Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  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 find 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 first 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 office on the ground floor. “By the way,” John McVickar, one of the two consular officials, 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 floor 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 officials. 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 officials 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 final 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 fifteen, 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 profit 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 office 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 difficulties 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 florist 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 offices 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 first 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 flee 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 official 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 officials: 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 terrified of being sent to some American equivalent of Siberia. Because of the language barrier, she had no one in whom she could confide. 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 first 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 first 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 find 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 influence 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 Har
vard. My first 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 first 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 first 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 fish at the foot of the bed and a life-size cutout of Marilyn Monroe tacked upside down on his door. On the floor 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 filled 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.”