The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, is a murder that seemingly will never have the closure of a why, given that the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was never tried in court, but instead shot dead days later--live on television.
![[book cover]](marinaandlee.gif)
Into a decades-old miasma of conspiratorial mania, Priscilla Johnson McMillan offers Marina and Lee. Definitive and authoritative because first it is an engaging love story, if tragic, about two real people, rendered in convincing detail: yearnings, frustrations, arguments, deceptions, and, yes, beatings. What a refreshing change from a typical conspiracy freak's supposition like "Marina Oswald would never have been allowed to leave the Soviet Union unless she was a KGB spy."
Ms. McMillan spent seven months interviewing Marina after the assassination. If Ms. McMillan's fluency in Russian weren't enough of an advantage for getting all of Marina's story, she had two other life experiences that motivated the thirteen years spent writing this account.
As a young woman with a Master's degree in Soviet Area Studies from Harvard, she was a staff researcher for then Senator John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts. Years later, working as a journalist in Moscow, she interviewed a young American defector, Lee Harvey Oswald.
It is moreover Ms. McMillan's painstaking attention to detail that enables her to document, for example, how Lee Harvey Oswald spent his time in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. She tells us what books Oswald checked out from the public library, from what branch, and on what day. She effectively accounts for his time in the Crescent City, a cataloguing that apparently was beyond the purposes of such hallucinatory accounts as summoned by filmmaker Oliver Stone, et al.
The question is not who killed JFK, but why? McMillan gives it a valiant try, looking at all the conceivable influences and psychological quirks that moved Oswald, but ultimately the truth died with Lee. Marina acknowledges this, saying "The truth is in Lee," but as McMillan notes, Marina doesn't use pravda [Russian for everyday truth] but instead istina, which is a higher truth, the final truth only God knows. McMillan readily acknowledges, however, the murder of JFK was impulsive, not planned. If Lee Harvey Oswald had not known two days in advance from the newspapers JFK's motorcade would go past the Texas School Book Depository, he would never have taken his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle there on the morning of November 22, 1963.
Marina and Lee by Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Harper & Row, 1977, 528 pp., ISBN: 0-06-012593-0.
Image credit: google images: goodreads.com
Read Charlie Dickinson's
story collection, The Cat
at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable
formats:
.mobi
(Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
Also, a flash fiction, "Ylena Thinks Nyet," is at Cigale Literary Magazine.
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