Paul Gregory’s ‘Friendship’ with Lee Harvey Oswald

Andrew Roberts: Paul Gregory is a Harvard trained historian of the Soviet economy. But today we'll be talking about someone who he was friendly with many years ago, Lee Harvey Oswald. Paul, in your excellent book, The Oswalds, An untold account of Marina and Lee, you state that from June to mid-September, 1962, you were the sole companion of Lee and Marina Oswald outside their immediate family.

How did you meet them, and how did you spend that summer with them?

Paul Gregory: The meeting occurred because my father was Russian, born in Siberia, managed to get to California, where he graduated from Berkeley as a mining engineer. We then moved to Fort Worth, where he was a consulting engineer, and as a civic service, he taught Russian in the public library.

So he was the only known Russian in Fort Worth, Texas, when Lee came. Lee immediately began looking for a job. They were staying at his brother Robert's house. Lee began looking for a job immediately and thought that his knowledge of Russian language, plus the fact that he'd lived two, three years in Russia would be an entre to a good job.

He needed a certificate that he could speak Russian. So he came to my father's office. They talked, my father determined he was pretty fluent in Russian. When Lee left, or as Lee was leaving, he left behind a phone number. If you want to get together, give us a call.

I'm with my brother. I'm at my brother's house, and my wife Marina is there, plus our baby.

Andrew Roberts: And Marina didn't speak any English, she just spoke Russian, didn't she?

Paul Gregory: She may have known hello, that was pretty much it. I didn't quite finish the story of the meeting.

In any case, my father came home. I was quite excited as a rather bad speaker of Russian. And I wanted to meet this young woman directly from the Soviet Union, which was a rarity in those days. So we called up and arranged to go over to Robert's house, and that was the first meeting.

Andrew Roberts: And what were they like?

Paul Gregory: That's a tough question. Lee didn't have much to say. The most notable thing was the fact that he always dressed well. He always wanted to distinguish himself from the hoi polloi, so he was well-dressed. We visited for a few minutes. Much of the time was spent looking at picture books that they'd brought with them about their life in Minsk, etc., etc.

It was just sort of an awkward, brief conversation. We left, but there was some talk of me and marina meeting to practice my Russian, and that, indeed is what happened. So a couple of weeks later, I appeared at their front door and supposedly to study Russian with Marina.

In fact, there wasn't much of that. But there was some good conversation practice, and that went on much of the summer, as you said, from the dates.

Andrew Roberts: You drove them around in a yellow Buick and explored the environment.

Paul Gregory: Correct.

Andrew Roberts: You say that he dressed himself to distinguish himself from the hoi polloi.

But of course, he believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat, didn't he? He was a convinced Marxist Leninist. Did you talk politics much?

Paul Gregory: Not much, I think he thought he was somewhat above this 21-year-old kid who had never had any real life experience. I never saw him in work clothes, and that, for him, was very important.

So-

Andrew Roberts: He was a welder, wasn't he?

Paul Gregory: He was a welder. He, I think, changed at work. Most would go to. And he went to work on the bus or by foot. Of course, as a good Marxist, you have to have an elite. You have to have a leadership.

And so, insofar as he was a real scholar of Marxism-Leninism, of course he would be an exception and would not be hoi polloi.

Andrew Roberts: Was he an angry person? He didn't want Marina to learn English, did he?

Paul Gregory: There were rare occasions where Lee would get angry.

He would get angry when I would talk to Marina about learning English. It was obvious that she was alone in a very hot house in Fort Worth, Texas, in June, July, August, which was very unpleasant. She was alone, she couldn't speak any English. And I recall distinctly one day volunteering to bring her what we call flashcards with Russian on one side and English on the other.

That upset Lee. I wasn't good at picking up signals, but I think I picked that signal up when we had Lee and Marina over to our house for dinner with other Russians. One of the Russians from Dallas, and we called them the Dallas Russians, volunteered to teach Marina English.

And Lee's response was, Marina should not learn English because that means I have to talk English with her and it's very important that I keep up my fluency in Russian. This very much upset the Dallas Russians, who consider that this guy was a boor.

Andrew Roberts: And you distinguished the Dallas Russians from the Fort Worth Russians.

What was essentially the difference between them?

Paul Gregory: The difference was we in Fort Worth were very few, but we had sort of the queen of the Russian community, Gali. And she was from a noble family on which Tolstoy based War and Peace. So she was the queen. The dictator was a man named George Bucha, who was from Petersburg or Leningrad.

He more or less managed the affairs. He was sort of a social worker for the Russian community, finding jobs and actually teaching English and so forth. So that dinner that we had involved him, of course, as the organizer. And when they left, they drove Lee and Marina back to their home, which meant that the Dallas Russians knew where they lived, and this was a big problem for Lee.

Andrew Roberts: The last time you saw Marina was on the 22 November, 1962. Two, coincidentally, exactly a year before the assassination of JFK. I was ten months old during the assassination of ten years. So I don't know where I was. But everybody else who's older than me knows exactly where they were when they heard about the assassination of the president.

Where were you?

Paul Gregory: Of course, I will not forget that, I was a student, an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma. We had just gathered for a Russian lesson which was scheduled for noon in the library. A fellow student came in and said, the president has been shot.

No classes. I decided to go to the student union, where there was a big screen tv, which was not very big by today's standards. There were probably 60 students sitting on the rug watching the TV, among them I. We watched Walter Cronkite on CBS, and then there was local coverage, which was repetitions of the shooting and the chaos and mayhem that was going on at Dealey Plaza.

Then they said, well, Cronkite came on, and it was clear that he was going to announce the president's death because he had tears in his eyes. So he announced the president's death about an hour later, or an hour and a half later. There was a call. They have a suspect.

They're bringing him in. I was quite shocked, as you can imagine, to immediately recognize it was Lee. And I said, I know that guy. But no one paid attention to me. They must have thought I was crazy.

Andrew Roberts: And then you phoned your mother maybe an hour and a half later.

Paul Gregory: And an hour and a half later is a very brief conversation. Mother, was it Lee? Answer, yes, it was Lee. That was our conversation.

Andrew Roberts: How long was it before the Secret Service and the FBI and basically everybody descended on you?

Paul Gregory: 9 AM the next day, I was lucky because they descended on my father's home in Fort Worth at 3 AM.

and by the way, we both developed great admiration for the Secret Service. They were tireless. They went five, six days without sleep. And they were very bitter about the FBI's lack of diligence because the FBI did know that Oswald was in Dallas and was a real problem, a real threat.

Andrew Roberts: They've been told, by the Dallas Russians or my father or the Fort Worth Russians or your father, and yet they didn't follow him or check into him or.

Paul Gregory: No, but they definitely knew he was a big problem.

Andrew Roberts: And part of that. Tell us about the assassination attempt on General Walker, because that was part of the problem, essentially, wasn't it?

Paul Gregory: Correct. I mean, this is something that I know of secondhand, not firsthand. But the attempted assassination of Walker is often forgotten, because that is the most convincing story as to the fact that Oswald did it, because if he had, first of all, who was Walker? He was the head of the right-wing community in Dallas, John Burke Society.

Lee knew his credentials and went about meticulously planning the assassination. He'd already ordered the mail-order rifle, and he spent around two weeks planning that operation. So he knew the Walker house well. He knew where to position himself. He knew how to escape. And his escape was by bus, which many think is a sign that he was a total incompetent.

But he actually addressed this issue, and he said to Marina, the Americans are so stupid. They would never think of anyone escaping by bus.

Andrew Roberts: And he missed. He missed Walker.

Paul Gregory: Narrowly, very narrowly, even though he was a very good shot.

Andrew Roberts: He'd been in the Marine Corps.

Paul Gregory: Correct, but it whizzed by Walker's head, so it was very close.

Andrew Roberts: Rather like the Trump attempted assassination earlier.

Paul Gregory: A millimeter difference, probably, yeah.

Andrew Roberts: The JFK assassination is considered, according to the Pew Research center, as more important to Americans than the Vietnam War and the moon landings.

Why is that, do you think?

Paul Gregory: Well, for those who lived through it, there was an incredible reaction to the death of JFK. There was no traffic on the street. People were hunkered down watching the funeral. There was just an incredible sense of grief. And a lot of this is due to the fact that JFK was charismatic.

He had this very attractive wife and family, so forth. So it was just the grief that went on for at least a week. Basically nothing happened for a week. One can look at it in a more practical way, which is, had JFK lived, what difference would that have made, particularly with respect to Vietnam?

But I just recall personally, this sense of grief. And, in fact, I would dream about JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald in one dream. So I would compare the only thing, and I'm no longer young, so I have the ability to compare. I would say the only parallel would be 911.

Andrew Roberts: Yeah, yeah, the Warren report was a tremendously distinguished work, wasn't it? You had Earl Warren himself, who was an unimpeachable figure, and it made the verdict that this was a lone gunman. But today, only one third of Americans believe that. Two thirds of them think that there was a conspiracy involved.

Why is that?

Paul Gregory: I thought about that a lot in writing this book. I think the foundation of this type of thinking is the fact that people are not prepared to think that a nonentity can change history. And Oswald was indeed a non entity, a little guy, as I would refer to him.

So

Paul Gregory: That, I think, is the main factor. You then have to contend with the fact that there are going to be all kinds of coincidences, serendipities, etc., which is going to give a handle to some conspiracy theorists that this guy couldn't have done it. But I think the underlying theme really is that little guys don't change history.

That's not a very scholarly answer to your question, but I think that's the main factor.

Andrew Roberts: And of course, the JFK conspiracy theory is the granddaddy of all the conspiracy theories. In a sense, it's the one that starts this new phenomenon, which has done so much damage, hasn't it, to the American political discipline.

Paul Gregory: That was the beginning of distrust in government. As you, I believe the Warren Commission did remarkable work in a short period of time. The most distinguished Americans were involved in it. I testified before it and can tell you they were very thorough. So I expected then and now the public to accept the conclusion of this very distinguished panel.

I didn't realize the fact that the little man changing history would prevail. There was money in conspiracy. There's not money in writing about a little guy who happens to be at wrong time, wrong time, or right place, right time as far as he was concerned. So-

Andrew Roberts: It's an industry, essentially.

Paul Gregory: Someone counted, I think there are 2000 books.

Andrew Roberts: Wow.

Paul Gregory: If you can accept that number, it's incredible.

Andrew Roberts: Yes, my Don at Cambridge, Norman Stone, said that you get cock up theories of history and conspiracy theories. Occasionally, there are conspiracies, the Cato Street Conspiracy, the Catiline conspiracy, but most often it's a cocked up conspiracy that explains history.

But you believe, as you say in your book, that Lee Harvey Oswald had the motive, resources, cunning, and killer instinct. And that's really what you need as well, of course, as being an extremely good shot firing from a book depository at a moving car.

Paul Gregory: I, for the first time, visited the 6th floor museum recently, about a year ago.

So the first thing I did was to go to the window. And believe me, it's not much of a shot. And it occurs at a right turn intersection where the car would have been basically standing still. And then I talked to some of our military experts here, and they said any marine could make that shot.

So there's a lot of controversy about how difficult the shot was.

Andrew Roberts: And how many shots there were.

Paul Gregory: And how many, two or three in the grassy knoll, etc., etc.

Andrew Roberts: The man with the umbrella. It's the gift that keeps on giving, doesn't it, the conspiracy thing.

Paul Gregory: Believe it or not, me and my father are among those who conspired to kill Kennedy. It was not really picked up. I think it began in Moscow, by the way. Because in Moscow, they decided, once they got the word of the killing from the Washington embassy, once they got the word, they said, we can't allow a communist to be the assassin of an American president.

So they had to find a scapegoat, and the scapegoat was the Russian, the conservative Russian community of Dallas. And I'm supposed to have basically lived at the Oswald house. This has not been picked up by many, but I would say-

Andrew Roberts: Part of des informatia.

Paul Gregory: Well, I don't know if you'd like to walk around as a potential murderer of the president.

Andrew Roberts: No, I certainly wouldn't. And didn't they also connect your father to the oil industry, and then, therefore, for some reason, the oil industry wanted to kill JFK?

Paul Gregory: Yes,

Paul Gregory: One of the reactions to my book, which was published and written with a 60-year delay, the question was, why did you wait 60 years?

We waited 60 years, because we didn't wanna be associated with this. It would have destroyed our social standing in Fort Worth, which was pretty good. My father had a booming oil consultancy business, so we went to all kinds of measures to avoid being identified with this event. My father had a more interesting experience than I, because he translated for marina for six days in the aftermath of the assassination.

So one reason for casting doubt on my writings on this subject is the fact that I waited 60 years, but I definitely couldn't have done it while my parents were alive. And then I had other things to do.

Andrew Roberts: And as well as the oil industry, the Dallas Russians have been blamed, the Mafia has been blamed, the Cubans have been blamed, that all of a stone movie, JFK seemed to blame all of them and more.

What do you yourself feel when you see the Zapruder film, for example? What emotions do you have? How do you feel?

Paul Gregory: The Zapruder film is tough to watch, because it does show the exploding brain. Just as if Trump had been hit, his brain would have exploded. So it's not something I wanted to watch more than once.

However, it's devastating. And clearly, the secret service, Jackie, would have known he was dead just by looking at that film.

Andrew Roberts: Your father was anti-Soviet, but Lee Harvey Oswald had defected to Russia, and, as you mentioned earlier, was a convinced Marxist Leninist. How did they get on, considering their politics was so very different?

Paul Gregory: My father stayed clear of Lee. He didn't like Lee at all. So there really wasn't much going on between my father and Lee except for this evening when we had what has now become famous dinner party, which introduced the Oswalds to the Dallas Russians and resulted in their moving to Dallas.

My father, I would guess, really disliked Lee and had to think twice about his 21 year old son being a regular visitor at their house. The Dallas Russians did not want to meet Oswald and Marina until they felt they had a go ahead, because one of the Fort Worth Russians had ties to the FBI and they wanted to make sure that the FBI was following.

Lee and they could meet with him. So it was getting Lee was the price you had to pay for meeting Marina.

Andrew Roberts: And, of course, almost immediately after Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK, he was himself murdered by Jack Ruby. What do you think that was all about?

Paul Gregory: Well, if you think in terms of probability theory, you have to multiply one incredible event by another incredible event.

And that Ruby is much harder to explain than Oswald, because Oswald had a clear motive. I know exactly why he did it. Ruby. He was standing in line at the post office. If the line had been a little bit longer, he wouldn't have missed the transfer. So I stay clear of Ruby because I have no firsthand knowledge of Ruby.

I have nothing really to add other than the fact that was a move that really bolstered the conspiracy theorists.

Andrew Roberts: And the assumption, because he was a nightclub owner, that therefore he was involved in the mafia also boosts it, doesn't it?

Paul Gregory: He was a very minor mafia player.

I think he had to turn over 10% of his take to the Chicago mafia. I don't think that's much under dispute or very important.

Andrew Roberts: But you can't, I don't know, think up a motive apart from maybe patriotism or what he said that he cared desperately about the horror of what had happened and felt sorry for Jackie Onassis and so on.

Paul Gregory: I tend to believe, I mean, he died a natural death, and he took whatever secrets with him to the grave. I think he would have broken. His explanation makes sense. He had great sympathy for Jackie and wanted to spare her the trial.

Andrew Roberts: Your father translated for the secret Service when they were questioning Marina.

How did that go? How was that investigated? And also, could you tell us about the photograph, the famous photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald carrying the rifle?

Paul Gregory: Yeah, there are a couple of stories. But the first story would be the story of the rifle and who took the picture of Lee holding the rifle, dressed in black.

Because the secret Service thought that this is the key test for a conspiracy. If someone else had taken the photograph, that would have been an indicator of a conspiracy. Marina was terribly frightened throughout the entire process. She had two little kids. The FBI of Dallas had earlier warned her that they might deport her.

So she already had this deportation image in her mind. She may have even thought that she would be executed, because if she were in Russia, it would be life in jail or execution. So she was very frightened and did not want to admit that she had taken the photograph.

So I would say the major contribution of my father was to sort of present a friendly image to Marina and to convince her that telling the truth is best. So she did eventually confess to taking the picture. All of this took place in the Six Flags inn between Alice and Fort Worth.

And the bitterness between the Secret Service and the FBI was such that the FBI had to call my father to determine where Marina was. And he had been instructed by the secret Service not to tell them. The Secret Service was quite irate that the Dallas FBI had not neutralized Oswald.

And it almost came to shooting between the FBI and Secret Service when the FBI arrived at the Six Flags unannounced and there was almost shooting. So that would have been rather incredible end to the story.

Andrew Roberts: You can say that again. Can we go back to Oswald's motive, resources, cunning, and killer instinct?

That phrase of yours, which is very arresting in the book, he had gone to New Orleans to hand out pro Castro leaflets, and he probably wanted to get to Cuba. That was where the bus was going to. That was the first step of the journey, wasn't it? So there you've got the motive with regard to resources.

He, as you say, bought a mail order rifle. The cunning, well, he was cunning because he managed to get himself both to Russia and back from Russia without the Soviets stopping him coming back, in fact, helping him to come back. He had linguistic ability, as you've mentioned earlier.

And, of course, he could fire a rifle and was taught to by the best in the Marine Corps, so which he was forced, dishonorably discharged from. Again, a problem with his personality. So I think you've set up an extremely good case there for the lone wolf gunman. And yet there is this endless industry that we were talking about earlier.

Do people not want to face the fact that it could have been a lone gunman? I understand what you say, of course, about them not wanting them not believing that history can be changed by a single, insignificant person. But isn't there something also psychologically deeper that makes people refuse to accept what's in front of their faces?

Paul Gregory: I don't know if I can give you a good answer to your question. To me, to tell the truth, to me, any major event like the assassination of JFK, the Trump business, there are going to be some oddities.

Andrew Roberts: Well, because, not least because eyewitnesses all see different things, and we know that through the courts and so on and from the Lincoln assassination and other events like that.

Paul Gregory: Yeah, an assassination that occurs without coincidence, I don't think exists. Therefore, what, we're the one-third figure, one-third believers, therefore, has never puzzled me to tell the truth. So I kind of draw a blank on your question.

Andrew Roberts: What happened to Marina and her daughter by Lee Harvey Oswald, Jane?

Paul Gregory: There were two daughters. One was almost a newborn at the time of the assassination. Marina freed of Lee and rather wealthy, which. Few people know because there was such sympathy, such an outpouring of sympathy for Jackie and for Marina, that huge amounts of money were flowing in donations for the benefit of Marina.

This made Marina an attractive target for swindlers who became her business manager and so forth. But out of this, she was able to buy herself a home, which tells you something about the contributions. She remarried to a quite upstanding, nice fellow who has protected her from me, for example, because I wanted to talk to her one more time.

And that just didn't happen because he's has such a protective web around her, which I admire, by the way. So I've never seen Marina after that Thanksgiving in 62.

Andrew Roberts: So she lives, as far as we know, happily here in the United States.

Paul Gregory: She lives outside of Dallas.

So I have her phone number and I have her address, but I'm not going to bother her.

Andrew Roberts: And what about their daughters?

Paul Gregory: They turned out well. I can't remember the details other than the fact that they turned out remarkably well and she had a son, or has a son with the second husband.

Andrew Roberts: Now, you say in your book that you were a friend in the terms of the dictionary definition of the word friend, rather than the colloquial sense of a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, who obviously is seen to be a complete monster. So would you like to delve a bit into that?

Paul Gregory: The first time I sort of came out was with the 50th anniversary, and I published a short piece in New York Times that kind of summarized some of the things we're talking about here. And as you know, they chose the headline, and it originally said, Lee Harvey Oswald was my good friend.

So I talked them out of that. And I think in retrospect, as someone no longer young, I did not pick up on the fact that Lee must have hated me. And there were a number of reasons why. One was I was Marina's only contact with the outside world.

Therefore, I was a threat, such as encouraging her to learn English. My biggest betrayal of Lee, where he must have truly hated me, was when I received in Oklahoma a postcard giving me their address and the fact that they had moved and that the writer had a job.

Because the writing was so primitive and there was no punctuation, I thought Marina had written this postcard. So I wrote her back, encouraging her to learn more English and persist. So when we met at Thanksgiving, which was a couple of weeks after this postcard incident, she found me at my home.

Her first words were, Lee wrote that postcard, not I. So I then go and pick him up to take him to the bus station. First couple hours in our house, the whole time, Marina was berating Lee. What a bad husband he was, he was abusive. She was gonna get out of this marriage, etc.

So that postcard would have cemented any. Would explain this hatred he must have had for me, which I didn't pick up any romantic threat.

Andrew Roberts: You were good looking, 21 year old.

Paul Gregory: Good looking 25 year old.

Andrew Roberts: No, you were 21, and he was 24.

Paul Gregory: Thank you for catching.

Andrew Roberts: And she was 21.

Paul Gregory: She and I were the same.

Andrew Roberts: And she was very good looking indeed.

Paul Gregory: Attractive, very, very pleasant. In Minsk, Lee would not allow an unmarried man in the apartment. So you can imagine what a concession it was to allow me in.

So I was really a big threat to him. And also he said, this is a kid. He doesn't know anything. I've seen the world, he hasn't. So you don't pick up a lot of things when you're young.

Andrew Roberts: I always ask my guests what book or biography they're reading at the moment.

What are you reading?

Paul Gregory: A strange one. It has the unusual title of Stalin, and it's written by a man named Kuhn, K-U-H-N, who is the grandson of Bela Kuhn, who had excellent access to the archives before we started working on them. And his description of the early Bolsheviks is incredibly detailed.

So that's what I'm up to.

Andrew Roberts: And you're a Harvard historian of the soviet economy?

Paul Gregory: Yes, that's correct.

Andrew Roberts: And what's your what if you're counterfactual?

Paul Gregory: My what if is, it's not what if Oswald had missed. That's not interesting. My what if is what if Lee Harvey Oswald had gotten his Cuban visa in Mexico City about three weeks before the assassination?

Because he had clearly planned on the new life. So he's looking forward to this new life and was stymied by both the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City. So Lee Harvey Oswald smoking a cigar in Havana, that was his dream. And he had just lost that dream when he came back.

Andrew Roberts: It wouldn't have been Fidel Castro's dream, would it to have had the assassin of JFK claiming asylum in Havana? And that could have led to real. I mean, they already had an appalling tensions the previous October in the Cuban missile crisis, hadn't they?

Paul Gregory: The Kennedy assassination spooked both the Soviet Union and Cuba, for obvious reasons.

So I will add that to my what if.

Andrew Roberts: It's a good one. Let's do the obvious, though, what if the bullets had missed? And what do you think? American troops were already being sent to Vietnam under the Kennedy administration, weren't they? What's your sense of how Kennedy might have made a different choice than LBJ?

Isn't that just wishful thinking, in a sense?

Paul Gregory: Well, having lived through it as a 20 or 21 year old, I had great admiration for JFK's diplomatic abilities, primarily because of the Cuban missile crisis. If you had lived through that, I mean, we went to sleep at night not knowing whether we would wake up.

So that made me quite a JFK fan. But that doesn't answer your counterfactual question.

Andrew Roberts: Professor Paul Gregory, friend but not good friend of Lee Harvey Oswald. Thank you very much indeed for coming on Secrets of Statecraft.

Paul Gregory: Thank you for having me.

Andrew Roberts: Thank you, Paul. On the next Secrets of Statecraft, I'll be joined by Natalia Buga Jova, a Russia fellow at the Institute for the Study of War.

Presenter: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work, or to listen to more of our podcasts or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org.