Oswald: A brother's burden
Through 34 years of stress, Robert Oswald has stood steadfastly by his
family name in the shadow of that infamous day in Dallas.
MICHAEL LEAHY
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
WICHITA FALLS, Texas -- At night, when it falls dark and quiet in the
house and a tired Robert Oswald finds himself alone, the dream still
sometimes finds him.
He sees himself alongside his younger brother, Lee, in a grim room
with only a desk and a note pad. He hears himself ordering the smaller
man to sit down and write an explanation for why he killed John F.
Kennedy. Amazingly, Lee obeys. He sits at the desk, writing, writing,
writing furiously, while big brother paces.
Finally, the enigma finishes. He stands and, as Robert tells it,
"He's about to hand me this paper when he says, 'Just a minute.' He
looks at his writing on the paper, then tears it all up and throws it
away. And he looks at me and says, 'I don't know why.' And I think it
will always be that he doesn't know why. I think that's the truth of
it."
A third of a century after the 35th U.S. president's assassination
in Dallas, some things do not change. When a puzzled grandchild asks
Robert Oswald whether he has any brothers or sisters, the house falls
funereally hushed, holding its breath with the occupants. When the
leaves begin falling, he and his wife, Vada, monitor ever more closely
their visiting grandchildren's television viewing, just as they did
their own children's. They keep ears open for any program with a
reference to Oswald, or Lee, or Lee Harvey.
Autumn is the season for new TV documentaries and books about
Robert's dead brother, the time for revamped conspiracy theories and
for strangers' bizarre phone calls. He braces himself for the
exploiters and crackpots who will want a piece of him. November is
hard.
As with his own children during that first November in 1963, 63-
year-old Robert Oswald does not talk to his grandchildren about either
the assassination or their great-uncle Lee. To do so, he reasons,
would only cause them confusion and worry. He believes his brother
killed President Kennedy, alone and irrationally. Just the same, it
hurts terribly to say so.
"You can either light a situation or defuse it, and we chose a
long time ago to [defuse] it," he says. "Why put all of that on
kids?"
If a man is not the reputed presidential assassin, but the
surviving brother who must live with the name, how do he and his
family do it when the name is Oswald?
In the aftermath of Nov. 22, 1963, Robert Oswald could have
avoided the question, along with many worries, merely by changing his
name at age 29. It was something that a variety of people, including a
Secret Service agent, urged him to do -- because the name Oswald
swiftly had become like that of John Wilkes Booth a century earlier in
the rage it triggered.
But while Oswalds unrelated to the family were reportedly becoming
Smiths and Joneses all over Texas and elsewhere in America, Robert
Oswald never considered the possibility of a name change.
His name was his father's and grandfather's, after all. The Oswald
family tree dated back to colonial times. He'd learned as a child that
he was a fifth or sixth cousin of Gen. Robert E. Lee, which explained
why he had been named Robert Edward Lee Oswald Jr., and his little
brother Lee Harvey Oswald. To change his name would have amounted to a
betrayal of his heritage, he believed.
He snaps his fingers loudly. "I mean I didn't think about changing
it for that long, OK?" he says, the "OK" for emphasis.
This is the former Marine's way when he's intense, his deep blue
eyes flashing behind glasses, and then, like a furnace burner going
from ON to OFF, the eyes dim and cool. His fingers rake his sparse
gray hair, his tensed shoulders settle back into his chair. He grins
companionably. By nature, he is affable, soft-spoken, gentle, a
chronic laugher, utterly without pretense.
When a stranger calls the house, skeptically asking whether the
casual-sounding man on the other end of the phone with the twang part-
Texan and part-Cajun could possibly be Robert Oswald, the Robert
Oswald, the brother of Lee Oswald, the object of the chase chuckles by
reflex. He says in the cheery, peppy voice of the brick salesman he
was, "Hi. You got him. That's me."
STEELED FOR HARD TIMES
Two weeks after the assassination, he made himself return to his
job as a sales coordinator for a brick company in Denton, 30 miles
outside of Dallas. He would neither run nor deny he was an Oswald.
Neither he nor his family was guilty of anything, he kept telling
those closest to him. A childhood spent in and out of orphanages had
prepared him for hard times and steeled his belief in, among other
things, his ability to get along with people and survive the worst of
circumstances.
Away from the brick lot, however, uncertainty gripped him. During
the weekend after John F. Kennedy's murder, President Lyndon B.
Johnson had ordered the Secret Service to provide the Oswald family
around-the-clock protection at their home in Denton. A couple of weeks
later, believing the Oswalds to be safe, the Service bid them goodbye.
The family was alone.
One night, after visiting friends in Fort Worth, Oswald was
driving his wife and two children back home to Denton when he saw the
flashing lights of a police car in his rear-view mirror. He stepped
out of his vehicle to be confronted by a towering state trooper, who
informed him he had a defective headlight. License and registration,
please. The trooper inspected his license, then glanced down at him.
"Robert, are you Lee's brother?"
"Yes, sir."
He felt unmasked. So here it was. Welcome to the future. Hello to
his new life as leper, maybe. The big trooper kept looking him over.
"We're like two peas in a pot," Lee once had told Robert in his
mangled syntax, part of a letter from the Soviet Union in which Lee
recounted how he'd described their physical resemblance to his curious
new Russian wife, Marina.
The observation was at least half true. While Robert was slightly
taller at 5 feet 10 inches, and had a far more robust build than his
slight brother, their faces had a similarly long shape. Their blue
eyes took on a hooded, almost sleepy quality when sad or pensive.
Looking at one of them as a young man would always remind a stranger
of the other. The trooper scrutinized him. Robert braced himself. The
cop said, "Robert, I want you to know something. My wife and I have
prayed for your family."
In retelling the story 34 years later, Bob Oswald's voice quavers.
His jaw line trembles violently. He is a tough Marine veteran of
Korea, a man unaccustomed to displays of emotion around strangers. His
blue eyes bat and keep batting now, and he looks up at the ceiling a
little helplessly, as if stunned by this reaction from himself,
perhaps mortified. He excuses himself to walk out of his den and stand
ramrod-straight in the kitchen, drinking a glass of tap water,
flicking at his eyes, looking off with the mile-long stare he
sometimes gets.
Just as abruptly as he left it, he returns to the den and sits
back down.
"Copacetic," he says crisply. This means, let's go. This means he
is OK and can resume talking. This means, among other things, that
life since 1963 has been a regular exercise in keeping things
copacetic.
"None of us really knew what was going to happen back then," he
says. "I'd already thought of alternate landing places for us [to
live]. ... But, not long after the [assassination], we had so many
kind letters from strangers and friends. ... You learn so much about
the decency of people. We had phone calls from friends and neighbors
and strangers asking us if we needed anything, people saying they were
thinking of us. For the first time ever in my life, I felt strength
from other people. It was almost overwhelming."
WICHITA FALLS REFUGE
In the summer of 1964, Acme Brick Co. transferred him to Wichita
Falls in dusty north Texas -- not to get an Oswald out of the Denton-
Dallas area, believes Bob Oswald -- but simply because Wichita Falls
needed a sales coordinator. Regardless of the motive, the move placed
the family in an area that has largely respected their privacy for
more than three decades and let them live as ordinary people
unburdened by stigma.
"They'd come to the Little League games back in the early days,
and they were very reserved," recalls longtime friend Helen Seyler.
"They just quietly tried to be a part of the community. I think people
respected them for that. ... The nice thing is, they let you live your
life in these parts. People know plenty from personal experience about
families having black sheep sometimes. They know you can't hold that
against someone."
Still, if kindness predominated, snubs and cruelty lurked close.
"I guess it happens to us because this thing never goes away
completely," observes Robert Oswald's 40-year-old daughter, Cathy.
To this day, Cathy remains leery, bracing herself at parties for
the awkward moment or odd comment that might come her way when people
learn she's an Oswald. Among the members of her family, she bears the
most visible scars. She still can recall the moment 26 years ago at
Rider High School when her ninth-grade history teacher, a brash young
instructor who doubled as an athletic coach, unexpectedly asked her a
question: "Oswald, are you related to Lee Harvey Oswald?"
Her classmates wheeled. Stunned, she could not make her lips move.
Instinct accounted for what happened next. She picked up her books and
started walking hurriedly for the door.
The teacher turned belligerent: "Oswald, I asked you a question."
Just before she reached the door, the teacher said it: "Cathy
Oswald, I better get you out of my class before you assassinate me."
"It knocked the air right out of me," she remembers.
She sobbed in the bathroom. She became accustomed to crying out of
sight from crowds. During her freshman year at the local college, as a
nominee for queen of a big football game, she stood with her sash on a
stage alongside other contestants, awaiting a banal pageant question
about hobbies or goals like all the other girls were getting. The
master of ceremonies asked instead, "How does it feel to be Lee Harvey
Oswald's niece?"
Silence.
"I guess she's not going to respond," the host quipped.
She put down her sash, grabbed her car keys and raced home. "It
was the only time I saw my father that hurt and angry," she remembers,
but it wasn't her only hurtful moment in the autumn of 1975. A blind
date told her, at the end of an otherwise pleasant evening, that while
she was sweet and pretty, "I can't handle it that you're an Oswald."
A year earlier, two taunting boys had told her younger brother,
Robert, then a seventh-grader, that his uncle had killed a president.
He rushed home, crying uncontrollably.
"He thought they were talking about another uncle, one of my
brothers," Vada Oswald recalls. "He didn't really know anything about
an Uncle Lee. Oh, he knew he had some kind of relative named Lee, but
that's all. We'd never sat him down and talked to him about Lee. We
just thought the less said, the better -- that the more we could keep
him from it, the more it'd be lost."
LIMITS TO FORGETTING
There are limits to forgetting and losing anything, especially the
past. But the middling city of Wichita Falls -- population: 97,000 --
seems as good a spot as any to make the attempt. It looks like a good
place to get lost. It lies in an otherwise sparsely populated,
generally barren section of north Texas close to the Oklahoma border.
The area, called Texoma by its inhabitants, is a kind of cultural and
geographic no-man's land.
It is exactly 126 miles from Bob Oswald's brown-brick house here
on his quiet middle-class cul-de-sac to his younger brother's grave in
their old boyhood metropolis of Fort Worth. It's 126 miles south along
a big fat nothin', as some of the locals will tell you -- past the
water-leaching mesquite trees and the sallow Texas cattle ranches flat
and far as the eye can see, past the plains where a cold wind in
November has nothing to block it except shivering man.
In about two hours, you leave the sameness and descend into a
tattered, honky-tonk section of Fort Worth, which is when you're
close. In the last mile and a half, you go past the tattoo bar, past
the body-piercing parlor and the pawnshop, past the taverns, past the
Peppermill Lounge and the Cowtown Inn. Then you turn into the
cemetery's parking lot, walk up a hill dotted by swaying oaks and sun-
burnt patches of grass, and you're there.
"OSWALD," the flat red gravestone reads. At 12 inches by 24
inches, it is the smallest type of marker in the 12 large gardens of
Rose Hill Cemetery, difficult to locate, intended to be inconspicuous.
Robert Oswald visits the spot unannounced and never with anyone except
his wife. "I don't have to be there to be there, if you know what I
mean," he says softly.
His two children, now adults, would gain nothing but pain, he
thinks, by seeing the small piece of granite. That would hurt him all
the more, because Robert carries enough pain for all of his family.
Over the years, he has seldom discussed his torment even with his
wife, unwilling to burden her. Instead, he'll sit up alone and think
and dream his dream of Lee.
"He handles things by himself," says his close friend, Eddie
Seyler, a retired budget officer at a local Air Force base. Not long
after the Oswald family's 1964 arrival in Wichita Falls, the two men
met when Seyler went to buy bricks. Helen Seyler later taught Robert
Jr.'s kindergarten class.
The Oswald and Seyler families became close, and the two men began
playing golf together in the mid-'60s. They'd ride in the same golf
cart, swapping news and jokes. With time, Eddie dared to broach the
assassination, asking Robert what he thought of some new theory being
advanced by skeptics of the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee
Harvey Oswald had acted alone.
"Eddie, it's nonsense, I think," Robert would say.
Seyler would press a little deeper.
"Eddie, I believe he was the only one involved."
The years flew by and the theories kept coming. The prosecutor in
New Orleans, Jim Garrison, declared he had the real killers of John F.
Kennedy in his sights, and a cottage industry of conspiracy books
followed. Lee's body was exhumed after someone convinced his widow,
Marina, that it was possible the body buried beneath the Oswald
tombstone was not Lee's but a spy's. A group of university
pathologists studied the corpse and concluded, "Nonsense."
At various points, Eddie Seyler wondered how his close friend was
holding up. "You doing OK with this?" Seyler asked him once as they
rolled along a golf course.
"Yeah, I'm handling it," Seyler recalls Oswald saying.
"You know, Bob, if you ever want to visit about it-- "
"I'm all right, Eddie. But thanks."
It was what Robert Oswald always said, more or less. Cathy Oswald
remembers childhood moments when she had the urge to ask her parents,
"Why don't you say something about it? Why don't you ask me something
once about what I think about it?... But I have a lot of admiration
for them. They wanted to protect us. ... My father had to be carrying
a terrible burden. I'm amazed by how he stood up to it."
Photos / Part I / Part II / Part III
http://www.ardemgaz.com/prev/oswald/index.asp
This article was published on Sunday, November 16, 1997
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