Mr. JENNER. About when was this?
Mr. THORNLEY. From the time he went to the Soviet Union until February
of 1962.
Mr. JENNER. You learned that he had gone to the Soviet Union?
Mr. THORNLEY. Yes; I was stationed at his former outfit, Marine Air
Control Squadron 1, at the time he went to the Soviet Union.
Mr. JENNER. Where were you then stationed?
Mr. THORNLEY. That is where I was at the time.
Mr. JENNER. What country?
Mr. THORNLEY. At Atsugi, Japan.
Mr. JENNER. I see. And you learned about it through what source?
Mr. THORNLEY. The Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper in the
Far East. It was on page 3, I believe, a little article about Lee
Harvey Oswald having appeared in the American Embassy in Moscow,
having plopped down his passport and requested Soviet citizenship. My
first reaction was, "Good Lord, what is going on here?" And afterward,
I, of course--it began to occur to me, his interest in communism,
and I started kicking myself, thinking, well, you know, just for so
misjudging a person. I just----
Mr. JENNER. Misjudging? What respect, please?
Mr. THORNLEY. As far as his sincerity went. I did not ever think he was
so interested in communism to go to all the trouble to go to the Soviet
Union and certainly to jeopardize his citizenship, and so forth. This
was a great surprise to me. And right away I began to try to figure out
the mechanism of his thinking.
Mr. JENNER. I see. Keep going and tell me what your rationalization and
thinking was at that time.
Mr. THORNLEY. And what caused him to do this. This gets us back to the
emotional instability and why did it occur. I do believe, to begin
with, Oswald, how long ago he had acquired the idea I don't know, but I
think in his mind it was almost a certainty that the world would end up
under a totalitarian government or under totalitarian governments.
I think he accepted Orwell's premise in this that their was no fighting
it. That sooner or later you were going to have to love Big Brother and
I think this was the central, I think this was the central thing that
disturbed him and caused many of his other reactions.
I think he wanted to be on the winning side for one thing, and,
therefore, the great interest in communism. I think he wanted--I think
he felt he was under a totalitarian system while in the Marine Corps,
and, therefore, the extreme reactions when someone would call him a
Communist. I think he had a persecution complex, and I think he strove
to maintain it. I could not go so far as to say why. Perhaps it was
necessary to his self-esteem in some way. This was and is the general
conclusion I now have as to his general motivations, his overall
motivations, insofar as he has tended to be emotionally unstable.
Mr. JENNER. Do you think he was emotionally unstable?
Mr. THORNLEY. I think so.
Mr. JENNER. That is an opinion you gathered from your association with
him in the Marines.
Mr. THORNLEY. Yes. Primarily once again from that last experience, that
short exchange and just the complete unexpectedness of it. And then, of
course, after that was when I learned some of the other things, such as
the pouring the beer over the staff sergeant's head. These things, I
don't know when I learned them, but I do definitely know I learned them
afterwards because I----
Mr. JENNER. You mean you learned of that incident after you left the
base at El Toro?
Mr. THORNLEY. I believe I learned it over in Japan, as a matter of
fact, I believe soon after I got there somebody mentioned it in some
connection or another, and that was because I remember, yes, I am sure
it happened over there because I remember, then I said, "Oh, he was in
this unit? He was in here in MACS 1?" and somebody said, "Yes." And
that was another connection in my mind as far as Oswald was concerned.
And then when the defection occurred, I therefore felt that I--I had
been thinking about writing a book on the Marine Corps. I had not
decided exactly what it was going to concern, what it was going to be
about as far as plot or theme went, the background would be the Marine
Corps in Japan, because that was the first big, at that time to me,
dramatic experience of my life suitable for a book, worth telling about.
So, when the defection occurred on that same day, I thought, "Well,
this is it. I am in a perfect position to tell how this took place, why
this happened." I was not so interested in explaining Lee Harvey Oswald
to myself or anybody else, as I was in explaining that particular
phenomenon of disillusionment with the United States after serving in
the Marine Corps overseas in a peacetime capacity; thus the title: The
Idle Warriors.
Since Oswald inspired the book, I did base a good deal of it as a
matter of convenience on his personality and on his ideas.
Mr. JENNER. You said you had the impression as you sat there in Japan
that here was a man whom you felt wanted to be on the winning side.
Mr. THORNLEY. Yes.
Mr. JENNER. What impression did you have as to why? Did you, for
example, have the impression that he felt that his life had been such
that he had been deprived of the opportunity to be on a good side?
Mr. THORNLEY. No.
Mr. JENNER. That he conceived to be the leading side?
Mr. THORNLEY. No. I had a definite impression of why.
Mr. JENNER. All right.
Mr. THORNLEY. I think it is a mistake that many people make, and I
think it is a mistake he shared, and that is: he looked upon, not only
Marxists make this mistake, but he looked upon history as God. He
looked upon the eyes of future people as some kind of tribunal, and he
wanted to be on the winning side so that 10,000 years from now people
would look in the history books and say, "Well, this man was ahead of
his time. This man was"--he wanted to be looked back upon with honor
by future generations. It was, I think, a substitute, in his case, for
traditional religion.
The eyes of the future became what to another man would be the eyes of
God, or perhaps to yet another man the eyes of his own conscience.
Mr. JENNER. So it wasn't in the prosaic sense of merely wanting to be
on the "winning side."
Mr. THORNLEY. No.