Priscilla Johnson McMillan - Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of John F. Kennedy

McMillan achieves with art what the Warren Commission failed to do with its report. She makes us see It is not at all easy to describe the power of Marina and Lee It is far better than any other book about Kennedy Other books about the Kennedy assassination are all smoke and no fire. Marina and Lee burns.

New York Times Book Review

Because Priscilla McMillan is a superb narrator and a superior scholar, her book has all the power of a first-class novel, and all the austerity of excellent scholarship. It is even more than that. It answers the questions: Did Lee Harvey Oswald murder John Kennedy, was he alone in the act, and why did he do it? The answers are all there, and they all make sense.

Chicago Tribune

McMillan has done us the service of pointing out just how deeply the enemy lives within us. One closes her book pondering the odds that America has a sociological victim like Oswald on every block. Compared to this, the conspiracy question looks incidental. The question is not how many assassins can dance on the head of a pin, but what makes one dance, given a particularly ugly set of human circumstances at birth?

The New Republic

Fully as persuasive as the conspiracy lore that has preceded it [McMillan] has a novelists sense of when to dramatize, through dialogue and the use of exact detail, the crucial twists and turns of domestic life Priscilla McMillans extraordinary book makes the necessary and subtle connection between private frailties and their power to change the history of the world.

The Atlantic Monthly

Richly detailed and absorbing Marina and Lee may be the closest we will ever get to understanding the mind of John F. Kennedys assassin.

Newsday

A fascinating and richly detailed portrait of the man involved in one of the most terrible moments in American history.

The Springfield News-Leader

A woman of intelligence, compassion and understanding, McMillan has written a magnificent book about a man who, as the world views such things, deserves to be hated. Yet, without shifting anything from the tragedy or placing blame anywhere, she brings insights to the Oswalds and others involved this book on Oswald may be the best of all. Theres a lot of heartLees, Marinas, and Priscillasin it.

The Charlotte Observer

Pulls at the emotions in such a way as to leave the intellect in turmoil.

Asbury Park Evening Press

McMillan has skillfully and vividly captured Lee Harvey Oswald, the man.

The Sacramento Bee

The first comprehensive work of its type that attempts to deal with the life and thoughts of the alleged assassin a fascinating book, highly readable, and very frankly hard to put down entertaining, informative, well written, and well documented.

The State (Columbia, SC)

The finest, most insightful, and most carefully researched study of Oswald to date. To read Marina and Lee is to be awash in alternate waves of depression and fascination while recognizing that powerful intelligence has reconstructed one of the truly sad and terrible stories of our time.

The Providence Journal

Not only admirable as a piece of writing but a valuable historical document. The fruit of all [McMillans] devoted labor reads almost like a Dostoyevsky novel which treads the threshold of insanity a deeply impressive book, penetrating the smokescreen of argument and speculation the writing is stamped on every page with the sense of truth.

The Age

An eminently human book.

The Cleveland Press

A painstakingly detailed piece of work, a marvel of research.

SoHo Weekly News

Marina and Lee, one of the finest books yet written about a still painful subject, stands as a tragic account of a relationship ultimately destroyed by politics. It is required reading for anyone interested in what went on in the mind of the man accused of murdering a president.

The Milwaukee Journal

Not likely to be surpassed a compelling story told with a mature authority. Without detracting from the horror of the act, it forces us to confront the human face of the assassin.

New York Post

Copyright 2013 Priscilla Johnson McMillan
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Originally published in 1977 by Harper & Row

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:
Steerforth Press L.L.C., 45 Lyme Road, Suite 208,
Hanover, New Hampshire 03755

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

eISBN: 978-1-58642-217-2

v3.1

I want to give the people of the
United States something to think about.

L EE H ARVEY O SWALD
to the author, Moscow, November 16, 1959.

Shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, in November of 1963, a Gallup poll found that 52% of the American public believed that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was part of a conspiracy. In the fifty years since, that figure has climbed closer to 80%.

You can understand why. Its painful to accept that an American president was cut down by one small, half-crazy guy with a mail-order rifle who could easily have been stopped in any of a dozen different small waysbut wasnt. No wonder Norman Mailer called the assassination the largest mountain of mystery in the twentieth century a black hole in space absorbing great funds of energy and never providing a satisfactory answer.

The key word here is satisfactory. The simple explanationthat Oswald acted alonewas unpalatable. The enormity of the crime didnt fit the insignificance of the criminal. Far easier to imagine Oswald as a cats paw of a much larger scheme, engineered by invisible but all-powerful forces.

Theres something deeply consoling about conspiracy. As a writer of suspense fiction for whom conspiracy is a stock in trade, I know the gratifications of a world in which everything means something, everything adds up, everything is under the control of some grand human intention. We like to think that things happen for a reason, and that large things happen for large reasons.

The Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon Johnson a week after the assassination, was meant to set the record straight. Its task was to reassure a grieving nation that everything was under control, that there hadnt been a coup dtat, that the US wasnt, in Johnsons phrase, a banana republic. Its published report gave us such turgid bureaucratese as The Commission does not believe that the relations between Oswald and his wife caused him to assassinate the President and Many factors were undoubtedly involved in Oswalds motivation for the assassination, and the Commission does not believe that it can ascribe to him any one motive or group of motives. It is apparent, however, that Oswald was moved by an overriding hostility to his environment.

All this bureaucratic caution had a paradoxical effect, however. The Oswald who emerged from the Warren Commission reports twenty-six volumes was a blank slate. No wonder it was so densely inscribed with our worst suspicions. It didnt help that Oswald was himself shot dead two days after the assassination, by a nightclub operator named Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. The shooting of the shooter made him loom all the larger in our imagination. As Thomas Powers pointed out, Lee Harvey Oswald in prison for decade after decadesurfacing in the news whenever parole boards met, but otherwise forgotten, like Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremer, John Hinckleywould have faded back down to size. It is Oswald dead and unexplained that excites suspicion. We needed a good long look in order to forget him.