Oswald’s publicity-seeking mother: I will go down in history too

Lee Harvey Oswald was a shiftless, self-pitying, wife-beating, uneducated loser. But he was his mother’s son.

Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald. Credit: Bill Winfrey Collection, The Dallas Morning News/The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

Lee Harvey Oswald was a shiftless, self-pitying, wife-beating, uneducated loser. But he was his mother’s son.

When news broke of John Kennedy’s assassination and her son’s involvement, Marguerite Oswald called a local newspaper in Fort Worth, not far from Dallas, asking if they could help her get to Dallas.

Trying to shake her off, the reporter said he was busy as the president had been assassinated. “I know,” she said. “They think my son is the one who shot him.”

On the short trip to Dallas she complained that she thought her youngest son’s Russian wife Marina, and not the mother, would become the centre of attention. Oswald had not spoken to his mother in more than a year. She was unaware he and Marina had had a second child. His brothers similarly ignored the woman one reporter described as deranged.

But she was at the centre of the biggest story on earth and revelling in it. “I am an important person,” she was reported to have said to journalists, adding, “I understand I will go down in history, too.” Later she would say, after reading about Marina’s evidence to the Warren Commission: “I want to have a voice in this and the public and the foreign public wants me to have a voice in this.”

She kept telling reporters she had sensational evidence about the assassination. She tried to contact chief justice Earl Warren, and when a Secret Service manager called her back she abused him for being too junior. In the tirade that followed she said she had seen Marina with a black eye – “sometimes … I believe a woman should be beaten” – and then claimed Marina was involved in the murder, not her son, whom Marina had “set up”.

Eventually, but reluctantly, she was called to give evidence. One of the commissioners was future president Gerald Ford, who described her as “kooky”. She accused the Secret Servicemen guarding Marina of complicity in the crime and that this would be revealed by scrutinising Marina’s financial statements as she sold her story.

Asked if she had the documentary evidence to prove a conspiracy that did not involve her son – she had said so for days – she finally conceded: “I do not have proof, sir.”

She had been with Marina, one of her other sons, Robert, and Marina’s children at the funeral the day after her son’s murder by Jack Ruby. No one else turned up. Reporters covering the story were drafted in as pallbearers.

A year later, she was there on her own: “Lee Harvey Oswald, my son, even after his death, has done more for his country than any other living human being.”

Even Cuban dictator Fidel Castro – concerned about the fallout from the assassination – would have disagreed.

Marguerite died in 1981 and is buried alongside her son. Months later her son’s remains were exhumed to test – and disprove – that it was a Russian spy buried there. He was reinterred using a new coffin. The waterlogged original was auctioned off for $130,000.

Kennedy also would be exhumed. His original site at Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington was deemed inadequate and unable to cope with the volume of visitors. A larger site was found below it, designed with the help of his widow, and buried there too were the couple’s children Arabella, who had been stillborn in 1956, and Patrick who had died after two days not long before the events at Dallas.

Buried there now are Jackie, the president’s brother Robert, who was assassinated in 1968, and youngest brother Ted Kennedy, who died in 2009. Both men had overseen the secret night-time exhumation of JFK in 1965. The famed Arlington Oak, around which the site was shaped and which had grown there since 1791, blew over during Hurricane Irene in 2011. Six month later, a sapling grown from one of its acorns was planted to replace it.

It was revealed in 1999 that the handleless brass coffin in which Kennedy’s body was flown from Dallas to Washington in 1963 was dealt with on February 18, 1966, at the request of Robert Kennedy.

It was removed from the National Archives, driven to Andrews Air Force Base, where 42 holes were drilled into it. It was weighted down with three 36kg sandbags and flown beyond the Delaware coast that morning where, attached to two parachutes, it descended gently to the Atlantic Ocean and sank “sharply, clearly and immediately”.