Happier days: Marina with husband, and president’s Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Oswald, in Minsk.

By Michael Granberry


Marina Porter did not recant her testimony about knowing that it was Lee Oswald, who attempted to kill General Edwin Walker in the Turtle Creek section of Dallas in April 1963.
“She’s in a position,” Posner said, “where so many of her dealings with Lee were one-on-one. All she needs to do if she wants to be a mischief maker in history is recant one of those.”
Were she to do so, most historians would not believe her, Posner said, “but it would set the conspiracy industry on fire. She has never done that, and that’s to her credit.” She also “never cashed in,” he said, in a gaudy, dramatic way, a la 21st-century pop culture.
“You never saw the Oswalds as a show,” he said. “You never saw Marina on reality television. Anything that would have been tawdry or Kardashian-like, she avoided. She had a name that could have been utilised by someone with much lower standards in the desire to chase a dollar.”
The Marina who has lived most of her adult life in North Texas is the mother of three children. Her son Mark, whose father is Kenneth Porter, lives in East Texas. June lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Rachel in the Midwest.
Like their mother, the children have built a wall of secrecy that attempts to shield them from the onslaught of history but never quite does. Rachel, who bears a close resemblance to her father, gave an interview to Texas Monthly in 1995 in which she discussed being Oswald’s daughter. At the time, she was working as a waitress at the Texas Chili Parlor in Austin.
“I didn’t know my family was any different until I was about 7,” said Rachel. “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 father’s name was Lee Oswald and that he had, well, that he had been accused of killing the president of the United States. This helped explain why our school bus was sometimes followed by news teams, why our mailbox got shot at, why kids at school would ask, ‘Did your daddy shoot the president?’ At home we rarely discussed Lee. We were just trying to be a normal family.”
Several weeks ago, Marina’s husband, Kenneth Porter, politely declined The News’ request for an interview.
“We just want to put 1963 behind us,” he said. But, of course, his wife will never be able to leave behind 1963.
In November of that year, Marina and Lee were estranged. She was living with Ruth Paine, an Irving, Texas, housewife battling the pain of her own failed marriage. Oswald spent weeknights in an Oak Cliff rooming house while working at the Texas School Book Depository.
“I just feel she was a young mother trying hard to have her husband be someone who could support her, but he wasn’t that,” said Paine, now 81. “And she was very frightened by what she called his fantasies. We learned just the weekend before the assassination that he had been using an assumed name” at the Oak Cliff rooming house, where he was known as OH Lee. “She was so disturbed over that.”
It was Oswald’s pattern in those days to spend Friday through Sunday at Paine’s house, with Marina and the girls. So, it was surprising to Paine when she drove home from work on Thursday night, November 21, 1963, to find Oswald in the front yard playing with Paine’s young son.
The ensuing night has remained forever shrouded in assassination folklore, because of Marina’s role in what happened next.
Despite the fact that, unbeknownst to Paine, Oswald had been hiding his rifle in her garage, and would leave with it the next morning in a cylindrical brown paper package, he spent his final night with his wife pleading for a new beginning.
He tried to kiss her more than once, but she rebuffed him. He pleaded for the two of them to get back together, and still, she rebuffed him.
The next morning, he left behind his wedding ring — which Marina recently auctioned for $108,000 — and $187 in cash. Within hours, the president was dead.
Over the years, Marina has expressed to such journalists as Mike Cochran of The Associated Press her lingering fear that her rejection of Oswald the night before may have accelerated the assassination or at least failed to prevent it.
Posner finds the question intriguing.
“Why would Oswald have had such an emotional discussion with her the night before if he wasn’t serious?” the author asked. Author McMillan agrees, saying, “I do think that if Marina had said yes ... Yes, that might have changed things.”
But as the other woman in the house that night, Paine deems such a conclusion unfair, despite the fact that Marina ended their once-close friendship by disappearing from Paine’s life forever less than 48 hours later.
“I think it’s very sad to go in that direction,” Paine said. “You need to know that Oswald prepared a paper packet out of material he found at the School Book Depository, material he wrapped the gun in. He clearly had decided that he was going to do this. I have felt that it was totally unfair to blame her, and I hope she doesn’t blame herself for saying no to him at that point.”
And yet, Posner said, it remains one of the unanswered riddles of history. Would Kennedy have lived, had she simply said yes to her husband’s requests?
The answer, of course, will never be known. — The Dallas Morning News/MCT