Facing the Bad

Marina Oswald on the stand

When directed to give her name, the pencil-thin, brown-haired woman in the witness chair of a congressional hearing room said nervously: "Marina Prusakova Porter."

Asked a startled lawyer for the House Select Committee on Assassinations: "Have you also been known as Marina Oswald Porter?"

"Yes," she replied.

For 15 years, the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald has been trying to "forget the bad things." But last week, testifying for the first time in public about President Kennedy's assassin, she recounted their life together, from the day they met at a dance in Minsk to the time of his death, two days after he killed Kennedy.

Speaking in uncertain English, she portrayed Oswald as a moody, volatile man. Oswald, she said, had few friends and was never visited by strangers or even in touch with anyone who could be suspected of being a fellow conspirator. "He liked to be alone by himself," she said.

She described how he had told her about shooting at, and missing, right-wing General Edwin Walker in April 1963. Said she: "All of a sudden, I realized that it was not just a manly hobby he had of possessing a rifle. It seemed like he was capable of killing someone with it." She recalled how she had locked him in the bathroom after he spoke of wanting to kill Richard Nixon that same month, and she remembered the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, when he told her not to bother cooking breakfast and then left early for the Texas School Book Depository.

When asked if her husband killed the President, she said softly: "Yes, I do believe he did. I believe the man was capable of it." She also agreed with a suggestion from North Carolina Democrat Richardson Preyer that Oswald's motive was probably not political but a product of his own twisted ego. He would probably, she said, have gone after whoever was President at the time.

The committee also heard last week from an assassination buff, Advertising Man Jack White of Fort Worth, who has fed conspiracy theories for a decade by insisting that two famous snapshots of Oswald holding his rifle were fakes. Marina has said all along--and reiterated to the committee--that she had taken the pictures. Moreover, a panel of experts convincingly refuted White. The committee even turned up other prints of Oswald with the weapon, including one that he had signed.

Other experts gave testimony supporting the "single bullet theory," that one bullet fired by Oswald hit both Kennedy and former Texas Governor John Connally. Engineer Tom Canning of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the two were so seated in the car that a trajectory traced from their bodies led to the sixth floor of the book depository, where investigators have established Oswald was perched with his rifle.

Another witness, Sound Expert James Barger, told the committee how he had recreated a series of shots at the Dallas site and compared them with a police tape recording of the 1963 shooting. Barger startled the Congressmen by saying there could have been four shots, and thus a second gunman. But when pressed, he said there was only a fifty-fifty chance that four shots could have been fired. Further, he said his finding could be the result of random statistical error. When Michigan Republican Harold Sawyer grumbled, "I'd hate to sue anybody or prosecute any body on this sort of evidence," Barger just shrugged.

There will undoubtedly be some people who will always believe a fourth shot was fired. But at the halfway point of the monthlong hearings on the Kennedy assassination, the overwhelming weight of evidence heard by the committee points to the same conclusion reached by the Warren Commission: Oswald, acting alone, killed Kennedy. qed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.