Quick, have we overturned every single stone for the 50th Anniversary JFK-palooza? Because I think there’s someone out there we can still
peg as the unanswered riddle in the whole thing. Hmmm, maybe Lee Harvey
Oswald’s widow? She’s still around, right?
In the spring of 1961, Lee Oswald
met Marina Prusakova at a dance in Minsk, Belarus. Six weeks later, they were
married at the home of her uncle, who worked for Soviet domestic intelligence.
In October 1962, they moved to Dallas. By the fall of 1963, they were living
with a woman, Ruth Paine, in Irving. Marina and Lee Oswald had two children,
Rachel and June.
You know what comes next: JFK/blown away/what else do I have to— anyway, she remarried after
Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby — to a guy named Kenneth Porter, while news helicopters swarmed overhead. She worked at an Army Navy Surplus
store a few miles from the scene of the crime for some 20 years before
retiring. She stopped giving any interviews or
making public appearances, I presume because she realized it wasn’t going to
improve the contours of her life to keep granting them. Besides, she had two
daughters to raise and terrible old life to not be reminded of. Go figure.
Regardless of the remaining speculation about the
assassination — and “there
is still no accepted story about the assassination” but also no
real evidence of a conspiracy — the majority of the stuff focused on in the media rehash right now includes the impact on presidential security or more personal stories, or unanswered questions, like: Were JFK and Governor
Connally hit by the same bullet? Why did Jack Ruby leave his dog in his car?
Why was the original JFK autopsy report burned?
That’s all fine: I understand that as long as it’s never really wrapped up Scandal-style, this political maelstrom will be a source of endless fascination,
possibly forever. But yes, some of the stones being overturned are dumb ones that don’t need overturning. Like asking What if Marina Oswald had just taken her husband back when he asked?
Wut? For that you might need a little context: In 1963, the
Oswalds were bustling back and forth between Dallas and New Orleans as Oswald
became more entrenched in leftwing groups like the Communist Party and the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee. Says a piece in the International Business Times of the Oswald relationship that
year:
As 1963 progressed, Oswald and his wife drifted further apart.
In April, he told her that he had shot Edwin Walker, a retired rightwing
general whom Oswald regarded as a fascist. When she confronted him about the
assassination attempt, he replied: “What would you say if somebody got rid
of Hitler at the right time? If you don’t know about General Walker, how can
you speak up on his behalf?”
The two started to argue about Oswald’s fantasies, as she called
them, and in November they were estranged.
Cool guy! Man, if only she’d wanted to work things out? Oswald was working at the Book Depository by now, and was
living in a boarding house under the name OH Lee. Marina was still rooming with a
divorced Ruth Paine who also had a child. On November 21, 1963, Paine
returned home to find Lee Harvey Oswald was visiting Marina.
He spent the night trying to convince Marina to give their
relationship another chance – but she refused and rebuffed his attempts to kiss
her, according to the Dallas News.
In the years following, Marina told journalists that her
rejection of Oswald may have triggered the murder process in his mind. Author
Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who wrote the 1977 biography, Marina and Lee,
believed there was some truth in these fears.
“I do think that if Marina had said yes, that might have
changed things,” she said.
Yeah, like she would have taken back a shitty dude. Oswald, it turns out, had left behind his wedding ring and
$187 (Marina recently auctioned it for $118,000). And as the Dallas
News thankfully adds to their story: Though Ruth Paine and Marina Porter are no longer friends and
haven’t been for decades, Paine also thinks it is a shit move to still ask the
question of what would’ve happened if Marina had said just said yes to Oswald’s
requests to get back together.
“I think
it’s very sad to go in that direction,” Paine said. “You need to know that
Oswald prepared a paper packet out of material he found at the School Book
Depository, material he wrapped the gun in. He clearly had decided that he was
going to do this. I have felt that it was totally unfair to blame her, and I
hope she doesn’t blame herself for saying no to him at that point.”
I hope so, too. Because she, and her children, have suffered enough. But that
hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorist debunker Gerald Posner — he wrote the
popular 1993 book Case Closed, the
JFK book that “cures”
people of their conspiracy theories — from stating that whether she could have stopped the assassination by simply staying with her dick husband remains “one of
the unanswered riddles of history.”
Would Kennedy have lived, had she
simply said yes to her husband’s requests?
I’m sure it
is the world’s biggest unanswered riddles — to you, dude. Yes, Marina
admitted that she has
lived with the guilt:
“Guilt, tried to prove that I am
worthy of this country, tried to go backwards to please people. … ‘Please like
me, I’m OK,'” she said.
“You learn to live not with the
guilt that you shed because you are you and you’re not responsible for
somebody’s doing, whether it’s your child or husband, gradually you get out of
that guilty conscience,” she said. “I’m sympathetic to Lee, many times, but I’m
also angry at him. He left me to swim in the dirty water. … So many times I
questioned: ‘Did he use me as well? Does he really care for me at all?'”
But the
thing is, Oswald was a known fabulist, a controlling, abusive guy, a story
corroborated by his
own friend, who describes him as incredibly threatened and temperamental.
Marina herself may have gone over that night in 1963 over and over again — such
is the right of all humans to dwell on their own fates — and it may still very
well be the “stone she could not get rid of,” but she also did what she thought was right for her and her children. And the idea that we should be speculating over whether
that choice was right 50 years later seems utterly
preposterous, proof of how out of hand the JFK thing still is.
And as this op-ed
on leaving the Oswald relatives alone points out:
We forget
that these were ordinary people: Marina, a frightened Russian emigre with two
small daughters and a crumbling marriage to a husband who seemed to be coming
unraveled. Robert Oswald, a Dallas brick salesman whose younger brother seemed
to be sinking under the weight of his own failures, delusions and frustrations.
… To his daughters, he is “Lee,” a stranger they can’t recall, a “father” only
by an accident of biology. And to
Marina Porter, he’s an odd, angry man to whom she was briefly married nearly a
lifetime ago.
So let’s make this anniversary be the first year of stopping this nonsense. Can’t we
just talk about all
the ladies JFK bagged instead?
