The FBI was another matter. Marina instinctively mistrusted the FBI, equating it with the secret police in Russia. In addition, Lee had hated and feared the FBI, and Marina had taken over his attitude. As if that were not enough, a few days after Lee died, the FBI brought down an immigration official from New York who insinuated that unless Marina cooperated fully, she might be deported from the United States.
And so Marina was being manipulated by two sets of officials: one afraid she might leave the country; another threatening to throw her out. On every side she encountered suspicion that she might be a Soviet agent and might have been Lee’s accomplice. Apart from the Secret Service men, no one treated her as if she had feelings, as a woman who had just lost her husband and had lately given birth to a child. No one realized that as a Russian she was especially frightened of having government agents all around her and was secretly terrified of being sent to some American equivalent of Siberia. Because of the language barrier, she had no one in whom she could confide. She had only her husband’s brother, Robert Oswald, to turn to. From him, in spite of the fact that they could barely communicate, she was able to draw comfort.
From the very first days her greatest dilemma lay in her loyalty to Lee. She was subjected to searching interrogations. Lee was dead, she could not help him, and in a way her instinct was to tell the truth. But she had another instinct, and that was not to inculpate Lee, outside the bare fact of the assassination, any more than she could help. She resolved her dilemma imperfectly, telling the whole truth in response to some questions, holding back for a time in response to others, and, about one question, Lee’s trip to Mexico, she claimed at first that she didn’t know about it and then later said that she did. In a word, she created suspicions about her truthfulness.
The problem of loyalty to Lee that came up during her interrogations by day also came up in her dreams at night. Again and again she had a nightmare that she was rushing Lee away from an angry crowd, running, running, running from a mob that would kill him. And there was another in which she screamed to an accuser: “Say what you like. Only, don’t say it to me. I am not guilty. Lee did it, not me!”
The problem of guilt was always with her, and again and again she asked the question: Is it a sin to have loved a criminal? It was to be a long time before she could begin to come to terms with the fact that she had indeed loved Lee and yet at the same time accept what he had done.
By the time I met Marina, she was out of protective custody and was living in the ranch house she had managed to buy. But she had two tiny children to care for, along with business and legal headaches, and was still spending many hours a week answering the questions of a by now polite and rather charming FBI man who kept showing up in her dinette. With so much to worry about and hundreds of hours of questioning behind her already, I wondered why it was worth it to her to collaborate on a book that would dig even more deeply into her private life. One night after we had been working late, she explained in a small, sad, tired voice that she was doing it to find the truth. “The truth is in Lee,” she said, “and Lee is dead.” I noticed that the word she was using for “truth” was not the everyday Russian word “pravda,” but rather “istina,” a word that has a holy ring to it, God’s truth, gospel truth.
Marina was speaking at that moment of the truth about Lee and the assassination. But she carried another truth, too—the truth about herself. She had been asked thousands of questions about Lee, his maps, his guns, his movements, but she had been asked surprisingly little about herself and nothing at all about her feelings. In spite of the hysterical bustle that surrounded her, Marina never once, to her credit, lost sight of the fact that the thing that meant most to her was the truth about herself and her emotions.
I suspect that may be one reason she was willing to work on this book. Throughout our collaboration she spoke to me with complete honesty about herself and demanded equal honesty of me. I found it hard to match her candor. I was anxious, moreover, not to influence her recollections, and I tried, mistakenly, I now think, to appear neutral and neither approve nor disapprove of what she was saying. But some of my feelings came out. “You know,” I said cruelly one night, as we were working together, “I don’t know if I can write this book. Your husband killed a friend of mine.”
You see, I had known Jack Kennedy—had known him quite well, in fact.
Like many idealistic young people right after World War II, I was a World Federalist and hoped that the Soviet Union could be persuaded to join a world government. Because of this interest, I majored in Russian at Bryn Mawr and in 1953 received an MA in Russian studies from Harvard. My first job was in Washington as a researcher for the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.
Oddly, it was in New York, where I later went to work as a Russian-language translator, that I got to know Senator Kennedy. I saw him there occasionally during the winter of 1954–1955 when he was undergoing two operations on his spine. Doctors at the hospital said that the danger did not come from his back, but from a form of Addison’s disease, a disorder of the adrenal glands, which produce hormones that enable the body to deal with stress. Kennedy could survive a major operation, and was one of the very first to do so, because of cortisone and other artificial substances that were used to combat shock and infection.
One of the doctors I knew begged Kennedy not to go through with the first operation. And Kennedy, about to be wheeled into surgery, said simply: “I’d rather die than go around the rest of my life on crutches.”
That winter he did almost die, several times. I went to see him, posing as one of his sisters, whenever he asked me to come or whenever I heard that he was better. Each time I went I was sad because I thought he was going to die. But within a few minutes I would be laughing and incredulous at the scene in his hospital room. One Saturday I found him with a Howdy Doody doll as tall as he was lying under the covers beside him. He had a tank of tropical fish at the foot of the bed and a life-size cutout of Marilyn Monroe tacked upside down on his door. On the floor at the head of his bed were three tall stacks of books, and I noticed that many of them were about how this or that politician had become president, or how some politician or other had won his party’s nomination for the presidency. On this particular afternoon the room was also filled with a gaggle of gum-chewing bobby-soxers, “cousins from New Jersey,” Jack said, every one of whom was treating him with ebullient irreverence. A nurse came in and raised her hand to her head in dismay. “He’s supposed to see no one but family,” she moaned. “But he has such an enormous family—especially sisters.”
Sometimes I brought him a copy of the New York Post in an effort to make him more liberal. Once he hurled it across the room, and it hit me with a force that belied his weakened state. “You liberals!” he shouted, and went on to excoriate half a dozen Harvard professors and experts on Russia whom I admired—all of them to become well-known advisers of his once he was in the White House. You see, Jack had not come on his liberal days yet.