It’s a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The idea of assassination, McMillan believes, is highly contagious, like an influenza virus, and Oswald was infected not once, but on multiple occasions. McMillan was the first to report that, in January of 1962, when Oswald was living in Minsk, there was an assassination attempt on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, probably by one of his own bodyguards, at a nearby hunting lodge. Oswald heard about it from a relative of his new wife, Marina Prusakova. The attempt was hushed up; no one outside Russia knew the details until McMillan’s book was published. “If this had happened in America,” Oswald told Marina and her family, “it would have been in all the newspapers, and everyone would be talking about it.”
Seven months before that afternoon at Dealey Plaza, Oswald had tried to assassinate another political figure: the segregationist and right-wing hero General Edwin Walker. Oswald had missed by one inch, and he was emboldened by how easy it had been—and how no one had ever found out. Neither the FBI nor the Dallas police had an inkling he’d tried.
McMillan’s book undermines all the conspiracy theories so successfully because it doesn’t set out to do so. Marina and Lee doesn’t polemicize; it portrays. It’s alive to the small crevices of character—and to the vast and irreducible role of chance.
Even today, half a century after the assassination, the cascade of contingencies McMillan documents is painful to absorb. Oswald had only learned of the route of the president’s motorcade a few days before, she establishes, when it was published in the Dallas newspapers. The shooting was practically a spur of the moment decision. Once he heard that the president’s limousine would be passing right by the building where he worked, he felt that Fate had put him there. The president’s limousine looped right under his window. (McMillan’s reconstruction of the day of the assassination, documentary yet novelistic, is as pulse-pounding as the finest thriller.)
Would Oswald have shot any politician who passed under his window? Would he have traveled across town to shoot Kennedy if Kennedy hadn’t presented himself, in a slow-moving open-topped limousine, some eighty-eight yards from the Texas Schoolbook Depository? McMillan can’t say for sure, of course, but she doubts it.
And the cascade continues. What if the FBI hadn’t closed its investigation of Oswald—who changed his mind about defecting to the Soviet Union and returned to the US in 1962—once they’d realized he wasn’t a Moscow-directed threat to national security? What if they hadn’t investigated Oswald at all? (McMillan speculates that the FBI’s repeated questioning of Oswald and his wife and their friends may paradoxically have inflated his delusional sense of his own importance and may have even emboldened him to go after the president.) What if Marina had agreed to his repeated pleas that she and their children move back in with him? What if it hadn’t been so easy to buy guns? What if the Secret Service had argued against JFK’s request to take down the protective bubble-top of his limo on that nice sunny day?
“The tragedy of the president’s assassination was in its terrible randomness,” McMillan writes. The task of coming to terms with this reality is the challenge that Marina and Lee bodies forth in meticulous, mesmerizing detail. For most Americans, that challenge remains unmet. The reissue of McMillan’s classic book is the perfect occasion to surrender the salve of conspiracy, and take that good, long look. The truth is out there. Just turn the page and start reading.
INTRODUCTION
“For two years I have been waiting to do this one thing: Dissolve my American citizenship and become a citizen of the Soviet Union.”
The young man sipping tea in my Moscow hotel room that November evening in 1959 seemed unlikely to become a Soviet citizen any time soon. In his gray suit, white shirt and red tie, he looked like an American college boy, and his light Southern drawl (North Carolina? I wondered) did little to dispel the impression. Yet if he succeeded in what he had set out to do, he would never see North Carolina, or wherever he was from, again. Like defectors I had heard of from the days of Stalin, he would find himself locked away in some frozen provincial town, I imagined, chained to a dreary mechanical job, eating heavy Russian dumplings, living among rough men and women whose experiences of war and deprivation went far beyond anything he had experienced. He had barely reached the age of twenty, and the oath of renunciation he hoped to take would keep him trapped here for the rest of his life.
I had first heard of Oswald only a few hours before, when I stopped by the American Embassy to pick up my mail. The mail was located just outside the consular office on the ground floor. “By the way,” John McVickar, one of the two consular officials, said as I prepared to leave, “there’s a boy named Lee Oswald staying at your hotel. He’s angry at everything American and wants to become a Soviet citizen. He won’t talk to any of us. But maybe he’ll talk to you because you’re a woman.” As a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance and The Progressive Magazine stationed in Moscow at the time, I was as well equipped as any to bring a young man like this out of himself.
Which is not to say I expected much of a welcome when I stopped by Oswald’s hotel room later that afternoon. But greeting me at his doorway, he gave me a small smile and said he would come to my room, located on the floor above his in the Metropole Hotel, for an interview at nine in the evening.
Sure enough, no sooner had he arrived and settled in his chair than he started comparing the runaround he had received from the American Embassy with the solicitude shown him by Soviet officials. Having come to Moscow on a ten-day tourist visa, he had immediately confronted his startled hosts with a demand that he be granted Soviet citizenship. Since then, he had been living in suspense in his hotel room, fearful that he had burned his bridges—that his request would be refused and he would be shipped back to the place he loathed and feared, the United States. Finally, after weeks of waiting, he was assured by Russian officials that, regardless of whether he was accepted as a citizen, he would not be forced to leave the country. Knowing that he would not have to face charges of some kind at home, he now felt that it was “safe” to air his feelings about the US embassy.
Oswald had grown up poor in New Orleans, Fort Worth, and New York, he told me, and joined the Marines at seventeen because he did not want to be a burden on his family. He had served in California, the Philippines and Japan, studying Russian at night during his final year in the Marine Corps and saving money with which to travel to Russia. As a teenager in the Bronx, he said, “I was looking for something that would give me a key to my environment.” At fifteen, he discovered Socialist literature, works by Marx and Engels, and found an explanation for the wretched treatment of Communists, workers, and black people he was witnessing in New York. “I saw that I would become either a worker exploited for capitalist profit or an exploiter or, since there are many in this category, I’d be one of the unemployed.” His mother was “a good example, being a worker all her life, having to produce profit for capitalists.”