Priscilla McMillan — author knew both Kennedy, Oswald
Priscilla Johnson McMillan, believed to be the only person to have conversed extensively with both John F. Kennedy and his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, died July 7 at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 92.
Her niece HollyKatharine Johnson confirmed the death. She said McMillan had been in hospice care since injuring her spine in a fall several months ago.
Like nearly everyone, McMillan was shocked on Nov. 22, 1963, by reports that Kennedy had been killed. But walking through Harvard Square when she heard that the president — who was also her former boss — had been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, she was one of a very few who had another thought as well.
“My God,” she told a friend. “I know that boy.”
Several other people had briefly encountered both men, but McMillan had conferred with both. She had dealt with Kennedy in Washington as an adviser on Indochina in 1953, when he was a senator. And as a journalist, she had interviewed Oswald, a 20yearold disillusioned Marine veteran, in Moscow in 1959 about why he was defecting to the Soviet Union.
She would later spend seven months interviewing Oswald’s Russianborn widow, Marina, and 13 years researching and writing a book, “Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” which was published in 1977.
Marina Oswald received twothirds of the advance for the book and a share of the royalties.
Thomas Powers, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and author, wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “Marina and Lee” persuasively challenged conspiracy theories involving Cubans, Communists, American intelligence agents and multiple gunmen firing on the presidential motorcade from several locations.
Instead, Powers wrote, McMillan’s book made a convincing case that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman who “rationalized the assassination as a salutary shock for a complacent public” — although “his real motive emerges as a desperate desire to transcend the obscurity and impotence to which fate was inexorably confining him.”
“Other books about the Kennedy assassination are all smoke and no fire,” Powers continued. “‘Marina and Lee’ burns. If you can find the heart to read it, you may finally begin to forget the phantom gunmen on the grassy knoll.”
McMillan said she remembered Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the president’s sister, asking her at a Washington dinner party, “Why did Oswald hate my brother so?” To which she replied: “He didn’t. Oswald liked him. And he liked Jackie, too.”
But McMillan revealed Oswald as a confused, selftutored Marxist who had soured on the American government’s aggressive prosecution of the Rosenberg atom spy ring and its lax enforcement of civil rights, and on capitalism’s exploitation of workers like his mother.
McMillan later told the Christian Science Monitor that while Oswald never mentioned Kennedy in that 1959 interview, he indicated that he had no qualms about resorting to murder as a political weapon. “From our conversation,” she added, “I could see that he was a man capable of a whole lot.”
In addition to writing “Marina and Lee,” McMillan translated “Twenty Letters to a Friend” (1967), a memoir by Svetlana Alliluyeva, Josef Stalin’s daughter, who had defected to the United States, and wrote “The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race” (2005), about the scientist behind the atomic bomb who was falsely labeled a Soviet spy during the Red Scare of the 1950s.
Priscilla Mary Post Johnson was born July 19, 1928, in Locust Valley, New York, on Long Island, into a family descended from the Pilgrims. Her father, Stuart Holmes Johnson Sr., was a financier. Her mother, Mary Eunice (Clapp) Johnson, was a homemaker.
She attended the private Brearley School in Manhattan and graduated in 1950 from Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in Russian and was active in the World Federalist Society, which advocates democratic world government. She earned a master’s in Russian studies and Soviet law from Radcliffe College in 1953.
She married George McMillan, an author and journalist who covered the civil rights movement, in 1966. They divorced in 1982. He died in 1987. No immediate family members survive.
She worked as a translator and for Kennedy when he was a senator as an adviser on Asia (although she acknowledged that she was underqualified), and she remained in contact with him for several years after. She moved to the Soviet Union in 1955 but was expelled with other U.S. citizens after an American U2 spy plane was shot down over Russia in 1960; she would return there to live several times.
In an interview with the Atlantic in 2013, she said that when Oswald left the Soviet Union with his Russian wife and child, disillusioned with his adopted country’s bureaucracy, “They were glad to be rid of him. The Russians sized him up, very accurately, for what he was: a nut.”
Her 1959 interview with Oswald at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow, for an article for the North American Newspaper Alliance, began by quoting him: “For two years now I have been waiting to do this one thing. To dissolve my American citizenship and become a citizen of the Soviet Union.”
He added that he also had a larger life mission.
“I want,” Oswald said, “to give the people of the United States something to think about.”