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My heart goes out to Marina. She is a nice girl, but they are keeping her from me. They whisked her away the other day at the cemetery. They saw me, and they just shoved her in that car and took her away. I was so humiliated. There were a lot of people standing there, and I cried, and got in my car and cried all the way home."
Looking back, Marguerite Oswald says, "Everybody has sympathy for Mrs. Kennedy. Doesn't anybody feel sorry for me? I've had enough misery. I've been married three times and altogether had husbands for a total of eight years. I did my best for my boys."
The Boy. Marguerite Claverie was born in New Orleans in 1907. Her miseries began in 1931, about two years after she married New Orleans Stevedore Edward John Pic. She became pregnant, she says, and Pic left her because he did not want any children. She and Pic were divorced, but Pic sent support money for their son John Edward, now an Air Force staff sergeant, for some years after that. In 1933 Marguerite married Robert Edward Lee Oswald, an insurance agent. Their first child, Robert, born in 1934, works for a brick company in Denton, Texas. In August 1939, Mrs. Oswald's husband died of a coronary thrombosis; two months later, on Oct. 18, she gave birth to her third child, Lee Harvey Oswald. Mrs. Oswald recalls that "other kids teased Lee because he was so bright. He learned to read by himself before he went to school. He was always wanting to know about important things."
In 1945 she married an industrial engineer from Boston, Edwin A. Ekdahl, and moved to Fort Worth. They kept Lee with them, sent the two older boys to a Mississippi military academy. That marriage also was brief. In 1948 Ekdahl filed for divorce, charged that his wife nagged him constantly about money, hit and scratched him, threw a bottle and a cookie jar at him, once nearly crowned him with a vase.
The Truant. Marguerite and Lee moved in 1952 to New York City, where they took an apartment in The Bronx. At 13, Lee Oswald was a chronic truant, and The Bronx children's court referred him for psychiatric examination to the Youth House for Boys. Psychiatrist Renatus Hartogs concluded that Lee had a schizoid personality and was potentially a "dangerous person who needed treatment." Says Probation Officer John Carro: "His environment was poor because his mother was in need of help herself." At one point during an examination, young Lee was asked what he would feel if he plunged a knife into a person. His reply: "Nothing." But all efforts to get treatment for Lee failed—because Marguerite Oswald was convinced that there was nothing wrong with her son.
She told Carro: "Please keep out of family affairs."
Marguerite took Lee out of New York, moved to New Orleans. Not long after that, he began bringing home library copies of Das Kapital and other books dealing with Communism and socialism. "I didn't worry," says his mother. "You can't protect children from everything—just try to help them see things in the right way. Besides, if those books are so bad, why are they where any child can get hold of them?"