The Oswalds

October 10, 2022
Gregory (Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives), a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, examines in this disappointing memoir the role of Lee Harvey Oswald in the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the summer of 1962, a Texas employment agency sent Oswald to the office of Gregory’s father, who taught Russian at the Fort Worth public library, for certification that he was fluent in Russian. Later, Gregory’s father introduced his 21-year-old son to Oswald’s Russian wife, Marina, who tutored him in Russian to help him pass a college minor. Gregory visited the couple at their Fort Worth apartment from June through mid-September, where he witnessed Oswald’s need for control: “Lee kept Marina in isolation.” Though Gregory last saw the couple in the fall of 1962, a year before the assassination, he suspected that Oswald murdered Kennedy because he wanted “to become a part of history.” Gregory’s narrative, which leans on his personal observations to assess Oswald’s character and motives, leaves important questions unanswered; for example, he never explains why Oswald didn’t confess in the two days between his arrest and his murder by Jack Ruby, if his motive was to become infamous. This thin account adds little to a much scrutinized subject. Agent: Peter Bernstein, Bernstein Literary.