Marguerite Oswald

Oswald was born Marguerite Frances Claverie in 1907 to John Claverie, whose family were French Catholics, and Dora Stucke, a German Lutheran, a family of French and German descent. In 1911 her mother died, leaving Oswald, her three sisters, and brothers Charles and John in the care of their streetcar conductor father, who raised them on a salary of $90 per month (equivalent to $2,800 in 2022), though he had the help of housekeepers.[3] Oswald's older sister, Lillian Murret, related that their family was poor but happy.[3][4] Oswald's brothers, Charles and John, both died of tuberculosis as young men.[3] Oswald attended McDonogh High School, but dropped out in her first year.[3][4] Shortly before she turned 17, she began working at a New Orleans law firm as a receptionist,[3][4] falsely claiming on her application that she had graduated high school.[3]

In August 1929, while she was still working at the law firm, Oswald married Edward John Pic Jr., a clerk for a stevedoring company. By July 1931, when Oswald was three months pregnant, they had separated, because, according to Pic, of irreconcilable differences,[4] though a salient issue was money, as it would be for Oswald her entire life.[3] Oswald told her family that Pic did not want children, and would not support her. Their son, John Edward Pic, was born on January 17, 1932. Pic supported him until he was 18, though he only saw him occasionally in his first year, and then not again until he was 16. During their separation,[4] Oswald met a friend of Lillian's, a premium collector for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company named Robert Edward Lee Oswald, who was also separated from his wife, when he saw her and infant John coming home from a park.[3][4] Marguerite divorced her husband in 1933, by which time Oswald had left his wife, as well. Six months after Robert Edward's divorce, he married Marguerite in a Lutheran church on July 20. Oswald described her marriage to Robert Edward as "the only happy part" of her life. Their first son, Robert Jr., was born April 7, 1934, and though Robert Sr. wanted to adopt John, Oswald refused this in order to maintain Edward's support payments. On August 19, 1939, little more than a year after the Oswalds bought a house on Alvar Street, and two months before his second son's birth, Robert Lee Oswald died of a heart attack[4] while mowing a lawn on a hot day.[3] On October 18, 1939, the Oswalds' second son, Lee Harvey Oswald, was born at New Orleans' French Hospital.[3][4]

In 1944, Oswald moved her family from New Orleans to Dallas, Texas. She later married Edwin A. Ekdahl that year. They separated in 1946, and formally divorced in 1948. After her second divorce, she became known as Marguerite C. Oswald.[4]

In August 1952, Oswald and Lee moved to New York City, where they lived for a short time with her son John Pic,[5] a Coast Guard staff sergeant who worked at the Port Security Unit at Ellis Island, and who lived with his 18-year-old wife Marge and their three-month-old son[6] in an apartment at 325 East 92nd Street.[4] Though John and Marge initially bonded with twelve-year-old Lee, Oswald and Lee's stay there, which the young couple understood to be a visit, was turbulent. This was owing to Oswald's conflict with Marge, and her stated desire to move in with them permanently, one which the couple rejected. During the Oswalds' stay, Lee enrolled in the seventh grade at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran School on Watson Avenue. On September 30, after several weeks of inconsistent attendance,[6] Lee enrolled in P.S. 117, a junior high school in the Bronx, where he was teased by classmates for his regional clothes and accent,[6][7] Around this same time, John noticed that Lee's disposition at home changed. No longer well-behaved, he was hostile to him and their mother, and disrespectful of authority. A few days after an incident in which Marge related that Lee threatened her with a pocket knife, the Oswalds moved out of the Pics' apartment, Lee's rapport with the Pics now permanently broken. Oswald found a one-room basement apartment at 1455 Sheridan Avenue, and found a job at Lerner Shops.[6] However, Lee became truant, preferring to stay home to read and watch television over attending school. Because neither his mother nor school authorities were able to compel his return to school, truancy charges were brought against him, stating that he was "beyond the control of his mother insofar as school attendance is concerned." Lee was sent to Youth House, an institution where children underwent psychiatric observation, where he stayed from April 16 to May 7, 1953. Lee was found to exhibit higher-than-normal intelligence for his age, and showed no signs of neurological impairment or mental illness, having scored 118 on an IQ test. However, Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Renatus Hartogs found:[7]

Lee has to be diagnosed as 'personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive—aggressive tendencies.' Lee has to be seen as an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self involved and conflicted mother.[7]

Hartogs recommended that Lee be placed on probation on condition that he seek help and guidance through a child guidance clinic, and that Oswald seek "psychotherapeutic guidance through contact with a family agency."

Evelyn D. Siegel, a social worker who interviewed both Lee and Oswald at Youth House, while describing "a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him," found that he had detached himself from the world around him because "no one in it ever met any of his needs for love."

Hartogs and Sigel indicated that Oswald gave Lee very little affection, with Siegel concluding that Lee "just felt that his mother never gave a damn for him. He always felt like a burden that she simply just had to tolerate." Furthermore, Oswald did not apparently indicate an awareness of the relationship between her conduct and Lee's psychological problems, with Siegel describing Oswald as a "defensive, rigid, self-involved person who had real difficulty in accepting and relating to people" and who had "little understanding" of Lee's behavior and of the "protective shell he has drawn around himself." Hartogs reported that Oswald did not understand that Lee's withdrawal was a form of "violent but silent protest against his neglect by her and represents his reaction to a complete absence of any real family life."[7]

When Lee returned to school for the 1953 Fall semester, his disciplinary problems continued, and when Oswald failed to cooperate with school authorities, they came consider placing him in a home for boys. This was postponed, perhaps partially because his behavior abruptly improved.[7][8] Before the New York family court system could address their case,[7][9] the Oswalds left New York in January 1954, and returned to New Orleans,[7][10] where Lee finished the ninth grade before he left school to work for a year. In October 1956, he joined the Marines.[7]

Oswald held a variety of positions, including as a legal clerk and telephone operator. One family that had hired her as a baby nurse fired her when they began to suspect she was drugging their infant so he would stop crying at night.[11]

• Bessie Love The Silence of Lee Harvey Oswald (stage adaption)[37]
• Annabelle Weenick (1977) (The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald)
• Ada Lynn (1991) (JFK)
• Mary Pat Gleason (2013) '('Killing Kennedy)
• Jacki Weaver (2013) (Parkland)
• Cherry Jones (2016) (11.22.63)

• Clarke, James W. (2007). Defining Danger: American Assassins and the New Domestic Terrorists. Piscataway, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-0765803412.