Priscilla Johnson McMillan graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1950 and received a master's degree in Russian Studies from Harvard-Radcliffe. In 1953 she went to work for Senator John F. Kennedy. In late 1959, she was working as a reporter in Moscow when she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald, who was trying to defect to the Soviet Union. In the years after JFK's assassination, she befriended Marina Oswald and spent many months at her side, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews, in order to gather the primary source material that would become the foundation for her magisterial book. She would spend another 13 years researching and writing before first publishing Marina and Lee in 1977. She received a MacArthur grant in research and writing for work on her next book, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (Viking, 2005).
“This classic of the JFK assassination literature . . . unfolds
like a Russian novel with an American ending, a tale of galling
social constraints, claustrophobic relationships and thwarted
ambitions that birth a monstrous drive for self-assertion. Oswald
is the most vivid of many sharply etched characters—arrogant,
grandiose, calculating but feckless, his narcissism fed by Marxist
dogma and Cold War paranoia, seizing a chance to shoot his way from
failure to fame.” —Publishers Weekly
“More than three decades after its initial publication, Marina
and Lee remains the single best book ever written about the
Kennedy assassination. No one has managed to weave the
psychological, political and fateful strands of this crime with the
power and perspicacity displayed here by Priscilla McMillan. This
is a book that will leave you deeply shaken and continually
haunted.” —Thomas Mallon, author of Mrs. Paine's
Garage and A Book of One's Own
“McMillan achieves with art what the Warren Commission failed to do
with its report. She makes us see . . . It is not at all easy to
describe the power of Marina and Lee . . . It is far
better than any other book about Kennedy . . . Other books about
the Kennedy assassination are all smoke and no fire. Marina
and Lee burns.” —New York Times Book Review
“Because Priscilla McMillan is a superb narrator and a superior
scholar, her book has all the power of a first-class novel, and all
the austerity of excellent scholarship. It is even more than that.
It answers . . . the questions: Did Lee Harvey Oswald murder John
Kennedy, was he alone in the act, and why did he do it? . . . The
answers are all there, and they all make sense.” —Chicago
Tribune
“McMillan has done us the service of pointing out just how deeply
the enemy lives within us. One closes her book pondering the odds
that America has a sociological victim like Oswald on every block.
Compared to this, the conspiracy question looks incidental. The
question is not how many assassins can dance on the head of a pin,
but what makes one dance, given a particularly ugly set of human
circumstances at birth?” —The New Republic
“Fully as persuasive as the conspiracy lore that has preceded
it…[McMillan] has a novelist’s sense of when to dramatize, through
dialogue and the use of exact detail, the crucial twists and turns
of domestic life . . . Priscilla McMillan’s extraordinary book
makes the necessary and subtle connection between private frailties
and their power to change the history of the world.” —The
Atlantic Monthly
“Richly detailed and absorbing….Marina and Lee may be the closest
we will ever get to understanding the mind of John F. Kennedy’s
assassin.” —Newsday
“Not likely to be surpassed . . . a compelling story told with a
mature authority. Without detracting from the horror of the
act, it forces us to confront the human face of the
assassin.” —New York Post
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