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The John Batchelor Show

THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION: 4/8: The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee by Paul R. Gregory

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

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4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2023

⏱️ 8 minutes

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THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION: 4/8: 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 Batson with Paul Gregory. My longtime colleague is the Hoover Institution, and Paul

0:10.0

and I have talked about this book for years. I've read pieces of it, and now that I have

0:14.1

the whole thing, I'm completely confounded. I thought I was figuring Lee Harvey Oswald

0:19.1

out in the bits and pieces that Paul and I had talked about over the years. When you

0:22.9

put it all together, there are leaps here that Lee Harvey Oswald, the immature, delusional,

0:29.4

arrogant, and extremely violent young man. He makes leaps that you can't see coming. If

0:35.5

Paul, if this was a novel, I would say it lacks verisimilitude. So let's get on to what

0:40.2

happens next. Your back at school is April of 1963. The Oswalds have been separated.

0:47.0

They've come back. I believe at one point Lee Harvey Oswald, Marina was living at a

0:52.0

friend's house. She'd been given a place by the Dallas Russians to hide from Lee's abusing.

0:59.4

He came by, got her in his knees, begged her to wept. She went back with him, but it's

1:04.0

now April of 1963. I believe they're living in Dallas. You'll help, my Paul. I believe

1:09.1

that at this point, they're living in Dallas. The night of April 10th, what does Lee do

1:15.0

that night and what does Marina make of it? That night, Lee did not come home with the

1:22.8

usual time. He came home very late, and he was visibly shaken. When she noticed that

1:33.8

he was not home at the normal time, she looked through his things and found a letter to

1:40.7

her, which contained written in Russian, very bad Russian, by the way, which gave her directions

1:50.8

as to what to do if he was not able to come home. As I recall, there were instructions

2:03.3

about a number of things financial and so forth. He eventually came home around 11. He

2:10.5

was quite agitated, very agitated, according to Marina. He confessed to her that he had attempted

2:20.5

to assassinate General Edwin Walker, who was a leader of the John Birch Society in the

2:27.1

Dallas area. He had fired a single shot. He did not know if he hit the target. Marina obviously

...

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