The life of a solitary gunman.

The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee

The Kennedy assassination still provokes heated disagreement about who really killed the president and how the event should be understood. Who was Oswald? Was he capable of carrying out such an act? If so, what were his motives? Was he part of a conspiracy to murder the president?

Paul R. Gregory provides answers to these questions in The Oswalds, a personal memoir of his relationship with Lee and Marina Oswald during the summer of 1962 when the couple had few American friends or acquaintances. At that time, Gregory was an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma studying economics and Russian, and Oswald had only recently arrived back in the United States with his Russian wife after his earlier defection to the Soviet Union.

Gregory’s Relationship with the Oswalds

Gregory met the Oswalds through his father, a member of the tight-knit Russian community in the Dallas area, whom Oswald approached as someone who might certify that he was fluent in Russian so that he might find work as a translator. The younger Gregory visited the Oswalds twice per week through that summer in their small apartment while taking Russian instruction from Marina and helping the couple adjust to their new surroundings.

He took them on shopping errands (Oswald did not have access to a car) and drove the couple on sightseeing trips through the area. He was aware of Oswald’s Marxist leanings but saw no signs at the time that he might act on those beliefs.

Gregory, along with his father, introduced the Oswalds to the Russian community in Dallas, a generally professional, conservative, and anti-communist group (not Oswald’s kind of crowd). The Russian Americans responded warmly to Marina but took a disliking to Oswald, who refused to answer questions about why he defected to the Soviet Union and why he had returned to the United States.

In the months that followed, they looked for opportunities to help Marina but preferred to avoid dealing with Lee. Marina and Lee had starkly different personalities and temperaments, so much so that Gregory wondered how they could have been married in the first place.

Oswald’s Motives

Gregory’s overall assessment of the event is hardly novel: He agrees with the main outlines of the Warren Commission report and with Priscilla McMillan’s conclusions about Oswald in her authoritative biography, Marina and Lee (1977), written with Marina’s cooperation. McMillan similarly concluded that Oswald shot President Kennedy for personal, not ideological, reasons.

This latter point is an aspect of The Oswalds that is still open to debate. Oswald might have been a “jerk” or a “nut,” but he was also a communist and a dedicated one at that. That combination may have made him a more lethal threat to American leaders than the run-of-the mill outsider or the arm-chair Marxist. He looked for opportunities to act on his beliefs.

Gregory recounts in his book many of the facts that might point to ideological motives in the assassination. Oswald, after all, defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, denouncing America and capitalism in the process, and promising the Soviets that he would turn over secret military information that he acquired during his stint in the Marines. He returned in 1962 disillusioned with the Soviet system but now intrigued with third-world revolutionaries like Castro, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh.

Oswald stepped up his political activities toward the end of 1962, perhaps in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. From that time forward, he invested disproportionate energies in political intrigues.

In early 1963, Oswald ordered a rifle by mail for the purpose of assassinating Gen. Edwin Walker, the head of the John Birch Society in Dallas, then in the news for opposing desegregation in the schools and demanding an American invasion of Cuba to overthrow Castro.