The Oswalds

Reviews / Votes

Nearly sixty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald, conspiracy theories abound. In his revelatory book, Paul Gregory offers a compelling, credible account of why we should reject them and go 'no further' than Oswald himself. Gregory actually knew Oswald, one of the very few people who can stake that claim, and gives us a clear-eyed, often chilling portrait of a demented loner with the mind and motives of a killer.

-Mark K. Updegrove, author of Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency

An invaluable record of life with JFK's assassin. Insightful.

-David Pietrusza, author of 1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon-The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies

The Oswalds offers the most vivid portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald that has ever appeared. Could Oswald really have acted alone? Paul Gregory, who was the assassin's friend-really, his only friend-puts that question to rest. An astonishing account-and a major contribution to our history.

-Peter Robinson, the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the host of Uncommon Knowledge

At last, a book, deeply felt and remembered, by someone who really knew Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina before the assassination of President Kennedy. Paul Gregory makes a powerful case that Oswald acted alone, an inadequate man wanting to make a name for himself in history. A true cracker of an account.

-Robert Service, author of Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin

Paul Gregory's compulsively readable memoir is filled with shocking revelations, among them that when the twenty-one-year-old University of Oklahoma student Paul Gregory first started taking Russian language lessons from the twenty-one-year-old Marina Oswald, there was always the same six-month-old Time magazine on prominent display in the extremely modest duplex. The cover photo was Time's Man of the Year for 1962: President John F. Kennedy. Paul Gregory relates that Lee Harvey Oswald had carried this old copy with him when he and Marina emigrated from the Soviet Union to Dallas. No novelist would construct such a scene. History is unbelievable.

-John Batchelor, host of CBS Eye on the World

Some sixty years ago, an insignificant school dropout who had failed at almost everything he had tried to do, Lee Harvey Oswald, brought his Carcano rifle to the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas and became one of the most infamous criminals in history. Ever since then, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 has been engulfed in a morass of falsehoods and ludicrous conspiracy theories. This book finally sets the record straight about Oswald, building on the earlier seminal work of Priscilla Johnson McMillan. . . . Paul Gregory, who later became one of the world's leading experts on the economy of the former Soviet Union, happened to know Oswald (and later Oswald's Soviet-born wife, Marina) exceedingly well. In this book, Gregory brings to bear his authorial skills and academic expertise in showing how the pathetic young man he had known in Texas could have committed such a monstrous crime. Gregory's book offers a definitive personality sketch of Oswald and a great deal of evidence that should put an end, once and for all, to the notion that shadowy forces intent on murdering the president would have enlisted such an unreliable and tempestuous loser. . . . Gregory's book will stand the test of time.

-Mark Kramer, Director of Cold War Studies, Harvard University

An engrossing psychological portrait based on Gregory's time as Oswald's only friend. There are many conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination. Gregory shows that the key to what happened was completely banal-the disturbed mind of one insignificant individual."

-David Satter, author of Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union




"An informative view of a killer's marriage and lethal motivations."


-Kirkus Reviews