The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy
July 8, 2013
McMillan, who translated Svetlana Alliluyeva’s “Only One Year,” had one interview with Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow in 1959. After the Kennedy assassination she had privileged access to Oswald’s widow Marina. And she was at one time an aide on JFK’s Senate staff. Given these credentials and the nature of her subject, “Marina and Lee” is bound to excite interest among the curious, but skeptical readers may become even more so. McMillan apparently accepts the general conclusions of the Warren Commission Report, and her 544-page narrative is an attempt to get at Oswald’s motives. In her view Oswald was acting out fantasies connected with an over-dependency on his mother. We are given intimate details of the Oswalds’ masochistic marriage, of Marina’s early life in Russia, of their ties to the Russian émigré community in Dallas, and much else. The book sympathetically fleshes out a human picture of this unlikely couple, but who they actually were vis-à-vis JFK, CIA, KGB, is an open question. Index, etc. 16 pages of photos. National ad/promo.
July 8, 2013
This classic of the JFK assassination literature, originally published in 1977 and now reissued for the 50th anniversary of the murder, presents a searching wife’s-eye view of a killer’s curdling mind. Journalist McMillan, who knew Kennedy and met Oswald, mines extensive interviews with Oswald’s wife, Marina, to paint a harrowing portrait of their marriage and his character. The improbable romance moves from the Soviet Union, where the misfit Marina gravitated to the glamorous American defector and his rare private apartment—the pressure-cooker tensions of overcrowded housing are a crucial element of the saga—to Texas, where a spiral of poverty, marital violence, and political delusions climaxed in bloodshed. McMillan’s narrative unfolds like a Russian novel with an American ending, a tale of galling social constraints, claustrophobic relationships and thwarted ambitions that birth a monstrous drive for self-assertion. Oswald is the most vivid of many sharply etched characters—arrogant, grandiose, calculating but feckless, his narcissism fed by Marxist dogma and Cold War paranoia, seizing a chance to shoot his way from failure to fame. McMillan’s richly detailed, bleak, heartbreaking profile proves his unfitness for any conspiracy outside his own head—and builds a compelling case for him as the demon-driven author of the Kennedy tragedy.