Lee Harvey’s Legacy
Rachel Oswald did not kill John F. Kennedy, but for more than three decades she has stuggled to make peace with the darkest day in Texas History.
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As Van Morrison’s “Moondance” started up on the radio, Rachel danced her shoulders a little and then lit another cigarette. “Dating was a little tricky,” she said. “There was always the question of whether I should tell the guy about Lee. If so, do I tell him on the first date or the third? What if I don’t tell him at all? Believe it or not, a couple of guys at UT refused to ask me out again after I told them about my dad. One guy I told actually thought I was crazy. He got really scared and wanted to take me to a hospital. I guess it was easier for him to believe that I was insane than that Lee was my father. I’ve had assassination buffs send me roses and love letters. One guy tracked me down to the Chili Parlor and for a while was coming in several nights a week. I’ve listened to customers talk about Lee and the shooting, especially after JFK came out, without them knowing who I was. I actually once had a customer refuse to tip me. He said, ‘I know who your father is,’ and then he just got up and shook his head and left. What it boils down to is that every time I meet someone—every person at a party, every customer I wait on, every classmate, every teacher, every would-be friend—I ask myself: Do they know who I am? Are they looking at me that way because of me or because I’m the daughter of Lee Harvey Oswald?”
Over a final round of drinks we started talking about the movie JFK. I asked her what she thought of Gary Oldman’s portrayal of her father.
The question brought her up from her Bloody Mary. “The first time I met Gary,” she said, “I was visiting my mother in Dallas. She told me that there was going to be a movie made about the assassination and asked if I wanted to have lunch that afternoon with Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner—my mother didn’t even know who they were—and I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m going to have lunch with Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner!’ So we meet them at a Chinese restaurant. It was so exciting, you know, me being a young woman and everything. At the time I didn’t know Gary was involved in the movie, in fact I didn’t really even know who he was. But when he walked into the restaurant, he had come straight from rehearsal and seemed really tired—they were doing the scene where Lee was held in jail—and he was wearing the same white T-shirt and blue overshirt that Lee had been wearing, his hair was cut like Lee’s, and the way he walked—he looked exactly like him. Then he sat down. I got really embarrassed, but every time I looked up we would catch each other’s eye. I think he was checking me out because I look very much like my father, and I think he was trying to get a feel for my dad by looking at me. And then at one point, while he’s asking my mother questions about Lee, he starts to cry. He said that he had been in jail for hours doing this scene—that he had been in handcuffs since dawn, that he’d been beaten up and spit at—and that he had come to really empathize with what had happened to my father, and that now, looking at his wife and daughter, it really broke his heart to know what we had all gone through. We were terribly moved by this. As far has his portrayal in the movie, let me tell you—Gary Oldman is an actor. I remember my sister and I going to his hotel room and seeing twelve books about my father on the nightstand. Apparently he had even gone to my father’s grave. I mean, I’ve never gone to my father’s grave.”
“Is the movie accurate then?”
“Everything about my father is accurate.”
“So, what do you think really happened? Do you think your father pulled the trigger?”
Rachel was quiet for a moment. “I think Lee was this twenty-four-year-old guy, this youngster, who got himself in over his head. Lee was intelligent, but he was no genius. I don’t know who else was involved, but clearly it was too big of a deal for one twenty-four-year-old kid to do by himself. For example, right before the shooting someone asked my mother to take a picture of Lee holding a rifle, and then right after the shooting, the picture is confiscated, and everyone says, ‘Look, there’s the gun, there’s the guy who did it, case closed.’ And apparently there were police recordings of someone saying Jack Ruby was planning to kill Lee, and sure enough, the next day Jack Ruby makes his way through all the police and kills Lee live on national TV. I mean, think about it. There are just too many loose ends for it all to be dumped on my father. It was just too big of a deal. Until I was twenty-three, I didn’t even know there were alternative theories. I’ve only read a couple of books about it. I’m sorry for my father’s pain, but basically I just want it to be over, one way or another, especially by the time I have kids.
“It’s hard having things written about you that aren’t true. For example, this TV movie about my family. When I read the script, I was really angry. It’s set in 1978, when I was fifteen and my sister was seventeen. The writers portray me as this traumatized, victimized kid—there’s a scene of me having a birthday party that no one comes to—just me in my birthday hat all by myself. That never happened. In the final scene they have my sister and me walking hand in hand to the Kennedy Memorial, singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ That never happened either. I’ve never even been to the Kennedy Memorial. The writers never talked to me or my sister about our lives. I guess they decided we must be a certain way and then wrote it. That kind of stuff makes you feel violated. I’ve tried not to make a big deal about things. I’ve never tried to profit from any of this—I’ve waited tables for the last six years, making maybe forty or fifty bucks a night, to pay my way through college and nursing school. I have a bachelor’s degree in natural sciences. I drive a beat-up car. I’m just a regular person. But there are still people who refuse to believe that I could be normal. That’s what I hope my kids will never have to go through.”
“Do you have any pictures of you and your father?”
“No. All of our family pictures were confiscated.”
The bartenders were closing up, and Rachel said she needed to call it a night. There was more I wanted to ask, but it was clear from her face that she was wondering if she hadn’t shared too much already. Looking at her, I was struck again by the peculiarity of the moment. I was sitting next to the daughter of a presidential assassin, an attractive and healthy woman who apparently wanted nothing more from life than to be a good nurse. (Rachel went on to graduate from nursing school and find a job in the field.) If it is true that poetry is the silence between words, then there is something genuinely poetic about the life Rachel Oswald is quietly leading between the headlines.
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