“No,” said Marina, “I watch.”
And watch she did, right up to the moment when she left to attend Lee’s funeral.
The Oswalds arrived at Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth to find it, too, heavily guarded, with policemen stationed all along the fence that surrounded the burial ground. They drove to the chapel, expecting to have a religious ceremony. They found the chapel empty and unprepared. They realized with a shock that all they were to be allowed was a hurried service at the grave.
Robert had forgotten to select pallbearers. Without the family’s knowing it, a group of reporters who were covering the funeral volunteered. It was they who, even before the Oswalds arrived, had carried Lee’s body down from the chapel to its grave.
Word arrived that the Lutheran minister who had promised to officiate would not be there after all. But a minister named Louis Saunders of the Council of Churches in Fort Worth had driven out on his own to Rose Hill Cemetery to see if he could help the family. It was the Reverend Saunders who pronounced the simple words of Lee’s funeral ceremony.
Marina was humiliated. It had been furtive and meager.
That night, the lowest of her life, Marina received a telegram. She could not imagine who had sent it, unless a friend in Russia. It was from a group of American college students. Marina could hardly believe the words Peter Gregory read to her:
We send you our heartfelt sympathy. We understand your sorrow and we share it. We are ashamed that such a thing could happen in our country. We beg you not to think ill of us. You have friends and we are with you.
There was a long list of names at the end.
It was Marina’s first hint that in the life ahead of her she did not have to be an outcast.
EPILOGUE
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 offe
rs 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 ma
rried 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.”
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