By Michael Granberry


The British paparazzi have descended on this quiet community, where they recently marshaled forces to stalk a woman who lives on a winding farm road full of ranch-style homes, barbed-wire fences, 4-by-4s and chicken coops.
The Mirror, a racy Fleet Street tabloid, followed her to the nearest Wal-Mart, where, unbeknownst to her and her husband of nearly 50 years, they photographed and videotaped the two of them as they strolled to their car.
The shockingly invasive images popped up on the Internet last weekend and underscore dramatically why, for many reasons, this looms as an autumn of discontent for Marina Porter, who during her 72 years has lived with two other surnames — Prusakova and Oswald.
It’s the last one that has forever made this pharmacist-by-training born in Severodvinsk in the old Soviet Union a public figure, whether she wants to be or not.
It’s her former name — Oswald — that has forever chiseled this Rockwall retiree into the pages of history and defined her life as something that will never be truly private.
On March 17, 1961, on a dance floor in Minsk, Marina Prusakova locked eyes with a thin, wavy-haired young American, an ex-Marine who had already garnered international press attention for having defected to the Soviet Union. They were married barely a month later.
As a teenage bride of 19, Marina, her husband and their newborn daughter immigrated in June 1962 to the United States, where she would soon become a woman of infamy: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald.
Her husband, the Warren Commission concluded, assassinated president John F Kennedy on Elm Street in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Two days later, Oswald suffered a fatal gunshot in the basement of the police station, leaving behind three homeless survivors — Marina, then 22, and the couple’s tiny girls, June and Rachel. Soviet-born June was not yet 2; Rachel was barely a month old.
To this day, their mother remains a woman of mystery, a symbol of international intrigue, in no small part for having changed her story, first helping to convict her dead husband in the minds of most, then attempting to say he was framed.
She told the Warren Commission in 1964 that she believed her husband acted alone in killing the president and expounded on that in chilling detail in sharing her life story with author Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who wrote the 1977 dual biography, Marina and Lee.
“I would not describe her as an accomplice or even an accessory,” McMillan said. “She was a bystander. She didn’t have any idea what he was going to do.”
Her husband’s guilt or innocence notwithstanding, those who know her say the term “survivor” best describes Oswald’s widow.
“I think she’s been a very good mother in raising those kids,” said Hugh Aynesworth, author of the new book, November 22, 1963: Witness to History, who first met her in February 1964. Her children got a break, Aynesworth said, when she married Kenneth Porter in 1965. It allowed them to live their lives under a new identity.
“But still, going through school, they had some difficulties,” Aynesworth said.
All the while, their mother tried as hard as she could to live a normal life, working for more than 20 years, Aynesworth said, at the now-defunct Army Navy Surplus Store in the 4400 block of McKinney Avenue in the Uptown section of Dallas, just a few miles from where the president was killed.
Over the years, she began to speak openly about the possibility of a conspiracy masterminding his death, and in 1988, she said the presumed assassin was “not necessarily guilty of murder.” Aynesworth, who believes Oswald acted alone, credits money as the motive.
There is, he said, no financial reward in believing Oswald acted alone, but conspiracy theorists “have a lot of money. I probably sent her thousands of dollars from foreign journalists who want to know where she is. I’ve had them tell me they paid her in the range of $5,000.”
Twenty-five years ago, she shared her belief with Ladies Home Journal that Oswald “worked for the American government.” She also shared conspiratorial thoughts in a landmark interview with Oprah Winfrey.
In 1981, partnering with British barrister and famed conspiracy theorist Michael Eddowes, Oswald’s widow succeeded in having his body exhumed from Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth. The exhumation and subsequent examination contradicted their belief that the real Oswald was not the one buried in Fort Worth.
But even in espousing conspiracy, the storyline of her own role hasn’t changed.
Gerald Posner, who wrote the definitive lone-gunman book on the assassination, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, sees even the pro-conspiracy Marina “as a woman of integrity, because it would have been easy for her to mix up the historical record by lying.”
For instance, she never retracted the fact, Posner said, that it was she who photographed a proud Oswald holding his rifle, in the backyard of an Oak Cliff apartment complex where they were living months before the president’s death, and where, many have documented, he often struck her in the face.

* Part two will appear tomorrow