Marina was stuck with her Russian “brother’s keeper” mentality that if your “comrade” commits a crime and you have failed to prevent it, then you are as guilty as he. Clearly, she felt guilty that she had failed to report Lee to the police after Walker, and she felt that guilt so strongly that it obscured such feelings of responsibility as she might have had on any other score. Had she informed on Lee then, he would have had a terrible fright. And had he been convicted of the attempt, he might have been in prison in November, and Kennedy would have been saved.
As for November 21, the evening before the assassination, when Lee asked her to move with him to Dallas, Marina did not berate herself for her refusal because she had had no idea what Lee was planning. She did not have a clue that she and a pair of curtain rods were being weighed in his mind against the president of the United States and a rifle. Had she had any hint, not only would she have agreed to move to Dallas, she would have locked Lee in the bathroom and Ruth would have called the police. And there was another side to that evening. Lee was an expert manipulator. He knew how to get his wife back—indeed, he had done so one year before when she ran away from him and he wanted her back in time for Thanksgiving at Robert’s on November 22, 1962. Had Lee, on November 21, 1963, genuinely wanted Marina back, he knew how to arrange it—the telephone call in advance, a little cajoling, believable tenderness. It seems a fair guess that, unhinged as he must have been, Lee still, on November 21, knew how to obtain the answer “yes.”
There is one other score on which Marina might have felt guilt, and that was on the matter of her former suitor, Anatoly. During our conversations Marina often spoke about her feelings for Anatoly and the president and observed that they looked alike. She had not, she said, mentioned the resemblance to Lee, and evidently it did not occur to her that by her talk of Anatoly she might unintentionally have given Lee a shove, one of a good many he had, in the direction of President Kennedy as a target. It is strange that Marina, attuned to the world of unconscious motives as she is, failed to perceive this. But there is an indication that, at some level, perhaps she did understand. Throughout our seven months of interviews, Marina was unable to recollect Anatoly’s surname. Yet she had thought of marrying him, and she had written to him, surname and all, in January of 1963. A few weeks after we finished work she remembered it and telephoned from Texas to tell me the name. But her guilt feelings, if any, on this point, appear to have remained buried and unconscious to this day.
Apart from “Walker,” Marina’s feelings of responsibility are diffuse. She knew after April 1963 that Lee was capable of killing and was “sick,” but she did not know what to do. She blamed herself for having married him when he was still too young for the responsibility. She blamed herself for treating him, during their New Orleans summer, with too much “pity” and “compassion.” But from the middle of July in New Orleans until the visits of Agent Hosty in November, Lee had appeared to be getting better. Marina thought he would “outgrow his youth and trouble.” Later, of course, she blamed herself bitterly for her failure to be “strict” enough with him.
George Bouhe was much gentler. He was to say later that it did not matter what Marina said or did, for “Lee did not pay the slightest attention to her anyway.” And Ruth Paine, who had been a witness to the last weeks, took a still kinder view. “Marina was a rock to Lee,” she says. “She was his reality test always. Had it not been for her, he would have gone off into fantasy long before he did.” A Dallas woman in whom Marina was to confide afterward agreed with Ruth that “immature” as both of them had been, Lee and Marina had their good times, and there had been “much good” in the marriage.
I have often asked Marina whether Lee might have been capable of joining with an accomplice to kill the president. Never, she says. Lee was too secretive ever to have told anyone his plans. Nor could he have acted in concert, accepted orders, or obeyed any plan by anybody else. The reason Marina gives is that Lee had no use for the opinions of anybody but himself. He had only contempt for other people. “He was a lonely person,” she says. “He trusted no one. He was too sick. It was the fantasy of a sick person, to get attention only for himself.”
Those who knew Lee in Dallas agree with her. “I’d have thought it was a conspiracy,” one of the Russians says, “if only I hadn’t known Lee.” Another says, “Lee couldn’t have been bought—not for love, not for money, and not for the sake of a political plot.” These people think, as Marina does, that Lee acted on impulse and first thought seriously about killing the president only a day or two before he did it.
But a few of those who knew Lee have altered their sense of him over the years, and as they read about plots to kill Castro, gangland killings, and cover-ups by the FBI and the CIA, they have come to wonder whether Lee might not have been part of a conspiracy after all. Not Marina. She has kept intact her sense of Lee as she knew him. She has not heard all the conspiracy theories by any means, but she is humorous, commonsensical and nearly always incredulous at those that do come her way. She dismisses any notion that Lee knew his killer, Jack Ruby. “How could Lee have known Ruby?” she asks. “He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t go to nightclubs, and besides, he was sitting home with me all the time.”
A year or so ago, I told Marina about another rumor, a rumor that there had been “two Oswalds,” or possibly more, one in Russia, another, or perhaps several, in America, and that some of these “Oswalds” together accomplished the assassination. Marina, who is usually quick with a retort, took a few seconds to absorb this. Then she was rather reproachful. “Really, Priscilla,” she said, “with your own husband, wouldn’t you know whether you were living with the same person this week as you were living with last!”
Perhaps more than anyone whose life was brushed by the assassination, Marina is encapsulated by time, her perceptions virtually unjarred by the events that happened after. Today she lives outside Dallas on a seventeen-acre farm, with cattle on it, with Kenneth Porter, whom she married in 1965. They were divorced in 1974, but they continue to live together as man and wife. Kenneth loves life on the farm, and he is an expert mechanic, “one of the best,” Marina says. He is a handsome man, and a devoted stepfather, a fact that Marina, after her own difficult childhood, values greatly. Marina has retained all her old intuitiveness and candor, and these qualities mark her relationships within the family—with Kenneth, with June and Rachel, who are now fifteen and thirteen, respectively, and with whom she enjoys excellent, if not unruffled, communications, and with her eleven-year-old son, Mark Porter.
Russian that she is and remains, Marina loves nature. She has a vegetable garden, Kenneth has built her a greenhouse for her ferns, and she grows such trees and flowers as she can in the scorching Texas sun. But Marina dreams of Russia more often than she used to, and she begs Kenneth to take her some day to a place where she can see birch trees again. And more than she used to, she thinks about her stepfather, Alexander Medvedev, who is alive and remarried and living in Leningrad. She especially misses Petya and Tanya, the brother and sister in Leningrad whom she has no hope of seeing again.
Marina grew up in hard times, and she has survived them. But her life since the assassination, as before it, has not been an easy one. Marina ascribes her discontent to her lifelong feeling that she was “special,” the feeling that caused her to marry Lee. She also feels that something is missing in her life. “I came to America,” Marina says, “and I lost my way.” Mostly she blames herself. Someday, she says, she hopes she will feel better about herself, will feel that she is worth something. But she feels powerless to change her fate.
Moreover, no matter how obscure the lives that they try to lead, Marina, Kenneth, and the children receive constant jolts from the past. Thus Marina, like many others, was shocked when, at the end of March 1977, George de Mohrenschildt committed suicide after proclaiming to a foreign journalist that he had conspired with Lee Oswald to kill the president. There was no truth to this—George and Lee had not s
een one another for seven and a half months prior to the assassination and had not exchanged letters. And George himself, in a letter to a friend shortly before he died, lamented what he had written during the last year of his life as “stupidities.”2 Marina as usual put her finger on it when she remarked how odd it was that someone with so much vitality, someone who seemed to represent life, should have died by his own hand.
Marina liked the de Mohrenschildts. While she was married to Lee, it was she whom they apparently liked better at first, and later on they preferred Lee. But they never seemed critical of her until a year or so after the assassination, when, during an interview on a nationally broadcast television program for which they were paid, they said that Marina had been bitchy to Lee and that her goading helped drive him to kill the president. Very soon after that, and thirteen years before de Mohrenschildt actually died, Marina dreamt that both George and Jeanne committed suicide.
All these years, however, Marina has praised the de Mohrenschildts. She agrees with George’s friend, Samuel Ballen, that George represented sunshine and life and warmth to Lee. And while she does not go as far as Ballen, who felt that if George had been in Dallas in November 1963, the assassination might not have taken place, she does believe with Ballen that George had, on the whole, a good influence on Lee. True, she thinks that something George said prompted Lee to shoot at General Walker, but she is certain that it was not intentional. George was a “peaceful” man, she says. He had lost his own birthright by violence, and he of all men would have thought it “uncivilized” to foist his views on anybody else, much less to do so by killing. And indeed, long after Kennedy was dead, George showed no sign of feeling guilty about his relationship with Lee. A friend who visited him in Haiti shortly after the assassination reported, “George went around planting his seed in many women. If he planted a seed, another kind of seed, in Lee Oswald, I don’t think it bothers him very much.”3
But when George returned from Haiti in the late 1960s, his life had changed once again for the worse. He had failed to pull off the big coup in sisal or oil that he had counted on. His book on his Central American adventures had been refused by several publishers. And as always, George was feeling financial pressure. Having spent his life among tycoons, he had never been able to earn as much as he felt he needed. His relations with Jeanne became bitter. They divorced, but they went on living together, estranged from everyone they knew. Jeanne had a job, while George taught French at a small black college in Dallas. His sole remaining tie to the once-familiar world of the rich and famous was his link with the Kennedy assassination, which existed by virtue of his and Jeanne’s emeritus “stray dog,” Lee Oswald. A decade or so after the assassination, as his spirits sank into depression, George started to feel guilty in retrospect, his relationship with Lee apparently assuming even greater importance in his mind than it had had in reality.
Sam Ballen, who saw him in Dallas only one month before he died, found George “beating himself pretty hard.” He berated himself for friendships he had lost and opportunities he had tossed aside and said that his life had been a failure. He had been an “idiot,” he said, to act in a joking and cavalier fashion in his appearance before the Warren Commission. And he was worried about the people he had injured, especially Lee Oswald and the young rancher, Tito Harper.4 But it was Lee Oswald about whose “sick mind” George was worried most. He had allowed Lee to make a hero and a father of him. He had known it, had basked in it, had tolerated it for a while. But now he thought it “frivolous” and “irresponsible” to have done so. And he was seized with guilt over whether something he had done or said, something “childish” and “sophomoric,” might have influenced Lee in what he did.5 George was “gripped by remorse.”
Ballen, who had not seen de Mohrenschildt in years, came away from their meeting feeling sad. For all his faults, of which the greatest was his “utter irresponsibility,” George was, Ballen believed, “one of the world’s great people.” He tried to reassure George. He invited him to come to Santa Fe and offered him the kind of rough, outdoor work that seemed likely to help George the most. Afterward Ballen looked back with the feeling that he had been dining with “Hemingway before the suicide.”
If de Mohrenschildt belatedly, and in illness, began to wonder what his responsibility might have been, what about Marina? She, too, has been alone for years with the question, Why? Why did Lee do it? For the overwhelming fact, the fact she mentions again and again, was that Lee liked President Kennedy. He frequently said that for the United States at this moment of its history, Kennedy was the best possible leader, just as Khrushchev was for Russia. Whenever Marina pointed out how handsome the president was, Lee agreed with her. And when she mentioned how beautiful Mrs. Kennedy was, he agreed again. He agreed, moreover, without the special edge of reserve that told her he was thinking something else. And when the Kennedys’ baby died in the summer of 1963, he had been as upset as she.
Yet Lee had killed Kennedy, and Marina intuitively felt that he had done it the moment she heard the School Book Depository mentioned as the place from which the shots had originated on the afternoon of November 22. She felt it again when the rifle proved to be missing from the Paines’ garage, and she saw guilt in Lee’s eyes when she visited him in the Dallas police station. But she could not understand Lee’s motive, and it was nearly a year before she unequivocally accepted not only that Lee had killed Kennedy, but that he had intended to do so. Indeed, she came closer to accepting his intention at the beginning than she was to do later. During her first appearance before the Warren Commission in February 1964, Marina gave it as her opinion that Lee had killed the president, that his act had had a “political foundation,” and also that he had wanted to make himself famous. On her second appearance, in June of 1964, she again gave it as her view that Lee killed the president, but mentally she kept the reservation that perhaps he had meant to kill Governor Connally instead. She did not mention this because she thought that the commission did not care to hear her speculations. Finally, in September 1964, shortly before the Warren Report was to be issued, Marina threw the commission into confusion by testifying that Lee had liked the president so much, she thought it must have been Connally he was aiming at. (Lee’s remarks about Connally had been mixed, but he had also said that he liked Connally and that he would vote for him.)
After her last appearance before the commission, some Secret Service men took Marina to dinner. They told her that while President Kennedy had been sitting directly behind Connally at the moment the first shot was fired, this was no longer the case by the time of the final, fatal shot. Kennedy had been wounded by then and was leaning toward his wife. He was no longer in alignment with Governor Connally. Thus the man who fired the final shot could only have been aiming at Kennedy. Marina then accepted the fact that Lee not only had killed the president, as she had thought all along, but that for some reason that she has difficulty compassing to this day, he had actually intended to do so.
Marina did have a key that helped her to understand the reason. It went back to November 21, the day before the assassination, when, as she was to recall later, Lee had done everything in threes. That afternoon he tried to kiss her three times, and the third time she reluctantly acceded. But the memorable thing had been his asking her, three times, to move in to Dallas with him “soon.” If she agreed, he would find an apartment “the next day.” And three times Marina refused.
Marina knew that her husband attributed an altogether magical significance to the number three and was obsessed by it. She remembered that one year earlier, on November 11, 1962, when the de Mohrenschildts took her away from Lee because of his violence toward her, then, too, he had begged her three times not to leave him, but after the third time he gave up. And on the bottom right-hand corner of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee card on which he had asked her to forge the name “A. J. Hidell” the previous summer, he had written the number “33,” to signify that he was the thirty-third member of his fictitious
chapter—still another sign of the power he attached to the number three.6
Marina had known of the peculiar importance that her husband attached to the number three from the outset of their marriage when Lee often used to sneak off to see the film version of the opera based on Pushkin’s short story, “The Queen of Spades.” In Minsk he played music from the opera every night and, while listening to his favorite aria (“I would perform a heroic deed of unheard-of prowess for your sake … ”), he fell into a reverie and imagined that he was the hero, Hermann. A young Russian Guards officer during the 1820s, Hermann thought that his life was determined by the powers of fate and was obsessed by the number three. Avid for money, he obtained what he believed to be the secret of three cards that, played one after the other, would win him a fortune at the gaming table. Hermann played the three cards, staked his love and his whole life on them—and lost.
Marina believes that on the evening of November 21 Lee was again seized by the fantasy that he was Hermann. That is why he asked her three times if he might kiss her and three times if she would move in with him to Dallas. Like Hermann, he staked his life on three cards. And like Hermann, he lost.
The more Marina thought about it, the more she had to conclude, although she came to it reluctantly and with pain, that Lee had not fully made up his mind what he was going to do when he came to see her that evening, but as a result of what passed between them—her three “no’s”—he had done so by the time he left. Or perhaps he had made up his mind and asking her to veto his decision. He was begging her to move in to Dallas with him so he would not have to go through with the terrible deed. Lee was asking Marina to save his life for him. And she, by refusing what he asked of her, failed to save him from his fate.
Marina and Lee Page 71
