What do I tell them? Sacrifice, Revolution, Certain. I assumed she would appreciate the thought. Marguerite Claverie, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, was born in New Orleans in 1907,1 into a family of French and German extraction. Their son, Mark Porter, listened to my stories about his mothers arrival in Fort Worth in 1962 but declined to be interviewed. And she said: "I'm so and so, and I just want you to know that I've written a song about you - and your child. Lee Harvey Oswald, his wife Marina, and his daughter June Lee, when they lived in Minsk in the USSR. Watch on. After completing her English program, she left Michigan for good. At the time, Oswald was traveling here and there in his attempts to advance his political goals, although whether that led to estrangement or if the couple just lived in separate domiciles for the sake of convenience, isn't clear. His cartridge cases were also found a few feet away from the body of a murdered policeman on the route of his flight. If it is true that poetry is the silence between the words, then there is something genuinely poetic about the life Rachel Oswald is quietly leading between the headlines. After an hour or so, I drove them downtown to the bus station for their ride back to Dallas. I mean, think about it. Two days earlier, Marguerites son shot the president of the United States. Q: To what extent have you followed the various conspiracy theories? On these shopping trips, I soon realized, Marina couldnt help noticing that other mothers were buying more, dressing better and even driving their own cars. By Steve Salerno. Then he dropped out of high school and joined the Marines, before being released and traveling to Moscow. Book Haven readers will remember his earlier account of the events of 1963 in The New York Times Sunday Magazine here. I went on a car trip up to the house I had lived in with Lee, Lee's boarding house, another house Mom had lived in with Lee that's still standing, the path of the motorcade, where the bullets hit. Yet I recall that his companion for the evening, a Russian woman named Anna Meller, couldnt resist asking the question we all secretly wanted answered why had Lee defected to the Soviet Union? [3] They married six weeks later and had a daughter, June Lee, born the following year. While Lee Harvey Oswald was sitting in a Dallas jail cell, his wife and mother and two young daughters were hiding out at the Executive Inn, a commuter hotel near the airport, where they were taken and then abandoned by a team of Life magazine staff members. It was during these months after moving back to the U.S. that Marina, now known as Marina Oswald, learned of her husband's violent proclivities. He tried to after the arrest but everybody discounted it. Because that's mostly what I think of when I think of Lee. Linda Lavin Bio, Lucille Ball Alice, Age, Net worth, Sitcom, B Positive. She hadn't read it. Having dated for a while, they tied the knot on the 30th of April the year 1961. Very interesting. The question brought her up from her Bloody Mary. I listened uncomfortably, sensing his hostility at me for suggesting that he, a self-styled intellectual keeping a Historic Diary, could not write or punctuate any better than someone just learning English. Although disillusioned with the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald remained "Marxist," even . On 22nd November 1963, Marina told the commission that she believed her husband was guilty of shooting President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I've wondered what my kids are going to turn out like. I mean, Ive never gone to my fathers grave., Everything about my father is accurate., So, what do you think really happened? "Personal Quotes/ Biography". Lee Harvey Oswald's 'reclusive' widow Marina pictured for first time in 25 years No-one gives the 72-year-old gran a second glance as she slowly walks across a Walmart car park in a small town in . Marina and Lee Oswald had two children, Rachel and June. He kept a journal, which he labeled Historic Diary. When he, Marina and little June touched down at Love Field, on June 14, 1962, he greeted his brother Robert by asking where the reporters were. Oswald, after all, fled the Texas School Book Depository by Dallass notably unreliable public-transportation system. Pete Gregory, the authors father, seated center left, translating as Secret Service agents questioned Marina Oswald days after the Kennedy assassination. Robert Oswald told me in September that he had not talked to Marina in quite a while. Moreover, Porter currently leads a private life and is afraid to go out in public. Lost in the shuffle was Oswald's widow, Marina Oswald. A few days later, my father decided to check up on Oswald and his wife, and because I was around their age and home for the summer, he took me along. We beg you not to think ill of us.. Yes he had June and Rachel, they stayed with Marina Oswald, who remarried around 1966, so they grew up with a stepfather who by all accounts was a decent man, raising the girls in a protective environment. I never saw them again. Marina had always seemed eager to impress on me the finer points of grammar during our Russian conversations. And then, they tell a story about how after that I stood up in front of the whole class and said, "My father shot the President." We send you our heartfelt sympathy, the message read. I remember my sister and I going to his hotel room and seeing 12 books about my father on the nightstand. (He often did so, almost humorously, with a smile on his face.) Lee Harvey Oswald, his wife Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, and . Marina took a step backward and fell, thumping her head on the hard, dry ground and dropping June. He tracked me down. The people Ive worked with the longest know. A: Not until recently. His voice rose, but what came out were canned slogans he left because capitalism was a terrible system, it exploited the workers, the poor got nothing and so forth. On the morning of November 24, while being transferred from a jail cell to an interrogation office, Oswald was shot by a distraught Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby. Included as an exhibit for the Warren. Marina, who never knew her father, said that she couldnt bear that her two children would also grow up without one. Q: If someone was to ask you today who your father is, what would you say? We visited the set of "JFK" when it was going on, and somebody said, "Your father was a hero." I dont think anybody I worked with ever thought twice about it, Rachel Oswald said. I read this intvu again and if there are two people I'd love to talk to, it's Rachel and June. Even now, three decades after President Kennedys death, the name still stirs up strong emotions - particularly in Texas. "The Mind of Oswald", p.171, Trafford on Demand Pub. Aaron Gilchrist Bio, NBC News, Age, Height, Wife, Salary, Twitter. Kate is a bit of a tomboy and a . Believe it or not, a couple of guys at UT refused to ask me out again after I told them about my dad. It might not have told us very much about the assassination of JFK but it provides an excellent insight into what it must be like to be the child of a much hated historical figure. He himself was fatally shot two days later by Jack Ruby (1911-67) in the Dallas County Jail. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lee-Harvey-Oswald, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, Academia - Timeline of the Life of Lee Harvey Oswald, National Archives - Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Reporters came over and she would tell us, "shhhh, go in the other room". Lee Harvey Oswald was a KGB associate who was personally instructed by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to assassinate President Kennedy. But he recalled with clarity the frantic image of Marguerite Oswald roaming around the suite at Six Flags; he also remembered that she hid a bayonet under a pillow. If someone has it, I would also like to read it again. According to the University of Michigan Heritage Center, the plight of thewidow, with two preschoolers to feed, tugged at the heartstrings, and soon enough she'd received donations of food, clothing, and cash totaling $70,000 the equivalent of over $600,000 in 2022 dollars as well as an offer to come to Michigan to learn English and live with a family there. Because Marina Oswald realized that she and her children could become the focus of attention at any time, she made sure June and Rachel were always neatly dressed - no matter how small the chore, and despite the fact that the family was often financially strapped. Q: I'm sure there must have been a lot of unusual incidents as you were growing up. After a short while, he concluded that he would do whatever he could for this young woman, even if that meant helping her husband, who had sulked off to the den, waiting to be called to the table. I didn't really want to be the center of gossip in this whole building. Until I was 23, I didnt even know there were alternative theories. ___________________________________________, Reminds me of Elvis Costello's song "Watching The Detectives.". Q: Give me an example of what you'd consider harassment, A: When I was pregnant with my first, some lady got my phone number and called in the middle of the night. Audrey was born after her family moved from Russia to the United States. A: I don't have any real memories of those ages. Marina would later tell the Warren Commission, through a translator, about his imagination, his fantasy, which was quite unfounded, as to the fact that he was an outstanding man. Perhaps he chose what seemed like the only remaining shortcut to going down in history. Most Americans believe that Oswald shot Kennedy. There were a lot of things leading up to that that they wanted Mom to do, and Mom in recent years has gotten more and more involved, I guess because she's getting older and trying to rectify some of the things she may have done unintentionally - like stating publicly that Lee did it. The first chapter opens with my family, and he goes way back to my great-grandmother in Russia. Within this morass of facts, however, there is a central actor: Lee Harvey Oswald. thanks for posting that interview I had not read it before. www.imdb.com. For the time being, he was treating her better, but she did not know for how long. Around 11 a.m., with the temperature climbing into the 90s, a slight, 22-year-old Oswald arrived, drenched with sweat and wearing a wool suit. I guess they decided we must be a certain way and then wrote it. I started worrying about, first of all, do I have a responsibility to tell them? He got really scared and wanted to take me to a hospital. At the time, I thought that Lee, who did not have a drivers license, seemed to recognize that I was doing his young family a favor. He himself was fatally shot two days later by Jack Ruby (191167) in the Dallas County Jail. I had already written a we got to President Clinton to try to make sure he would appoint this review board from the Bush legislation to review assassination records, and to release those records. So Lee Harvey Oswald the man who the Warren Commission Report concluded was JFK's pro-Communist, pro-Castro lone nut assassin had been an active-duty Marine who had volunteered to risk his life in a CIA program using fake defectors to infiltrate the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Marina also disclosed that her grandmother was religious, which was particularly pleasing to Bouhe because he organized Russian Orthodox services in Dallas. And so my father, Pete, led the discussion by asking her questions about their voyage to the U.S., life in Minsk and what it was like to be a young person in the Soviet Union. Are you able to maintain the same detachment when you see that? Two years after the Kennedy assassination, Marina married Kenneth Porter, an electronics technician who has effectively protected her from the media. I think Lee was this 24-year-old guy, this youngster, who got himself in over his head. Lee Harvey Oswald was a former U.S. Marine who was accused of killing President John F. Kennedy. Oswald has three children, two daughters, and one son. In addition, she is a Russian-American. Investigators took Marina and her children to Dallas, essentially severing the friendship with. I also had an interview for Rachel Oswald, but haven't located it. In every community across Washington, families are facing the challenge of accessing and affording long-term care. By October, Oswald had found his own room and, with the help of Marina's landlady, had found work at the Texas School Book Depository. I always felt that the Cubans were being pushed into the Soviet Bloc by American policy. She didn't feel like Kenneth was her dad. In the final scene they have my sister and me walking hand in hand to the Kennedy Memorial singing We Shall Overcome. That never happened either. In February 1962, Marina gave birth to a daughter named June. He was always provided for, but he was also, in a way, homeless--without a stable backdrop of buildings or even. In 1977,she told reporters at a press conference about her book "Marina and Lee" that she believed her husband was guilty. And there have been public hearings there and in Dallas and Boston. The evidence has remained highly debatable. We do not support the individual. assassination looming, I sent Marina a personal letter and a written recollection of our time together and followed up this fall with a phone call. She had long admired the first lady and asked her husband to translate any magazine articles she could find about the president. In January 1963 Oswald bought a .38 revolver and, in March, a rifle and telescopic sight, through the mails. I didn't break down and cry or anything. Hours after the Kennedy assassination, my parents and I experienced the shared horror of realizing that the Lee Oswald we knew, the one who had been in our house and sat at our dinner table, was the same man who had just been accused of killing the president. He never knew his father, Robert Edward Lee Oswald, who had died 2 months before his birth of a heart attack. When we moved to Rockwall, which was much smaller than Richardson - people there lived for farming and football - everyone in town knew my mother. Dating was a little tricky, she said. For seven years Rachel was a waitress at the Chili Parlor while she put herself through nursing school. My family tried to put those tragic events behind us, but over the ensuing decades, as I became an academic and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, I felt compelled to combine my memories and the historical record to present my own sense of Oswald. Eventually, she retired. By September 1963, Marina was pregnant with her second child and she moved the family back to Dallas, where they roomed in a boarding house, according to Spartacus Educational. Here are eight things about Oswald you might not have known: 1. Then I find out he's been doing some quote-unquote assassination research. According to the story, Rachel was a miserable, lonely child - her dogs had been poisoned, she had never been asked out on a date, she had no friends, her family couldnt even afford to buy albums for her record player. Brigit Mahoney Bio, Age, FOX Weather, Married, Ryan, Salary. It is difficult to imagine what life must be like for the child of a celebrity - having a recognizable last name, a childhood in the spotlight. So eventually the group headed to Parkland Hospital, where Oswald had been taken and where a belligerent crowd was already growing outside. Lee Harvey Oswald, (born October 18, 1939, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.died November 24, 1963, Dallas, Texas), accused assassin of U.S. Pres. Autobiography of Lee Harvey Oswald: My Life in My Words, p.194, iUniverse, Diane Holloway, Lee Harvey Oswald (2000). He treated her Russian friends poorly, she said, and tried to keep her isolated in the house, doing the grocery shopping himself. By age 17, he had already moved some 20 times. In the 1970s, Mae Brussell, an authority on the Kennedy assassination, compiled every statement she could find made by Lee Harvey Oswald between the time of his arrest for the shooting of President John F. Kennedy and Officer Tippit and the time of his death. Its hard having things written about you that arent true. From nearly the moment I met Lee Harvey Oswald, it seemed that he felt the world had sized him up wrong. Left: Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife, Marina, are seen aboard a train as they depart Russia in 1962. The first car was The National Enquirer. I felt they manipulated her and made her look foolish. Her family eventually wound up in Minsk, at the time a part of the Soviet Union, but now part of the fully-independent Belarus. Every day we present the best quotes! didnt want to recruit Oswald. But see, I'm matter-of-fact about a lot in my life. He argued that it would jeopardize his fluency in Russian, but more important, it was a way he leveraged control over her. In 1965, according to All That's Interesting, Marina married a carpenter named Kenneth Porter. Is David Lifton still working on a book about Lee? He avoided deportation by attempting suicide and was sent to Minsk, where he met Marina. But there are still people who refuse to believe that I could be normal. She hinted at physical abuse and explained that she had left him only to reconcile after he pleaded for her to attend Thanksgiving at his brothers house. Lee Harvey Oswald (1939-1963) had an unexceptional life until the fateful day of November 22, 1963 when he allegedly assassinated President John F. Kennedy. She copied it and put it on all my staff's desks. (Lee was one of several suitors back in Minsk.) And we got to President Kennedy and I was told to go across the hall during that one. Q: What are your thoughts on Norman Mailer's new book? Earlier that morning, my father, a successful petroleum engineer, received a call from a young man who wanted certification of fluency in Russian. In addition, Marina lived there together with her mother and stepfather until the year 1957. Marina Prusakova was born in 1941, in the Russian city of Molotovsk, according to Spartacus Educational. Dinner ended abruptly. And I realize that I'm kind of cold about it, so how do I tell them? Moreover, the widow later came to believe that her husband Lee Harvey was innocent. I want to make sure they understand why I'm so matter-of-fact about it. Q: What is the status of your present-day identity? As Priscilla Johnson McMillan writes in her book, Marina and Lee, the presidents route under Oswalds workplace might have convinced him that fate had provided a unique opportunity. She his always felt really bogged down by it. "Please get her away from Michigan. (At the time, I didnt realize he hadnt graduated from high school.) I know that in my life, Lee wasn't a good man. I did not call in the middle of the night however and I did not say I wished to sing my song to her. Dont get me wrong, Rachel said, blushing a little. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. She was a widow with two preschool children and limited English. [quote name='John Geraghty' date='May 13 2006, 02:49 PM' post='62308'], Dixie, thanx for the interview. Then he sat down. Oswald's wife Marina, two daughters, brother Robert and mother Marguerite were the only mourners. She would get around to it one of these days, she said. But reporters were already camped out in front of Paines yard, so the group was diverted to the home of the citys police chief, C. J. Wirasnik. This story appears in the March issue of Texas Monthly. It also gives us information that helps explain Marina Oswalds comments about the assassination. Somehow those boxes came down and she was reading, and I guess she felt it was time to tell us. In September he went to Mexico City, where, according to the Warren Commission, he tried vainly to get a visa for Cuba and to get Soviet permission to return to the U.S.S.R. In my book she belongs where her husband is. Nevertheless, Marina was not implicated in the assassination but testified against Lee Harvey during the Warren Commission hearings. They both believe that the facts need to be revealed, all files opened and let the chips fall where they may.