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

Priscilla McMillan

Cambridge, Massachusetts

August 1977

PHOTOS

^{Lee Harvey Oswald (front row, third from left) in grade school in Texas.}

^{Marina (bottom left) at the age of twelve, with classmates in Leningrad.}

^{Mr. and Mrs. Edwin A. Ekdahl (Marguerite Oswald), Lee’s mother and stepfather, after their marriage in 1945.}

^{Marina at the age of fourteen and about to enter pharmacy school, in the woods outside Leningrad.}

^{Lee at the Hotel Berlin in Moscow, at the time of his defection in 1959.}

^{Lee in a photograph taken at the Minsk Radio Plant in mid-January, 1960.}

^{Lee in the summer of 1960 relaxes in the courtyard of the Minsk Radio Plant with some of the men who taught him Russian.}

^{Lee on a picnic in Minsk with Eleonora Ziger and a friend in the summer of 1960.}

^{Lee’s birthday, October 18, 1960, with his best friend, Pavel Golovachev, and Ella Germann (upper right), the girl who refused to marry him.}

^{Marina in the spring of 1961, at about the time she met Lee.}

^{Lee just before his marriage.}

The Oswalds’ apartment house in Minsk. An arrow indicates the apartment Marina identified as theirs.

^{Marina on the balcony.}

^{Lee in the summer of 1961.}

^{Marina and Lee with her Aunt Lyuba Axyonova on a picnic in Minsk in the early autumn of 1961.}

^{Marina and June Oswald in the spring of 1962.}

^{The Zigers see the Oswalds off at the Minsk railway station in May 1962.}

^{Lee and Marina say goodbye to Minsk on the first step of their journey to America.}

^{Marguerite Oswald in her uniform as a practical nurse, in a photograph she sent to Lee and Marina in Russia.}

^{Marina, Lee, and June squeezed into a photo booth at the Greyhound Bus Station in Dallas, en route to Robert Oswald’s home in Fort Worth, Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 1962.}

^{Lee posing with his rifle and pistol, holding copies of the Militant and the Worker, in a photograph taken by Marina in the backyard of their apartment on Neely Street in Dallas, March 31, 1963.}

^{Lee in a photograph taken in September 1963, probably in New Orleans.}

^{Marina and the author in Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 1964.}

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Priscilla Johnson McMillan graduated from Radcliffe College with a master’s degree in 1952 and went to work for Senator John. F. Kennedy in 1953. In late 1959, she was working as a reporter in Moscow when she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald, who was trying to defect to the Soviet Union. When JFK was assassinated in Dallas and it was reported that Oswald had been arrested, her first thought was, “My God, I know that boy.” In 1964 she befriended Marina Oswald and spent many months at her side, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews, in order to gather the primary source material that would become the foundation for her magisterial book. She would spend another 13 years researching and writing before first publishing Marina and Lee in 1977. McMillan is also the author of The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (Viking, 2005).

Review

“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