“McMillan achieves with art what the Warren Commission failed to do with its report. She
makes us see … It is not at all easy to describe the power of Marina and Lee … It is far better
than any other book about Kennedy … Other books about the Kennedy assassination are all
smoke and no fire. Marina and Lee burns.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Because Priscilla McMillan is a superb narrator and a superior scholar, her book has all the
power of a rst-class novel, and all the austerity of excellent scholarship. It is even more than
that. It answers … the questions: Did Lee Harvey Oswald murder John Kennedy, was he
alone in the act, and why did he do it? … The answers are all there, and they all make
sense.”
— Chicago Tribune
“McMillan has done us the service of pointing out just how deeply the enemy lives within us.
One closes her book pondering the odds that America has a sociological victim like Oswald on
every block. Compared to this, the conspiracy question looks incidental. The question is not
how many assassins can dance on the head of a pin, but what makes one dance, given a
particularly ugly set of human circumstances at birth?”
— The New Republic
“Fully as persuasive as the conspiracy lore that has preceded it … [McMillan] has a novelist’s
sense of when to dramatize, through dialogue and the use of exact detail, the crucial twists
and turns of domestic life … Priscilla McMillan’s extraordinary book makes the necessary and
subtle connection between private frailties and their power to change the history of the
world.”
— The Atlantic Monthly
“Richly detailed and absorbing … Marina and Lee may be the closest we will ever get to
understanding the mind of John F. Kennedy’s assassin.”
— Newsday
“A fascinating and richly detailed portrait of the man involved in one of the most terrible
moments in American history.”
— The Springfield News-Leader
“A woman of intelligence, compassion and understanding, McMillan has written a magnificent
book about a man who, as the world views such things, deserves to be hated. Yet, without
shifting anything from the tragedy or placing blame anywhere, she brings insights to the
Oswalds and others involved … this book on Oswald may be the best of all.… There’s a lot of
heart—Lee’s, Marina’s, and Priscilla’s—in it.”
— The Charlotte Observer
“Pulls at the emotions in such a way as to leave the intellect in turmoil.”
— Asbury Park Evening Press
“McMillan has skillfully and vividly captured Lee Harvey Oswald, the man.”
— The Sacramento Bee
“The rst comprehensive work of its type that attempts to deal with the life and thoughts of
the alleged assassin … a fascinating book, highly readable, and very frankly hard to put
down … entertaining, informative, well written, and well documented.”
— The State (Columbia, SC)
“The nest, most insightful, and most carefully researched study of Oswald to date.… To
read Marina and Lee is to be awash in alternate waves of depression and fascination while
recognizing that powerful intelligence has reconstructed one of the truly sad and terrible
stories of our time.”
— The Providence Journal
“Not only admirable as a piece of writing but a valuable historical document.… The fruit of
all [McMillan’s] devoted labor reads almost like a Dostoyevsky novel which treads the
threshold of insanity … a deeply impressive book, penetrating the smokescreen of argument
and speculation … the writing is stamped on every page with the sense of truth.”
— The Age
“An eminently human book.”
— The Cleveland Press
“A painstakingly detailed piece of work, a marvel of research.”
— SoHo Weekly News
“Marina and Lee, one of the nest books yet written about a still painful subject, stands as a
tragic account of a relationship ultimately destroyed by politics. It is required reading for
anyone interested in what went on in the mind of the man accused of murdering a president.”
— The Milwaukee Journal
“Not likely to be surpassed … a compelling story told with a mature authority. Without
detracting from the horror of the act, it forces us to confront the human face of the assassin.”
— New York Post
Copyright © 2013 Priscilla Johnson McMillan
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Originally published in 1977 by Harper & Row
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:
Steerforth Press L.L.C., 45 Lyme Road, Suite 208,
Hanover, New Hampshire 03755
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
eISBN: 978-1-58642-217-2
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Foreword
Introduction
Part One: Russia, 1941–1961
1. Archangel
2. Moldavia
3. Death of Klavdia
4. Farewell to Leningrad
5. Meeting in Minsk
Interlude
Part Two: Russia, 1961–1962
6. Courtship
7. The Wedding
8. Journey to Moscow
9. Marina’s Ordeal
10. The Long Wait
11. Birth of June
12. Departure for America
Interlude
Part Three: Texas, 1962–1963
13. Family Reunion
14. Summer in Fort Worth
15. The Émigrés
16. Ingratitude
17. Dallas
18. George de Mohrenschildt
19. Reconciliation
20. Lee and George
Photos
21. The Revolver
22. The Sanction
23. “Ready for Anything”
24. Walker
25. Legacies
Interlude
Part Four: New Orleans, Mexico City, Dallas, 1963
26. Brief Separation
27. Magazine Street
28. Castro and Kennedy
29. Arrest
30. “You Understand Me”
31. Parting
32. A New Disappointment
33. Lee and Michael
34. Agent Hosty
35. The President’s Visit
36. November 22, 1963
37. The Wedding Ring
38. An End and a Beginning
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
“I want to give the people of the
United States something to think about.”
LEE HARVEY OSWALD
to the author, Moscow, November 16, 1959.
FOREWORD
Shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, in November of 1963, a Gallup poll
found that 52% of the American public believed that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was
part of a conspiracy. In the fifty years since, that figure has climbed closer to 80%.
You can understand why. It’s painful to accept that an American president was cut down by
one small, half-crazy guy with a mail-order ri e who could easily have been stopped in any
of a dozen di erent small ways—but wasn’t. No wonder Norman Mailer called the
assassination “the largest mountain of mystery in the twentieth century … a black hole in
space absorbing great funds of energy and never providing a satisfactory answer.”
The key word here is “satisfactory.” The simple explanation—that Oswald acted alone—
was unpalatable. The enormity of the crime didn’t t the insigni cance of the criminal. Far
easier to imagine Oswald as a “cat’s paw” of a much larger scheme, engineered by invisible
but all-powerful forces.
There’s something deeply consoling about conspiracy. As a writer of suspense ction for
whom conspiracy is a stock in trade, I know the grati cations of a world in which everything
means something, everything adds up, everything is under the control of some grand human
intention. We like to think that things happen for a reason, and that large things happen for
large reasons.
The Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon Johnson a week after the
assassination, was meant to set the record straight. Its task was to reassure a grieving nation
that everything was under control, that there hadn’t been a coup d’état, that the US wasn’t, in
Johnson’s phrase, a “banana republic.” Its published report gave us such turgid bureaucratese
as “The Commission does not believe that the relations between Oswald and his wife caused
him to assassinate the President” and “Many factors were undoubtedly involved in Oswald’s
motivation for the assassination, and the Commission does not believe that it can ascribe to
him any one motive or group of motives. It is apparent, however, that Oswald was moved by
an overriding hostility to his environment.”
All this bureaucratic caution had a paradoxical e ect, however. The Oswald who emerged
from the Warren Commission report’s twenty-six volumes was a blank slate. No wonder it
was so densely inscribed with our worst suspicions. It didn’t help that Oswald was himself
shot dead two days after the assassination, by a nightclub operator named Jack Ruby in the
basement of Dallas police headquarters. The shooting of the shooter made him loom all the
larger in our imagination. As Thomas Powers pointed out, “Lee Harvey Oswald in prison for
decade after decade—surfacing in the news whenever parole boards met, but otherwise
forgotten, like Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremer, John Hinckley—would have
faded back down to size. It is Oswald dead and unexplained that excites suspicion. We needed
a good long look in order to forget him.”
That good long look didn’t come until 1977, with the publication of Marina and Lee by
Priscilla Johnson McMillan. The timing could not have been worse. It was two years after the
ignominious end of the Vietnam War and three years after Watergate. The country had been
through two more traumatic assassinations (Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King). We
were by then steeped in conspiracy thinking. Our distrust of politicians and government
organizations was at fever pitch, shaped in part by the paranoid conspiracy thriller that had
come into vogue in Hollywood: “The Parallax View” and “The Conversation” and
“Chinatown” in 1974, “Three Days of the Condor” in 1975, “All the President’s Men” in 1976.
Marina and Lee o ered a deep, nuanced, and spellbinding portrait of Oswald, as seen
through the prism of the person who knew him best, his Russian wife, Marina. But it gave us
no sensational revelations, no grassy-knoll conspiracy talk. What it o ered instead was
something far more unsettling: a portal to the life and times of a twisted, small man. The
book was widely reviewed but its sales were modest. It wasn’t what the conspiracy-minded
American public was in the mood to buy. McMillan’s book forces readers to confront
something more vexing than a conspiracy: an absence of conspiracy.
It’s no less suspenseful for all that, in part because of the breathtaking intimacy of its
character studies. The author’s gifts of observation are considerable. Yet she was also
extraordinarily fortunate in the access that she enjoyed. A few months after the assassination,
Oswald’s Russian widow, Marina Prusakova Oswald, was o ered a choice of collaborators to
write a book about her life with Lee. One was a Russian-born journalist named Isaac Don
Levine, who’d written biographies of Lenin and Stalin. But he was mostly interested in talking
about politics, and Marina had no patience for that. She wanted to talk about her
tempestuous marriage.
The one writer Marina was drawn to was a thirty-six-year-old woman named Priscilla
Johnson (later, Priscilla Johnson McMillan), who had a gentle, warm nature and an intriguing
background. McMillan had been a friend of John F. Kennedy’s—she had been an aide to him
when he was in the Senate, and, pretty and socially connected, was a target of his attentions,
though it never led to an a air. She also spoke uent Russian, which was crucial, since
Marina’s facility with English was poor. She understood the idiosyncrasies of Soviet life,
having spent several years in Russia as a young reporter.
By a startling coincidence, she had also known Marina’s husband. In November, 1959, as a
reporter in Moscow, she had interviewed a twenty-year-old ex-Marine at the Metropole Hotel
in Moscow named Lee Harvey Oswald, who’d announced he wanted to defect to the Soviet
Union.
Marina Oswald and Priscilla Johnson McMillan hit it o immediately. McMillan then
signed a contract with Harper & Row for a book about Lee Oswald for which she received an
advance of $60,000. Two-thirds of that went to Marina. Marina signed a release giving
McMillan a free hand to write whatever she wanted.
From July 1964 until the end of the year, McMillan all but moved in with Oswald’s young
widow and her two small children in her ranch house outside Dallas. They cooked meals and
traveled together. McMillan babysat Marina and Lee’s kids. They traded con dences. The
terrible event was less than a year old, and its details were still fresh. This was about as close
as we could get to asking questions of Oswald himself.
McMillan had a di cult task. Marina had been overinterviewed. Fearing deportation to the
Soviet Union, she had given di erent versions of her life to the FBI, the Secret Service, and
the Warren Commission. She was also wary, ashamed, and overwhelmed with guilt. Was she
in some way to blame for his actions? She vacillated between wanting to condemn her late
husband and wanting to defend him.
The result of McMillan’s immersive reporting is a full, rounded sense of Oswald’s character.
His sense of self swings wildly. At times he regards himself as a world-historical gure
destined to change the course of human events; at other times, he’s a cruelly neglected
victim. It was a highly volatile combination. He fancied himself a Marxist, lived in rooming
houses under aliases and was a furtive, nasty man. He wrote in what he called his “Historic
Diary” while singing the theme song to the Gary Cooper western High Noon (“Although you’re
grievin’, I can’t be leavin’/Until I shoot Frank Miller dead”). He was far too angry,
unbalanced and delusional to consent to be the cat’s paw of some gleaming cadre of
conspirators. (Only if you haven’t read Marina and Lee can you take Oswald’s famous
jailhouse remark—“I’m just a patsy!” —at face value.) He was a liar, a manipulator, a wifebeater, an odious human being, and nally a pathetic one. We like to think that great men
make history. McMillan reminds us that small men do, too.
It’s a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The idea of assassination,
McMillan believes, is highly contagious, like an in uenza virus, and Oswald was infected not
once, but on multiple occasions. McMillan was the rst to report that, in January of 1962,
when Oswald was living in Minsk, there was an assassination attempt on Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev, probably by one of his own bodyguards, at a nearby hunting lodge. Oswald
heard about it from a relative of his new wife, Marina Prusakova. The attempt was hushed
up; no one outside Russia knew the details until McMillan’s book was published. “If this had
happened in America,” Oswald told Marina and her family, “it would have been in all the
newspapers, and everyone would be talking about it.”
Seven months before that afternoon at Dealey Plaza, Oswald had tried to assassinate
another political gure: the segregationist and right-wing hero General Edwin Walker.
Oswald had missed by one inch, and he was emboldened by how easy it had been—and how
no one had ever found out. Neither the FBI nor the Dallas police had an inkling he’d tried.
McMillan’s book undermines all the conspiracy theories so successfully because it doesn’t
set out to do so. Marina and Lee doesn’t polemicize; it portrays. It’s alive to the small crevices
of character—and to the vast and irreducible role of chance.
Even today, half a century after the assassination, the cascade of contingencies McMillan
documents is painful to absorb. Oswald had only learned of the route of the president’s
motorcade a few days before, she establishes, when it was published in the Dallas
newspapers. The shooting was practically a spur of the moment decision. Once he heard that
the president’s limousine would be passing right by the building where he worked, he felt
that Fate had put him there. The president’s limousine looped right under his window.
(McMillan’s reconstruction of the day of the assassination, documentary yet novelistic, is as
pulse-pounding as the finest thriller.)
Would Oswald have shot any politician who passed under his window? Would he have
traveled across town to shoot Kennedy if Kennedy hadn’t presented himself, in a slow-moving
open-topped limousine, some eighty-eight yards from the Texas Schoolbook Depository?
McMillan can’t say for sure, of course, but she doubts it.
And the cascade continues. What if the FBI hadn’t closed its investigation of Oswald—who
changed his mind about defecting to the Soviet Union and returned to the US in 1962—once
they’d realized he wasn’t a Moscow-directed threat to national security? What if they hadn’t
investigated Oswald at all? (McMillan speculates that the FBI’s repeated questioning of
Oswald and his wife and their friends may paradoxically have in ated his delusional sense of
his own importance and may have even emboldened him to go after the president.) What if
Marina had agreed to his repeated pleas that she and their children move back in with him?
What if it hadn’t been so easy to buy guns? What if the Secret Service had argued against
JFK’s request to take down the protective bubble-top of his limo on that nice sunny day?
“The tragedy of the president’s assassination was in its terrible randomness,” McMillan
writes. The task of coming to terms with this reality is the challenge that Marina and Lee
bodies forth in meticulous, mesmerizing detail. For most Americans, that challenge remains
unmet. The reissue of McMillan’s classic book is the perfect occasion to surrender the salve of
conspiracy, and take that good, long look. The truth is out there. Just turn the page and start
reading.
Joseph Finder, 2013
INTRODUCTION
“For two years I have been waiting to do this one thing: Dissolve my American citizenship
and become a citizen of the Soviet Union.”
The young man sipping tea in my Moscow hotel room that November evening in 1959
seemed unlikely to become a Soviet citizen any time soon. In his gray suit, white shirt and
red tie, he looked like an American college boy, and his light Southern drawl (North Carolina?
I wondered) did little to dispel the impression. Yet if he succeeded in what he had set out to
do, he would never see North Carolina, or wherever he was from, again. Like defectors I had
heard of from the days of Stalin, he would nd himself locked away in some frozen
provincial town, I imagined, chained to a dreary mechanical job, eating heavy Russian
dumplings, living among rough men and women whose experiences of war and deprivation
went far beyond anything he had experienced. He had barely reached the age of twenty, and
the oath of renunciation he hoped to take would keep him trapped here for the rest of his
life.
I had rst heard of Oswald only a few hours before, when I stopped by the American
Embassy to pick up my mail. The mail was located just outside the consular o ce on the
ground oor. “By the way,” John McVickar, one of the two consular o cials, said as I
prepared to leave, “there’s a boy named Lee Oswald staying at your hotel. He’s angry at
everything American and wants to become a Soviet citizen. He won’t talk to any of us. But
maybe he’ll talk to you because you’re a woman.” As a correspondent for the North American
Newspaper Alliance and The Progressive Magazine stationed in Moscow at the time, I was as
well equipped as any to bring a young man like this out of himself.
Which is not to say I expected much of a welcome when I stopped by Oswald’s hotel room
later that afternoon. But greeting me at his doorway, he gave me a small smile and said he
would come to my room, located on the oor above his in the Metropole Hotel, for an
interview at nine in the evening.
Sure enough, no sooner had he arrived and settled in his chair than he started comparing
the runaround he had received from the American Embassy with the solicitude shown him by
Soviet o cials. Having come to Moscow on a ten-day tourist visa, he had immediately
confronted his startled hosts with a demand that he be granted Soviet citizenship. Since then,
he had been living in suspense in his hotel room, fearful that he had burned his bridges—that
his request would be refused and he would be shipped back to the place he loathed and
feared, the United States. Finally, after weeks of waiting, he was assured by Russian o cials
that, regardless of whether he was accepted as a citizen, he would not be forced to leave the
country. Knowing that he would not have to face charges of some kind at home, he now felt
that it was “safe” to air his feelings about the US embassy.
Oswald had grown up poor in New Orleans, Fort Worth, and New York, he told me, and
joined the Marines at seventeen because he did not want to be a burden on his family. He had
served in California, the Philippines and Japan, studying Russian at night during his nal year
in the Marine Corps and saving money with which to travel to Russia. As a teenager in the
Bronx, he said, “I was looking for something that would give me a key to my environment.”
At fteen, he discovered Socialist literature, works by Marx and Engels, and found an
explanation for the wretched treatment of Communists, workers, and black people he was
witnessing in New York. “I saw that I would become either a worker exploited for capitalist
pro t or an exploiter or, since there are many in this category, I’d be one of the
unemployed.” His mother was “a good example, being a worker all her life, having to
produce profit for capitalists.”
“I was brought up, like any Southern boy, to hate negroes,” he explained. Now, however,
he realized that racial discrimination simply provided a rationale for keeping their wages
low. It was the same thing with Filipinos at the US naval base at Subic Bay, where, he said,
his company had been stationed for a time and where he came to sympathize with
“Communist elements and the Filipinos’ hatred of Americans.” Even so, Oswald said that he
had “never seen a Communist in his life,” he had had no contact with the American
Communist Party, and it was not through being a Communist, but through reading and
observation that he had concluded that Communism was best for him personally. I was
intrigued by Oswald’s old-fashioned jargon, such as “exploitation of the worker,” and his
professions of belief in Communism, since I had not met any Russians in Moscow who still
believed in the cause, and the few defectors I had seen had arrived there in the 1930s, when
faith in Communism had been sweeping the world, and were now trying, desperately, to
leave.
As we were talking, Oswald told me that he had never talked so much about himself to
anyone before. If so, I thought, he must have lived a lonely life, for I found him, in fact,
rather reticent on any subject outside politics. His father died before he was born, he said in a
tight-lipped way that did not encourage further questioning—“I believe he was an insurance
salesman.” He refused to say what his mother did for a living and admitted to having one
brother. (I learned later that he had a half brother, too.).
What he wanted to talk about, and the reason for our interview, was his anger at the US
embassy. On a Saturday morning two weeks before, he had presented himself at the US
Consular o ce and demanded that he be allowed to swear an oath on the spot, renouncing
his American citizenship. Richard Snyder, the consul on duty that weekend, had, according to
Oswald, tried to discourage him and warned of the di culties he could be getting into. Again
according to Oswald, Snyder said he needed time to get the proper papers in order and make
sure that Oswald had acquired Soviet citizenship and would not be left without a country.
Furious at being stalled, Oswald threw his American passport onto Snyder’s desk. Snyder told
Oswald to think it over and, if he still wanted to go through with it, come back and he would
administer the oath. This made Oswald angry all over again: his passport was now in Snyder’s
possession, and Snyder knew perfectly well that a visitor without a passport would not be
admitted by the Soviet militiamen outside the building. Oswald next wrote to US Ambassador
Llewellyn Thompson protesting Snyder’s behavior. He received a formal reply from the
ambassador stating that it was every citizen’s right to renounce his citizenship and he could
return at any time to take the oath.
Oswald’s complaints about the embassy’s “illegal” actions ran through our conversation
until I pointed out that he was letting something comparatively minor keep him from going
back to the embassy and either taking his passport back or taking the oath renouncing his
citizenship. Why, when he had trekked halfway around the world, was he allowing anger to
stand in the way?
“I would like to give my side of the story,” he said. “I want to give people in the United
States something to think about.”
Three years later I returned to Russia to write a series for The Reporter magazine, and in the
fall of 1963 I was a visiting scholar at the Russian Research Center at Harvard. On November
21 I drafted a letter to President Kennedy: a plea for Olga Ivinskaya, who had been loved by
the poet Boris Pasternak and was said to be the model for the heroine, Lara, in his novel Dr.
Zhivago. Soon after Pasternak’s death in 1960, Mrs. Ivinskaya was seized by the Soviet
authorities and shipped to a prison area in the desolate Mordovian Autonomous Republic,
where she was going blind. Her friends in Moscow were afraid that she was going to die from
cold and lack of medical care. I wrote President Kennedy to ask if he would intervene for
Mrs. Ivinskaya should he meet with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a summit
conference the following spring.
I asked a friend, Rose di Benedetto, with whom I worked at the Russian Research Center,
to type up the letter, then addressed it to the president in care of his private secretary, Mrs.
Evelyn Lincoln, because I had known her and thought she would see to it that the letter got
through to him. Rose and I mailed the letter on the night of November 21.
The next afternoon Harvard Square was in chaos with the news that President Kennedy had
just been murdered in Dallas. People wandered up the subway stairs looking dazed, with
tears streaming down their faces. Men and women who had not seen one another in years fell
into each other’s arms. Like every other place in America, we were a community pulled
together by shock.
By chance I met Rose in front of a orist shop. “Isn’t it awful?” she said. “Now he’ll never
see our letter. He’ll never get to help that lady.”
For a second we were, both of us, too stunned to think beyond our letter.
Then I asked: “Do they know who it is? Have they caught anybody yet?”
“Yes. His name’s Lee Harvey Oswald.”
“My God,” I said. “I know that boy.”
Two days later, on November 24, Lee Harvey Oswald was himself dead, the victim of an
assassin’s bullet.
On November 29 Lyndon Johnson created the president’s Commission on the Assassination
of President Kennedy, and for ten months the Warren Commission, as it came to be called,
probed into the tragic and bizarre events in Dallas. Witness after witness was called,
including Oswald’s widow, Marina, who scarcely spoke any English and had to testify through
an interpreter. The Commission was able to establish what happened in Dallas. But it was
unable to give a clear answer to the most intriguing question of all, the question that puzzles
many people even today. Why?
That was one question in particular I needed to settle for myself. I needed to reconcile the
quiet, rather gentle “Lee,” the boy whom I had met in my hotel room and who told me he
was “unemotional,” with the dangerous “Oswald,” the man who shot the president. I was not
at all sure how these two fit together.
If there was an answer to my question, Marina Oswald seemed the only person likely to be
able to answer it. And so, through the o ces of my publisher and her lawyer, I arranged to
meet her with a view to writing a book.
As I came up the drive of her small ranch house in Richardson, Texas, outside Dallas, she
ran over from a neighbor’s house to greet me. She was tiny, she looked like a child, and she
had very large, light blue eyes.
“You met Lee?” It was the rst question she asked. “Did you meet him once or several
times? Did he speak Russian then?”
It came up again and again in our conversations. “Was he wearing his gray suit when you
met him? His dark red tie? Didn’t he look nice in that suit? He was good-looking then, wasn’t
he?” One day, when a neighbor came upon us working at the dining table, Marina simply
nodded in my direction and said by way of introduction: “She knew Lee in Moscow.”
Marina’s life had been turned upside down. First there were the numbing events
themselves, the assassination and Lee’s death. Immediately afterward, she was placed in
protective custody and sequestered in a hotel. She was in the care of two organizations that
were competing with each other and whose treatment of her was at cross-purposes: the Secret
Service and the FBI.
The Secret Service was made responsible for her protection because it occurred to the
attorney general, Robert Kennedy, and the new president, Lyndon Johnson, that Marina
might meet the same fate as her husband. Later, the Secret Service was kept on because it
occurred to the newly created Warren Commission that Marina held a Soviet passport, might
be a Soviet agent, and might try to ee the country. Marina did not mind. She liked the
Secret Service. She enjoyed the company of the agents, who babysat and burped her baby and
regaled her with stories about President and Mrs. Kennedy and their children, whom they had
also guarded.
The FBI was another matter. Marina instinctively mistrusted the FBI, equating it with the
secret police in Russia. In addition, Lee had hated and feared the FBI, and Marina had taken
over his attitude. As if that were not enough, a few days after Lee died, the FBI brought down
an immigration o cial from New York who insinuated that unless Marina cooperated fully,
she might be deported from the United States.
And so Marina was being manipulated by two sets of o cials: one afraid she might leave
the country; another threatening to throw her out. On every side she encountered suspicion
that she might be a Soviet agent and might have been Lee’s accomplice. Apart from the Secret
Service men, no one treated her as if she had feelings, as a woman who had just lost her
husband and had lately given birth to a child. No one realized that as a Russian she was
especially frightened of having government agents all around her and was secretly terri ed of
being sent to some American equivalent of Siberia. Because of the language barrier, she had
no one in whom she could con de. She had only her husband’s brother, Robert Oswald, to
turn to. From him, in spite of the fact that they could barely communicate, she was able to
draw comfort.
From the very rst days her greatest dilemma lay in her loyalty to Lee. She was subjected
to searching interrogations. Lee was dead, she could not help him, and in a way her instinct
was to tell the truth. But she had another instinct, and that was not to inculpate Lee, outside
the bare fact of the assassination, any more than she could help. She resolved her dilemma
imperfectly, telling the whole truth in response to some questions, holding back for a time in
response to others, and, about one question, Lee’s trip to Mexico, she claimed at rst that she
didn’t know about it and then later said that she did. In a word, she created suspicions about
her truthfulness.
The problem of loyalty to Lee that came up during her interrogations by day also came up
in her dreams at night. Again and again she had a nightmare that she was rushing Lee away
from an angry crowd, running, running, running from a mob that would kill him. And there
was another in which she screamed to an accuser: “Say what you like. Only, don’t say it to
me. I am not guilty. Lee did it, not me!”
The problem of guilt was always with her, and again and again she asked the question: Is it
a sin to have loved a criminal? It was to be a long time before she could begin to come to
terms with the fact that she had indeed loved Lee and yet at the same time accept what he
had done.
By the time I met Marina, she was out of protective custody and was living in the ranch
house she had managed to buy. But she had two tiny children to care for, along with business
and legal headaches, and was still spending many hours a week answering the questions of a
by now polite and rather charming FBI man who kept showing up in her dinette. With so
much to worry about and hundreds of hours of questioning behind her already, I wondered
why it was worth it to her to collaborate on a book that would dig even more deeply into her
private life. One night after we had been working late, she explained in a small, sad, tired
voice that she was doing it to nd the truth. “The truth is in Lee,” she said, “and Lee is dead.”
I noticed that the word she was using for “truth” was not the everyday Russian word
“pravda,” but rather “istina,” a word that has a holy ring to it, God’s truth, gospel truth.
Marina was speaking at that moment of the truth about Lee and the assassination. But she
carried another truth, too—the truth about herself. She had been asked thousands of
questions about Lee, his maps, his guns, his movements, but she had been asked surprisingly
little about herself and nothing at all about her feelings. In spite of the hysterical bustle that
surrounded her, Marina never once, to her credit, lost sight of the fact that the thing that
meant most to her was the truth about herself and her emotions.
I suspect that may be one reason she was willing to work on this book. Throughout our
collaboration she spoke to me with complete honesty about herself and demanded equal
honesty of me. I found it hard to match her candor. I was anxious, moreover, not to in uence
her recollections, and I tried, mistakenly, I now think, to appear neutral and neither approve
nor disapprove of what she was saying. But some of my feelings came out. “You know,” I
said cruelly one night, as we were working together, “I don’t know if I can write this book.
Your husband killed a friend of mine.”
You see, I had known Jack Kennedy—had known him quite well, in fact.
Like many idealistic young people right after World War II, I was a World Federalist and
hoped that the Soviet Union could be persuaded to join a world government. Because of this
interest, I majored in Russian at Bryn Mawr and in 1953 received an MA in Russian studies
from Harvard. My rst job was in Washington as a researcher for the newly elected senator
from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.
Oddly, it was in New York, where I later went to work as a Russian-language translator,
that I got to know Senator Kennedy. I saw him there occasionally during the winter of 1954–
1955 when he was undergoing two operations on his spine. Doctors at the hospital said that
the danger did not come from his back, but from a form of Addison’s disease, a disorder of
the adrenal glands, which produce hormones that enable the body to deal with stress.
Kennedy could survive a major operation, and was one of the very rst to do so, because of
cortisone and other artificial substances that were used to combat shock and infection.
One of the doctors I knew begged Kennedy not to go through with the rst operation. And
Kennedy, about to be wheeled into surgery, said simply: “I’d rather die than go around the
rest of my life on crutches.”
That winter he did almost die, several times. I went to see him, posing as one of his sisters,
whenever he asked me to come or whenever I heard that he was better. Each time I went I
was sad because I thought he was going to die. But within a few minutes I would be laughing
and incredulous at the scene in his hospital room. One Saturday I found him with a Howdy
Doody doll as tall as he was lying under the covers beside him. He had a tank of tropical sh
at the foot of the bed and a life-size cutout of Marilyn Monroe tacked upside down on his
door. On the oor at the head of his bed were three tall stacks of books, and I noticed that
many of them were about how this or that politician had become president, or how some
politician or other had won his party’s nomination for the presidency. On this particular
afternoon the room was also lled with a gaggle of gum-chewing bobby-soxers, “cousins from
New Jersey,” Jack said, every one of whom was treating him with ebullient irreverence. A
nurse came in and raised her hand to her head in dismay. “He’s supposed to see no one but
family,” she moaned. “But he has such an enormous family—especially sisters.”
Sometimes I brought him a copy of the New York Post in an e ort to make him more
liberal. Once he hurled it across the room, and it hit me with a force that belied his weakened
state. “You liberals!” he shouted, and went on to excoriate half a dozen Harvard professors
and experts on Russia whom I admired—all of them to become well-known advisers of his
once he was in the White House. You see, Jack had not come on his liberal days yet.
When he got out of the hospital, he came across my path once in a while, lit it up brie y,
then disappeared, very often for months at a time. I was one of hundreds of friends in his
life; he was unique in mine. Because he was unique, I thought about him a good deal. Aside
from his humor and Irish irascibility, the characteristic of Jack’s that I saw most was his
wide-ranging curiosity. He was forever bombarding me with questions. Should we give aid to
Yugoslavia? With whom was I going skiing that weekend? Why had So-and-so been defeated
for state o ce the week before? At what age did I expect to get married? And would I expect
my husband to remain faithful? He treated everyone to an endless ow of questions, and I
imagine that they, too, were as amused and flattered as I was.
But in spite of all the questions, I noticed that Jack held his curiosity within limits. Even in
the hospital, when he had plenty of time and no certain future at all, it seemed to me that he
did not allow his questions to roam freely, wherever they might lead. He kept them on a
fairly tight course, to those whose answers might prove useful. Eager as he was for
information, then, he did not allow himself the luxury of genuine intellectual curiosity.
Perhaps he did not think he had time.
Kennedy had a rebellious streak, and it showed through in many delightful and eccentric
things he did. But he had on the whole accepted the ambition that had been thrust upon him,
the ambition to become president of the United States. Only, I thought, he had done it at a
cost to his capacity for empathy and imagination. He had a candor and a breathtaking
detachment about himself, but I wondered how well he understood other people, especially
those who lacked his kind of ambition, or those who happened to be failures.
Marina and Lee was my attempt to draw upon all I knew and learned of the personalities at
the center of this most de ning American tragedy in an e ort perhaps to put at least some of
the most maddening questions to rest. But, of course, the matter will not rest. Since the book
rst appeared in 1977, I have been asked many times whether I still believe that Lee Harvey
Oswald alone killed President Kennedy.
My answer is, emphatically, yes. No new evidence has surfaced, no conspiracy theory has
appeared to fundamentally alter the picture of Oswald, his ideas and his last-minute actions
that I have laid out here. It is the picture of a lonely, secretive man who at the age of
nineteen acted on his anger toward the United States by defecting to its archrival, the Soviet
Union; who behaved increasingly violently toward the person closest to him, his wife; and
who on April 10, 1963, seven months before he killed President Kennedy, shot at and
narrowly missed killing an imagined political opponent, General Edwin A. Walker, head of
the right-wing John Birch Society. Presented unexpectedly and after a decade of failed
dreams with a target who could be seen as the embodiment of US capitalism, this man chose
to commit the world-changing deed he had dreamt of all his life.
Important as it was to Lee Oswald to destroy the symbol of American capitalism, it was
equally important to let the world know why he had done it. When Marina Oswald paid a
short, tearful visit to him in the Dallas city jail the day following the assassination, Lee tried
to comfort her by telling her that there was a lawyer in New York he was counting on. That
lawyer, whom he started calling immediately after Marina left, was John J. Abt, whom he
had read about in the left-wing newspapers he subscribed to, the Worker and the Militant.
Asked why he did not want a Dallas attorney to represent him, Oswald explained to Police
Chief J. W. Fritz that Abt had defended “victims” charged under the Smith Act—the 1940 law
making it a crime to advocate violent overthrow of the US government. He did not tell Fritz
that Abt was attorney for the American Communist Party.
No one answered the telephones at Abt’s o ce or his apartment in New York City that
Saturday afternoon. John Abt and his wife Jessica had left the day before, as they did most
Fridays, for their country house in Kent, Connecticut. By the time Lee started trying to reach
him, however, Abt had already heard. A reporter from CBS-TV woke him early that morning
to ask whether he would be willing to represent Oswald; Abt replied that he would have to
be asked by the defendant himself before he could consider it. During a transfer inside the
jail, the reporter said, Oswald had shouted to newsmen, “Get hold of Abt to be my lawyer.”
John Abt received a barrage of calls that weekend, among them a message from Vincent
Hallinan in San Francisco, a left-wing attorney and onetime Progressive Party candidate for
president, asking to help defend Oswald. Abt also heard from Arnold Johnson, head of the
American Communist Party, that he had had a letter from Oswald a few months before,
asking how to join the party. Abt never did speak to Oswald, however, for the man who
wanted him to be his attorney was shot in front of millions of television viewers the very
next day, as he was being transferred to the county jail.
Oswald’s murder of the president was an act with many determinants. The rst and
indispensable one was the presidential route, laid out to pass directly under the Texas School
Book Depository, the building where Oswald worked. He may have learned of the route the
weekend before the president’s visit or he may have learned it only on Tuesday, November
19, when the route was published in the Dallas Morning News. There were signs, starting the
next day, Wednesday, that something might be changing Oswald’s plans. Thursday, on his
way to work, he ate an unusually self-indulgent breakfast, and at the end of the day, he made
an unscheduled trip to Irving, Texas, to the house where Marina and his two children were
staying, to say goodbye perhaps, but also to fetch his ri e, never giving any hint as to what
he might be up to.
If the route of the presidential motorcade was the trigger, the target himself was another
matter. Oswald rather liked President Kennedy, or what he knew of him as a man. Kennedy,
like Oswald, was the father of two young children and excelled at the very endeavors Oswald
wanted to excel at, too. Kennedy had been a naval hero; Oswald had been a Marine. Kennedy
had written books; Oswald aimed to be a published author. Oswald approved President
Kennedy’s record on civil rights, a cause on which he himself had taken a stand as early as
the age of fourteen. And during the summer just past, Kennedy had made a speech urging
better relations with the USSR and had signed a weapons treaty with the Russians as well. On
the other hand, Kennedy’s forces had attacked Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs. Castro was a
hero to Oswald, and Oswald had even wanted to go to Cuba to show his soldiers how to
handle rearms better—until he was blocked only the month before by Cuban consular
o cials in Mexico City who refused him a visa. Oswald’s feelings toward Castro at the end of
November seem therefore to have been ambiguous.
But for Oswald, the overwhelming fact about President Kennedy was that he was head of
the US capitalist system, for which he, Lee Oswald, had professed hatred all his life. How
could he have shown his feelings more eloquently than to have defected to Russia at the age
of nineteen, announced that he hated the United States, and asked to stay in the Soviet Union
for the rest of his life? The opportunity that presented itself now, though, dwarfed anything
he could have imagined. Oswald might have shot at any political leader who happened to be
passing by the School Book Depository that day, but the leader who was coming was
President of the United States. The two together—the route and the target—amounted to a
command: He had to do it. And his personal feelings toward Kennedy, even fear for his own
life, could not enter in.
The world would have to know why. It would have to know that he, Lee Oswald, a lifelong
Marxist, had chosen this way to bring justice, to remove inequality from American life. And
he would have to have the Mother of all show trials.…
Of course, it was not to be. As Marina herself observed, Lee took with him, when he was
shot, all too many answers.
It was a brilliant day in May 1996, and I was again in Moscow, staying once again in the
Metropole Hotel, where I had met Lee Oswald all those years before. By now, though,
everything had changed. The Soviet Union, which had seemed impregnable back then, had
dissolved into the air in 1991. The Metropole, home to merchants and traders from the
Russian provinces back in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century a comfortable
old eabag for Westerners, had been remodeled by Finnish architects and was now a deluxe
destination for businessmen from all over the world who hoped to make a killing in Boris
Yeltsin’s newly capitalist Russia.
The man I was going to meet was Oleg Nechiporenko, a onetime KGB o cer who
apparently had dealt with Oswald at the Soviet consulate in Mexico City two months before
the assassination. Friends had told me that Nechiporenko had read my book about the
Kennedy assassination and wanted to talk to me. Over the telephone he had told me to look
for a gray-haired man with dark rimmed glasses and a moustache. I found him easily in the
lobby, where he immediately presented me with an autographed Russian-language copy of
Passport to Assassination, the book he had written about his encounters with Oswald in Mexico
back in 1963.
On the third oor of the Metropole, the very oor where I had interviewed Lee Oswald in
November, 1959, his KGB interlocutor and I sat comfortably on the landing, exchanging
memories of Lee Oswald. Nechiporenko kept his dark glasses on, making him look spooky on
a May afternoon which seemed made for sunshine and owers. And he seemed amused, as if
to say that in a lifetime of meeting people who were o the beaten track, he had never seen
one like Oswald.
This is what he told me:
Just before lunchtime on September 27, 1963, Nechiporenko, vice-consul at the Soviet
Embassy in Mexico City, got a call from his coconsul, Valery Kostikov. “Listen. There’s some
gringo here, asking for a visa. Claims he’s already lived in the Soviet Union, married one of
our girls. They live in the States, but the FBI is persecuting him and keeping him from getting
a job. I’ve gotta run. O to lunch with the comrades. Come over here and get to the bottom
of this.”
Nechiporenko’s rst impression of the American was one of aloofness. He was standing on
the steps, leaning against a doorpost, and did not react as Nechiporenko came toward him.
“He seemed to be looking beyond me, absorbed in his thoughts.” He was wearing a light
jacket, a sport shirt open at the collar, and rumpled slacks and appeared to be in a state of
mental and physical exhaustion. But he became lively, even agitated, as he told his story of
FBI persecution. Asked why he had left the Soviet Union and returned to the United States,
Oswald avoided answering, and this put Nechiporenko on guard. The Russian, whose job as
consul was a cover for his real work in counterintelligence, realized from the start that the
KGB in Moscow would have a complete dossier on Oswald and that he was “not suitable
agent material.” Nor was he of any real interest to counterintelligence. He told the visitor
that he could give him the papers he needed and the consulate, as a favor, would forward
them to Moscow, but the answer would still come from the Soviet Embassy in Washington
and take at least four months. “Oswald slowly leaned forward and, barely able to restrain
himself, practically shouted in my face, ‘This won’t do for me. For me it’s all going to end in
tragedy!’ ” Nechiporenko noticed that his hands were shaking as he put his documents back
inside his jacket.
That night, as he drove to meet a contact, Nechiporenko admitted to himself that he was
disappointed at having had to waste an hour with yet another unpromising American. But
when he got back to the embassy he stopped for a beer with his friend Kostikov. Kostikov
had had a call that afternoon from a woman named Sylvia Duran at the Cuban consulate. She
was checking on Oswald: After leaving the Soviet consulate that day, he had gone to the
Cubans and told Duran that the Russians had promised him a visa. She wanted to know
whether it was true. It was not true, of course. Like other statements Oswald made that day,
it was a fabrication.
Saturday was soccer day at the embassy of the USSR. First to arrive for the game was Pavel
Yatskov, boss of the two men who had seen Oswald the day before. Yatskov kept his sports
clothes at the o ce and was preparing to change into them when the sentry showed in a
visitor. It was Oswald. A little later, when Nechiporenko arrived to change into his clothing
for the game, he spotted Yatskov and Kostikov seated at a desk, Oswald on the other side
with his back to the window, documents strewn over the desk, and a pistol lying there.
Worried about his comrades, Nechiporenko tiptoed into the o ce next to the room the men
were in and put his ear to the keyhole.
As Kostikov described it to him later, Oswald had repeated his story of the day before,
pleading that he needed a visa quickly because he was under surveillance, even persecution,
at home and was afraid for his life. He dreamed of returning to Minsk and living there quietly
with his family. Suddenly he became hysterical, started to sob, and cried, “I am afraid.
They’ll kill me. Let me in.” Repeating again and again that he was being persecuted, and was
being followed even in Mexico, he reached into the left pocket of his jacket and pulled out a
revolver. “See, this is what I must carry to protect my life,” and he placed the revolver on the
desk.
As Nechiporenko watched through the keyhole, Yatskov asked Oswald for the gun.
Kostikov handed it to him, while Oswald continued sobbing. Yatskov opened the chamber,
shook the bullets into his hand, and placed them in the desk drawer. He poured Oswald a
glass of water. Calming down, Oswald explained that he also hoped to “help Cubans build a
new life” and asked that as an alternative to giving him a Soviet visa, they recommend to the
Cuban consulate that it issue him a Cuban visa instead. Yatskov explained that as a sovereign
nation, Cuba decided such questions for itself. The conversation was over. Yatskov leaned
down, extracted the bullets from the drawer, and calmly handed them back to the visitor.
Oswald had meantime pocketed his revolver.
Before leaving the Metropole, Nechiporenko and I compared conclusions as to why Oswald
had killed President Kennedy. I was not at all surprised that his interpretation was closer to
mine than that of just about anyone I’d ever talked to—stressing above all the importance of
certain last-minute events. In this book I describe Oswald’s asking Marina three times the
night before the assassination to move in with him to Dallas from the house where she was
staying with friends, and “I will nd an apartment tomorrow.” Completing the domestic
fantasy, Oswald told the coworker who gave him a ride to work on the morning of November
22 that the long package he was carrying contained “curtain rods,” when in fact it contained a
rifle concealed in brown wrapping paper.
Without realizing it, Marina had had a negative power, I wrote in the book—the power to
veto the act Oswald was considering. If she had said “yes,” and agreed to move back in with
him, he might not have gone through with it. But if she said no …
Nechiporenko would go further, he said: From his long experience with unstable characters,
he was convinced that Marina’s power to accept or refuse her husband that night had been
more than a veto: It was decisive. Coupled with the fact that Marina was attracted to
Kennedy, who in her view closely resembled an old boyfriend back in Minsk, her rejection
could be seen to have triggered the assassination.
Is this an overstatement? Perhaps. But there can be no doubt that the assassination of our
thirty- fth President was inextricably linked to the fortunes of the beleaguered marriage
between these two lost souls who’d grown up clear across the globe from one another—
Marina and Lee.
Priscilla Johnson McMillan
Cambridge, Massachusetts—2013
PART ONE
Russia, 1941–1961