THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION: 2/8: The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee by Paul R. Gregory
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2023
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
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THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION: 2/8: The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee by Paul R. Gregory
https://www.amazon.com/Oswalds-Untold-Account-Marina-Lee/dp/1635768217
Merely two hours after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, television cameras captured police escorting a suspect into Dallas police headquarters. Meanwhile at the University of Oklahoma, watching the coverage in the student center, Paul Gregory scanned the figure in dark trousers and a white, V-neck tee shirt and saw the bruised and battered face of Lee Harvey Oswald. Shocked, Gregory said, “I know that man.” In fact, he knew Oswald and his wife Marina better than almost anyone in America.
After sixty years, Paul Gregory finally tells everything he knows about the Oswalds and how he watched the soul of a killer take shape.
Identified by the FBI as a “known associate of LHO,” Gregory soon faced interrogations by the Secret Service. Later he would testify before the Warren Commission. Here, in The Oswalds, he offers the intimate details of his time spent with Lee and wife Marina in their run-down duplex on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth, Texas, and his admission into the inner world of a young marriage before candidly assessing the murder that marked a turning point in our country’s history. His riveting recollection includes memories both casual and deadly serious, such as the dinner at his parents’ house introducing Marina to the “Dallas Russians,” a front-yard incident of spousal abuse, and a further rift in the marriage when he exposed to Marina that Oswald was not the dashing, radical intellectual whose Historic Diary would be a publishing sensation. And Gregory also gives a fascinating account of his father’s role as an eyewitness to history, serving as Marina’s translator and confidante in the first four days after the assassination.
As a scholar and skilled researcher, Gregory debunks the vast array of assassination conspiracy theories by demonstrating that Lee Harvey Oswald did it and did it alone—that the Oswald he once called a friend had the motive, the intelligence, and the means to commit one of the most shocking crimes in American history.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchler. Paul Gregory is the author of the new book, The Oswalds. The word |
| 0:11.0 | shilling is inadequate because we're about to understand who Lee Oswald was from the |
| 0:16.6 | point of view of people who tried to help him, tried to help Marina, tried to help their |
| 0:21.8 | daughter, their baby daughter, June, and eventually their baby daughter, Rachel, helped them |
| 0:26.2 | all in Fort Worth and Dallas for more than a year. It begins with Pete Gregory, who is |
| 0:33.4 | a refugee from the Soviet creature many years before in the 1920s, but he's now well-employed |
| 0:41.3 | and sophisticated and a volunteer of Russian teaching at the Fort Worth Public Library. |
| 0:48.6 | One of his students, he does not know the name. One of his students gives him a call eventually |
| 0:54.9 | or suggests to her son, Lee Harvey Oswald, that he's a person to look to because he's |
| 1:01.2 | a Russian speaker who can translate easily. Lee Harvey Oswald has arrived in town after |
| 1:08.0 | a troubled history and is seeking employment. The Texas Employment Office, well-meaning |
| 1:16.2 | and spontaneously, calls up Peter Gregory and asks if he'll interview this young man, |
| 1:23.8 | see if his Russian skills are adequate. Paul, can you can you remind us what your father |
| 1:29.8 | first made of Lee Harvey Oswald when he walked into that heavy wool suit in June of 62? |
| 1:39.8 | Well, the my recollection is that Lee did come in and he brought with him perhaps a manuscript |
| 1:51.9 | of his historic diary which he was trying to get published and he wanted my father's |
| 1:59.2 | support on that. But anyway, Lee came to my father's office and presented himself as |
| 2:10.6 | a Russian speaker who had spent time actually three years in Minsk, USSR. My father had |
| 2:22.4 | a Russian book section in his office so he picked it random, a book, I don't know, it was |
| 2:30.6 | probably about Siberia and asked Lee to translate. And he was surprised that this young guy |
| 2:40.1 | spoke quite passable and fluent Russian. He thought that perhaps Lee was a pole or a |
| 2:50.9 | Latvian, these are satellites or worse satellites where the population spoke Russian but it |
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