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.
When he got out of the hospital, he came across my path once in a while, lit it up briefly, then disappeared, very often for months at a time. I was one of hundreds of friends in his life; he was unique in mine. Because he was unique, I thought about him a good deal. Aside from his humor and Irish irascibility, the characteristic of Jack’s that I saw most was his wide-ranging curiosity. He was forever bombarding me with questions. Should we give aid to Yugoslavia? With whom was I going skiing that weekend? Why had So-and-so been defeated for state office the week before? At what age did I expect to get married? And would I expect my husband to remain faithful? He treated everyone to an endless flow of questions, and I imagine that they, too, were as amused and flattered as I was.
But in spite of all the questions, I noticed that Jack held his curiosity within limits. Even in the hospital, when he had plenty of time and no certain future at all, it seemed to me that he did not allow his questions to roam freely, wherever they might lead. He kept them on a fairly tight course, to those whose answers might prove useful. Eager as he was for information, then, he did not allow himself the luxury of genuine intellectual curiosity. Perhaps he did not think he had time.
Kennedy had a rebellious streak, and it showed through in many delightful and eccentric things he did. But he had on the whole accepted the ambition that had been thrust upon him, the ambition to become president of the United States. Only, I thought, he had done it at a cost to his capacity for empathy and imagination. He had a candor and a breathtaking detachment about himself, but I wondered how well he understood other people, especially those who lacked his kind of ambition, or those who happened to be failures.
Marina and Lee was my attempt to draw upon all I knew and learned of the personalities at the center of this most defining American tragedy in an effort perhaps to put at least some of the most maddening questions to rest. But, of course, the matter will not rest. Since the book first appeared in 1977, I have been asked many times whether I still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed President Kennedy.
My answer is, emphatically, yes. No new evidence has surfaced, no conspiracy theory has appeared to fundamentally alter the picture of Oswald, his ideas and his last-minute actions that I have laid out here. It is the picture of a lonely, secretive man who at the age of nineteen acted on his anger toward the United States by defecting to its archrival, the Soviet Union; who behaved increasingly violently toward the person closest to him, his wife; and who on April 10, 1963, seven months before he killed President Kennedy, shot at and narrowly missed killing an imagined political opponent, General Edwin A. Walker, head of the right-wing John Birch Society. Presented unexpectedly and after a decade of failed dreams with a target who could be seen as the embodiment of US capitalism, this man chose to commit the world-changing deed he had dreamt of all his life.
Important as it was to Lee Oswald to destroy the symbol of American capitalism, it was equally important to let the world know why he had done it. When Marina Oswald paid a short, tearful visit to him in the Dallas city jail the day following the assassination, Lee tried to comfort her by telling her that there was a lawyer in New York he was counting on. That lawyer, whom he started calling immediately after Marina left, was John J. Abt, whom he had read about in the left-wing newspapers he subscribed to, the Worker and the Militant. Asked why he did not want a Dallas attorney to represent him, Oswald explained to Police Chief J. W. Fritz that Abt had defended “victims” charged under the Smith Act—the 1940 law making it a crime to advocate violent overthrow of the US government. He did not tell Fritz that Abt was attorney for the American Communist Party.
No one answered the telephones at Abt’s office or his apartment in New York City that Saturday afternoon. John Abt and his wife Jessica had left the day before, as they did most Fridays, for their country house in Kent, Connecticut. By the time Lee started trying to reach him, however, Abt had already heard. A reporter from CBS-TV woke him early that morning to ask whether he would be willing to represent Oswald; Abt replied that he would have to be asked by the defendant himself before he could consider it. During a transfer inside the jail, the reporter said, Oswald had shouted to newsmen, “Get hold of Abt to be my lawyer.”
John Abt received a barrage of calls that weekend, among them a message from Vincent Hallinan in San Francisco, a left-wing attorney and onetime Progressive Party candidate for president, asking to help defend Oswald. Abt also heard from Arnold Johnson, head of the American Communist Party, that he had had a letter from Oswald a few months before, asking how to join the party. Abt never did speak to Oswald, however, for the man who wanted him to be his attorney was shot in front of millions of television viewers the very next day, as he was being transferred to the county jail.
Oswald’s murder of the president was an act with many determinants. The first and indispensable one was the presidential route, laid out to pass directly under the Texas School Book Depository, the building where Oswald worked. He may have learned of the route the weekend before the president’s visit or he may have learned it only on Tuesday, November 19, when the route was published in the Dallas Morning News. There were signs, starting the next day, Wednesday, that something might be changing Oswald’s plans. Thursday, on his way to work, he ate an unusually self-indulgent breakfast, and at the end of the day, he made an unscheduled trip to Irving, Texas, to the house where Marina and his two children were staying, to say goodbye perhaps, but also to fetch his rifle, never giving any hint as to what he might be up to.
If the route of the presidential motorcade was the trigger, the target himself was another matter. Oswald rather liked President Kennedy, or what he knew of him as a man. Kennedy, like Oswald, was the father of two young children and excelled at the very endeavors Oswald wanted to excel at, too. Kennedy had been a naval hero; Oswald had been a Marine. Kennedy had written books; Oswald aimed to be a published author. Oswald approved President Kennedy’s record on civil rights, a cause on which he himself had taken a stand as early as the age of fourteen. And during the summer just past, Kennedy had made a speech urging better relations with the USSR and had signed a weapons treaty with the Russians as well. On the other hand, Kennedy’s forces had attacked Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs. Castro was a hero to Oswald, and Oswald had even wanted to go to Cuba to show his soldiers how to handle firearms better—until he was blocked only the month before by Cuban consular officials in Mexico City who refused him a visa. Oswald’s feelings toward Castro at the end of November seem therefore to have been ambiguous.
But for Oswald, the overwhelming fact about President Kennedy was that he was head of the US capitalist system, for which he, Lee Oswald, had professed hatred all his life. How could he have shown his feelings more eloquently than to have defected to Russia at the age of nineteen, announced that he hated the United States, and asked to stay in the Soviet Union for the rest of his life? The opportunity that presented itself now, though, dwarfed anything he could have imagined. Oswald might have shot at any political leader who happened to be passing by the School Book Depository that day, but the leader who was coming was President of the United States. The two together—the route and the target—amounted to a command: He had to do it. And his personal feelings toward Kennedy, even fear for his own life, could not enter in.
The world would have to know why. It would have to know that he, Lee Oswald, a lifelong Marxist, had chosen this way to bring justice, to remove inequality from American life. And he would have to have the Mother of all show trials.…
Of course, it was not to be. As Marina herself observed,
Lee took with him, when he was shot, all too many answers.
It was a brilliant day in May 1996, and I was again in Moscow, staying once again in the Metropole Hotel, where I had met Lee Oswald all those years before. By now, though, everything had changed. The Soviet Union, which had seemed impregnable back then, had dissolved into the air in 1991. The Metropole, home to merchants and traders from the Russian provinces back in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century a comfortable old fleabag for Westerners, had been remodeled by Finnish architects and was now a deluxe destination for businessmen from all over the world who hoped to make a killing in Boris Yeltsin’s newly capitalist Russia.
The man I was going to meet was Oleg Nechiporenko, a onetime KGB officer who apparently had dealt with Oswald at the Soviet consulate in Mexico City two months before the assassination. Friends had told me that Nechiporenko had read my book about the Kennedy assassination and wanted to talk to me. Over the telephone he had told me to look for a gray-haired man with dark rimmed glasses and a moustache. I found him easily in the lobby, where he immediately presented me with an autographed Russian-language copy of Passport to Assassination, the book he had written about his encounters with Oswald in Mexico back in 1963.
On the third floor of the Metropole, the very floor where I had interviewed Lee Oswald in November, 1959, his KGB interlocutor and I sat comfortably on the landing, exchanging memories of Lee Oswald. Nechiporenko kept his dark glasses on, making him look spooky on a May afternoon which seemed made for sunshine and flowers. And he seemed amused, as if to say that in a lifetime of meeting people who were off the beaten track, he had never seen one like Oswald.
This is what he told me:
Just before lunchtime on September 27, 1963, Nechiporenko, vice-consul at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, got a call from his coconsul, Valery Kostikov. “Listen. There’s some gringo here, asking for a visa. Claims he’s already lived in the Soviet Union, married one of our girls. They live in the States, but the FBI is persecuting him and keeping him from getting a job. I’ve gotta run. Off to lunch with the comrades. Come over here and get to the bottom of this.”
Nechiporenko’s first impression of the American was one of aloofness. He was standing on the steps, leaning against a doorpost, and did not react as Nechiporenko came toward him. “He seemed to be looking beyond me, absorbed in his thoughts.” He was wearing a light jacket, a sport shirt open at the collar, and rumpled slacks and appeared to be in a state of mental and physical exhaustion. But he became lively, even agitated, as he told his story of FBI persecution. Asked why he had left the Soviet Union and returned to the United States, Oswald avoided answering, and this put Nechiporenko on guard. The Russian, whose job as consul was a cover for his real work in counterintelligence, realized from the start that the KGB in Moscow would have a complete dossier on Oswald and that he was “not suitable agent material.” Nor was he of any real interest to counterintelligence. He told the visitor that he could give him the papers he needed and the consulate, as a favor, would forward them to Moscow, but the answer would still come from the Soviet Embassy in Washington and take at least four months. “Oswald slowly leaned forward and, barely able to restrain himself, practically shouted in my face, ‘This won’t do for me. For me it’s all going to end in tragedy!’ ” Nechiporenko noticed that his hands were shaking as he put his documents back inside his jacket.
That night, as he drove to meet a contact, Nechiporenko admitted to himself that he was disappointed at having had to waste an hour with yet another unpromising American. But when he got back to the embassy he stopped for a beer with his friend Kostikov. Kostikov had had a call that afternoon from a woman named Sylvia Duran at the Cuban consulate. She was checking on Oswald: After leaving the Soviet consulate that day, he had gone to the Cubans and told Duran that the Russians had promised him a visa. She wanted to know whether it was true. It was not true, of course. Like other statements Oswald made that day, it was a fabrication.
Saturday was soccer day at the embassy of the USSR. First to arrive for the game was Pavel Yatskov, boss of the two men who had seen Oswald the day before. Yatskov kept his sports clothes at the office and was preparing to change into them when the sentry showed in a visitor. It was Oswald. A little later, when Nechiporenko arrived to change into his clothing for the game, he spotted Yatskov and Kostikov seated at a desk, Oswald on the other side with his back to the window, documents strewn over the desk, and a pistol lying there. Worried about his comrades, Nechiporenko tiptoed into the office next to the room the men were in and put his ear to the keyhole.
As Kostikov described it to him later, Oswald had repeated his story of the day before, pleading that he needed a visa quickly because he was under surveillance, even persecution, at home and was afraid for his life. He dreamed of returning to Minsk and living there quietly with his family. Suddenly he became hysterical, started to sob, and cried, “I am afraid. They’ll kill me. Let me in.” Repeating again and again that he was being persecuted, and was being followed even in Mexico, he reached into the left pocket of his jacket and pulled out a revolver. “See, this is what I must carry to protect my life,” and he placed the revolver on the desk.
As Nechiporenko watched through the keyhole, Yatskov asked Oswald for the gun. Kostikov handed it to him, while Oswald continued sobbing. Yatskov opened the chamber, shook the bullets into his hand, and placed them in the desk drawer. He poured Oswald a glass of water. Calming down, Oswald explained that he also hoped to “help Cubans build a new life” and asked that as an alternative to giving him a Soviet visa, they recommend to the Cuban consulate that it issue him a Cuban visa instead. Yatskov explained that as a sovereign nation, Cuba decided such questions for itself. The conversation was over. Yatskov leaned down, extracted the bullets from the drawer, and calmly handed them back to the visitor. Oswald had meantime pocketed his revolver.
Before leaving the Metropole, Nechiporenko and I compared conclusions as to why Oswald had killed President Kennedy. I was not at all surprised that his interpretation was closer to mine than that of just about anyone I’d ever talked to—stressing above all the importance of certain last-minute events. In this book I describe Oswald’s asking Marina three times the night before the assassination to move in with him to Dallas from the house where she was staying with friends, and “I will find an apartment tomorrow.” Completing the domestic fantasy, Oswald told the coworker who gave him a ride to work on the morning of November 22 that the long package he was carrying contained “curtain rods,” when in fact it contained a rifle concealed in brown wrapping paper.
Without realizing it, Marina had had a negative power, I wrote in the book—the power to veto the act Oswald was considering. If she had said “yes,” and agreed to move back in with him, he might not have gone through with it. But if she said no …
Nechiporenko would go further, he said: From his long experience with unstable characters, he was convinced that Marina’s power to accept or refuse her husband that night had been more than a veto: It was decisive. Coupled with the fact that Marina was attracted to Kennedy, who in her view closely resembled an old boyfriend back in Minsk, her rejection could be seen to have triggered the assassination.
Is this an overstatement? Perhaps. But there can be no doubt that the assassination of our thirty-fifth President was inextricably linked to the fortunes of the beleaguered marriage between these two lost souls who’d grown up clear across the globe from one another—Marina and Lee.
Priscilla Johnson McMillan
Cambridge, Massachusetts—2013
PART ONE
Russia, 1941–1961
— 1 —
Archangel
In the predawn hours of Sunday, June 22, 1941, the dive bombers of Adolf Hitler swept down savagely on the sleepy, utterly unprepared Soviet fortress at Brest, on the border between Russia and Poland. So, abruptly, the war began, and for millions of men and women living in Russia at that time, as well as for millions yet unborn, l
ife was destined to become the sprawling panorama of tragic suffering that is the shape of the country itself. Countless thousands were swallowed up as Hitler’s greedy divisions pounded across the plains and marshlands of western Russia. In the four cold, hungry, disease-wracked years that followed, thousands more were caught at random, seized and spun in the cyclone of war. For those who survived, life was never to be the same again.
A few months before the war began, Klavdia Prusakova, a twenty-three-year-old laboratory worker in Leningrad, found herself in a classic predicament. She was pregnant and unable, for reasons that are obscure to this day, to marry the father of her child. She packed up her bags that spring, said goodbye to the uncle whose apartment had sheltered her, and hurried home to her mother in Archangel. She found work in the nearby village of Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk) on the White Sea, and there, on July 17, 1941, two months prematurely and less than a month after the outbreak of the war, Klavdia gave birth to a girl weighing little over 2 pounds. Miraculously, the child survived, and when the doctors pronounced her strong enough, Klavdia bundled the baby up and took her the 30 miles to her mother’s apartment in Archangel. That apartment was to be the child’s home until she was almost six years old.
The mistress of the apartment was the baby’s grandmother, Tatyana Yakovlevna Prusakova, a member of the former landowning class and a straitlaced woman of the old school who was steeped in the religious values of the Russian provinces. The child herself never learned exactly the circumstances in which she happened to be conceived. Perhaps it was an age-old story of seduction. But perhaps, as the child herself hopes, it was one of the innumerable sad stories of Russian life in the 1930s and early 1940s—purges, the Finnish war, the conflict with Germany, a time when men frequently vanished into the night as victims of political disfavor.1 Whatever the circumstances of Klavdia’s pregnancy may have been, Tatyana Yakovlevna found it in her heart to forgive her favorite daughter. She took the baby and consented to bring it up. But first, she insisted on a christening. Religious observances of any kind were frowned on, if not actually forbidden, by Stalin himself. But Tatyana Yakovlevna, as usual, had her way. At the age of two months the child was christened in the living room of her apartment by a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. She was immersed in warm water in the family’s most treasured ornament, a bowl of green porcelain and mother-of-pearl. The child was named Marina.
Marina and Lee Page 3