Marina and Lee [Hardcover]

Priscilla Johnson McMillan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1977

Marina And Lee by McMillan, Priscilla Johnson

Product Details

• Hardcover: 527 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st edition (October 1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060129530
• ISBN-13: 978-0060129538
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #199,742 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #67 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( K ) > Kennedy, John F.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This good book needs to be re-issued., May 24, 2000

By 

Betty Stoneking (Sun City West, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Marina and Lee (Hardcover)

Shortly after the assassination of President John Kennedy, Priscilla McMillan contacted Oswald's widow, Marina, and spent considerable time with her. McMillan had interviewed Lee Oswald when he defected to Russia and had the added advantage of knowledge of Russia and Russians. She used this to persuade Marina to give an account of her life with Oswald. To this day, 2000, nobody has given a better account of Marina's view of their relationship. It is very worthwhile reading.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Marina and Lee" Gives Detailed Insight Into the Mind of an Assassin, August 13, 2005

By 

kone "kone" (USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Marina and Lee (Hardcover)

"Marina and Lee", by Priscilla Johnson McMillan, is without a doubt the the best book available on the mind and personality of Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of President John Kennedy.

McMillian's excellent book sheds considerable light on who Lee Oswald was, how he developed into the man he became, how he thought, how he acted, what drove his actions, how he interacted with his wife and others, his ambitions, and ultimately, his final days before he entered the Texas Schoolbook Depository on November 22, 1963. Although McMillian focuses her attention on both Marina and Lee Oswald, (the book is essentially the recollections of Marina Oswald) the reader's attention is of course focused on learning what Lee Oswald was like as a person, and what forces drove him to act as he did. The reader obtains a very sympathetic viewpoint of Marina, which is natural considering the narrative is from Marina's point-of-view. However, the book strives for day-to-day historical accuracy, and the personalities of both Marina and Lee are presented warts and all. I believe it to be an accurate portrayal of both persons.

McMillian, an American writer living in the Soviet Union, interviewed Lee Oswald in the USSR, when he defected there in 1959. She also extensively interviewed Oswald's wife Marina after the assassination. From these in-depth interviews, she is able to piece together the intensely and tragically flawed personality of Lee Oswald, and she ultimately builds to the conclusion that Oswald killed Kennedy on 11-22-63.

Folks, this is a MUST-READ if you have interest in the Kennedy assassination, for it is the only book of its kind that lends intricate insight into the mind of Lee Oswald, helping the reader to understand the depravity of conscious that Oswald possessed. You will be amazed at the depth of insights McMillian provides the reader in regards to Oswald! After reading this book, one can come to understand that Oswald was most capable of politically-movitated killing, and must be the prime candidate for the assassination of President Kennedy.

The book will grab you in the first chapter and hold your interest to the last chapter. I guarantee that after reading it, you will begin to understand how Oswald was capable of shooting President Kennedy, and how his intense drive to "be someone" led to his ultimate act.

Get this book!

Jim "Konedog" Koenig

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sad Masterpiece, September 3, 2009

By 

John Loken "careful reader" (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Marina and Lee (Hardcover)

Priscilla Johnson McMillan's "Marina and Lee" is surely the best work ever written on the assassination of President Kennedy. McMillan is so insightful, her style so calm, and her facts so straight, as to achieve a masterpiece here, albeit a sad one. I'm glad that a couple of other readers (Betty and James) have already given this book the high praise it deserves.

McMillan focuses her narrative not on the day of the assassination, but on the life of the assassin, Lee Oswald. Ironically, she had known both Kennedy and Oswald in the 1950s, and drew on those personal experiences when writing her book. But most of the information in "Marina and Lee" derives from the recollections of Marina Oswald, Lee's young Russian-born wife, as elicited by McMillan's careful questions to her from 1964 onward. And Marina's perceptions were acute. She seems to have remembered every little thought, feeling, nuance, and observation during her few years together with Lee. Marina was very young, only 22 years old in November 1963 (Lee was barely older at 24). McMillan supplemented Marina's information with that from hundreds of other sources. It took her over a dozen years to complete the book, given her painstaking effort. But the result was worth it. Alas, by then the conspiracy theorists had largely taken over the field.

Most other books about the assassination of President Kennedy dwell largely on the events of that tragic day (or weekend). Which is to say, those books dwell on the action or mechanics of the assassination, the "how," as it were. As for the "why," many such books present weak or fantastic conspiracy theories, involving such a wide range of conspiratorial groups that they all cancel each other out. Other researchers (e.g. Gerald Posner in his excellent work "Case Closed") are therefore obliged to spend many pages of their books refuting those conspiracy scenarios.

By contrast, "Marina and Lee," appropriately written by a woman, spends only a small amount of time on the actual assassination, and only a few pages refuting some conspiracy scenarios. Instead it relates the background and the facts of the case: what really happened, not what didn't happen. But its story is compelling in a way the others are not, on a personal, psychological level. McMillan is profoundly mundane in her focus on Lee and Marina's day-to-day lives. It's almost as if the reader is observing Oswald on camera, in revealing vignettes, or even seeing inside his very mind. Oswald's complex and dysfunctional personality stands front and center here. The narrative slowly, gradually, inexorably builds up to his act. Especially revealing is his behavior during the 17-18 months after his arrival back in the USA (summer 1962) until the day of the assassination.

And yet, chance played a huge role, too. In that regard, McMillan reveals some little known bits of the story. For example, on November 20, 1963, two days before the assassination, a man who worked at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, where Oswald also worked, brought two rifles into the manager's office, and the manager there even lifted one rifle up to his shoulder admiringly (it happened to be hunting season). Among the onlookers was Lee Oswald. Surely his seeing rifles in that building just days before President Kennedy's motorcade was scheduled to pass by it was one of Oswald's final motivators. He must have realized that he would have an alibi if he were caught bringing his own rifle to work two days later. He could simply say that he, likewise, just wanted to show it to his co-workers, an innocent enough intention. And who could prove him wrong?

Another example of the role of chance is that Oswald actually tried desperately to reconcile with his wife Marina on the evening before the assassination, but she was too angry at him to do so. If he had succeeded in reconciling with her that evening, he would probably have refrained from his deadly act the next day. After all, he actually liked Kennedy.

With regard to conscious or long term motivations, Oswald's Marxism comes through very strongly in the book. It was a violent ideology, of course. His love for Castro's new Socialist Cuba was another key factor, since JFK was threatening Cuba. McMillan also relates some significant media influences on Oswald's mind, among them a Cuban presidential assassination movie, "We Were Strangers," which Oswald watched eagerly in October 1963, only days after learning of Kennedy's upcoming visit to Dallas. Other such media influences (today we might call them "copycat" influences) came from several of the books he read.

"Marina and Lee" is a long book and may be difficult for some people to read through in its entirety. Its early chapters focus on Marina's early life alone in Russia. Many male readers may prefer to speed-read through these (I must admit that I did). But there is no need to read the whole book to get a great deal out of it. Start in at page 150 if you wish, and simply read the rest.

The Oswalds' three years together were ones of almost constant fighting. The prime causes were Lee's relentless egotism (apparently inherited from his mother), his erratic Marxist idealism, his mere ninth grade education, his lack of employable skills, his poverty, and his disagreeable personality. He was often brutal to Marina, both physically and emotionally.

He had his tender moments, though. On his last evening before the act, and after Marina had rebuffed him, Oswald played wistfully outdoors with his children at sunset, knowing full well by then what he would attempt to do the next day. McMillan describes the moment hauntingly (pp. 416-419).

In her final pages, McMillan explicitly accepts Oswald's act as a personally "fated" one, with a certain inevitability to it. Oswald had always lacked a father figure, and so he both resented and envied JFK. The two men also, surprisingly, had a few things in common, increasing the obsession in Oswald's mind.

But then McMillan wisely pulls away from Oswald and places the assassination in a much larger context. A statistical analysis reveals that death threats against Kennedy were far higher in number than against any previous president. His charisma acted as a lightning rod for Americans' mixed emotions.

We must take her suggestion and enlarge upon it, recognizing several other general factors that converged and caused that national tragedy on November 22, 1963: the poor security precautions of the time (riding slowly in an open car through the crowded streets of a gun-happy town - how foolish can you get?); the advanced firearms technology of the 20th century (scopes on rifles); the low cost of rifles after WWII as millions of surplus ones became cheaply available (Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano); the increasingly graphic and provocative Hollywood movies about presidential assassinations ("We Were Strangers," "Suddenly," "The Manchurian Candidate"); the Cold War era with its widespread espionage, which permeated everyday culture and made many young men eager to lead exciting secret lives; the Cold War era again with its opposing ideologies, one of which was violent and revolutionary Marxism; and so on. Appreciating such factors deeply, one gains a wider perspective on the assassination of President Kennedy, finally seeing and accepting it as a historical inevitability, or at least a historical probability that did in fact become reality. After all, President Kennedy himself seems to have thought his assassination was almost inevitable. So, for all the shock of it at the time, which no one who lived through it will ever forget, there was really nothing surprising about it.

And with that said, dysfunctional little Lee Harvey Oswald dwindles into insignificance. His name could just as easily have been Grant Henry Osborne, or any of a hundred others waiting in the wings. In the case of Oswald, the required factors simply came together in the end.

Still, despite the apparent historical necessity of the assassination, and the incidental nature of Oswald's participation in it, McMillan's book is a great accomplishment. It will probably remain the best work ever on the facts behind that momentous historical event.

To supplement McMillan's book, I'd suggest also reading Robert Oswald's "Lee: a Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald by His Brother," and Thomas Mallon's "Mrs. Paine's Garage," among other thoughtful works on the subject.