MARINA AND LEE by Priscilla Johnson McMillan Harper & Row; 527 pages; $15
Conspiracy theorists beware! Priscilla Johnson McMillan has come forward with the first plausible explanation for Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of John F.
Kennedy. Plots will doubtless continue to be spun out of the coincidences, contradictions and inconsistencies that surround the crime. But McMillan amply demonstrates that Oswald had no need of any of the world's intelligence services to steady his hand, eye and malevolent will as the Kennedy motorcade rolled into his line of fire in Dallas. He had long before been possessed of the essential preconditions for his crime: abundantly sufficient interior motives and a proven predisposition for homicidal violence.
Sovietologist McMillan knew Oswald.
As a news agency correspondent in Moscow in 1959, she interviewed the would-be defector who was then holed up in the Metropole Hotel. Lee was recovering from his first public act of violence—a suicide attempt prompted by the Soviets' initial reluctance to let him stay in Russia. To McMillan, Oswald made the astonishing statement that is the epigraph to her book:
"I want to give the people of the United States something to think about."
For this biography of Oswald, McMillan went to Texas to conduct a series of exhaustive interviews over a seven-month period with Oswald's Russian wife, Marina, and also talked with many of the people who had known Lee after his return to the U.S. in 1962. The author brought together the material on Oswald scattered through the 26 volumes of the Warren Report and in many recently declassified documents. Out of these data, covering all 24 years of Oswald's life, McMillan has constructed a remarkable portrait of a man on his way to a murder.
Few men have absorbed as much bile in their mother's milk as the son of Marguerite Oswald. Her sense of grievance against a world that she felt owed her a living pervaded Lee's life, causing him, at the age of 20, to seek some fancied redress in the U.S.S.R. Though the Soviets finally accorded the American defector privileged status—with perquisites that included an apartment of his own and a cash subsidy—the Soviets' largesse could not satisfy Lee's inexhaustible demands.
Soon disabused of Mother Russia, he clung to a half-baked Marxism that served his sociopathy. Later he would contrive to stretch his ideology to encompass Kennedy and right-wing General Edwin Walker as targets for assassination.
Marguerite Oswald also nourished Lee with the delusions of grandeur displayed in the celebrated interviews she gave Novelist Jean Stafford: "Lee Harvey Oswald even after his death has done more for his country than any other living human being." Once Lee emerged from Marguerite's cocoon, he seemed to regard himself as a rare and vivid specimen, on the wing in an ungrateful world.