With the discovery of the note, however, Marina had no choice but to add to the weight of evidence against her husband. She then blamed Ruth for the fact that she had been compelled against her wishes to go into the Walker affair, and she used this as a rationalization for having severed their communications. But it would not wash, and Marina came to feel overpoweringly guilty about two things: her failure to go to the police “after Walker,” and turning her back on Ruth. The barrier of guilt became so high that Marina was unable to take steps to mend the breach between them, although it would have eased her conscience to do so.
Ruth for her part felt that Marina had not dealt squarely with her; she ought to have told her, while she was living in her house, about the Walker attempt, the trip to Mexico, and the rifle in her garage. Knowledge of these things, Ruth said afterward, would have altered her behavior toward the Oswalds. Still, Ruth missed Marina’s friendship and would probably have repaired the breach if she could have.
They were very different people: Marina all intuition, Ruth all conscience and consideration. Marina was on edge with women who were a little older than she, even though she needed them, and she held against Ruth the fact that she had no faults. Marina was not at ease with flawless people and was certain that eventually she would lose their good opinion. But she says that she and Ruth were “close.” They confided completely in each other about their marriages, if not about other things, and Marina has said that she herself “suffered” over Ruth’s unhappiness with Michael. She also tried to alter Lee’s attitude toward Ruth for the better. And she and Ruth were a real source of moral support to each other during the spring and fall of 1963. Despite the very large differences between them as human beings, there was more to their friendship than Marina at first allowed herself later to admit.
It was not only the Walker affair that Marina would have preferred to keep secret. Less than a week after the assassination, she was confronted with copies of the photographs she had taken of Lee with his rifle. Marina was very much aware that she had destroyed the same photographs, not knowing that there were other copies in the Paines’ garage, and at first she denied knowing anything about them. She was then assured that nothing she said about the photographs would be held against her, and she also realized that unless she told what she knew, someone else might be unjustly accused of having taken them. She then told the truth.
On November 29, 1963, and again on January 17 and 22, 1964, Marina also denied any knowledge of Lee’s trip to Mexico, although soon afterwards she told what she knew about that, too. She explained her reluctance on this score by saying that she continued to hate the FBI for pestering her, and in her bad moods she could not refrain from showing it. She still felt loyal to Lee, and thinking in a manner that was very like Lee, she said to herself that if the FBI was so clever, “let them find out for themselves.” While she realized that it would not be easy to reverse herself on the Mexico trip, Marina also confided that she had been hoping to save up a morsel or two as a special surprise to tell the Warren Commission on her first appearance before it in February.
There was still another matter on which Marina held out—Lee’s threat to kill Nixon. At first she forgot all about it, since it had led to nothing, and Robert says that she first mentioned it to him on January 12, 1964. When she spoke of it to James Martin, manager of the Inn of the Six Flags Motel, on whom she had come to rely, he advised her “to try not to think about these things too much.” But Marina’s feeling that she ought to protect Lee was fading, and it was not long before she also told about the Nixon episode.
With no place else to go, Marina considered living with Marguerite. But Robert once more was against it. It will go all right for a week, he said, but after that… Marina took his advice. By default she moved first to the home of James Martin and his wife and children, and he became for a time her business manager. Marina needed help of this kind, for she received film, magazine, and book contract offers from all over Europe and America, and in addition kindhearted Americans simply sent her money in the mail. About $70,000 reached her in this fashion. Late in the winter, however, there was a break between Marina and Martin, and Marina moved briefly to Robert’s, then to the Fords’, and finally, using the money that had been sent to her and that she had received for interviews, she bought a modest home of her own in the Dallas suburb of Richardson.
Marina’s fears that she would be sent to prison—for failing to prevent the assassination, omitting to go to the police after Walker, and burning the photographs of Lee—gradually faded, but for months she remained afraid that she still might be sent back to Russia. Marina did not, of course, want to go. But her feelings were contradictory—and typical. She had always behaved toward the Soviet embassy in Washington in filial fashion and had even sent the embassy a New Year’s card from herself and Lee at the end of 1962. Now that she, a daughter of the Soviet Union, was in trouble, she was puzzled and hurt that no one from the embassy came forward to offer sympathy and ask her how she was bearing up. Marina did not see why her own government would have nothing to do with her.
If she was at a loss to understand the political realities that surrounded her, Marina’s understanding of the human factors was clear. She never could bring herself to be angry at Jack Ruby, for example, and when Ruby went on trail, she wrote a letter to the prosecutor asking, as Lee Oswald’s widow, that his life be spared. Marina did not believe in “an eye for an eye.” There had been too much killing already, and the taking of one more life would not bring anybody back—not Kennedy, nor Tippit, nor Lee.
Marina hated what Lee had done to President Kennedy and to Officer Tippit, and she worried about their widows and children. Even as she read articles about them and sympathized with them, however, she went to painful lengths not to blame Lee for what he had done to her, leaving her, a Russian who was unable to speak English, alone, widow of the president’s assassin, in a suspicious if not hostile country, almost untouchable. The most she could bring herself to say was, “Lee had a right not to think about me. Maybe he didn’t love me. But he was obliged to think about the children.”
Marina in the early days was like a person in the eye of a storm, with wreckage around her on every side, but in the poorest position of anyone to assess what had happened. First, the shock was too great, and the event itself, the president’s death and her own involvement in it, too immense and too improbable to absorb. Second, she was alone in her bereavement, for the man she was mourning was the nation’s Number One enemy, a man whose very name caused embarrassed silence to fall across any room she happened to be in. Apart from her brother-in-law, Robert, who was there to join her in mourning him, or enter into her feelings at all? Finally, she was also grief-stricken over President Kennedy, the nation’s Number One martyr, and there was something a little strange and out of kilter in Marina’s grieving simultaneously, in an utterly personal way, over both the president and his assassin. But isolated as she was in Texas, Marina was at odd angles to reality, and there was no way of being with her continuously without joining her in the upside-downness of her world.