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Do you think your father pulled the trigger?, Rachel was quiet for a moment. I hear they burn for murder. Americans are so spoiled. It sounds as if most people are not aware you're Lee Oswald's daughter. Then he sat down. There are a lot of assassination buffs who have analyzed all the technical data and the other available material and even they don't agree about what happened. Q: Your childhood doesn't sound like it was easy. Are they looking at me that way because of me or because Im the daughter of Lee Harvey Oswald?. By September 1963, Marina was pregnant with her second child and she moved the family back to Dallas, where they roomed in a boarding house, according to Spartacus Educational. Additionally, Marina learned English and became a citizen of the United States by naturalization in the year 1989. According to a 2013 New York Post report, she and her family were good neighbors who kept to themselves. When I reached him by phone at his home, he had the wary tone of a man who has spent half a century answering for someone else. Q: Did you ever take the so-called assassination tour? A: Not until recently. A: Yes and no. In addition, Marina lived there together with her mother and stepfather until the year 1957. The Oswalds had been my friends. After completing her English program, she left Michigan for good. He said that he had been in jail for hours doing this scene - that had been in handcuffs since dawn, that hed been beaten up and spit at - and that he had come to really empathize with what had happened to my father, and that now, looking at his wife and daughter, it really broke his heart to know what we had all gone through. Marina would understand what kind of man he really was. Mom would smoke all the time. Pete Gregory, the authors father, seated center left, translating as Secret Service agents questioned Marina Oswald days after the Kennedy assassination. She didn't feel like Kenneth was her dad. Her family eventually wound up in Minsk, at the time a part of the Soviet Union, but now part of the fully-independent Belarus. Since I hadn't gotten a response, I toyed with the idea that I might have to go public. Q: How did you feel about being singled out? In 1982, a national tabloid newspaper ran an unauthorized cover story on Rachel and her sister claiming, OSWALD KIDS DONT HAVE DOGS OR DATES. The word Oswald was stamped in red ink over photographs of the two girls. A special Presidents Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, better known as the Warren Commission because it was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, investigated from November 29, 1963, to September 24, 1964, and concluded that Oswald alone had fired the shots killing Kennedy and that there was no evidence that either Oswald or Ruby had been part of any conspiracy. A doctor pulled up the sheet to reveal the area in his torso where Jack Ruby shot him. Marina met Lee Harvey Oswald (a former U.S. Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union) at a dance on March 17, 1961. I didn't break down and cry or anything. In September he went to Mexico City, where, according to the Warren Commission, he tried vainly to get a visa for Cuba and to get Soviet permission to return to the U.S.S.R. I wrote her a response telling her as much, politely suggesting a few points about punctuation. poll, only a quarter of Americans believe that one man acted alone to kill Kennedy. We stayed with her for the summer. While that five-month period might seem fleeting, it was a significant period in Oswalds life. Q: Tell me about growing up in the aftermath of the assassination. She told me that there was going to be a movie made about the assassination and asked if I wanted to have lunch that afternoon with Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner - my mother didnt even know who they were - and I was thinking to myself, Oh, my gosh, Im going to have lunch with Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner! So we meet them at a Chinese restaurant. I arrived at Roberts house as the guests were leaving and then drove Lee, Marina and June back to our house. On April 10 in Dallas he allegedly shot at but missed an ultrarightist, Edwin A. Walker, a former army general. I didn't shoot anybody, no sir . In the year and a half after he returned to the United States, he moved several more times. ", I said I appreciate it, but I really don't get involved in that. Especially Oswald. And I'll tell you why: It could come up at any minute. As Priscilla Johnson McMillan writes in her book, Marina and Lee, the presidents route under Oswalds workplace might have convinced him that fate had provided a unique opportunity. In conversation, Rachel could be both reserved and outgoing, and though she speaks with a slow drawl, her dark eyes, high cheeks, and thick, heavy eyebrows make it clear she is of Slavic descent. So she became a sort of tourist attraction. These were lean times for the Oswalds, but they werent without hope. Take this, Lee told me. And then, they tell a story about how after that I stood up in front of the whole class and said, "My father shot the President." You try to be nice because you don't want to make somebody upset who's going to seek you out if they're kooky enough to do that stuff anyway. Earlier that morning, my father, a successful petroleum engineer, received a call from a young man who wanted certification of fluency in Russian. Do I need to be more compassionate' about it? Two months later, I peered into the mailbox of my student walk-up in Norman and extracted a penny postcard, which had been handwritten and posted two days earlier from 602 Elsbeth Street, Dallas. We were of interest to people. He wasn't much of a husband, he wasn't much of a father. By 1964,Marina Oswald Porter had put the Warren Commission behind her and was willing to take up Michigan's offer to learn English while receiving help from a local church, according to the University of Michigan Heritage Project. Marina waved goodbye from the steps. Now Lees voice rose again. Obviously, if I'd wanted to share that I would have told everyone a long time ago. He was never in the same place for long. Despite being attached to one of the most shocking crimes of its time, it seems that the people of America took pity on Marina. I do blame him for having beat my mother, and not being a good father or a good provider. "She and Ken are good people, the best neighbors you could ever have," said a neighbor, Fred McCurley. A: I remember what I did during that time-out was, I plotted how I could run for class president and win! At the same time, an ex-marine defector to the USSR returned the Ft. Worth with his wife and infant daughter. I did not call in the middle of the night however and I did not say I wished to sing my song to her. The Presidents were all around the walls in the rooms. I'm a strong woman, but I don't know if I could've kept myself together. During a trip to the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, Oswald exuded an air of optimism. I know you were just a toddler, but do you have any recollections of turbulence in the household? But it was still depressing, seeing my father shot every time I came to work.. Though pressured to change her name, she declined, saying she wanted to "face reality, not dodge it," according to a church newsletter. He avoided deportation by attempting suicide and was sent to Minsk, where he met Marina. Tippit, who believed that Oswald resembled the suspect already being described over the police radio. The assassination has also been a constant in the life of June Oswald Porter, the 33-year-old daughter of Lee Harvey Oswald. After her testimony, she did, in fact, go to Michigan, although not everyone in the Wolverine State was happy to have her there. She took on the name Marina Oswald Porter, and the family moved to Richardson, Texas. We were studying the Presidents. I drive a beat-up car. (In the past, I saw baby June sleep on a blanket atop a suitcase.) Fifty years later, I would love to ask Marina Oswald Porter why that Time magazine never moved, what happened when Lee received my letter in Dallas and why she has continued to make her home so near the place where tragedy struck. Every day we present the best quotes! I was certainly relieved to hear that the Oswalds were doing well, and I assumed, from the spelling and punctuation mistakes, that Marina had written the letter and was getting the hang of English. He kept a journal, which he labeled Historic Diary. When he, Marina and little June touched down at Love Field, on June 14, 1962, he greeted his brother Robert by asking where the reporters were. Q: I'm sure there must have been a lot of unusual incidents as you were growing up. Included as an exhibit for the Warren. However, her other body measurements including weight, eye color, and hair color are still being looked at and will be updated once they are available. Kate O'Brien (Christa Miller) - Friends with Drew, Lewis, and Oswald since they were kids. He dressed for the occasion, as I remember it, in dark slacks and a white shirt, but when we arrived, he motioned for Marina and me to wait at a distance while he had a whispered consultation with the woman at a desk. ___________________________________________, Reminds me of Elvis Costello's song "Watching The Detectives.". When I was reading the interview with June and she made the comment abouty getting the, call from someone who had written a song at first I was a little jarred. After a short while, he concluded that he would do whatever he could for this young woman, even if that meant helping her husband, who had sulked off to the den, waiting to be called to the table. But we all knew it would also greatly benefit their ability to run errands. I never saw them again. Oswald killed Tippit with his mail-order revolver (1:15 pm). But as a true patriot of his adopted country, he was wary of her husband for leaving the U.S. for the Soviet Union. I don't think it's relevant to anything we do here and I appreciate you keeping it to yourself." Marina did her best to disappear into obscurity once the dust had settled on her husband's crimes and subsequent murder. Q: One can't help but notice that you address him as "Lee.". When I read the script, I was really angry. As we drove, I began telling them about how I met Oswald, the evenings driving around Fort Worth, the Dallas Russians and how a college kid got caught up with an accused assassin. (At the time, I didnt realize he hadnt graduated from high school.) The first time I met Gary, she said, I was visiting my mother in Dallas. Lee was intelligent, but he was no genius. My biggest concern was that people at the office had my home address and phone number and I didn't want it leaked to The National Enquirer I have two small children, I'm divorced, I didn't want people to harass the kids. From nearly the moment I met Lee Harvey Oswald, it seemed that he felt the world had sized him up wrong. Most Americans believe that Oswald shot Kennedy. Meller would not let him off the hook, though. I always feel torn by whether I'm required to tell somebody about my history. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lee-Harvey-Oswald, Spartacus Educational - Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, Academia - Timeline of the Life of Lee Harvey Oswald, National Archives - Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Sacrifice, Revolution, Certain. But I don't remember that. Porter was born on the 17th day of July in the year 1941 in Severodvinsk, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. As they ordered their lunch, my father tried to engage Oswald about his wife and life in contemporary Russia, but the young man volunteered little about how a former Marine and Fort Worth resident could end up in Minsk other than to say enigmatically that he had gone to the Soviet Union on my own. Upon parting, Oswald offered the address and telephone number of his brother Robert, with whom he and his wife were staying, just in case anything came up. During one of Lees lectures about Castros Cuba, Marina, who had lived her whole life under Communism, interrupted to say that the Soviet Union was foolishly spending its precious resources to prop up Cuba. he asked in his Texas-Russian accent, still half-asleep. I guess they decided we must be a certain way and then wrote it. He tracked me down. (Rachel went on to graduate from nursing school and find a job in the field.) It was hilarious. Alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, son of Marguerite Frances Claverie Oswald. John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The name of Bader's character is an obvious reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman who assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Probably the only other people in America who have to routinely see film images of their father being killed are the children of President Kennedy. She blew a long stream of smoke toward the ceiling, Kinda strange, huh?. One guy I told actually thought I was crazy. His cartridge cases were also found a few feet away from the body of a murdered policeman on the route of his flight. Q: Did you see the "Seinfeld" episode in which they're at the ballpark, and they get spat upon, and-. The other thing is, you just worry genealogically: Lee was illegitimate, and so was my mother. (June has requested that her married name, which she still uses in business, not be printed), Despite privacy concerns, she's pushing for the release of all records pertaining to the assassination. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for John F Kennedy Lee Harvey Oswald mother Margaret Oswald signed about 6x9 Picture at the best online prices at eBay! He sold an article for an astronomical amount back then - I think it was $25,000. Or who my father was?. I can't imagine the burden they've carried over the years, but I hope they have found some peace in their lives. I found this on page 182 of the forum, well worth a read. Smallpox vaccination card, dated June 8, 1963. By While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Lee Harvey Oswald was a former U.S. Marine who was accused of killing President John F. Kennedy. One day, my mother sat my sister and me down on our big green couch and told us that the man who had raised us as our father - our stepfather, Kenneth - was not, you know, our real father, that our real fathers name was Lee Oswald and that he had, well, that he had been accused of killing the president of the United States., Rachel smiled. Oswald has three children, two daughters, and one son. Marina Oswald Porter Daughter | Children. In my book she belongs where her husband is. The next Tuesday, at around 6 p.m., Marina invited me in for my first lesson. I don't blame him for not being here for me. . . I'm sure he will respond. He himself was fatally shot two days later by Jack Ruby (1911-67) in the Dallas County Jail. Bouhe was impressed that Marina spoke educated Russian and that her grandmother had attended an exclusive girls school. At about 1:45 pm Oswald was seized in the Texas Theatre by police officers responding to reports of a suspect. My family tried to put those tragic events behind us, but over the ensuing decades, as I became an academic and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, I felt compelled to combine my memories and the historical record to present my own sense of Oswald. didnt want to recruit Oswald. However, Marinas husband Lee Harvey was later arrested in 1963 after the 35th president of the United States of America, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered. Because that's mostly what I think of when I think of Lee. Priscilla was a CIA asset, IMHO, as was June Cobb in Cuba. But I still have problems in that area, because I date a lot. So Lee Harvey Oswald the man who the Warren Commission Report concluded was JFK's pro-Communist, pro-Castro lone nut assassin had been an active-duty Marine who had volunteered to risk his life in a CIA program using fake defectors to infiltrate the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Marina also disclosed that her grandmother was religious, which was particularly pleasing to Bouhe because he organized Russian Orthodox services in Dallas. A single armed detective patrolled the grounds as Marina chain-smoked and drank coffee and was asked questions about Lees rifle, a photo of him holding the assassination weapon and his various associates. Wish there were more, by the family of Lee. By all accounts, she was a devoted mom to her two daughters by Oswald - June (now 51) and Rachel (now 50), who told The ENQUIRER: "Yes," when asked if she believes her father was innocent. A few of the regulars.. Marina and Lee Oswald had two children, Rachel and June. Thirteen months later, in June 1962, he was able to return to the United States with his wife and three-month-old daughter, June Lee. Marina Oswald and her mother-in-law, Marguerite Claverie Oswald, are seen through a window at the Dallas police station where her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald was being held in the. Marina Oswald had become the most wanted witness in America. So this little boy she was going with, his parents were going to come get her and they were going to go to the dance. All the while, Marguerite insisted that her son should be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and Robert patiently set out to find a funeral home that would bury the man accused of being the presidents assassin. And she said, "June Oswald?" And I realize that I'm kind of cold about it, so how do I tell them? Lost in the shuffle was Oswald's widow, Marina Oswald. And she recalls her childhood as a "pretty happy" time, thanks in large part to her stepfather. On November 22, 1963, Oswald shot and killed Kennedy from a room in the very building where he worked. the whole pattern of failure throughout most of his 23 years led to the outbursts of violence in April and the final tragedy in November 1963.. 17 Copy quote. We were terribly moved by this. He was back in America with a beautiful wife and an adorable daughter; his life ahead promised more study and a possible university degree; a publisher would surely understand the value of his memoir, and he could use it as a platform to further the socialist causes in which he believed. Soon after I arrived with the Oswalds, Marina and Bouhe repaired to the living room. The bars decor consists chiefly of scuffed wooden tables, and junkyard scraps nailed to the walls - rusted license plates, cow skulls, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a hand-scrawled sign above the cash register noting that Tipping is not a city in China. Old Life magazine photographs used to hang on the walls, including one of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. As the summer drew to a close, before I returned to Norman for my senior year at O.U., I went to the Oswalds for my final language lesson. The writers never talked to me or my sister about our lives. And I said, "Yes?" What do I tell them? Within this morass of facts, however, there is a central actor: Lee Harvey Oswald. What Happened To Lee Harvey Oswald's Wife? But anonymity exacted a curious price of its own, as June faced myriad graceless references to her father, mother and family. Moreover, the widow was under Secret Service protection until she finished giving her testimony before the Warren Commission. As I was leaving their house, he raced to the bedroom and returned with a faded pocket English-Russian dictionary that he used during his time in Minsk. He was too difficult and unreliable. A: The first time l saw it l was very upset, but it gets to the point where it almost becomes unreal, this movie you're watching that has very little to do with you as a person. His voice rose, but what came out were canned slogans he left because capitalism was a terrible system, it exploited the workers, the poor got nothing and so forth. By October, Oswald had found his own room and, with the help of Marina's landlady, had found work at the Texas School Book Depository. Around 11 a.m., with the temperature climbing into the 90s, a slight, 22-year-old Oswald arrived, drenched with sweat and wearing a wool suit. The following day, an agent named Mike Howard picked my father up and . Give directly to The Spokesman-Review's Northwest Passages community forums series -- which helps to offset the costs of several reporter and editor positions at the newspaper -- by using the easy options below. Days afterward, Lee Harvey Oswald was himself shot and killed by Jack Ruby, as History reports, setting into motion decades of conspiracy theories that maybe there was more to the narrative than meets the eye. This is material I never would have known about insofar as my mother's side of the family, because my mother was illegitimate, you know. Believe it or not, a couple of guys at UT refused to ask me out again after I told them about my dad. I don't think that's true. Can there be any American who, having failed to gain stature while he was alive, now haunts us more than Lee Harvey Oswald, asks Norman Mailer in "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery." November 19 . As for what his exact role in the assassination was - well, he'll have to be judged for that before God. By found it I meant that I was looking back through the forum pages and this was posted first in 2004 so I decided to bring it back up to peoples attention. MORE THAN 30 YEARS AFTER the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald is a name that will not go away. The discouragements and disappointments beginning in his childhood, continuing through the school years and the years in the Marines, the death of his dream of a new life in Russia, the boring jobs back in the United States, which made it impossible to support Marina adequately and gain some recognition as a man . A: Something had come up where Mom had old boxes of letters out. After a couple of months of lessons, my parents Russian migr circle became curious about my new friends. That rage would resurface later that month as we exited the duplex one evening. The public was prohibited from Rose Hill Cemetery, and no friends or other relatives showed up.. I will be glad to discuss this proposition with my attorney, and that after I talk with one, we could either discuss it with him or discuss it with my attorney, if the attorney thinks it is a wise thing to do, but at the present time I have nothing more to say to you. She apparently didn't know much, but her testimony was enough to convince the commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The wall build around Oswald's family women was intense after Dallas. While staying with her uncle she also studied pharmacy. Q: What is the status of your present-day identity? Reporters came over and she would tell us, "shhhh, go in the other room". Eventually, she retired. When we pulled up to the house on Davenport Street, we were greeted warmly by Robert Oswald, a tall and well-spoken man, who had served in the Marines and was working his way up to management at Acme Brick Company. The Secret Service first knocked on my parents' door at 3 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 23, 1963. And they got my mother on television in a live interview - she still doesn't have a good grasp of the language - and they were asking her specific questions about this book. They had so little in Minsk anyway, she said, why waste money on a faraway nation that offered her fellow citizens little besides expensive sugar? (He often did so, almost humorously, with a smile on his face.) She was pretty strong. On the Saturday morning after Kennedy was killed, I was sitting in my small apartment in Norman when a Secret Service agent and the local chief of police arrived and took me some 20 miles down I-35 to Oklahoma City for questioning. Marguerite Claverie, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, was born in New Orleans in 1907,1 into a family of French and German extraction. But there are still people who refuse to believe that I could be normal. Lee explained to his wife in Russian that he had invited over a pair of fellow Russian speakers as a favor. Mom accused me one day of being ashamed of who I was. And it was there that my father told Marina, in Russian, that her husband just died. In fact, Bouhe noted, he had arranged English lessons for many Russian migrs; he could do the same for her. Im just a regular person. A: Kenneth. I went on a car trip up to the house I had lived in with Lee, Lee's boarding house, another house Mom had lived in with Lee that's still standing, the path of the motorcade, where the bullets hit. As our first session came to an end, we decided that future lessons would take the form of my driving the Oswalds around town and having Marina correct my practical Russian as I pointed out landmarks. The bartenders were closing up, and Rachel said she needed to call it a night. They said it would depreciate the value of their home. Sometime shortly thereafter, the Soviets changed their. Marina asked her husband why he would attempt to murder someone: "I mean how dare you to go and claim somebody's life," she reportedly said. Marguerite, on the other hand, was having a fit; she refused to be sent out to the sticks, as she put it. She copied it and put it on all my staff's desks. She shrugged. www.imdb.com. Oh great!" I asked what it was like being named Oswald and growing up so close to Dallas. In January 1979 a special U.S. House of Representatives Assassinations Committee, after a two-year investigation, reported that a second assassin may also have fired a shot and that there may have been a conspiracy. Left: Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife, Marina, are seen aboard a train as they depart Russia in 1962. My first serious boyfriend -that's what he was fascinated about. I think Lee was this 24-year-old guy, this youngster, who got himself in over his head. She had long admired the first lady and asked her husband to translate any magazine articles she could find about the president. Sometimes when the cheerleading squad went to football games in different towns, people in the stands would shout stuff at me - you know, Your daddy shot Kennedy or Good thing your daddys dead and buried. But mostly things were pretty normal. She needed a translator fast. Cuban intelligence officers, a K.G.B. Dating was a little tricky, she said. Moreover, she has an average body weight judging from her pictures. "Please get her away from Michigan. I dont think anybody I worked with ever thought twice about it, Rachel Oswald said. Both interviews I found in the JFK collection at the Dallas Public Library last November. Fight over Lee Harvey Oswald's crumbling casket USA TODAY 2.45M subscribers Subscribe 458 94K views 8 years ago Michael Cohen, Trump's former attorney, testifies publicly for the first time.