Marina and Lee
The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy
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4.3 • 17 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“The single best book ever written on the Kennedy assassination” -- Thomas Mallon, author of Mrs. Paine's Garage: And the Murder of John F. Kennedy
“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
Marina and Lee is an indispensable account of one of America’s most traumatic events and a classic work of narrative history. In her meticulous—at times even moment by moment—account of Oswald’s progress toward the assassination of JFK, Priscilla Johnson McMillan takes us inside Oswald’s fevered mind and his manic marriage. Only a few weeks after the birth of their second child, Oswald’s wife, Marina, hears of Kennedy’s death and discovers that Lee's rifle is missing from the garage where it was stored. She knows that her husband has killed the President.
McMillan came to the story with a unique knowledge of the two main characters. In the 1950s, she worked for Kennedy and had known him well for a time. Later, working in Moscow as a journalist, she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald during his attempt to defect to the Soviet Union. When she heard his name again on November 22, 1963, she said, “My God! I know that boy!”
Marina and Lee was written with the complete and exclusive cooperation of Oswald’s Russian-born wife, Marina Prusakova, whom McMillan debriefed for seven months in the immediate aftermath of the President’s assassination and her husband’s nationally televised execution at the hands of Jack Ruby. The truth is far more compelling, and unsettling, than the most imaginative conspiracy theory. Marina and Lee is a human drama that is outrageous, heartbreaking, tragic, fascinating—and real.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
