To the man who became his assassin, Lee Oswald, President Kennedy was not an accidental victim. To the contrary, and despite the huge element of chance, Kennedy was a highly determined target, and he might well have proved to be so to some other assassin than Oswald. But there was another side of the presidency that entered into Oswald’s motives, and it, too, was immeasurable in its importance.
We as a nation are a family, with the president as our symbolic father, or head. What is only beginning to be understood is that the president is not only a father, but to some he is a combined parent, embodying elements of the mother as well. He is therefore in a position to magnetize the emotions of those who have had particularly strong feelings about either or both of their parents.
It is perhaps a strain on the imagination to see President Kennedy, with his virile masculinity, in the role of a symbolic mother. But there was something motherly about his presidency, for it was family lore that Kennedys are in politics to “serve,” to give of themselves unstintingly and asked nothing in return. President Kennedy emphasized this by working full time for the country and giving back his salary to the Treasury. In his inaugural address he urged others to be altruistic: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And he created the Peace Corps, so that young Americans could devote part of their lives to helping the less fortunate. In all these ways the president stressed the giving, caring, motherly aspect of his office.
Marina is still puzzled as to why her husband killed the president. “But he liked Kennedy!” she protests to this day. And this is the beginning of an answer, for the public figure who appeals to the good in men, who stirs in them visions of altruism and exhorts them to be better than they are, such a leader appears to touch a chord in his followers that renders him especially vulnerable to their disappointments.
And Lee Oswald’s life had been rich in disappointments. He had been disappointed in the mother who, he felt, let him down so egregiously while he was growing up that he came to feel deeply wronged by her. And he had been disappointed by the father who let him down by dying before he was born. It was not President Kennedy’s fault, it was his danger, that he stood in a position to magnetize the emotions of a Lee Oswald, who had had very little love in his life and whose feelings toward both his parents were so richly compounded of hate.
President Kennedy died, then, because of his plentitude. To some, and Oswald apparently was one of them, the memories and associations that this president stirred were too deep, too charged emotionally, altogether too much to bear. President Kennedy died because he had, as man and symbol, become so many things to so many men.
NOTES
Prologue and Part One: Russia, 1941–1961
Sources
Information concerning the childhood and youth of Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova in Russia (Part One); her marriage to Lee Harvey Oswald, and their life together in Minsk (Part Two); and their life together in the United States, as well as her experiences after her husband’s death (Parts Three and Four), is derived from her own recollections as Marina Oswald in personal interviews with the author in Russian from June 1964 through December 1964, and as Marina Oswald and Marina Oswald Porter in subsequent telephone conversations and correspondence in Russian and English; from Warren Commission testimony by Marina Oswald in Vols. 1, 5, and 11 (see below); from an account of her life by Marina Oswald dated January 4, 1964, written for the FBI and published in Vol. 18, pp. 596–642; and from reports on FBI and Secret Service interviews with Marina Oswald appearing in the Warren Commission Exhibits.
Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964). The Testimony of Witnesses taken by the President’s Commission, hereafter referred to as the Warren Commission (Vols. 1–15), and the Exhibits published by the Commission (Vols. 16–26), are cited in the Notes only by volume and page number. Report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964) is cited hereafter as Warren Commission Report.
Chapter 1. Archangel
1. Marina was conceived in December 1940 when the worst of the purges was over and before the war with Germany began. This had made it harder for her to guess the reasons for her father’s disappearance. The best estimate appears to be that he was a late victim of the Great Purges of the 1930s.
Chapter 3. Death of Klavdia
1. To an outside observer, Marina does resemble Princess Mary, who was moody, intelligent and flirtatious. And Pechorin bears resemblances to the man Marina was to marry, Lee Oswald. Pechorin shunned emotional contact with other people. “How many times have I played the part of an axe in the hands of fate!” he boasted, adding that, “Fame is a question of luck. To obtain it, you only have to be nimble.” (A Hero of Our Time, by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Vladimir Nabokov in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov, a Doubleday Anchor book, Garden City, NY, 1958.) An American scholar writing about Pechorin has said of him, “He is a type and an individual, and he casts a dark and ominous shadow.” (Mikhail Lermontov, by John Mersereau, Jr., Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale, IL., 1962.)
Marina indignantly rejects any comparison between Pechorin and the man she married. She says that Pechorin was the much better man. He destroyed Princess Mary and others, but through his destructiveness he found himself, and she admires him for this. Oswald, on the other hand, failed to find himself through his destructiveness, and for this she holds him in contempt.
Thinking about Marina’s later life, an observer might wonder, unfairly perhaps, whether Marina married her Pechorin or created him. Did she marry Oswald sensing that he had some of Pechorin’s destructive qualities or, having married Oswald, did she herself unwittingly reinforce his destructiveness?
2. For Marina, the pain of learning that she was illegitimate was in no way eased by the fact that, according to published Soviet sources, as many as 20 percent of her classmates, children born during the late 1930s and early 1940s, may also have been illegitimate.
Interlude and Part Two: Russia, 1961–1962
Sources
Warren Commission Hearings: Testimony of Richard E. Snyder, Vol. 5, pp. 260–299; Testimony of John A. McVickar, Vol. 5, pp. 299–306, 318–326; Testimony of Oswald’s Marine Corps associates, Vol. 8, pp. 288–323; Testimony of Kerry Thornley, Vol. 11, pp. 82–115; Oswald’s “Historic Diary,” Vol. 16, pp. 94–105; Copy of handwritten notes taken by Priscilla Johnson during interview with Lee Harvey Oswald on or about November 16, 1959, Vol. 20, pp. 277–285; Copy of article submitted by Priscilla Johnson to North American Newspaper Alliance, Vol. 20, pp. 286–289; Memos of Oswald’s record in US Marine Corps, Vol. 23, pp. 795–798. Warren Commission Report, pp. 383–394, 681–701. Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, by his brother Robert Oswald with Myrick and Barbara Land (New York: Coward-McCann, 1967), hereafter cited as Robert Oswald. Letters to the author from Richard E. Snyder, February 9, 1969, January 6, 1970, and December 2, 1976. Conversations with John A. McVickar, Marie Cheatham, Richard E. Snyder, and Edward L. Keenan.
Interlude
1. Interview of the author with Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow, November 16, 1959.
2. Testimony of Paul Edward Murphy, Vol. 8, pp. 319–320.
3. Interview of the author with Oswald, November 16, 1959.
4. Recently declassified documents concerning the Martin Schrand case are: Warren Commission Document No. 35, December 1, 1963; Warren Commission Document No. 492, March 11, 1964; and Warren Commission Document No. 1042, June 3, 1964.
5. Oswald first described himself as a Marxist in writing in a letter to the Young People’s Socialist League dated October 3, 1956: “I am a Marxist, and have been studying socialistic principles for well over 15 months” (Warren Commission Report, p. 681). Oswald was not yet sixteen. In his interview with the author in November 1959, Oswald said that “for two years I have been waiting to do this one thing”; i.e., de
fect to the USSR. He was stationed at Cubi Point (Subic Bay) at the beginning of those “two years,” and it is not inconceivable that at this base or at one of the two other U-2 bases at which he was stationed, he did try to learn something about the super-secret aircraft that would heighten his acceptability to the Russians. (The rumor linking Oswald with Schrand’s death is mentioned in an affidavit by Donald Peter Camarata, Vol. 8, p. 316, and the fact that the hangar Schrand was guarding sometimes housed a U-2 appears in testimony by Daniel Patrick Powers, Vol. 8, pp. 280–281. Both men were part of the original group, including Oswald, that had been together since Jacksonville.)
6. Conversation with Marina Oswald.
7. Testimony of John E. Donovan, Vol. 8, pp. 292 and 298–299.
8. Testimony of Nelson Delgado, Vol. 8, p. 265.
9. Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 93.
10. Warren Commission Report, p. 688.
11. Robert Oswald, op. cit., p. 77.
12. Exhibit No. 24, Vol. 16, pp. 94–95.
13. Exhibit No. 294, Vol. 16, p. 814.
14. Oswald told many lies and was very reticent with all the Americans who spoke to him in Moscow—Snyder, Aline Mosby, and myself. As a result, we thought he had arrived in Russia shortly before the scene at the embassy, and at the time of my interview, I assumed he had been in Moscow two weeks, not a month. Except for Oswald himself, Rimma Shirokova, and Soviet officials, no one knew of Oswald’s suicide attempt until after he was dead and his “Historic Diary” was published.
15. I have been asked by Warren Commission lawyers and others since 1963 whether, during my brief time with Oswald, I detected any signs that he was being manipulated by outsiders. In 1959 travel arrangements to the USSR could be time-consuming and complicated. If the would-be visitor went to the Soviet Embassy in one European capital, it might take four days to obtain a visa; in another city it might take three months; and in still another there might be no reply to the request at all. Aware of this, I asked Oswald how he learned the mechanics of entering Russia and defecting, and he was either evasive or mysterious in his replies. He said that it had taken him two years to learn the mechanics but it had not been “hard.” He refused to name any “person or institution” that had helped him. And he added that he had never met a Communist Party member until his arrival in the USSR and that officials there were not “sponsoring” him.
He was saying, I think, that he had no ties with the US Communist Party; but he seemed also to have been trying to create an impression that he was shielding someone, when in fact he could have learned what he wanted to know from a travel agency or from the Soviet embassies in Washington or Tokyo.
My own strong impression at the time was that, far from being manipulated from the outside, Oswald was, to a degree I found shocking, responding only to signals from within. Rather than being alive to, or stimulated by, his new environment, he was at pains to seal himself off from it. At first I attributed this to a feeling of foreignness or strangeness. Then I saw that he was motivated by another kind of fear: fear that if he took a hard look at the society around him, he might question his decision. Thus the feeling he gave was that he was wholly occupied by his inner preconceptions and by promptings from within, and that he did not want to be bothered by outside forces or facts.
16. McVickar wrote a memorandum about our conversation (Exhibit No. 911, Vol. 18, pp. 106–107), which is sometimes cited as evidence that I might have been working for the State Department, even though McVickar states in the memorandum that he had to point out to me that in addition to my duty as a correspondent, I also had a “duty as an American.”
In 1956, three years before my meeting with Oswald, I worked briefly for three embassies—the American, British, and Canadian—as a translator during the 20th Soviet Communist Party Congress in Moscow. The American ambassador, Charles Bohlen, tried to have my thirty-day employment extended, but the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, refused because I lacked a security clearance. Neither before nor since have I been employed by any agency of any government.
17. The information conveyed by Nosenko, who in 1959 was a KGB officer assigned to Intourist in Moscow, is to be found in numerous Warren Commission memoranda based on CIA and FBI interviews with him in 1964. Many of these memoranda were declassified in 1973 and 1975. Thus, according to an FBI memo dated February 28, 1964, Nosenko stated that Oswald from the time of his arrival in Moscow was regarded by the KGB as not “completely normal mentally” and not “very intelligent.” The KGB’s interest in Oswald was therefore “practically nil” and, when he was sent to Minsk in January, 1960, the KGB office there was merely told to keep a “discreet check” to make sure that he was not a “sleeper agent” for American Intelligence.
According to another interview with Nosenko (Commission Document No. 451, an FBI memorandum dated March 4, 1964), the KGB did not know about Oswald’s Marine Corps service when he arrived in Russia and, had it known, the information would not have been of interest or significance.
18. According to a memorandum from Allen Dulles, a member of the Warren Commission, to J. Lee Rankin, its chief counsel (Commission Document No. 1345, dated July 23, 1964), Henry Brandon, Washington correspondent of the London Sunday Times, was told by a member of the Soviet Embassy in Washington following the assassination that it was Yekaterina Furtseva, a member of the ruling Communist Party Presidium, who heard about the Oswald case, reversed orders, and arranged for him to remain.
The rumor may have been purposely planted to discredit Khrushchev, for he was known to be personally and politically close to Furtseva, and if, through her, he could be linked to handling of the Oswald case, he might then be made to suffer political damage in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Khrushchev did, in fact, fall from power less than one year after Kennedy’s death. On the other hand, the rumor Brandon heard may have been true. It is not unusual for Soviet leaders to concern themselves with individual cases: on one occasion my own visa was extended through the intervention of Anastas Mikoyan, then the number two or number three Soviet leader, who was close to Khrushchev and was identified with his pro-American policy. Khrushchev may have entrusted some very high party body, or one or more party leaders who were especially close to him, with seeing to it that the Spirit of Camp David was implemented, or at least not sabotaged, by his own bureaucracy. If something of the sort occurred, then Mme Furtseva would have been a logical choice to have supervised the handling of “humanitarian” cases.
The dates are worth noting. Khrushchev returned from the United States in early October 1959 and quickly departed on a trip to the Soviet Far East. It would have taken a few weeks for a new policy in handling Americans to be established. Oswald was told that he would have to leave the USSR on October 21, and he attempted suicide that day. On October 28, only one week later, he was interviewed by four new officials who, according to him, apparently knew nothing about his case. It is possible that Oswald was the beneficiary of blind luck in his timing and that that one week at the end of October, plus the suicide attempt itself, was sufficient for his case to be bucked to a higher level and decided in accordance with the new Spirit of Camp David.
19. Exhibit Nos. 294, 295, and 297, Vol. 16, pp. 814–823, 825.
Chapter 6. Courtship
1. According to Soviet hospital records, Oswald was not admitted to the hospital until the next day, Thursday, March 30, and was discharged on April 11.
2. The internal passports carried by Soviet citizens for travel inside the USSR are of three types. One is for Soviet citizens, another is for citizens of foreign countries who have permission to reside in the USSR, and the third is the so-called stateless passport, which Oswald carried, for the foreign resident who has not become a Soviet citizen but who may, or may not, have retained citizenship of another country. Confusion therefore appears to have been possible even for an official like Ilya Prusakov.
3. A small but interesting example of disarticulation of the Soviet bureaucracy may be seen
here. In January, officials at OVIR, the Office of Visas and Registration, inquired whether Oswald was still interested in acquiring Soviet citizenship, and he answered no. He asked merely to have his residence permit extended for one year. Thus, OVIR in Minsk had at least a hint that he was thinking of leaving Russia. The following month, February of 1961, he wrote the US Embassy in Moscow asking to have his passport back and stating his desire to go home. His Soviet “Red Cross” subsidy was immediately cut off, an indication that his letter had been intercepted and the appropriate agency in Moscow, probably the KGB, knew his intentions. Yet two months later, in April, when he applied at ZAGS, still another official agency, to marry Marina, no effort was made to dissuade either of them. Usually, when a Soviet girl applies to marry a foreigner who is not a Soviet citizen and who may leave the country some day, strong pressure is brought on the girl not to go through with the marriage, and permission is very often denied. That the Oswalds were permitted to marry is a sign that it was generally supposed in Minsk that Oswald was already a citizen or was on his way to becoming one. The disarticulation was therefore a double one: what Moscow knew, Minsk did not; and OVIR in Minsk, which could have suspected Oswald’s intentions, did not communicate any suspicions to ZAGS, the bureau that registers marriages—another sign that controls in the USSR, as elsewhere, are not perfect.
4. Exhibit No. 24, Vol. 16, p. 103.
5. Exhibit No. 245, Vol. 16, pp. 685–687.
6. Exhibit No. 933, Vol. 18, p. 135.
7. Exhibit No. 932, Vol. 18, pp. 133–134.
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