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A major reason why I am so interested in the movie Dirty Dancing is that the story takes place about three months before the assassination of President John Kennedy. Although I was only 11 years old when the assassination happened, I know a lot about the events of 1963, because I have read and written a lot about that assassination. For example, this webpage shows part of a long work that I wrote about Jack Ruby.
I have written another long work (which I never have published) titled "The Oswalds' Plans to Hijack an Airplane". From about August 9 through September 10, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was plotting to hijack an airliner to Cuba. That period of time overlaps closely the Housemans' stay at Kellerman's from August 10 through September 2. (I wrote my hijack work long before I began writing this blog.)
My hijack work is about 25 single-spaced pages, with many footnotes, written for people who are very knowledgeable about the assassination. My work is too long and complicated to post as an article in this blog, so I have shortened and simplified it to cover just the days of the Dirty Dancing story for my readers here.
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After Oswald was fired from his job in New Orleans on July 18, 1963, he began to think seriously about moving to Cuba. Already in 1959 he had thought about moving to Cuba, but he moved instead to the Soviet Union. In June 1962 he had returned to the United States with his wife Marina and their baby daughter June.
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| Marina and Lee Oswald with their daughter June. The photo was taken in 1962. |
He was qualified to receive unemployment benefits for 13 weeks – until about October 10. These benefits are his only known income during that period. Marina was due to give birth to their second child in October.
On August 5 and 8, 1963, there were two attempts to hijack airplanes from the USA to Cuba. These were the only hijackings that happened anywhere in the world during the year 1963.
* On August 5, a man named Roy Siller unsuccessfully attempted to hijack a small private airplane, which was flying entirely within the Miami area, to Cuba.The hijackings apparently gave Lee his initial idea to hijack an airplane flying from New Orleans. He figured that his employment prospects and his family's medical would be better in Cuba. He could not simply emigrate to Cuba, because the US Government had imposed an economic embargo on Cuba.
* On August 8, a man named Robert A. Michelena successfully hijacked a Beech T-34 private airplane to Cuba.
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Lee Oswald's hijack plans are known because he discussed them with his wife Marina and persuaded her to participate. She, however, kept the plan secret until she revealed it through a 1977 book titled Marina and Lee. The book was written by Priscilla Johnson McMillan based on her exclusive interviews with Marina.
Because Marina felt culpable for the hijack plan, she did not mention it during the investigation of the JFK assassination. Only after more than a decade had passed did she feel secure enough to tell her biographer, McMillan about it.
Although Marina tried to talk Lee out of the plan, she eventually did agree to help him hijack an airplane. McMillan's book called Marina an "emotional accomplice" and explained her agreement as follows::
At this stage in their marriage, Lee was confiding to Marina, making her his touchstone, his lightning rod to reality. And Marina understood what he was asking of her. Even though she wondered, as he unfolded his hijacking scheme, whether or not he was crazy, she drew funny word pictures for him to show how his plan looked in the clear light of day....======
She perceived that Lee needed her. With what appears to be an inborn sympathy for anyone who is lost or in trouble, or on the outs with the world, she reached out and responded to his need.
"Do you know why I loved Lee?" she once said. "I loved him because I felt he was in search of himself. I was in search of myself, too. I couldn't show him the way, but I wanted to help him and give him support while he was searching." ...
As the one person whom Lee trusted, and feeling responsible for his actions, as she did, Marina was painfully at odds with herself and her surroundings. She, too, had been a rebel. In part, it was this that had drawn her to Lee, and this that still helped her to understand him ....
Marina tried, not always successfully, to resist complicity in Lee's deceptions. She refused to approve such of his schemes as she knew about. But she now insists that he had a stronger character than she, "because he brought me low and made me cover up his 'black deeds,' when it was against my morality to do so. I felt too much pity for him. If only I had been a stronger person, maybe it would have helped." ...
The truth is that there is no such thing as being married to a man like Lee Oswald and not becoming his emotional accomplice.
Lee began scheming right after the hijackings of August 5 and 8, but he did not inform Marina until the last half of August. On August 11, before he informed her, he asked Marina to write a letter to a friend, Ruth Paine. Much later, after the assassination, Marina feared that the letter might be used as evidence of her participation in the hijack plan. This fear caused Marina to say nothing about that plan for many years.
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Ruth Paine was a 31-year-old woman who had learned some Russian and had befriended Lee and Marina in Irving, Texas, soon after they had come there from the Soviet Union. In April 1963, Lee decided to move from Irving back to his home town, New Orleans. He went alone to New Orleans to find a job and an apartment, and Marina and June moved into Paine's home.
In May, Lee found a job and apartment there, and so Ruth drove Marina and June from Irving to New Orleans. Paine stayed in the Oswalds' apartment for a few days and then drove on to the East Coast for a vacation. Paine gave Marina a mailing address in Paoli, Pennsylvania, in case Marina needed to contact her.
On August 11, when Lee told Marina to write the letter, Paine still was traveling around on the East Coast.
By that time, Lee's thinking about hijacking an airliner had evolved. His first idea had been to hijack an airliner that was scheduled to fly from Dallas to Miami. He worried, however, that an airliner doing such a flight might not have enough fuel to fly the additional distance to Cuba.
Because Paine was traveling in or near Pennsylvania, Lee figured that such a fuel problem would be eliminated if he hijacked an airliner that was fueled to fly from Dallas to (for example) Philadelphia. With this consideration in mind, he told Marina to send a letter to the Paoli address, informing Paine that Lee was unemployed and that their family had no money.
Lee apparently hoped that Marina eventually might persuade Paine to buy airplane tickets for the Oswald family to fly to Pennsylvania. When Marina wrote the letter on August 11, she still did not know anything about Lee's hijack plan, but later she realized that this plan was his motivation for her writing the letter.
Because Paine was traveling, she did not receive the letter in Paoli until about August 25. On that date, she wrote a letter back to Marina. Since that date was a Sunday, the Paoli post office would not have begun to move the letter until Monday, August 26. I estimate that the Oswalds received Paine's letter in New Orleans on about Saturday, August 31.
Paine's letter lacked any hint that she might arrange for the Oswalds to join her on the East Coast. Paine did not even send any money. Rather she said that she would return home through New Orleans in late September and, if necessary, would drive Marina and June back to Irving. When Lee read the letter, he understood that his family would not fly to the East Coast with tickets purchased by Paine.
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Marina mailed her letter (August 11?) close to the day when the Houseman family arrived at Kellerman's Mountain House (August 10), and Marina received Paine's letter (August 31?) close to the day when the Houseman family departed from Kellerman's (September 2?).
So, while the Houseman family was at Kellerman's, Lee Harvey Oswald's was thinking that he and Marina might hijack a Dallas-Philadelphia flight to Cuba.
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Marina told her biographer McMillan that she was informed about Lee's hijack plan in the third week of August -- a few days after she mailed her letter to Paine.
Lee explained to Marina that she and June would sit in the airliner's back end, whereas he would sit in the front end, near the pilots' cabin. During the flight, Lee would pull out a pistol to demand control of the plane, and Marina would stand up and persuade the passengers to not resist the hijacking. Marina rejected this proposal, because she spoke English too poorly to persuade the passengers.
After arguing about Marina's objection for a few days, Lee altered his plan so that Marina would not have to say much on the airplane. He would buy her a small pistol, which she would use to silently threaten the passengers into submission. Lee informed Maria that he was shopping for a pistol that she could use.
Of course, Marina rejected this second plan too. Lee and Marina continued to argue about his plan for several days. Eventually and reluctantly, however, she did agree to go along with the hijacking.
Eventually Lee modified his plan yet again. Now he planned to hijack a smaller plane from a smaller town (smaller than New Orleans). He reasoned that a smaller plane would carry fewer passengers who would have to be controlled. To develop this new plan, he went to some unknown airport and returned with a new set of airline schedules.
I think that Lee redirected his plans toward smaller airports after Marina received Paine's disappointing letter (disappointing to Lee) at about the end of August. In this article here, I will not discuss Lee's subsequent hijack plans, which evolved mostly during September. I will discuss them in my next article.
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On August 31 -- about the same date when Paine's letter was received -- Lee wrote a letter to the editor of The Worker newspaper in New York City applying for a job as a photographer, explaining that he and his family intended to move to New York "in a few weeks." On the next day, September 1, he wrote two more letters – to the Socialist Workers' Party and to the Communist Party – indicating that he and his family intended to move to the Baltimore-Washington area in October. He apparently hoped one of these organizations might offer him a job and advance him the money for the airplane tickets that would enable him and Marina to hijack an airplane to Cuba.
September 1 was the day of the talent show at Kellerman's.
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On the same day, September 1, Lee also called the family of his aunt -- of his mother's sister -- and proposed that he and Marina visit on Labor Day, September 2. Lee might have intended to probe his aunt's family -- the family name was Murret -- to loan him the money for the airplane tickets. Lee and Marina did visit the Murret family on Labor Day, but the conversations there did not get around effectively to any loan being given to Lee.
At that Labor's Day party, Lee did talk with his cousin, Marilyn Murret. She had traveled abroad a lot during the previous several years and had just returned from a two-month bus trip through Mexico and Central America. According to McMillan's book, Lee said nothing to the Murrets that day about traveling to Cuba or even Mexico. However, Marilyn Murret's stories about her low-cost travels might have prompted Lee to consider the possibilities of buying tickets for a small airplane flying from a small airport instead of tickets for a major airline flying from the New Orleans airport.
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At about the beginning of September, figured that he would not be able to hijack an airliner, but he continued to think about hijacking a smaller airplane. He eventually gave up on all hijack plans -- probably around September 10. Subsequently he began developing a different plan to emigrate to Cuba by obtaining a visa in Mexico City.
At some point in his arguments with Marina about his hijack plan, he mentioned to her that he had found another man who had agreed to use a gun to help him take over an airplane. Lee told Marina that he had considered using this other man (Lee did not name him to Marina), but ultimately decided not to do so. Lee's explanation to Marina about his decision to reject this other man's help was "your accomplice is your enemy for life".
I think that Oswald's discussions with this other man about the hijacking began during August. I will speculate about this in this series' next article, titled "Oswald's Possible Accomplice in the Hijack Plan".
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