you like. It purports to record a discussion that you had with Mr. McVickar about Lee Harvey Oswald.
Miss JOHNSON. Yes; firstly he says that I told him that I had seen Oswald Sunday, May 15. He would have meant here Sunday, November 15. My recollection is that it was a Monday night that I spoke with Oswald, and it would therefore be Monday, November 16, not May.

Mr. Mosk.

1959?
Miss JOHNSON. 1959. Yes; I was struck by Oswald's reserve, and that comes out in the memo. I had forgotten, but I recollect, and it is not in my notes but I recollect, that it is true that he said he had never talked so long about himself to anybody, that about his use of words struck me very much in conversation, that he sometimes pronounced a particular word correctly and later pronounced it incorrectly, and that simple words he sometimes mispronounced and hard ones he got right.

Mr. Mosk.

He was speaking in English ?
Miss JOHNSON. Oh, yes; his emphasis on legality, I had the impression that unconsciously he wasn't 100- percent behind what he was doing, that he wanted to get out of it and he left a loophole and that the scapegoat was the Embassy.

Mr. Slawson.

I would like to ask a question on that. You think then that he may have at least unconsciously had reservations right at that time that he was not doing the right thing?
Miss JOHNSON. Yes; and I think this is implicit in the interview and it corresponds with my recollection. It says here, "it was her opinion that he might consciously or not have been trying to leave a loophole for himself." I felt that in making such a scapegoat of the Embassy and of Mr. Snyder, he was leaving himself a reason not to go back to the Embassy, and hence not to really renounce his citizenship, and that impressed me even then, and I think that didn't come out in my story and it doesn't come out in my notes, but it does correspond with my recollection.
I felt he was using his annoyance at the Embassy for other reasons. It was a pretext, although I didn't think it was conscious. And I did bore in on whether the Embassy had given him two versions, that is, whether they had said they were too busy, or whether there was legal grounds that they couldn't allow him to renounce citizenship until he had assurance of Soviet citizenship.
I was just interested in resolving the discrepancies, because I wanted to clarify the nature of the loophole he was leaving himself, rather really than to put the Embassy on the spot. And also I wanted to get the Embassy's role straight because I didn't know how fully in my story to put his annoyance at Snyder, the consul. I wanted to be clear on what he was doing, before writing about his annoyance with Snyder.

Mr. Mosk.

Do you think, Miss Johnson, that he had any knowledge of the law of expatriation?
Miss JOHNSON. My recollection of him was that he was very legally minded. He showed me his letters from the Embassy, his exchange of letters from the Embassy, and that is in the notes, that he claimed they were acting illegally. He showed me the text of these letters and asked me what I thought of them. He said that he had been told on Saturday, October 31, that is a Saturday, that they needed time to get the papers together.

Mr. Mosk.

But do you think that he had ever read a book of statutes or did he give you that impression, that somebody had told him about the law or that he had read the law?
Miss JOHNSON. He claimed that they were acting illegally, and I am not at 'all sure that he didn't also indicate that he had a right, that he knew he had a fight. I am not sure that he didn't say that they had told him at the Embassy that they wanted some assurance that he had Soviet citizenship, but actually I believe that this was more what I gathered from talking to Mr. Snyder and Mr. McVickar, that they actually wanted to give him time to think.
Somewhere I got the idea that he had also been told that they wanted assurance that he had Soviet citizenship, before letting him renounce American citizenship. Where I got the impression, I think it was from him, but I am not sure. Yes; my guess about him is that he would feel that he knew the law. Whether he would have seen it or been told it by somebody that he thought

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