Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Oswald’s Relationship With His Wife

This section examines Oswald’s relationship with his wife Marina as a possible window into his motives. The Commission describes a stormy union: a brief courtship of about six weeks, a marriage partly motivated by Oswald’s desire to hurt a girl who had rejected him, and Marina’s possible hope that marriage to an American would let her leave the Soviet Union. Although relations appeared to improve somewhat after Oswald returned from Mexico, with Marina noting he “changed for the better” and was more attentive, the underlying tensions persisted. Oswald was described as overbearing, dictating many details of their life, striking his wife on occasion, opposing her drinking, smoking, and use of cosmetics, and apparently wanting her to remain unable to speak English so she could not build an independent American life. Marina, for her part, complained about Oswald’s inability to provide more material things, ridiculed his political views and grandiose self-image, and reportedly told friends that Oswald “was not a man” and that their sexual relations were unsatisfactory. Despite this, the period from Oswald’s return from Mexico until mid-November 1963 appears to have been relatively calm, until Marina asked him not to visit the Paine home the weekend of November 16–17 because Michael Paine was present and Oswald disliked him. The chapter also recounts the November 17, 1963 incident in which Oswald was not reached by a call placed under his real name because he was registered at his roominghouse under the alias O. H. Lee. Marina was angry about the alias, and Oswald justified it by claiming he feared the FBI, whose visits he claimed had cost him jobs and which he exaggerated as evidence of his own importance. The Commission concluded that this claimed FBI warning was another of Oswald’s fabrications, noting that Agent Hosty had not spoken to him between August 10, 1963, and the assassination and that Oswald’s account of his wife’s strong protest to the Bureau was largely invented.