Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy

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Shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, in November of 1963, a Gallup poll found that 52% of the American public believed that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was part of a conspiracy. In the fifty years since, that figure has climbed closer to 80%.

You can understand why. It’s painful to accept that an American president was cut down by one small, half-crazy guy with a mail-order rifle who could easily have been stopped in any of a dozen different small ways—but wasn’t. No wonder Norman Mailer called the assassination “the largest mountain of mystery in the twentieth century… a black hole in space absorbing great funds of energy and never providing a satisfactory answer.”

The key word here is “satisfactory.” The simple explanation—that Oswald acted alone—was unpalatable. The enormity of the crime didn’t fit the insignificance of the criminal. Far easier to imagine Oswald as a “cat’s paw” of a much larger scheme, engineered by invisible but all-powerful forces.

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