Lee Harvey Oswald is known for killing John F. Kennedy,
but why did his widow say he didn't do it? And what happened to her after she made that claim?
Marina Prusakova was born in 1941, in the Russian city of Molotovsk.
Her family eventually wound up in Minsk, at the time a part of the Soviet Union,
but now part of the fully-independent Belarus. It was in Minsk that, in 1959, she met an American,
Lee Harvey Oswald, who had defected to the USSR — at the height of the Cold War, when
tensions between the U.S. and the Soviets were running high. The couple wed within a few weeks,
and eventually had a daughter. However, not long after their marriage, Oswald became disillusioned
with life in the USSR, and the family returned to the U.S., living in Dallas and New Orleans.
It was during these months after moving back to the U.S. that Marina, now known as Marina
Oswald, learned of her husband's violent proclivities. In 1963, according to Marina,
her husband tried to assassinate General Edwin Walker, a far-right politician,
while the family was living in New Orleans. The Warren Commission would later confirm that
Oswald attempted to assassinate the general. 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. At the time, Oswald was traveling in his attempts to advance
his political goals, although whether that led to estrangement or if the couple just lived in
separate homes for the sake of convenience, isn't clear. 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.
Then, on November 22, 1963, in one of the most shocking crimes in the 20th century, Oswald shot
and killed President John F. Kennedy, from a room in the very building where Oswald worked.
"Two priests who were with President Kennedy say he is dead of bullet wounds."
Days afterward, Lee Harvey Oswald was himself shot and killed by Jack Ruby, setting into motion
decades of conspiracy theories that maybe there was more to the narrative than meets the eye.
Lost in the shuffle was Marina Oswald. As the University of Michigan Heritage Project notes,
she was only 22 years old, with two young children,
when she was widowed. She wasn't just a widow, however. She was a widow with
two preschool-aged children and limited English. And the feds wanted to talk.
Despite being attached to one of the most shocking crimes of its time,
it seems that the people of America took pity on Marina. According to the University
of Michigan Heritage Center, the plight of the widow, with two preschoolers to feed,
tugged at the heartstrings. Soon enough she'd received donations of food, clothing,
and cash totaling $70,000 – the equivalent of over $600,000 in 2022 dollars — as well
as an offer to come to Michigan to learn English and live with a family there.
First, however, the Warren Commission wanted to talk to her, and the feds,
on learning that she was a Soviet, made it clear that she'd be on
the first plane back to Minsk if she didn't tell them everything she knew.
Though her testimony was enough to convince the Warren Commission that Lee acted alone,
later in her life Marina expressed her doubts about her husband's guilt. In 1977,
she told reporters at a press conference about her book Marina and Lee that she believed
her husband was guilty. According to the Washington Post, she said,
"I can never forget or forgive what he did, to me and to my children,
to the president and his family, to the whole world."
However, a decade later, she told Ladies Home Journal that she believed the Warren
Commission pressured her to implicate her husband. She said at the time,
"Their questioning left me only one way to go: guilty. I made Lee guilty."
"Well he definitely did not fire the shots."
By 1964, Marina 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. Afterward, Marina did
her best to disappear into obscurity. In 1965, Marina married a carpenter named Kenneth Porter.
She took on the name Marina Oswald Porter, and the family moved to Richardson, Texas.
Over the years, though, Marina began to shy away from making public statements about
her deceased husband. According to a 2013 New York Post report, she and her family were good
neighbors who kept to themselves. Today, Marina Oswald Porter is 81 years old.