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 With no mourners around to serve as pallbearers, it was a task
that fell to me and a few other reporters covering the funeral of
John F. Kennedy's assassin. Fifty years later, I remain a reluctant
and minor footnote in American history.
It was a story that began with a tip: Oswald would be buried at Rose
Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth, where he had spent part of his
childhood, just one day after nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and
killed him during a jail transfer on Nov. 24, 1963, itself just two
days after Kennedy's death.
As the Fort Worth correspondent for The Associated Press, I drew the
assignment.
I arrived to discover dozens of police and federal agents, writers
and photographers, but no mourners waiting to bid Oswald goodbye or
good riddance. A police escort delivered Oswald's casket in the
early afternoon. Much later, officers arrived with his family:
mother Marguerite, brother Robert, widow Marina and her two
daughters, June Lee, 2, and infant Rachel.
No one else would follow; even the minister failed to show. Shaking
his head ever so slightly, Jerry Flemmons of the Fort Worth
Star-Telegram turned to me and said, "Cochran, if we're gonna write
a story about the burial of Lee Harvey Oswald, we're gonna have to
bury the son of a bitch ourselves."
Sure enough, officials asked the gathered reporters to serve as
pallbearers. I was among the first they asked, my reply not just
"No!" but "Hell no!" Then Preston McGraw of United Press
International stepped forward and volunteered, and with my top
competition for scoops accepting the duty, I realized my error and
joined McGraw and other reporters.
The ceremony itself was as brief as it was simple. The Rev. Louis
Saunders, executive secretary of the Fort Worth Council of Churches,
had been drafted to fill in for the missing minister. His words —
"we are not here to judge, only to commit for burial Lee Harvey
Oswald" — were barely audible, mingled with muffled sobs by Oswald's
mother and widow. Her eyes red and swollen, Marina Oswald stepped
beside her husband's casket and quietly whispered something.
Not long after the nation's slain president was laid to rest at
Arlington National Cemetery with tearful family members and millions
of television viewers around the world looking on, Oswald's body was
lowered into his grave at 4:28 p.m.
For years, I would continue to report on the assassination,
interviewing Oswald's mother, investigating conspiracy theories and
writing stories on the anniversary of that dreadful day in Dallas.
For one of the first of those anniversary stories, I wanted to
interview Oswald's widow. She had remarried, moved to suburban
Dallas and rarely spoke to reporters. Her new husband had reportedly
brandished a pistol and chased one writer away.
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Early on a cloudy November morning, I staked out their house and
trudged up the steps after he left for work. I had not called ahead,
but identified myself as an AP reporter when Marina Oswald opened
the door.
"I am no longer news," she said, making it clear she did not intend
to talk with me.
She was slim and blonde, with arresting eyes of an intense
blue-green and a distinctive Russian accent. She was 24 and I must
have stared like a smitten dolt.
"Is something wrong?" she asked.
Embarrassed, I babbled something about not having seen her since
that day at Rose Hill.
"You were there?" she asked. I told her I was a pallbearer.
Surprised, she said the least she could do was invite me in for
coffee. Several hours later, we were still talking and smoking.
Denied cigarettes by Oswald during their marriage, she was now a
chain smoker.
"Have you ever tried to analyze yourself?" she asked me at one
point, then added: "It's very hard to do."
Asked about the Warren Commission's conclusion that her husband was
the lone assassin, she said: "I think about it a lot. I try to
forget. It is very difficult. It is like a nightmare. ... I have
nightmares."
Years later, in 1983, when working on a story about the 20th
anniversary, I interviewed Marina Oswald for the second and last
time. She was no less candid and still a heavy smoker.
"For a while I thought it would all blow over, just go away," she
said. "But now I accept the fact that I must live with this the rest
of my life.
"I may still be naive, but I'm not stupid."
[Associated
Press; MIKE COCHRAN]
Mike Cochran was AP's
Fort Worth correspondent in 1963 and retired from the company in
1999.
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