changed after his defection to Russia.373 For part of his time at El Toro, Oswald may have been assigned to clerical or janitorial tasks on the base.374 Some of his associates believed rumors,375 incorrect according to official records,376 that he had lost his clearance to work on radar crews; one recalled hearing that Oswald had once had clearance above the "confidential" level and had lost it because he "had poured beer over a staff NCO's head in an enlisted club in Japan, and had been put in the brig." 377

The officer in command of the radar crew, Lt. John E. Donovan, found him "competent in all functions," and observed that he handled himself calmly and well in emergency situations.378 Donovan thought Oswald was not a leader but that he performed competently on occasions when, as the senior man present, he served as crew chief.379 This estimate was generally shared by his fellows, most of whom thought that he performed his assigned duties adequately but was deficient in disciplinary matters and such things as barracks inspection.380 One of them recalled that after a number of bad inspections, the other members of Oswald's quonset hut complained about him and secured his transfer to another hut.381 He was thought to be an intelligent person, somewhat better educated and more intellectually oriented than other men on the base.382 A few of the men thought it more accurate to describe him as someone who wanted to appear intelligent.383 He had a pronounced interest in world affairs, in which he appears to have been better informed than some of the officers, whose lack of knowledge amused and sometimes irritated him; he evidently enjoyed drawing others, especially officers, into conversations in which he could display his own superior knowledge.384

It seems clear from the various recollections of those who knew him at El Toro that by the time Oswald returned to the United States, he no longer had any spirit for the Marines; the attitudes which had prompted his enlistment as soon as he was eligible were entirely gone, and his attention had turned away from the Marines to what he might do after his discharge. While no one was able to predict his attempt to defect to Russia within a month after he left the Marines, the testimony of those who knew him at El Toro in contrast to that of his associates in Japan, leaves no doubt that his thoughts were occupied increasingly with Russia and the Russian way of life. He had studied the Russian language enough by February 25, 1959, to request that he be given a foreign language qualification test; his rating was "poor" in all parts of the test.385 Most of the marines who knew him were aware that he was studying Russian; 386 one of them, Henry J. Roussel, Jr., arranged a date between Lee and his aunt, Rosaleen Quinn, an airline stewardess who was also studying Russian.387 (Miss Quinn thought that Oswald spoke Russian well in view of his lack of formal training; she found the evening uninteresting.388 Donovan, with whom she had a date later, testified that she told him that Oswald was "kind of an oddball.") 389 He read, and perhaps subscribed to, a newspaper, possibly printed in Russian, which his associates connected with his Russian bent.390