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 seen 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.