Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of John F. Kennedy

715 Pages·2013·4.41 MB·English

by  Priscilla Johnson McMillan

“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: 978-1-58642217-
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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