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A Mother in History
Book by Stafford, Jean
121 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
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About the author
Jean Stafford
100 books94 followersJean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.
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March 11, 2024
I have revised my review of this book, putting it in a much broader context. The research I refer to was unplanned. Every assertion I make has a citation, but I have elected to omit footnotes.
The new review title is:
Worse Than I Thought: A Mother In History
The literature on the JFK assassination is rife with dishonest books that endorse, defend, and/or excuse the findings of the Warren Commission. Nothing new about that: this has been true since publication of the Warren Report in 1964, and has carried on through a long line of apologist nonsense.
One Commissioner and several WC attorneys cashed in on their experiences. A host of lesser, pseudo-serious WC advocates have contributed to this worthless tripe, and profitably. At the time of the assassination’s fiftieth anniversary, Vince Salandria called it a mountain of trash. All of this propaganda is meant to bury the obvious.
Jean Stafford’s A Mother in History (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966) was an early entry into this disgraceful body of work. I have written about it before, most recently on the Kennedys and King site. What more could I possibly have to say? Do I have an unhealthy preoccupation with this slender book, ostensibly an unbiased profile of the mother of the alleged presidential assassin?
If you Google “Jean Stafford A Mother In History” you are likely to find available copies on used book sites, along with reviews and reader opinions. Most of the opinions I found are favorable. All of them, it is safe to assume, are based solely on reading Jean Stafford’s published text. Almost certainly, none of the writers of these favorable judgments had access to some of the book’s raw material, in particular the tape-recorded Stafford-Oswald interviews.
I have. Once this raw material has been appraised, and contrasted with the published work, it is difficult to see A Mother in History as anything but a deliberate hatchet job intended to destroy Marguerite Oswald.
•
The raw material to which I refer is in the Jean Stafford Collection at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder, part of the Norlin Library’s Rare and Distinctive Collections. By chance, it's about fifteen minutes from where I live.
Stafford, who was from Boulder, primarily wrote fiction, which is probably why the source material for A Mother in History is only a small portion of that archive. This small portion includes typescripts, notes, and an interview transcript, all of which reside in one small box. Not included in the box are the interview tape recordings, which have long since been digitized.
A Mother in History is in three sections, simply titled I, II, and III (plus an Epilogue and appendices). A breathless jacket blurb touts Stafford’s “three incredible days” with Marguerite Oswald. That, and other indicators, clearly imply each of those three book sections correspond to one day of conversation between the author and her subject.
There may have been three days of interviews, incredible or otherwise, but I am highly suspicious of this presumed chronology. An exchange on the book’s p. 36, as the presumed first-day section nears its end, first got my attention. Here Stafford writes that she asked Mrs. Oswald if it would be okay to bring a tape recorder the next day. Marguerite agreed. Stafford does not say so explicitly, but the clear message is that the first day was not tape recorded.
The audio at CU tells a different story. It consists of six undated .mp3 files. A CU archivist told me last summer that the original reel-to-reel tapes were transferred to audio cassette in the 1970s. They were digitized sometime in the 1980s, or perhaps a little later.
Nowhere, in the .mp3 audio, does Stafford say the day, date, or subject of her interviews. Interviewers often do; it could even be considered a best practice. It creates a record, and helps keep things in order.
The .mp3 files at CU may be undated, but they do have sequential filenames. What appears to be the first is stafford-interview-with-mrs.-oswald_-part-1-a.mp3. This particular audio begins with Stafford asking, “Tell me about your early life, Mrs. Oswald. You were born in New Orleans, weren’t you?”
The transcript begins the same way. It’s an amiable first question, a likely starting point, and I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest this was, in fact, the very first of the interviews: that is, the first day, which Stafford implied was not recorded.
As I described in a previous article, I had grown curious about a quote in the first section of the book – on an unrecorded first day, readers are led to believe. Lee Harvey Oswald, Marguerite said, “spoke Russian, he wrote Russian, and he read Russian. Why? Because my boy was being trained as an agent, that’s why.”
In Stafford’s book there was no follow-up question. This baffled me. Even an amateur journalist, like Stafford, should have enough sense to explore such an explosive statement. Surely, I assumed, the audio would clarify things. Instead, it revealed that Marguerite Oswald didn’t say what Stafford quoted her as saying. It is a manufactured quote.
It’s a little complicated, so bear with me. Most of the words in that quote were, in fact, spoken by Marguerite Oswald. They were also tape recorded; I have heard the audio. But it’s a false quote, because Stafford pieced together several phrases – some of them separated by as much as three minutes. Placing it all within quotation marks, with no hint of edits, implies it is verbatim – but it is not, and is thus a deception.
I can only speculate on Stafford’s motives. That false quote does not support the lone gunman thesis. But given the magnitude of surrounding events, I cannot believe creating it was innocent. I think Stafford floated the idea of Oswald-as-agent – not a common view at the time – to characterize Marguerite Oswald as paranoid, and out of her mind.
•
There are other false and manufactured quotes in A Mother in History. I have not itemized them all and don’t intend to; it would be a huge undertaking. The more I studied the source material, the more dishonesty I found.
On page 23 of A Mother In History is the following statement, attributed to Marguerite:
This is a rather inconsequential matter, but it is still false. Marguerite Oswald didn’t really say it. Here is what she did say, in answer to Stafford’s question, “Did he ever have any pets?”
True, the published quote roughly parallels what she really said. But it is still false. “Lee purely loved animals” does not appear in any of the audio. There is no mention of dogs in the published quote, let alone puppies, or giving one to a school teacher.
Nor does Marguerite say, “Sometimes I am very sad.” In fact, elsewhere in the recorded interviews, she said quite the opposite: “I’m not unhappy, Jean. You can see I’m not.”
As I write these words, I feel like I’m in attack mode. I have listened to all the audio that is available. Can I be certain that every last recorded word from the Stafford-Oswald interviews wound up in the CU archive? Of course not. All that CU has is what Stafford gave them. (She also wrote, in her book, that when Mrs. Oswald agreed to be tape recorded, she stipulated that there be two recorders so she could have a copy.)
•
The example about animals and pets is minor, compared to a false quote on pages 12-13 of A Mother in History. This one is presented as dialogue between interviewer and interviewee, and Jean Stafford goes in for the kill. It is intended, I am convinced, to make Marguerite Oswald appear nuts – to use a non-clinical term.
Marguerite spoke first:
“And as we all know, President Kennedy was a dying man. So I say it is possible that my son was chosen to shoot him in a mercy killing for the security of the country. And if this is true, it was a fine thing to do and my son is a hero.”
“I had not heard that President Kennedy was dying,” I said, staggered by this cluster of fictions stated as irrefutable fact. Some mercy killing! The methods used in this instance must surely be unique in the annals of euthanasia.
This exchange is not found anywhere in the interview audio or the transcript. Marguerite does not make the statement, and Jean Stafford does not make that stunned reply.
There is something similar to this in the interviews. Unfortunately, the digitized version of the tape recording at CU ends partway through the quote. Did the original tape end there, too? No, because the corresponding transcript, which I have found to be consistently accurate, continues for several more pages. It is convoluted, but this is what Marguerite Oswald really said.
A minute or so before her “mercy killing” remark, Marguerite did say “a dying President,” but “As we all know” is an invention. She says JFK was dying because he had Addison’s disease, which he did. She also called it a kidney disorder, which it is not. Addison’s can be life-threatening, but Stafford correctly points out that it is a manageable adrenal condition. And Kennedy managed his.
But Stafford can’t let this go without having some fun, falsely quoting Marguerite calling it Atkinson’s disease. In the audio, there is no doubt: Marguerite says Addison’s. It is rendered as Atkinson’s in the transcript. Maybe Stafford didn’t remember what Mrs. Oswald actually said, and later on trusted the error of the unknown transcriber. While accurate overall, the transcript does, in fact, garble certain words here and there; in places it reminds me of the sometimes-strange voicemail transcripts my Smartphone makes. The ethical thing would have been double-checking Marguerite’s presumed mistake, before putting it to print.
But the point is that Marguerite Oswald did not say her son was chosen to shoot a terminally ill JFK in a mercy killing. Jean Stafford created that illusion.
According to biographer David Roberts (Jean Stafford: A Biography, 1988) Jean Stafford later “held parties at which she played the Oswald tapes for her friends.” Roberts cites Stafford’s “fascination” with Marguerite Oswald’s voice.
It sounds more like arrogance to me. One imagines a bunch of cocktail-quaffing intelligentsia howling with laughter over Marguerite’s unschooled chatter. But maybe not. Maybe Stafford just wanted to give some of her pals a front-row seat to history. Whatever: the image this conjures is, to me, thoroughly repulsive.
•
The Stafford-Oswald interviews took place in May 1965. This is approximately ten months after Marguerite met with Harold Feldman and Vince Salandria, after which Feldman wrote “The Unsinkable Marguerite Oswald,” published in September 1964 (available online).
If Jean Stafford had done her homework, she might have answered a question she puzzled over in her book’s Appendix III. How, she wondered, was an undereducated Marguerite Oswald able to paraphrase an obscure quote from Sigmund Freud? “Without persecution,” she told Stafford, “there would not be a persecution complex.”
In his article Harold Feldman, a lay psychologist, said that the media consistently portrayed Marguerite Oswald “as a self-centered, domineering, paranoiac showoff with frequent delusions of persecution. It reminds me of Freud’s remark that there would be no such thing as a persecution complex if there were not real persecution.”
Feldman, whose writing often appeared in psychoanalytic journals, wrote about Marguerite with the deference and sympathy Jean Stafford failed to summon. He observed:
And he added: “… if Ibsen is right and the strongest is the one who stands alone for integrity and honor, then Marguerite Oswald is the strongest woman in America.”
Marguerite Oswald was an ordinary woman thrust, quite against her will, into extraordinary circumstances. In spite of tremendous obstacles, she defended her son against the Warren Commission and the mainstream media. She had few allies. Even family members, she told Jean Stafford, distanced themselves from her. “I’m alone in my fight, with no help.”
Marguerite Oswald may have struck Stafford as eccentric, but who doesn’t have personality quirks? Jean Stafford exploited Marguerite’s to the hilt, and did so ruthlessly, in exchange for money. I could cite many more examples of the dishonesty in A Mother in History, but life is too short.
Stafford shuffled the truth like a deck of cards, manufacturing quotes and manipulating chronology, all to create the false impression – the lie – that her subject was divorced from reality. Suffice it to say A Mother In History is even worse than I imagined when I visited the Jean Stafford archive at CU.
But it’s been more than fifty years since publication, so the damage is done.
-- Original review (FWIW!) --
I think this book is dishonest. Stafford went into this assignment with preconceived notions and turned out a real hatchet job.
Stafford's biographers say she dreaded going to Texas for the interviews. Originally an article for McCall's magazine, she told a friend that she was writing the piece "for a magazine whose name I am ashamed to write down."
At one point Marguerite said, "He [Lee Harvey Oswald] never did tell me why he went to Russia. I have my own opinion. He spoke Russian, he wrote Russian, and he read Russian. Why? Because my boy was being trained as an agent, that's why."
This is not as far-fetched at it may seem. Does it not cry out for a follow-up question? If Stafford asked one, she did not include it in her published text. Her next recorded question is, "What would Lee have done with his life if he had not been killed?"
One of Jean Stafford's biographers (there are several) wrote that this book is "profoundly unsympathetic" and "a cruel portrait, executed pitilessly."
A few months before Stafford talked to Marguerite Oswald, another writer interviewed her. The result is more balanced and sympathetic. Anyone interested should check out "The Unsinkable Marguerite Oswald," by Harold Feldman, published in The Realist in Sept. 1964. It can be found here:
The Unsinkable Marguerite Oswald
The new review title is:
Worse Than I Thought: A Mother In History
The literature on the JFK assassination is rife with dishonest books that endorse, defend, and/or excuse the findings of the Warren Commission. Nothing new about that: this has been true since publication of the Warren Report in 1964, and has carried on through a long line of apologist nonsense.
One Commissioner and several WC attorneys cashed in on their experiences. A host of lesser, pseudo-serious WC advocates have contributed to this worthless tripe, and profitably. At the time of the assassination’s fiftieth anniversary, Vince Salandria called it a mountain of trash. All of this propaganda is meant to bury the obvious.
Jean Stafford’s A Mother in History (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966) was an early entry into this disgraceful body of work. I have written about it before, most recently on the Kennedys and King site. What more could I possibly have to say? Do I have an unhealthy preoccupation with this slender book, ostensibly an unbiased profile of the mother of the alleged presidential assassin?
If you Google “Jean Stafford A Mother In History” you are likely to find available copies on used book sites, along with reviews and reader opinions. Most of the opinions I found are favorable. All of them, it is safe to assume, are based solely on reading Jean Stafford’s published text. Almost certainly, none of the writers of these favorable judgments had access to some of the book’s raw material, in particular the tape-recorded Stafford-Oswald interviews.
I have. Once this raw material has been appraised, and contrasted with the published work, it is difficult to see A Mother in History as anything but a deliberate hatchet job intended to destroy Marguerite Oswald.
•
The raw material to which I refer is in the Jean Stafford Collection at the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder, part of the Norlin Library’s Rare and Distinctive Collections. By chance, it's about fifteen minutes from where I live.
Stafford, who was from Boulder, primarily wrote fiction, which is probably why the source material for A Mother in History is only a small portion of that archive. This small portion includes typescripts, notes, and an interview transcript, all of which reside in one small box. Not included in the box are the interview tape recordings, which have long since been digitized.
A Mother in History is in three sections, simply titled I, II, and III (plus an Epilogue and appendices). A breathless jacket blurb touts Stafford’s “three incredible days” with Marguerite Oswald. That, and other indicators, clearly imply each of those three book sections correspond to one day of conversation between the author and her subject.
There may have been three days of interviews, incredible or otherwise, but I am highly suspicious of this presumed chronology. An exchange on the book’s p. 36, as the presumed first-day section nears its end, first got my attention. Here Stafford writes that she asked Mrs. Oswald if it would be okay to bring a tape recorder the next day. Marguerite agreed. Stafford does not say so explicitly, but the clear message is that the first day was not tape recorded.
The audio at CU tells a different story. It consists of six undated .mp3 files. A CU archivist told me last summer that the original reel-to-reel tapes were transferred to audio cassette in the 1970s. They were digitized sometime in the 1980s, or perhaps a little later.
Nowhere, in the .mp3 audio, does Stafford say the day, date, or subject of her interviews. Interviewers often do; it could even be considered a best practice. It creates a record, and helps keep things in order.
The .mp3 files at CU may be undated, but they do have sequential filenames. What appears to be the first is stafford-interview-with-mrs.-oswald_-part-1-a.mp3. This particular audio begins with Stafford asking, “Tell me about your early life, Mrs. Oswald. You were born in New Orleans, weren’t you?”
The transcript begins the same way. It’s an amiable first question, a likely starting point, and I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest this was, in fact, the very first of the interviews: that is, the first day, which Stafford implied was not recorded.
As I described in a previous article, I had grown curious about a quote in the first section of the book – on an unrecorded first day, readers are led to believe. Lee Harvey Oswald, Marguerite said, “spoke Russian, he wrote Russian, and he read Russian. Why? Because my boy was being trained as an agent, that’s why.”
In Stafford’s book there was no follow-up question. This baffled me. Even an amateur journalist, like Stafford, should have enough sense to explore such an explosive statement. Surely, I assumed, the audio would clarify things. Instead, it revealed that Marguerite Oswald didn’t say what Stafford quoted her as saying. It is a manufactured quote.
It’s a little complicated, so bear with me. Most of the words in that quote were, in fact, spoken by Marguerite Oswald. They were also tape recorded; I have heard the audio. But it’s a false quote, because Stafford pieced together several phrases – some of them separated by as much as three minutes. Placing it all within quotation marks, with no hint of edits, implies it is verbatim – but it is not, and is thus a deception.
I can only speculate on Stafford’s motives. That false quote does not support the lone gunman thesis. But given the magnitude of surrounding events, I cannot believe creating it was innocent. I think Stafford floated the idea of Oswald-as-agent – not a common view at the time – to characterize Marguerite Oswald as paranoid, and out of her mind.
•
There are other false and manufactured quotes in A Mother in History. I have not itemized them all and don’t intend to; it would be a huge undertaking. The more I studied the source material, the more dishonesty I found.
On page 23 of A Mother In History is the following statement, attributed to Marguerite:
Lee purely loved animals! With his very first pay he bought a bird and a cage, and I have a picture of it. He bought this bird with a cage that had a planter for ivy, and he took care of that bird and he made the ivy grow. Now, you see, there could be many nice things written about this boy. But, oh, no, no, this boy is supposed to be the assassin of the President of the United States, so he has to be a louse. Sometimes I am very sad.
This is a rather inconsequential matter, but it is still false. Marguerite Oswald didn’t really say it. Here is what she did say, in answer to Stafford’s question, “Did he ever have any pets?”
Oh yes, Lee had a dog, and with his first pay he bought a bird and a cage – I have pictures of it, with ivy in it and all the food for the bird. Yes, sir. With his first pay. He had a collie shepherd dog that I had gotten for him when it was a little [bitty] puppy. And he had it all those years until we went to New York. And that dog had puppies. He gave one to his school teacher. She wrote a nice article for the newspaper saying Lee loving animals and giving her a pet.
True, the published quote roughly parallels what she really said. But it is still false. “Lee purely loved animals” does not appear in any of the audio. There is no mention of dogs in the published quote, let alone puppies, or giving one to a school teacher.
Nor does Marguerite say, “Sometimes I am very sad.” In fact, elsewhere in the recorded interviews, she said quite the opposite: “I’m not unhappy, Jean. You can see I’m not.”
As I write these words, I feel like I’m in attack mode. I have listened to all the audio that is available. Can I be certain that every last recorded word from the Stafford-Oswald interviews wound up in the CU archive? Of course not. All that CU has is what Stafford gave them. (She also wrote, in her book, that when Mrs. Oswald agreed to be tape recorded, she stipulated that there be two recorders so she could have a copy.)
•
The example about animals and pets is minor, compared to a false quote on pages 12-13 of A Mother in History. This one is presented as dialogue between interviewer and interviewee, and Jean Stafford goes in for the kill. It is intended, I am convinced, to make Marguerite Oswald appear nuts – to use a non-clinical term.
Marguerite spoke first:
“And as we all know, President Kennedy was a dying man. So I say it is possible that my son was chosen to shoot him in a mercy killing for the security of the country. And if this is true, it was a fine thing to do and my son is a hero.”
“I had not heard that President Kennedy was dying,” I said, staggered by this cluster of fictions stated as irrefutable fact. Some mercy killing! The methods used in this instance must surely be unique in the annals of euthanasia.
This exchange is not found anywhere in the interview audio or the transcript. Marguerite does not make the statement, and Jean Stafford does not make that stunned reply.
There is something similar to this in the interviews. Unfortunately, the digitized version of the tape recording at CU ends partway through the quote. Did the original tape end there, too? No, because the corresponding transcript, which I have found to be consistently accurate, continues for several more pages. It is convoluted, but this is what Marguerite Oswald really said.
That President Kennedy was killed by – a mercy killing – by some of his own men that thought it was the thing to do and this is not impossible and since I blame the secret service from what I saw and what I thought it could have been that my son and the secret service were all involved in a mercy killing.
A minute or so before her “mercy killing” remark, Marguerite did say “a dying President,” but “As we all know” is an invention. She says JFK was dying because he had Addison’s disease, which he did. She also called it a kidney disorder, which it is not. Addison’s can be life-threatening, but Stafford correctly points out that it is a manageable adrenal condition. And Kennedy managed his.
But Stafford can’t let this go without having some fun, falsely quoting Marguerite calling it Atkinson’s disease. In the audio, there is no doubt: Marguerite says Addison’s. It is rendered as Atkinson’s in the transcript. Maybe Stafford didn’t remember what Mrs. Oswald actually said, and later on trusted the error of the unknown transcriber. While accurate overall, the transcript does, in fact, garble certain words here and there; in places it reminds me of the sometimes-strange voicemail transcripts my Smartphone makes. The ethical thing would have been double-checking Marguerite’s presumed mistake, before putting it to print.
But the point is that Marguerite Oswald did not say her son was chosen to shoot a terminally ill JFK in a mercy killing. Jean Stafford created that illusion.
According to biographer David Roberts (Jean Stafford: A Biography, 1988) Jean Stafford later “held parties at which she played the Oswald tapes for her friends.” Roberts cites Stafford’s “fascination” with Marguerite Oswald’s voice.
It sounds more like arrogance to me. One imagines a bunch of cocktail-quaffing intelligentsia howling with laughter over Marguerite’s unschooled chatter. But maybe not. Maybe Stafford just wanted to give some of her pals a front-row seat to history. Whatever: the image this conjures is, to me, thoroughly repulsive.
•
The Stafford-Oswald interviews took place in May 1965. This is approximately ten months after Marguerite met with Harold Feldman and Vince Salandria, after which Feldman wrote “The Unsinkable Marguerite Oswald,” published in September 1964 (available online).
If Jean Stafford had done her homework, she might have answered a question she puzzled over in her book’s Appendix III. How, she wondered, was an undereducated Marguerite Oswald able to paraphrase an obscure quote from Sigmund Freud? “Without persecution,” she told Stafford, “there would not be a persecution complex.”
In his article Harold Feldman, a lay psychologist, said that the media consistently portrayed Marguerite Oswald “as a self-centered, domineering, paranoiac showoff with frequent delusions of persecution. It reminds me of Freud’s remark that there would be no such thing as a persecution complex if there were not real persecution.”
Feldman, whose writing often appeared in psychoanalytic journals, wrote about Marguerite with the deference and sympathy Jean Stafford failed to summon. He observed:
She has devoted every day since November 22, 1963, to uncovering what she believes and millions believe is a real conspiracy in which her youngest son was the fall guy. As a result, she is held up to scorn as a bitter old woman who sees snares and plots everywhere.
And he added: “… if Ibsen is right and the strongest is the one who stands alone for integrity and honor, then Marguerite Oswald is the strongest woman in America.”
Marguerite Oswald was an ordinary woman thrust, quite against her will, into extraordinary circumstances. In spite of tremendous obstacles, she defended her son against the Warren Commission and the mainstream media. She had few allies. Even family members, she told Jean Stafford, distanced themselves from her. “I’m alone in my fight, with no help.”
Marguerite Oswald may have struck Stafford as eccentric, but who doesn’t have personality quirks? Jean Stafford exploited Marguerite’s to the hilt, and did so ruthlessly, in exchange for money. I could cite many more examples of the dishonesty in A Mother in History, but life is too short.
Stafford shuffled the truth like a deck of cards, manufacturing quotes and manipulating chronology, all to create the false impression – the lie – that her subject was divorced from reality. Suffice it to say A Mother In History is even worse than I imagined when I visited the Jean Stafford archive at CU.
But it’s been more than fifty years since publication, so the damage is done.
-- Original review (FWIW!) --
I think this book is dishonest. Stafford went into this assignment with preconceived notions and turned out a real hatchet job.
Stafford's biographers say she dreaded going to Texas for the interviews. Originally an article for McCall's magazine, she told a friend that she was writing the piece "for a magazine whose name I am ashamed to write down."
At one point Marguerite said, "He [Lee Harvey Oswald] never did tell me why he went to Russia. I have my own opinion. He spoke Russian, he wrote Russian, and he read Russian. Why? Because my boy was being trained as an agent, that's why."
This is not as far-fetched at it may seem. Does it not cry out for a follow-up question? If Stafford asked one, she did not include it in her published text. Her next recorded question is, "What would Lee have done with his life if he had not been killed?"
One of Jean Stafford's biographers (there are several) wrote that this book is "profoundly unsympathetic" and "a cruel portrait, executed pitilessly."
A few months before Stafford talked to Marguerite Oswald, another writer interviewed her. The result is more balanced and sympathetic. Anyone interested should check out "The Unsinkable Marguerite Oswald," by Harold Feldman, published in The Realist in Sept. 1964. It can be found here:
The Unsinkable Marguerite Oswald
July 2, 2018
What an odd little book. Three days with perhaps the most infamous mother in American history. I'd never heard her story before and I'll never forget her.
May 7, 2024
If your sense of humor is sufficiently warped (and mine is.)
I'm old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination and the shock and horror that followed it. What astonishes me is the continuing fascination with the event and the people involved. Political assassinations are hardly rare, so why the obsession with this one?
I can only say that I don't share that obsession, have read very few of the flood of books and seen none of the movies. I'm willing to accept that Oswald acted alone, but I don't mind if others think differently.
I read a library copy of this book when it was published. It was controversial, with some critics claiming that it added little or nothing of value and some accusing the author of simply trying to cash in on the public interest about every detail of JFK's death.
I find that hard to believe. Jean Stafford was a well-known writer who had published novels, as well as being a frequent contributor to respected magazines, including The New Yorker (where her husband was on the staff.) There's no evidence that she was short of money or that she craved attention.
I AM puzzled that she decided to focus her attention on Marguerite Oswald. None of Stafford's three marriages produced children, so she had no personal reason to delve into the maternal influence in Lee Harvey Oswald's life. The articles that led to this book appeared in McCalls Magazine, but I suspect its mostly female readers would have been more interested in the younger, more glamorous Marina Oswald.
Perhaps Stafford simply wanted to find out more about the people involved and Marguerite Oswald was the most easily accessible player. As Mrs Oswald said bitterly, she was much sought after (by police, press, etc) immediately after the assassination, but then those people started to avoid her. When you read this book, you'll know why.
It IS light-weight, but it's hard to say what any writer could have done with such an eccentric (putting it mildly) subject. Marguerite Oswald simply didn't live in the same world as the rest of us. She wasn't stupid, but she was deeply delusional and one of the most determinedly self-centered people imaginable.
All three of her sons left home (joining the Marines) in their teens and there's no evidence she knew any of them very well before she lost contact with them. She was a woman whose reality existed in her own head. Observers quickly learned that she was less interested in justice for her son than attention for herself. Her "research" consisted of collecting scrapbooks of newspaper articles and drawing her own strange conclusions.
She insisted that her son was an American hero charged with an important government mission - the elimination of an ailing president to safeguard national security. He should be remembered as such and (most importantly) the mother who raised him should be honored. That she failed to receive the attention she felt she deserved rankled. Anger and resentment ruled her life.
Like modern-day conspiracy theorists, she claimed to have "proof" that would shock the world, but she would reveal it when she was ready to do so. The world was still waiting for her revelations when she died in 1981 and was buried beside her youngest son.
You won't learn anything from this book, except that there are crazy people and you probably already know that. For such an odd woman, she led a relatively successful life. She DID raise three sons by herself. I can well believe that she was a good saleswoman and could have managed a retail store efficiently.
She moved frequently and changed jobs even more frequently, but some people do. It could not have made her sons' childhoods easier, but it's hard to argue with her when she says she did the best she could.
Don't be thrown off by the introduction. It seems to be the introduction to Stafford's short story collection (for which she received a Pulizer Prize.) Why it was included in this book is a mystery.
Stafford had a wry sense of humor and her take on the bizarre Mrs Oswald is entertaining. I read it decades ago and still remembered it vividly. That says something, doesn't it?
I'm old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination and the shock and horror that followed it. What astonishes me is the continuing fascination with the event and the people involved. Political assassinations are hardly rare, so why the obsession with this one?
I can only say that I don't share that obsession, have read very few of the flood of books and seen none of the movies. I'm willing to accept that Oswald acted alone, but I don't mind if others think differently.
I read a library copy of this book when it was published. It was controversial, with some critics claiming that it added little or nothing of value and some accusing the author of simply trying to cash in on the public interest about every detail of JFK's death.
I find that hard to believe. Jean Stafford was a well-known writer who had published novels, as well as being a frequent contributor to respected magazines, including The New Yorker (where her husband was on the staff.) There's no evidence that she was short of money or that she craved attention.
I AM puzzled that she decided to focus her attention on Marguerite Oswald. None of Stafford's three marriages produced children, so she had no personal reason to delve into the maternal influence in Lee Harvey Oswald's life. The articles that led to this book appeared in McCalls Magazine, but I suspect its mostly female readers would have been more interested in the younger, more glamorous Marina Oswald.
Perhaps Stafford simply wanted to find out more about the people involved and Marguerite Oswald was the most easily accessible player. As Mrs Oswald said bitterly, she was much sought after (by police, press, etc) immediately after the assassination, but then those people started to avoid her. When you read this book, you'll know why.
It IS light-weight, but it's hard to say what any writer could have done with such an eccentric (putting it mildly) subject. Marguerite Oswald simply didn't live in the same world as the rest of us. She wasn't stupid, but she was deeply delusional and one of the most determinedly self-centered people imaginable.
All three of her sons left home (joining the Marines) in their teens and there's no evidence she knew any of them very well before she lost contact with them. She was a woman whose reality existed in her own head. Observers quickly learned that she was less interested in justice for her son than attention for herself. Her "research" consisted of collecting scrapbooks of newspaper articles and drawing her own strange conclusions.
She insisted that her son was an American hero charged with an important government mission - the elimination of an ailing president to safeguard national security. He should be remembered as such and (most importantly) the mother who raised him should be honored. That she failed to receive the attention she felt she deserved rankled. Anger and resentment ruled her life.
Like modern-day conspiracy theorists, she claimed to have "proof" that would shock the world, but she would reveal it when she was ready to do so. The world was still waiting for her revelations when she died in 1981 and was buried beside her youngest son.
You won't learn anything from this book, except that there are crazy people and you probably already know that. For such an odd woman, she led a relatively successful life. She DID raise three sons by herself. I can well believe that she was a good saleswoman and could have managed a retail store efficiently.
She moved frequently and changed jobs even more frequently, but some people do. It could not have made her sons' childhoods easier, but it's hard to argue with her when she says she did the best she could.
Don't be thrown off by the introduction. It seems to be the introduction to Stafford's short story collection (for which she received a Pulizer Prize.) Why it was included in this book is a mystery.
Stafford had a wry sense of humor and her take on the bizarre Mrs Oswald is entertaining. I read it decades ago and still remembered it vividly. That says something, doesn't it?
October 13, 2018
The least said about this the better. Fortunately a quick read and I made as much sense out of Mizz Oswald as did the author. Yet if Jean Stafford could describe her time with Marguerite Oswald as 'three incredible days' she should have got out more!
As crazed as 'the mother in history' was portrayed, at least she never swallowed the official BS that was hung on her son. Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? He was a man who worked at a CIA base, had his records altered by the military. Defected to Russia with no money. Took a plane when no plane was available. Slipped across the iron curtain without leaving a trace. Threatened the U.S. Moscow embassy with espionage and is never arrested. Lived in a community infiltrated by intelligence agents. Befriended in Dallas by a CIA minder. Uses an alias. Keeps an office in a building with other agents. Eludes detection in Mexico City by CIA surveillance devices. Is repeatedly observed in two places at once. Obtains a passport when one should have been denied and finally is shot in a basement crowded with police, by another lone nut with links to organised crime and FBI.
So, are you dumb enough to think he was a lone nut? Marguerite Oswald always believed he was an agent of the U.S. government.
As crazed as 'the mother in history' was portrayed, at least she never swallowed the official BS that was hung on her son. Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? He was a man who worked at a CIA base, had his records altered by the military. Defected to Russia with no money. Took a plane when no plane was available. Slipped across the iron curtain without leaving a trace. Threatened the U.S. Moscow embassy with espionage and is never arrested. Lived in a community infiltrated by intelligence agents. Befriended in Dallas by a CIA minder. Uses an alias. Keeps an office in a building with other agents. Eludes detection in Mexico City by CIA surveillance devices. Is repeatedly observed in two places at once. Obtains a passport when one should have been denied and finally is shot in a basement crowded with police, by another lone nut with links to organised crime and FBI.
So, are you dumb enough to think he was a lone nut? Marguerite Oswald always believed he was an agent of the U.S. government.
December 21, 2022
Very disappointing. It's clear from the beginning that Stafford wasn't thrilled with the assignment, and in my view she would have been well inspired to turn it down. I knew nothing about Marguerite Oswald before reading this, and I feel I don't know a great deal more now because by her own account Stafford often tuned out of her subject's monologues. Marguerite comes out as both super organized and articulate, yet also illogical and almost deranged. After all, who wouldn't lose their bearings after what she'd been through? While it seems clear that she was interested in monetizing her story, Stafford's poor standard of conduct during this interview suggest that she may have been just as mercenary.
September 12, 2017
I had a gift card to a bookstore going out of business- with 1.00 and change left on it. This was priced at 99 cents. A pathetic story and sad rendering of life of the supposed killer of President Kennedy. Seemed more an attention grabbing story of the mother. You can read in between the lines if you wish.Thin book, worth reading in a day. I recommend seeing the film Parkland to follow this up.
June 1, 2023
We briefly encounter the real Jean Stafford and the understandably neurotic Mrs. Oswald.
June 3, 2012
This is a strange little book. Basically it consists of Jean Stafford – in her declining years, after her well-regarded short stories and novels had been written – hanging out with Marguerite Oswald in her home in Fort Worth, asking questions about her son, Lee Harvey Oswald. Nothing is really revealed here beyond the fact that Mrs. Oswald is a delusional woman full of grandiose ideas about herself, her son, and the world at large. It could be said that she is ground zero of JFK conspiracy nuttiness.
Now as I get older, I find myself drawn towards amateur psychology, and my random, non-systematic reading around on the Internet has lead me to the conclusion that Mrs. O suffered from (and causes those around her to suffer) Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Of course I could be wrong (and the idea that NPD is even a real “disorder” is under attack by real psychologists). NPD, as I gather, is primarily a coping mechanism that allows its sufferer to negotiate her way through a world that is overwhelmingly hostile, beyond control, and incomprehensible. And for a lot of people, NPD really works, in an evil, twisted way. Empathy and basic adherence to facts are jettisoned, to be replaced by a relentless and systematic distortion of reality in the service of preserving at all costs the itsy-bitsy self. This usually means, when the NPD sufferer is a parent, that their kids can get really screwed up.
This is not to say that Mrs. O is responsible for JFK’s death, but she sure didn’t do Lee Harvey any favors. But she did have it tough and she did manage to keep the family intact. Her energy too often went towards appearances rather than the actual nurturing of her children. As Stafford describes it, her home was modest and plainly furnished, but it was immaculate, and her standards of hospitality were gracious in an old fashioned Texas way. Many NPDers are hyper-vigilant in keeping up appearances, so what are virtues (hospitality, fastidiousness in dress and habits) can be part of an overall self-serving effort to be above reproach in all the unimportant ways: you could never accuse Mrs. O of an unvacuumed carpet. But Mrs. O’s crazy self-regard seems to have made her an unreliable employee, and so the kids moved a lot. The neglect of her children came from the fact she was a single parent without much by way of family support, but also because she appears to be malignantly self-absorbed and self-justifying. Her account of being a single mom raising kids is off-kilter; by turns self-pitying and self-congratulatory. Once Lee Harvey attained his horrible celebrity on Nov. 22, 1963, she took her show on the road…
Really, Mrs. O’s looniness is sometimes astonishing. One example is that she is convinced that Marina, Lee Harvey’s widow whom he met and wed while in exile in Russia was not Russian, but French. Stafford was bemused and baffled by this and pressed Mrs. O on why she thought this way. As with most of her beliefs, when Mrs. O ran out of logic to warp in their justification, she insisted on possessing a natural talent for penetrating insight that bordered on the occult. After a while, this gets to be a slog to wade through and is finally just sad.
As for Jean Stafford, I just don’t get it. I want to like her, if for nothing else she had to put up with Robert Lowell, one of my favorite poets and an first-class destructive loon (Stafford was his first wife – he crashed their car, drunk, probably, and put her through the windshield, mutilating her face. He then proceeded to put her through a bunch of other psychic windshields until they got a divorce). But I’ve never made it through much of her fiction. It strikes me as overwritten and yet coy. In “A Mother In History,” Stafford mostly lets Mrs. O ramble, but her scene-setting can be pretty tough going:
“Probably the storm through which we drove to Fort Worth was not the very worst I had ever seen, but at the time I could not recall another to equal its infuriated lightning and its dooming detonations and the niagaras that roared down on us from four directions, baffling the windshields. It sounded like catastrophe, and I was sorry to be in alien corn. But by the time we got o Mrs. Oswald’s street, the fulminations began to peter out and the malevolent splendor was replaced by a sniffling nastiness, the kind of mess that causes angleworms to materialize, mauve and visceral, on sidewalks.” (p. 78).
Make no mistake, there is a lot of writing going on here, but not the good kind (and I think those are earthworms rather than angleworms she sees dying so mauvely on the sidewalk). And yet this book does have its use. For one thing it reveals glimpses of the JFK assassination culture before it had taken on its patina of nostalgia (“I remember sitting in homeroom when the principal came on the speaker telling us…”). Furthermore, it dates from before the proliferation of conspiracy theorists – in fact, Mrs. Oswald is perhaps the very first conspiracy theorist of all.
Now as I get older, I find myself drawn towards amateur psychology, and my random, non-systematic reading around on the Internet has lead me to the conclusion that Mrs. O suffered from (and causes those around her to suffer) Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Of course I could be wrong (and the idea that NPD is even a real “disorder” is under attack by real psychologists). NPD, as I gather, is primarily a coping mechanism that allows its sufferer to negotiate her way through a world that is overwhelmingly hostile, beyond control, and incomprehensible. And for a lot of people, NPD really works, in an evil, twisted way. Empathy and basic adherence to facts are jettisoned, to be replaced by a relentless and systematic distortion of reality in the service of preserving at all costs the itsy-bitsy self. This usually means, when the NPD sufferer is a parent, that their kids can get really screwed up.
This is not to say that Mrs. O is responsible for JFK’s death, but she sure didn’t do Lee Harvey any favors. But she did have it tough and she did manage to keep the family intact. Her energy too often went towards appearances rather than the actual nurturing of her children. As Stafford describes it, her home was modest and plainly furnished, but it was immaculate, and her standards of hospitality were gracious in an old fashioned Texas way. Many NPDers are hyper-vigilant in keeping up appearances, so what are virtues (hospitality, fastidiousness in dress and habits) can be part of an overall self-serving effort to be above reproach in all the unimportant ways: you could never accuse Mrs. O of an unvacuumed carpet. But Mrs. O’s crazy self-regard seems to have made her an unreliable employee, and so the kids moved a lot. The neglect of her children came from the fact she was a single parent without much by way of family support, but also because she appears to be malignantly self-absorbed and self-justifying. Her account of being a single mom raising kids is off-kilter; by turns self-pitying and self-congratulatory. Once Lee Harvey attained his horrible celebrity on Nov. 22, 1963, she took her show on the road…
Really, Mrs. O’s looniness is sometimes astonishing. One example is that she is convinced that Marina, Lee Harvey’s widow whom he met and wed while in exile in Russia was not Russian, but French. Stafford was bemused and baffled by this and pressed Mrs. O on why she thought this way. As with most of her beliefs, when Mrs. O ran out of logic to warp in their justification, she insisted on possessing a natural talent for penetrating insight that bordered on the occult. After a while, this gets to be a slog to wade through and is finally just sad.
As for Jean Stafford, I just don’t get it. I want to like her, if for nothing else she had to put up with Robert Lowell, one of my favorite poets and an first-class destructive loon (Stafford was his first wife – he crashed their car, drunk, probably, and put her through the windshield, mutilating her face. He then proceeded to put her through a bunch of other psychic windshields until they got a divorce). But I’ve never made it through much of her fiction. It strikes me as overwritten and yet coy. In “A Mother In History,” Stafford mostly lets Mrs. O ramble, but her scene-setting can be pretty tough going:
“Probably the storm through which we drove to Fort Worth was not the very worst I had ever seen, but at the time I could not recall another to equal its infuriated lightning and its dooming detonations and the niagaras that roared down on us from four directions, baffling the windshields. It sounded like catastrophe, and I was sorry to be in alien corn. But by the time we got o Mrs. Oswald’s street, the fulminations began to peter out and the malevolent splendor was replaced by a sniffling nastiness, the kind of mess that causes angleworms to materialize, mauve and visceral, on sidewalks.” (p. 78).
Make no mistake, there is a lot of writing going on here, but not the good kind (and I think those are earthworms rather than angleworms she sees dying so mauvely on the sidewalk). And yet this book does have its use. For one thing it reveals glimpses of the JFK assassination culture before it had taken on its patina of nostalgia (“I remember sitting in homeroom when the principal came on the speaker telling us…”). Furthermore, it dates from before the proliferation of conspiracy theorists – in fact, Mrs. Oswald is perhaps the very first conspiracy theorist of all.
March 21, 2025
Jean Stafford Meets Marguerite Oswald
Jean Stafford (1910 -- 1975) had a decades-long career as a short story writer and novelist. In 1970, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her "Collected Stories". The Library of America has published two compilations of Stafford's writings, the first of which includes her three novels while the second includes her complete stories and other writings.
I became interested in reading Stafford and began with her short work "A Mother in History". which is available separately and also incldued in the LOA compilation of the stories. In March, 1965, McCalls magazine commissioned Stafford to interview and write an article about Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy. Stafford traveled to Fort Worth, Texas and interviewed Mrs. Oswald over three days in late May, 1965. Stafford's account of her visit was published in McCalls and expanded into a book "A Mother in History" which sold well and which provoked substantial controversy for its style and portrayal of Oswald's mother.
The book is in three chapters covering the three days of Stafford's interview. The interviews took place at Marguerite Oswald's small home, which Stafford describes in detail, and on the third day, which was Mother's Day, the two women visited Lee Harvey Oswald's grave. Stafford experienced little difficulty in getting her subject to talk. Marguerite Oswald was voluble during the interviews, so much so that Stafford used a tape recorder for the second and third days. Much of the book consists of Oswald speaking in a rambling, nonstop way. Stafford found her speech practised, among other things. Mrs. Oswald defended her son, and denied that he had assassinated Kennedy or that, if he had done so, he was an "agent" of the United States. She said she had studied the events surrounding the assassination in detail and wanted to publish a book to clear the name of her son. She would often switch course during her ramblings from defending her son to other subjects to asking suddenly "do you want a cup of coffee?". She wanted to rebut the findings of the Warren Commission. Its report had been published not long before and Marguerite Oswald had been called as a witness.
Stafford was not impressed with her subject, finding her delusional, calculating, dishonest, and in pursuit of money and recognition for herself. In her book, Stafford was clear about her responses. Marguerite Oswald's rants are followed by Stafford's own observations and by comments on what she saw and heard. She was not a sympathetic interviewer. Also, Stafford was aware of the controversy that surrounded President Kennedy's assassination from the outset and of the various conspiracy theories and denials of Oswald's guilt. She believed firmly in the conclusions of the Warren Commission.
Her book has been praised for its portrayal of Marguerite Oswald and for its writing style, in a work of journalism. It has been criticized for its lack of sympathy for its subject and for what is seen as its intrusive voice. Debate over the Kennedy assassination has continued over the years, and conspiracy theories still abound. Stafford's short book is a small historical document in the record of a tragic event.
As mentioned at the outset, I read the book from an interest in Jean Stafford and not as a student of the Kennedy assassination. The writing was good even though the focus was sometimes blurred by Marguerite Oswald's incoherence. I thought Stafford gave a compelling, informed portrait of her subject and that she properly shared her own responses to and conclusions on what she saw with her readers. Her account is worth reading and, I assume still has value as a historical document as well as a literary work. For what it is worth, I also accept the official account of Kennedy's death, Oswalds's guilt, and the lack of conspiracy.
I was glad to get to know something of Stafford in this book but feel she is likely better served by her stories and novels.
Robin Friedman
Jean Stafford (1910 -- 1975) had a decades-long career as a short story writer and novelist. In 1970, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her "Collected Stories". The Library of America has published two compilations of Stafford's writings, the first of which includes her three novels while the second includes her complete stories and other writings.
I became interested in reading Stafford and began with her short work "A Mother in History". which is available separately and also incldued in the LOA compilation of the stories. In March, 1965, McCalls magazine commissioned Stafford to interview and write an article about Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy. Stafford traveled to Fort Worth, Texas and interviewed Mrs. Oswald over three days in late May, 1965. Stafford's account of her visit was published in McCalls and expanded into a book "A Mother in History" which sold well and which provoked substantial controversy for its style and portrayal of Oswald's mother.
The book is in three chapters covering the three days of Stafford's interview. The interviews took place at Marguerite Oswald's small home, which Stafford describes in detail, and on the third day, which was Mother's Day, the two women visited Lee Harvey Oswald's grave. Stafford experienced little difficulty in getting her subject to talk. Marguerite Oswald was voluble during the interviews, so much so that Stafford used a tape recorder for the second and third days. Much of the book consists of Oswald speaking in a rambling, nonstop way. Stafford found her speech practised, among other things. Mrs. Oswald defended her son, and denied that he had assassinated Kennedy or that, if he had done so, he was an "agent" of the United States. She said she had studied the events surrounding the assassination in detail and wanted to publish a book to clear the name of her son. She would often switch course during her ramblings from defending her son to other subjects to asking suddenly "do you want a cup of coffee?". She wanted to rebut the findings of the Warren Commission. Its report had been published not long before and Marguerite Oswald had been called as a witness.
Stafford was not impressed with her subject, finding her delusional, calculating, dishonest, and in pursuit of money and recognition for herself. In her book, Stafford was clear about her responses. Marguerite Oswald's rants are followed by Stafford's own observations and by comments on what she saw and heard. She was not a sympathetic interviewer. Also, Stafford was aware of the controversy that surrounded President Kennedy's assassination from the outset and of the various conspiracy theories and denials of Oswald's guilt. She believed firmly in the conclusions of the Warren Commission.
Her book has been praised for its portrayal of Marguerite Oswald and for its writing style, in a work of journalism. It has been criticized for its lack of sympathy for its subject and for what is seen as its intrusive voice. Debate over the Kennedy assassination has continued over the years, and conspiracy theories still abound. Stafford's short book is a small historical document in the record of a tragic event.
As mentioned at the outset, I read the book from an interest in Jean Stafford and not as a student of the Kennedy assassination. The writing was good even though the focus was sometimes blurred by Marguerite Oswald's incoherence. I thought Stafford gave a compelling, informed portrait of her subject and that she properly shared her own responses to and conclusions on what she saw with her readers. Her account is worth reading and, I assume still has value as a historical document as well as a literary work. For what it is worth, I also accept the official account of Kennedy's death, Oswalds's guilt, and the lack of conspiracy.
I was glad to get to know something of Stafford in this book but feel she is likely better served by her stories and novels.
Robin Friedman
January 26, 2023
The mother in question is Lee Harvey Oswald's mother. Ms. Stafford spent a good deal of time with her. Ms. Oswald's lack of understanding is sad and disturbing.
June 7, 2011
Stafford provides Marguerite Oswald with the space to open up. Oswald's voice is incredible: paranoid, defensive, expansive, maternal and sharp. It's an excellent portrait Stafford provides, a mother wounded, and alone, seeking for a companion in telling a story she feels has been overlooked. Stafford's own high prose voice comes in brief intervals and contrasts Marguerite's. The question seems to be who is playing whom and needs the other.
July 26, 2022
This little book set in motion the idea for my senior history thesis -- how LHO's mother and her mental capacity affected her ability to raise children and how it affected LHO and his mental stability.
February 9, 2008
This is fabulous -- a book about Oswald's mother, based on interviews with the author. Clearly source material for "Libra" (which is to take nothing away from it).
May 22, 2016
An interesting perspective of the JFK assassination through the eyes of Lee Harvey Oswald's mother.
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