After Lee’s funeral Marina expected to go on living at Ruth Paine’s. But Robert Oswald was firmly against it. He had taken one look at Ruth and Michael Paine at the Dallas police station on the afternoon of November 22 and decided that if Lee had indeed killed President Kennedy, then these tall Eastern stringbeans, whom he had never heard of as being friends of his brother, must be behind it somehow. The Secret Service men who were assigned to protect Marina seconded Robert’s advice. Ruth was not under suspicion, they said, but she and Michael were active in the ACLU, an organization many Americans considered left-wing. Moreover Michael was under a special cloud, the nature of which was not made clear, but that seems to have derived from the fact that his father had once been a Trotskyite. Marina was allowed to understand that if she wished to remain in the United States, she had better put distance between herself and the Paines. Thus in one of the first acts of her widowhood, Marina did what she had sworn she would never do—she turned her back on Ruth Paine.
Marina was incommunicado, living at the Inn of the Six Flags Motel and cut off from everyone except government agents and members of the Oswald family when, on November 30, 1963, Ruth took to the Dallas police station two books in Russian that Marina had often used and that Ruth thought she might need. One was on baby care, the other a book of household advice on matters such as cooking and sewing. On December 2 two Secret Service agents confronted Ruth with a Russian-language note that had been found inside one of the books and accused her of having tried to convey a secret message to Marina. Ruth had never seen the note before. On December 5 Marina herself was confronted with the note, which proved to be the one Lee had left for her on the night he tried to shoot General Walker.
Marina had previously decided not to say anything about the Walker attempt, and she had forgotten the note entirely. She was still distraught by Lee’s death and felt that she ought to be all the more on his side since he was dead. Besides, Walker was still alive and the attempt had come to nothing. She freely admits to being “tricky” with the FBI in those days, and Robert Oswald says that from the outset the FBI was “extremely hostile” toward her.1 In any case, she explains, “Lee had too many murders on his soul already.” She would be a witness against him if she had to be, but only where she thought it really mattered.
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.
When I first met her in June of 1964, the air around her was still thick with Texas promoters in their black suits and two-tone Italian silk shirts, proposing deals in which they would exploit Marina and she, her predicament. One offer was that she would be paid to tour the country with Lee’s body. Because it fitted so perfectly her own low view of herself, this proposal, and others that were equally outlandish, did not offend Marina nearly as much as they might have. And there were situations, some of which had to do with magazine or television interviews, in which Marina went to the opposite extreme and tried to drive a hard bargain because she knew nothing about “business” and did not want to be taken for “naïve” and a “little Russian fool.” Marina trusted no one in those days. Above all, she did not trust herself.
For ten months she spent hundreds of hours being interrogated, first by the Secret Service and then, increasingly, by the FBI. She liked Wallace Heitman, the FBI man who came most frequently to see her and treated her like his own daughter. But Marina never did surmount her fear of the FBI, and any visit from one of its agents, even Mr. Heitman, made her feel sick all day ahead of time in apprehension.
Besides, the endless questions she was asked had mostly to do with “hard” evidence. At what time had Lee come home on a certain night, or where had he buried his rifle? Such questioning was of no help to Marina in coming to terms with the questions that were peculiarly hers, questions of the emotions, questions of guilt and responsibility. Indeed, the lengthy hours of interrogation tended to submerge the very difficulties that were troubling her the most, and Marina had critics, especially among her former Russian friends, who thought that she did not behave with sufficient dignity, or as if she felt her proper share of responsibility.
Indeed, Marina became a little wild, taking only fitful care of her children, and spending as many waking hours as she could on escapades with boyfriends and neighbors, on all-night bowling sprees, and on well-publicized sorties to a Dallas nightclub called the Music Box, where she was soon a favorite. Aware of her self-destructiveness, Marina calls 1964 her “second Leningrad period.” Having an abased view of herself already, she was unable to absorb the notion that, as a helpless and pretty Russian widow with two children, there was a reservoir of sympathy for her among the American people. Marina would have been incredulous if she had known this and would have been driven to destroy a good public image if she had suspected that she had one.
As it was, she courted scandal and apparently wanted to plummet into danger and disgrace and carry everyone she knew down with her. Marina, better than anyone, understood the downward spiral in her behavior, lacking not the insight but the will to arrest it. And as always, she had boyfriends. They were from various walks of life, and some, out of bemusement at her quicksilver ways, or perhaps in a spirit of noblesse oblige, would gladly have lifted her from her outcast state and raised her a few rungs up the ladder of what Marina calls “culture.” But she contrived not to marry them. Once again her opinion of herself was so low that she simply could not risk placing herself in a position in which she would have to sustain the world’s regard.
During that year of 1964, Marina had reason to fill her waking hours with activity, for her dreams when she was asleep were harrowing. Sometimes she was looking for Anatoly, but once she found him he might turn out to have the character of Lee. Most of her dreams, however, appear to have reflected a feeling that she was Lee’s “keeper.” In one dream she dragged him up a marble staircase and shoved him into an elevator to get him away from a mob that would have killed him. Always there was a mob, and always the two of them were together. Once, when they had been running from a crowd, Lee, with his old nonchalance, seated himself on the grass to drink a cup of tea. Suddenly Marina looked over at him—and he was gone. Lee had vanished into the ground.
For more than a year after he died, perhaps because she was angry at Lee, yet unwilling to blame him for abandoning her, Marina was unable to speak to him in her dreams, or he to her. Finally, when most of the government questioning was over and the interviewing for this book nearly done, she had a dream in which Lee told her in Russian that he loved her, and Marina was able to answer. She was happy the whole day after that.
Marina’s trouble, of course, was that long after Lee was dead she loved him and wanted him back. Her most prized possession was a miniature straw donkey that he had brought her from Mexico. It had cost him only five cents, but to Marina it was a treasure. Then, in June 1964, seven months after Lee died, she had a terrible shock. Without her knowing about it in advance, the Dallas Morning News published Lee’s “Historic Diary.” Marina had watched as Lee wrote the diary in Minsk and had listened to him as, writing, he sang the theme song from High Noon. But she had not read the diary, and even after Lee died nobody told her the contents. Only now did she learn what Lee had written—that he had married her to get even with another woman. Marina had known about Ella Germann and had even seen her, but she had never had any inkling that Lee’s motive in marrying her had been to avenge himself on Ella. It was as cruel a blow as any she had suffered, for it caused her to call into question the validity of every one of her private memories—above all, the memory that Lee had loved her the best he knew how.
So great was her hurt and humiliation that for two months after publication of the diary she did not mention Lee’s name if she could help it, and she never did speak of him in quite the same way again. Marina learned to hold herself erect for new and cruel revelations. It was as if she was afraid of speaking, even privately, about moments of tenderness between them lest suddenly it be proven in public that Lee had never loved her at all. Marina’s view of Lee, and of the two of them, had been altered forever.
Even his bringing her breakfast in bed, his great indulgence and one of which she had been proud, now appeared not to have been proof of Lee’s love, but merely insurance against that far-off day when, intending to slip out and kill someone, he would not want her to see him go. As for his plan to send her back to Russia, that, too, fell into place. Marina saw that she had been only a pawn that Lee moved across the chessboard of his life merely to make his travels easier. She was convinced that anyone who could use another so could not, ever, have loved that other person. Her awareness hurt her the more because it fitted so exactly the abased view of herself that she had had all along—that she was nothing.
Luckily for Marina, she did grow outraged at Lee, although she has never, on her own account, been as angry at him as I think she has a right to be. I asked her if Lee had once had a sense of right and wrong but then lost it. Marina was furious. Lee had no moral sense at all, she said. Only egotism, anger at others on account of his failures, and inability to understand his mistakes. Although she saw that his act in killing the president had in part “a political foundation,” she refused to countenance the idea that Lee gave any thought, ever, to the good of anyone but himself. Yet, displaying once again her feeling that she as Lee’s wife was responsible for him, she said, referring to the assassination, that, “If he came back to earth and I could talk to him, I’d give him such a scolding that he would die all over again.”
Marina was stuck with her Russian “brother’s keeper” mentality that if your “comrade” commits a crime and you have failed to prevent it, then you are as guilty as he. Clearly, she felt guilty that she had failed to report Lee to the police after Walker, and she felt that guilt so strongly that it obscured such feelings of responsibility as she might have had on any other score. Had she informed on Lee then, he would have had a terrible fright. And had he been convicted of the attempt, he might have been in prison in November, and Kennedy would have been saved.
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.
Marina liked the de Mohrenschildts. While she was married to Lee, it was she whom they apparently liked better at first, and later on they preferred Lee. But they never seemed critical of her until a year or so after the assassination, when, during an interview on a nationally broadcast television program for which they were paid, they said that Marina had been bitchy to Lee and that her goading helped drive him to kill the president. Very soon after that, and thirteen years before de Mohrenschildt actually died, Marina dreamt that both George and Jeanne committed suicide.
All these years, however, Marina has praised the de Mohrenschildts. She agrees with George’s friend, Samuel Ballen, that George represented sunshine and life and warmth to Lee. And while she does not go as far as Ballen, who felt that if George had been in Dallas in November 1963, the assassination might not have taken place, she does believe with Ballen that George had, on the whole, a good influence on Lee. True, she thinks that something George said prompted Lee to shoot at General Walker, but she is certain that it was not intentional. George was a “peaceful” man, she says. He had lost his own birthright by violence, and he of all men would have thought it “uncivilized” to foist his views on anybody else, much less to do so by killing. And indeed, long after Kennedy was dead, George showed no sign of feeling guilty about his relationship with Lee. A friend who visited him in Haiti shortly after the assassination reported, “George went around planting his seed in many women. If he planted a seed, another kind of seed, in Lee Oswald, I don’t think it bothers him very much.”3
But when George returned from Haiti in the late 1960s, his life had changed once again for the worse. He had failed to pull off the big coup in sisal or oil that he had counted on. His book on his Central American adventures had been refused by several publishers. And as always, George was feeling financial pressure. Having spent his life among tycoons, he had never been able to earn as much as he felt he needed. His relations with Jeanne became bitter. They divorced, but they went on living together, estranged from everyone they knew. Jeanne had a job, while George taught French at a small black college in Dallas. His sole remaining tie to the once-familiar world of the rich and famous was his link with the Kennedy assassination, which existed by virtue of his and Jeanne’s emeritus “stray dog,” Lee Oswald. A decade or so after the assassination, as his spirits sank into depression, George started to feel guilty in retrospect, his relationship with Lee apparently assuming even greater importance in his mind than it had had in reality.
Sam Ballen, who saw him in Dallas only one month before he died, found George “beating himself pretty hard.” He berated himself for friendships he had lost and opportunities he had tossed aside and said that his life had been a failure. He had been an “idiot,” he said, to act in a joking and cavalier fashion in his appearance before the Warren Commission. And he was worried about the people he had injured, especially Lee Oswald and the young rancher, Tito Harper.4 But it was Lee Oswald about whose “sick mind” George was worried most. He had allowed Lee to make a hero and a father of him. He had known it, had basked in it, had tolerated it for a while. But now he thought it “frivolous” and “irresponsible” to have done so. And he was seized with guilt over whether something he had done or said, something “childish” and “sophomoric,” might have influenced Lee in what he did.5 George was “gripped by remorse.”
Ballen, who had not seen de Mohrenschildt in years, came away from their meeting feeling sad. For all his faults, of which the greatest was his “utter irresponsibility,” George was, Ballen believed, “one of the world’s great people.” He tried to reassure George. He invited him to come to Santa Fe and offered him the kind of rough, outdoor work that seemed likely to help George the most. Afterward Ballen looked back with the feeling that he had been dining with “Hemingway before the suicide.”
If de Mohrenschildt belatedly, and in illness, began to wonder what his responsibility might have been, what about Marina? She, too, has been alone for years with the question, Why? Why did Lee do it? For the overwhelming fact, the fact she mentions again and again, was that Lee liked President Kennedy. He frequently said that for the United States at this moment of its history, Kennedy was the best possible leader, just as Khrushchev was for Russia. Whenever Marina pointed out how handsome the president was, Lee agreed with her. And when she mentioned how beautiful Mrs. Kennedy was, he agreed again. He agreed, moreover, without the special edge of reserve that told her he was thinking something else. And when the Kennedys’ baby died in the summer of 1963, he had been as upset as she.
Yet Lee had killed Kennedy, and Marina intuitively felt that he had done it the moment she heard the School Book Depository mentioned as the place from which the shots had originated on the afternoon of November 22. She felt it again when the rifle proved to be missing from the Paines’ garage, and she saw guilt in Lee’s eyes when she visited him in the Dallas police station. But she could not understand Lee’s motive, and it was nearly a year before she unequivocally accepted not only that Lee had killed Kennedy, but that he had intended to do so. Indeed, she came closer to accepting his intention at the beginning than she was to do later. During her first appearance before the Warren Commission in February 1964, Marina gave it as her opinion that Lee had killed the president, that his act had had a “political foundation,” and also that he had wanted to make himself famous. On her second appearance, in June of 1964, she again gave it as her view that Lee killed the president, but mentally she kept the reservation that perhaps he had meant to kill Governor Connally instead. She did not mention this because she thought that the commission did not care to hear her speculations. Finally, in September 1964, shortly before the Warren Report was to be issued, Marina threw the commission into confusion by testifying that Lee had liked the president so much, she thought it must have been Connally he was aiming at. (Lee’s remarks about Connally had been mixed, but he had also said that he liked Connally and that he would vote for him.)
After her last appearance before the commission, some Secret Service men took Marina to dinner. They told her that while President Kennedy had been sitting directly behind Connally at the moment the first shot was fired, this was no longer the case by the time of the final, fatal shot. Kennedy had been wounded by then and was leaning toward his wife. He was no longer in alignment with Governor Connally. Thus the man who fired the final shot could only have been aiming at Kennedy. Marina then accepted the fact that Lee not only had killed the president, as she had thought all along, but that for some reason that she has difficulty compassing to this day, he had actually intended to do so.
Marina did have a key that helped her to understand the reason. It went back to November 21, the day before the assassination, when, as she was to recall later, Lee had done everything in threes. That afternoon he tried to kiss her three times, and the third time she reluctantly acceded. But the memorable thing had been his asking her, three times, to move in to Dallas with him “soon.” If she agreed, he would find an apartment “the next day.” And three times Marina refused.
Marina knew that her husband attributed an altogether magical significance to the number three and was obsessed by it. She remembered that one year earlier, on November 11, 1962, when the de Mohrenschildts took her away from Lee because of his violence toward her, then, too, he had begged her three times not to leave him, but after the third time he gave up. And on the bottom right-hand corner of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee card on which he had asked her to forge the name “A. J. Hidell” the previous summer, he had written the number “33,” to signify that he was the thirty-third member of his fictitious chapter—still another sign of the power he attached to the number three.6
Marina had known of the peculiar importance that her husband attached to the number three from the outset of their marriage when Lee often used to sneak off to see the film version of the opera based on Pushkin’s short story, “The Queen of Spades.” In Minsk he played music from the opera every night and, while listening to his favorite aria (“I would perform a heroic deed of unheard-of prowess for your sake … ”), he fell into a reverie and imagined that he was the hero, Hermann. A young Russian Guards officer during the 1820s, Hermann thought that his life was determined by the powers of fate and was obsessed by the number three. Avid for money, he obtained what he believed to be the secret of three cards that, played one after the other, would win him a fortune at the gaming table. Hermann played the three cards, staked his love and his whole life on them—and lost.
Marina believes that on the evening of November 21 Lee was again seized by the fantasy that he was Hermann. That is why he asked her three times if he might kiss her and three times if she would move in with him to Dallas. Like Hermann, he staked his life on three cards. And like Hermann, he lost.
The more Marina thought about it, the more she had to conclude, although she came to it reluctantly and with pain, that Lee had not fully made up his mind what he was going to do when he came to see her that evening, but as a result of what passed between them—her three “no’s”—he had done so by the time he left. Or perhaps he had made up his mind and asking her to veto his decision. He was begging her to move in to Dallas with him so he would not have to go through with the terrible deed. Lee was asking Marina to save his life for him. And she, by refusing what he asked of her, failed to save him from his fate.
But Marina had no way of knowing what Lee was thinking, for he had given her no hint. It was her ignorance, and her helplessness before it, that she was to ponder afterward. If Marina can be said to have failed Lee, it is not, as some people thought later, that she ought to have known what he was thinking and sent him frivolously to his death. It is rather that she, too, was fated—by her lifelong conviction that she was unworthy and by uncertainty over his affections—to refuse his request. Preoccupied by worries such as these, she failed altogether to realize what Ruth Paine called “her own great power over Lee.”
The way Lee saw it, perhaps fate did have a hand. To such a man, the uncanny selection of a route that would carry the president right under his window could mean only one thing. Fate had singled him out to do the dangerous but necessary task that had been his destiny all along and that would cause him to go down in history. If Lee really felt this way, really felt the outcome was fated, then Marina’s power on November 21 was not great, since he was destined to put his questions to her in such a way that she was destined to refuse.
But Lee was more than Pushkin’s Hermann, playing a role marked out for him by fate. He was a Marxist, and as a Marxist he was also enacting a part that had been determined ahead of time. For Marxism is a determinist philosophy, which says that the course of history is decided in advance and such choices as an individual may make have little to do with the outcome. According to Marxism, it made no difference what Lee did on November 22—history would grind on and turn out in more or less the same manner anyhow. Lee was a poor Marxist in another way as well, for Marxist philosophy repudiates the kind of terroristic act he had in mind.7 But Lee took his Marxism selectively. And according to his Marxism, history would be moved forward by his deed and the Marxist cause would be advanced.
It is ironic, yet in keeping with Lee’s rigid nature, that he had chosen not one but two determinist philosophies by which to live and to die. According to one, he was Pushkin’s Hermann, who staked his life on the toss of three cards, and according to the other, he was the implacable engine of history. Both as Hermann the fatalist and as Lee Harvey Oswald the implausible Marxist, Lee had no choice but to do as he did. It happened that the two roles came together at the same moment to demand the same thing of him.
Yet accident did play a role, in the timing, for example. Lee had already attempted one assassination. But he did not go around killing every day, nor was he capable of it all the time. By chance, the president’s visit came at a moment when Lee was insane enough so that he needed to kill someone and coherent enough to succeed.
And the president came to him. Compared to the route, no other determinant mattered at all. Everything that had ever happened to Lee Oswald could have happened it exactly the way it had, his whole life could have been exactly what it had been, and it would not have made any difference. President Kennedy could have come and gone from Dallas in perfect safety. But the choice of a route that would carry the president past his window could mean only one thing to Lee—fate, duty, and historical necessity had come together in this time and place and singled him out to do the deed.
The tragedy of the president’s assassination was its terrible randomness.
That was not the only tragedy. The death of the president was a complex thing, made up of opposites. There was the tension between determination and accident, fate and chance. And for the assassin there appears also to have been a conflict between love and duty. As Lee saw him, the president embodied a social and historical evil that had become his duty to destroy. But Lee had not created his opportunity, and in some respects he did not relish his task. He did not leap to a decision immediately upon learning the route, and as late as the evening before, he gave a veto power of some sort to his unknowing wife.
Yet he went ahead despite his doubts, and in so doing he acted like another hero of his, Will Cain, the sheriff in the movie High Noon, who stands up to a band of outlaws, alone, because it is his duty, even though he is risking his own life and the love of his wife, who is opposed to violence. Lee may have felt that he had something in common with Will Cain, whose song he had sung so many times in Russia, and whose refrain—“Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’ ”—Marina had heard again and again as Lee was writing his diary.
Oh, to be torn twixt love and duty
Sposin’ I lose my fair-haired beauty …
I’m not afraid of death but, oh
What will I do if you leave me?…8
Lee may have seen himself, too, as torn between “love”—Marina and his children—and “duty,” which required that against his kindlier instincts and at the cost of his life, he must kill the president of the United States.
When he said goodbye to Marina at the Paine house on the morning of November 22, Lee left his wedding ring behind. It was a stunning repudiation of Marina and the family “love” she represented. And it was an act of retaliation, the sort of vengeful response to her rejection of the night before that had characterized Lee all his life. But it was much else besides. It was a way of dissociating Marina from the deed he was about to commit and the guilt he would incur for it. And it was a way of showing his scorn and relegating her, too, to the everyday herd of men and women who would be too stupid and cowardly to understand the great and heroic deed he was performing for their sakes. Lee’s leaving his wedding ring was an elegant gesture of contempt, an equivalent of Will Cain’s tossing his sheriff’s badge in the dust. Cain, too, is expressing his contempt. He is saying that the people for whom he has risked everything, love and life itself, are not worthy of what he has done for them. But their unworthiness did not alter his duty, and he would have been diminished as a man if he had failed to do it.
Yet Lee did not want to lose Marina, just as Cain does not want to lose Amy. In Irving on the evening of November 21, Lee in effect had asked Marina, as Cain asks Amy, “What will I do if you leave me?” Twice on the day after he shot the president, in the direst situation he was ever to know, Lee begged Marina not to forsake him, first during their brief visit in the city jail and later, that same evening of November 23, when he telephoned Ruth and virtually commanded that Marina return to her house so that she would be available to him at whatever hour he might call. If Lee saw himself as Will Cain, he may also have expected his personal drama to end the way High Noon does. Cain not only earns the thanks of the townspeople, he also wins back the love of his wife.
There may have been still another voice speaking to Lee before the assassination and telling him what he ought to do—that of John F. Kennedy. A few months earlier Lee had read Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, and since the book, like High Noon, was a product of the McCarthy era, it is not surprising that the message they carry is identical: a celebration of the brave and lonely hero who will stand up against the wrong-headed crowd and the climate of his time to do what he believes to be right. Kennedy’s book is addressed to the ordinary citizen, and its subject is political courage. When he read the book in the summer of 1963, Lee apparently took its message to heart, both as a citizen and the great man he supposed himself to be. Kennedy, in the book, defined the man of political courage as the one who will do the thing he knows in his heart to be right, whether the people understand that it is right for them or not. He cannot expect their approval. It is to history that he must look for vindication. “A man does what he must,” Kennedy wrote, “in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures.” These words, or words very like them, may have been in Lee Oswald’s head when he took aim and fired just after high noon on November 22.9
Oswald may also have thought that by acting as Kennedy had enjoined him to do and as his conscience told him he must, he would be achieving in life and in death a oneness with the man he was destroying. For it is clear that Oswald’s motives were not purely political. In addition to the conflict between love and duty and the polarity between accident and determinism, there was something else at work—the tension, the attraction, that the assassin felt for his victim.
Of all the bonds between this assassin and the victim, the strongest, perhaps, lay in a similarity the two of them shared. Both Oswald and Kennedy were attracted to death, and both had tempted it often. Oswald had tried suicide at least once and had made a murder attempt that could easily have led to his own death. One of his fictional heroes, Will Cain, had placed himself in a position from which he could barely escape alive. Another, Hermann in “The Queen of Spades,” had stabbed himself to death.
Even more frequently than Oswald, Kennedy had placed his life at hazard. He was a reckless driver, and he had often taken a risky charter flight in foul weather so as not to miss a political appointment.10 During World War II in the Pacific, he was known not merely for his bravery but for the frightening, and some said needless, risks he had taken with his own life, with his PT boat, and perhaps with the lives of his crew.11 As for literature, his favorite verses were said to be from a World War I poem by the American, Alan Seeger:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple blossoms fill the air—
…
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
…
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.12
Marina has said sadly of her husband that he “did not value his own life at all.” And Kennedy, on the morning of his death, actually pantomimed an assassination attempt that he thought could have been carried out against him the evening before.13 As greatly as he enjoyed life, and as much as he helped others to enjoy it, Kennedy exuded fatalism, a “come and get me” air. And Oswald, with his own fatalism, may have been peculiarly attuned to pick this up.
The Kennedy fatalism was a profound matter, with implications for others besides Oswald. Thus the president may have been attracted to death, in part, because he had already lost a beloved older sister and older brother in tragic air accidents. All of this had been publicized a good deal and had become part of the family mystique. But in becoming part of the mystique, it had also become a family taint. Already, in 1963, it was as if the Kennedys had had more than their share of untimely deaths. Each of these heightened the association in the public mind between the Kennedys and death, each made the taint greater, and each increased the vulnerability of the rest of the family, and especially of its head, the president.
To a person whose stability was as fragile as Oswald’s, even a tenuous connection, such as occurred in June 1963, when President Kennedy spoke on civil rights from the White House and a black leader, Medgar Evers, was murdered a few hours later only two hundred miles from where Oswald lived, could have strengthened some half-conscious association in Oswald’s mind between the president and death. And the death of the president’s newborn son in August, at a time when Oswald, too, was hoping for a son, may further have strengthened the association. Marina has said that her husband was upset by the Kennedy baby’s death, and it was on that day that he became engaged, for the first time, in a pro-Castro street fracas and was tossed into jail, almost as if he was impelled to sidetrack his own thoughts. Lee Oswald was fascinated by death, President Kennedy was fascinated by death, and of the ties between them in Oswald’s mind, this was the greatest of all.
But it was not the only one. For President Kennedy, like Lee Oswald, was a young husband and father. At the time of his election, he was handsome and in his early forties, his wife was thirty-one and beautiful, and they had been married only seven years. It was obviously true of Kennedy—as is not always the case with an older president who has been married for many years—that this president had an ongoing sex life, and there were infant children as proof. Both the president and his wife had, moreover, an extraordinary capacity to project themselves into the yearnings and fantasies of millions, and some of these fantasies were sexual. Their photographs were frequently displayed on the covers of movie magazines, which exist to exploit such fantasies. And since the Kennedys had close ties with Hollywood, members of the family were seen constantly with film stars and other celebrities. The symbolism surrounding such celebrities also tends to be sexual, and the presence of the Kennedys in their company contributed to a dangerous eroticization of the presidency.
Television was part of it, too, for it made the Kennedys’ life in the White House more visible than that of any First Family before them. Because of these elements and, above all, because of the attractiveness of husband and wife, both of the Kennedys appealed powerfully and intimately to men and women in every age group and every walk of life, people who did not ordinarily think about politics or see their own lives reflected in any way in that of the First Family.
Far from being unusual, the Oswalds were in some respects typical. They were young, twenty-two and twenty-four years old, and they read eagerly about the Kennedys in every fan magazine they could peruse during their evening strolls past the newsstands of New Orleans. They speculated without surcease about every facet of the Kennedys’ lives. Even their speculations were typical. Each seems to have yearned a little toward each of the Kennedys. Marina, for example, considered Jacqueline Kennedy a “goddess.” Since she was a goddess, however, it occurred to Marina that perhaps Mrs. Kennedy was “cold,” and that the president might need extra warmth in his life, warmth that a less perfect, more earthy woman such as she herself might provide. In thinking thoughts such as these, Marina seems only to have been thinking what many American women thought. She was unusual, perhaps, in that President Kennedy was a physical reminder of the suitor she wished she had married. And she was unusual in that, unlike other women whose daydreams about the president were innocuous, she was married to a man who happened to be capable of killing.
Oswald’s feelings are difficult to surmise, although Marina confirms that neither he nor she had heard rumors of the president’s affairs with women, nor of his Addison’s disease. They thought the Kennedys were just another couple such as they were, raised to the thousandth power of beauty and success. Oswald approved of Mrs. Kennedy and knew of her troubles in having children. He was a considerate husband in one respect—he let his wife decide how many children they would have. It may be that in shooting the president, Oswald imagined that he was protecting “Jackie” from a sexually exigent Catholic husband—Oswald despised religion—who compelled her to have children no matter what the injury to her health. And it is possible, although again a matter of conjecture, that the act of assassination was enhanced, and not diminished, in its attractiveness for Oswald by the fact that Jacqueline Kennedy would be there, that she would see it, that she would witness the “deed of unheard-of prowess” that he was performing for her sake.14
To say that President Kennedy shared with his assassin a fatalism and perhaps a yearning toward death, and that the Kennedys were surrounded by a volatile set of symbols concerning both death and sex, may explain a phenomenon reported soon after they entered the White House by U. E. Baughman, head of the Secret Service.15 In a book published in 1961, Baughman stated that the number of letters to the president increased by 50 percent during the early weeks of the Kennedy administration. Somewhat ominously, Baughman added that the proportion from what he called the “lunatic fringe” had increased by 300 percent, and that the number of “insane” people who tried to telephone the president or who stopped by the White House gates to threaten the president’s life or the lives of members of his family had also greatly increased. Thus there was an unusually large pool of potential assassins for this particular president. John F. Kennedy was, from the outset, highly assassinable.
There was another aspect of Kennedy’s special vulnerability that enhanced his appeal as a victim to Lee Harvey Oswald. It lay in the many roles he played, as a man, as a member of the Kennedy clan, as head of the First Family, and as president of the United States. Because he was vibrant and handsome, because his age gave him an across-the-board appeal, and because of his ability to project himself into other people’s longings, there was something in Kennedy for nearly everyone. There was scarcely any American who could not see something of himself in this president, or who did not want to. Countless men and women saw in him someone in their own lives who had been close to them, or someone they would like close to them.
Also, Kennedy had two living parents, an unusual thing for a president, and there must have been many older men and women who looked on him as a son, or as the son they wished they had had. And the children of such people could have been jealous of the president. John Kennedy was one of a large brood of brothers and sisters, and there must have been some among the population who viewed him as the fantastically successful older brother whose achievements they could not hope to match. These people, too, must have envied him.
Still others must have envied him his upbringing in a loyal and close-knit family. Oswald seems to have been one of these, for, switching things around in his mind, he told Marina that he himself would like enough children for a “whole football team.” There was only one family in America that was famous for having enough children to rouse up a football game at any moment—the Kennedys.
And Oswald appears to have envied the president not only the ebullient boyhood that was in such contrast with his lonely one, but he envied him his job—a job in which the president dealt daily with Russia and Cuba—for Oswald wanted to be president, and at the very age, forty-three, at which Kennedy had attained the office. Moreover, he wanted his “son,” the son he did not yet have, to be president. This, again, appears to have been a case in which Oswald identified not only with the president but with Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., “founding father” of the dynasty.
To the man who became his assassin, Lee Oswald, President Kennedy was not an accidental victim. To the contrary, and despite the huge element of chance, Kennedy was a highly determined target, and he might well have proved to be so to some other assassin than Oswald. But there was another side of the presidency that entered into Oswald’s motives, and it, too, was immeasurable in its importance.
We as a nation are a family, with the president as our symbolic father, or head. What is only beginning to be understood is that the president is not only a father, but to some he is a combined parent, embodying elements of the mother as well. He is therefore in a position to magnetize the emotions of those who have had particularly strong feelings about either or both of their parents.
It is perhaps a strain on the imagination to see President Kennedy, with his virile masculinity, in the role of a symbolic mother. But there was something motherly about his presidency, for it was family lore that Kennedys are in politics to “serve,” to give of themselves unstintingly and asked nothing in return. President Kennedy emphasized this by working full time for the country and giving back his salary to the Treasury. In his inaugural address he urged others to be altruistic: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And he created the Peace Corps, so that young Americans could devote part of their lives to helping the less fortunate. In all these ways the president stressed the giving, caring, motherly aspect of his office.
Marina is still puzzled as to why her husband killed the president. “But he liked Kennedy!” she protests to this day. And this is the beginning of an answer, for the public figure who appeals to the good in men, who stirs in them visions of altruism and exhorts them to be better than they are, such a leader appears to touch a chord in his followers that renders him especially vulnerable to their disappointments.
And Lee Oswald’s life had been rich in disappointments. He had been disappointed in the mother who, he felt, let him down so egregiously while he was growing up that he came to feel deeply wronged by her. And he had been disappointed by the father who let him down by dying before he was born. It was not President Kennedy’s fault, it was his danger, that he stood in a position to magnetize the emotions of a Lee Oswald, who had had very little love in his life and whose feelings toward both his parents were so richly compounded of hate.
President Kennedy died, then, because of his plentitude. To some, and Oswald apparently was one of them, the memories and associations that this president stirred were too deep, too charged emotionally, altogether too much to bear. President Kennedy died because he had, as man and symbol, become so many things to so many men.