Marina and Lee

New York: Harper & Row, 1977. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. viii, [2], 527, [5] pages. Illustrations. Epilogue. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. Some edge wear and soiling. DJ has some wear, tears, and soiling. Probes the psychology, motives, and actions of Lee Harvey Oswald, his marriage to Marina, and her view of her life with Oswald and the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Priscilla Johnson McMillan (born Priscilla Mary Post Johnson) (July 19, 1928 - July 7, 2021) was an American journalist, translator, author, and historian. She was a Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. At the beginning of her career she worked for Senator John F. Kennedy and saw him informally for several years thereafter. During the late 1950s she served as reporter in Moscow for the North American Newspaper Alliance, and interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald as he was defecting to the Soviet Union in 1959. Following the assassination of President Kennedy by Oswald, she became friendly with Oswald's widow, and in 1977 published the acclaimed study Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy. She also published Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-1964 (1965) with co-editor Leopold Labedz and The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (2005) about the Oppenheimer security hearing. She was the only individual who, to a significant extent, personally knew both President Kennedy and his killer Marina and Lee was ultimately published by Harper & Row in 1977. It received many positive reviews upon release. The New York Times Book Review wrote of "what a miraculous book Priscilla Johnson McMillan has written, miraculous because McMillan had the wit, courage and perseverance to go back to the heart of the story, and the art to give it life." Some reviewers considered it the best work on the assassination, or superior to the Warren Commission Report, or akin to a Dostoevsky novel. Derived from a Kirkus review: The stormy marriage of Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, an illegitimate Russian teen-ager, and Lee Harvey Oswald, American defector in Minsk, was a Russo-American soap opera that intersected international politics. McMillan--who once interviewed Oswald in Moscow--treats Marina and Lee whose muddled motives take on distressing psychological coherence here. McMillan, translator of Svetlana Alliluyeva's Only One Year, coaxed most of the domestic details out of Marina including accounts of the Oswalds' bedroom habits and Lee's preoccupation with fathering a son who would be President of the United States. McMillan's own theories rest on the assumption that Oswald had an evil mother who set up his complex pattern of rejections (he spurned the US for Russia, later Russia for the US, and later still would have left the US for Cuba--had they let him come) which took a fatal turn after he abandoned the security of his job and friends in Minsk. In the US, his natural anomie worsened; he began to beat Marina, who, frightened and far from home, came back like a ""blind kitten""--or a masochist. The pattern of jobs lost and friends driven off-the Russian emigre community of Fort Worth-Dallas at first befriended them--had begun. As Oswald's domestic life became more unmanageable with Marina expecting a second child, he grew more and more immersed in his fantasy political world. Soon he was ordering rifles by mail and setting up a paper chapter of The Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Despite the barrage of questions Marina endured after the assassination, McMillan reports that she "had been asked surprisingly little about herself and nothing at all about her feelings." McMillan gained Marina's confidence. She got a story of undeniable human interest.