[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

about my welfare.” 178 On the final day of the interview, Marguerite visited her son’s
grave on Mother’s Day, and declared “Let’s have a little defense of Lee Harvey Oswald!
On Mother’s Day, let’s come out and say that he died in the service of his country.” 179
Other family members had negative things to say about Oswald.
His wife, Marina, recounted an abusive relationship with her husband. Their
married life was the focus of journalist and Soviet scholar Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s
1977 account, Marina and Lee, which was largely based on the author’s exclusive series
of interviews with Marina. The cover of the book is a strange heart-shaped valentine,
with Lee, the accused assassin, on the right half of the heart in red and Marina, his bride,
on the left-half in yellow. As a young reporter in Moscow, McMillan had interviewed
Oswald as well when the U.S. embassy tipped her off that he was trying to defect.
McMillan found the ex-Marine’s “words to be bitter” even though his tone was “level
and expressionless.” 180 She also found his reason for defecting strange: there were few
people seeking to immigrate to the Soviet Union from the United States for ideological
reasons at that time. McMillan stated that she wrote her book to try to answer “the
question that puzzles many people even today. Why?” 181 That is in fact the classic
question for the post-Warren Commission authors who believe the lone gunman theory.
The author added that she also wanted to try “to reconcile the quiet, rather gentle ‘Lee’”
178
Stafford, 93.
179
Stafford, 106.
180
Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Marina and Lee, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 70.
181
McMillan, 6.
85