptly stalked and nearly succeeded in killing General Edwin Walker, the right-wing extremist. It was in the wake of that failure that Lee came up with the idea of defecting to Cuba. His first step in this process was to move back to New Orleans, which he did on April twenty-fourth, 1963, seventeen days before his pregnant wife and his child came to join him.
ME: That all sounds familiar. So what about the summer of ’63? You couldn’t find any proof of contact between Oswald and Ferrie? Or Oswald and Marcello?
KAISER: I did find one reliable source. An old Marcello soldier told me that Oswald worked part of that summer as a runner for Sam Saia, out of Felix’s Oyster Bar, just like his uncle Dutz had. But he wouldn’t testify to it, and he died two months ago. Oswald worked as a maintenance man at Reily Coffee for a while, but they fired him, so the runner job makes sense. He had no other source of money. And there’s no doubt that the old crowd knew Lee was back in New Orleans. He was making a real ass of himself, handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets on the street, getting into fights with anti-Castro Cubans, and going on TV for a debate. If you accept the exploitative sexual relationship back in 1955 and ’56, you’ve got to figure it was only a matter of time before David Ferrie came around to renew contact with his long-ago victim.
ME: I buy that, all right.
KAISER: Even if Ferrie didn’t initiate contact, I think Oswald would have sought him out. Lee had no real friends in New Orleans, and based on all my experience as a profiler, he would have been dying to tell Ferrie about all the big things he’d done since he’d last seen him.
ME: Oswald wouldn’t have felt any attraction for the guy who’d taken advantage of him when he was a kid, would he?
KAISER: Probably not, though it’s possible. But let’s assume Lee hated Ferrie. The summer of ’63 was still his chance to tell his abuser that he’d grown up and married a hot Russian girl, which proved he’d gotten past his sexual confusion. He had the baby to prove it.
STONE: What does your gut tell you, Penn? As a prosecutor, listening to a story?
ME: If you accept the secret sexual relationship, then further Ferrie-Oswald contact that summer makes sense. But even so, we’re back to square one. If Carlos had Frank Knox ready to kill Kennedy as a last resort, why bring Oswald into it at all?
STONE: Desperation.
KAISER: Genius, on Ferrie’s part. Think about his position. Marcello’s deportation trial was set for November first. Ferrie and Banister were trying to figure a way to fix the verdict, but they weren’t having any luck. Carlos was expecting them to pull a rabbit out of their asses, and they didn’t have one. Neither did Jack Wasserman in D.C. With every passing week, it looked more like it was going to be arrivederla to Carlos Marcello come November. But if Ferrie met Lee that summer, and Lee caught him up on his recent past, then Ferrie would have seen instantly that Oswald was a gift from the gods.
STONE: Only three pieces of information had to pass between Oswald and Ferrie for this theory to be valid. One, that Lee had taken a shot at General Walker in April. Two, that he owned the scoped Mannlicher-Carcano he’d taken that shot with. Three, that he was trying to defect to Cuba.
ME: You’re saying Oswald wasn’t brought in as a patsy, but as the main shooter? And a signpost pointing to Castro?
KAISER: I don’t think Lee was brought in at all at that point. I think Ferrie just filed the information in the back of his mind and let it simmer. It represented a potential manipulation, that’s all. For one thing, Lee wasn’t exactly stable. And he was trying to get into Cuba. Even if Ferrie had the idea that early, he would have to wait and see how the Cuba thing worked out before he tried to sell Marcello on using the kid.
ME: Go on.
KAISER: On September twenty-sixth, after a truly shitty summer, Lee left New Orleans for Mexico City, hoping to get a visa to Cuba. Marina had left New Orleans three days earlier with an older friend, Ruth Paine. She was pregnant and tired of Lee’s bullshit. She moved back to Texas to have her baby.
STONE: For three days in Mexico Lee tried without success to get a visa for Cuba, so that he could defect. He visited both the Cuban and Russian embassies. He had no luck at either place.
KAISER: This would have been a major stressor, coming on top of several others. Lee left Mexico by bus, in despair. He didn’t go back to New Orleans, but to Texas, where Marina was living with Ruth Paine and her husband. Marina didn’t want Lee back, of course. But two weeks later, a friend of Ruth’s got Lee an interview for the job at the Texas School Book Depository.
STONE: At that point, John Kennedy had thirty-seven days to live. But Lee Harvey Oswald had no idea he would be a part of his death.