(2 of 3)
Unlettered and unskilled, Lee compared himself favorably with the great men whose biographies he read, such as Mao Tse-tung and John F. Kennedy. He declared that in 20 years he himself would be President, or maybe Prime Minister, of the U.S. Such a rich fantasy life had to be concealed from the real world, so Lee became a compulsive liar and profoundly distrustful, like his mother. As McMillan points out, his personality made him an unlikely recruit in an assassination plot that would require accepting orders, obeying plans and working with coconspirators. Instead, she believes he acted alone to affirm his uniqueness the only way he knew how—by violence.
Violence was ever ready to erupt in Lee. At nine, he lunged at his half brother with a butcher knife—an attack that their mother dismissed as one of Lee's "little scuffles." A New York City social worker, who interviewed Lee when he was a truant of 13, reported that he had fantasies of being powerful and killing people. Before he turned 16 he confided to a friend that he would like to kill President Eisenhower "because he was exploiting the working class." After Lee shot at and very nearly killed General Walker, Marina became convinced that he intended to murder Richard Nixon. Her own life was in jeopardy. During the eleven months preceding the Kennedy assassination, Lee repeatedly beat up his wife and raped her when she was in the last stages of her second pregnancy. When she failed to cook a dish of beans and rice to his satisfaction, he tried to strangle her.
Still, Marina was not quite the typical battered wife. She was Oswald's mate, in the strict sense of the term. The squalid tale of their symbiotic relationship — told in excruciating detail by McMillan — makes it difficult to imagine Lee with out Marina. When he proposed to her, she was the belle of the Minsk Culture Palace dance hall and, at 20, a full-grown shrew.
Her own childhood, featuring an indifferent mother and a wicked stepfather, had scarcely been more propitious than Lee's, though she developed no homicidal tendencies. Both Marina and Lee, however, were infantile and dependent. Once married, they provoked each other in a classic case of folie a deux. In bed, Marina put Lee down mercilessly for his premature ejaculations and deliberately aroused his pathological jealousy by praising her past boy friends or her current pinups. One of Marina's revelations to McMillan is that she provoked Lee's fury with talk of her sexual attraction for Kennedy. It may well have been one reason why Lee's free-floating rage finally settled on the President. That is a compelling notion — more so than many of the conspiracy theories that depersonalize Oswald by pointing to some cold-blooded organization with a hired gun. The truth may be appallingly more human.
— Patricia Blake
Excerpt