“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 first-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 first 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 finest, 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 finest 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 rifle who could easily have been stopped in any of a dozen different 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 fit the insignificance 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 fiction for whom conspiracy is a stock in trade, I know the gratifications 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 effect, 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 offered 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 offered 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 offered 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 affair. She also spoke fluent 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 off 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 confidences. 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 difficult task. Marina had been overinterviewed. Fearing deportation to the Soviet Union, she had given different 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 figure 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 wife-beater, an odious human being, and finally 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 influenza virus, and Oswald was infected not once, but on multiple occasions. McMillan was the first 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 figure: 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 inflated 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.
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