Lee Harvey Oswald’s Wedding Ring, His Widow and an Anonymous Bidder
By DEIRDRE BAIR
In this weekend’s magazine, Paul Gregory reflects on his friendship with Lee Harvey Oswald in the early 1960s. Here, Deirdre Bair writes about Oswald’s widow, Marina, and her remembrance of her late husband’s wedding ring.
As the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s death looms, Marina Oswald has refused to give interviews, make statements or take part in any commemorations. But she has made one exception. Marina Oswald — who remarried and is now known as Marina Porter — commissioned RR Auction, a boutique collectibles firm, to sell her late husband’s wedding band on her behalf. The ring, with an inscribed hammer and sickle, comes with a confessional five-page handwritten letter that Porter hopes will “certify that the accompanying gold ring is the wedding ring that my husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, wore from the time we were married on April 30th 1961 until the morning of Nov. 22, 1963.” On October 24, an anonymous Texas bidder paid $108,000 for the ring and note.
The ring letter, the full contents of which RR Auction shared exclusively with The New York Times, is a curious document. Written with a command of English and only one or two Russian-isms, Porter constructs an account that focuses entirely on herself. She begins by describing a joyous wedding day — “I . . . felt lucky to become the wife of the only foreigner (that I know about) in all of Minsk” — during which their friends were “jolly and happy” as she threw some of the flowers from her wedding bouquet (“narcisses,” as she misspelled them) into the river. The letter then segues sharply to “the worst day of my life.” On Nov. 22, 1963, she and her husband were living apart — “due to money issues and arguments” — in the latest of their ongoing separations. She notes that he visited on Thursday instead of his usual Friday to spend the night with her at the home of her friend, Ruth Paine. She awoke earlier than usual the next morning to “watch the Presidential arrival,” but explains neither how she learned of Kennedy’s assassination nor when she learned her husband had been apprehended. In previous accounts, Porter has said that her husband told her before he left the house, somewhat curiously, that he put money on a bureau and that she should use it as needed. In some of these accounts, she is quite specific that he told her to use it to buy new shoes for June, the elder daughter, who was then a toddler. In the ring letter, however, Porter wrote that it was actually the next day, Nov. 23, as she visited her husband in jail, that “he told me he left money on the dresser to buy Junie some shoes.”
Nov. 22, 1963, was also the last time Porter saw her husband’s wedding band. For decades it lingered among the papers of Forrest Markward, a lawyer who had set up a fund for Porter immediately after her husband’s death and who also handled her 1964 book contract with Priscilla Johnson McMillan, author of the biography, “Marina and Lee.” Wedged among the correspondence dealing with the book contract was a file folder on which Markward had scrawled “historical significance.” Inside the folder was an envelope that held a ring and an unsigned receipt saying it was the gold wedding band “which had been turned over to the United States Secret Service on Dec. 2, 1963, by Mrs. Ruth Paine.”
Nov. 22, 1963, was also the last time Porter saw her husband’s wedding band. For decades it lingered among the papers of Forrest Markward, a lawyer who had set up a fund for Porter immediately after her husband’s death and who also handled her 1964 book contract with Priscilla Johnson McMillan, author of the biography, “Marina and Lee.” Wedged among the correspondence dealing with the book contract was a file folder on which Markward had scrawled “historical significance.” Inside the folder was an envelope that held a ring and an unsigned receipt saying it was the gold wedding band “which had been turned over to the United States Secret Service on Dec. 2, 1963, by Mrs. Ruth Paine.”
When she learned of the ring in 2004, Porter was aghast, according to the journalist Hugh Aynesworth, who interviewed her at the time. It languished in a law firm’s safe for years, until her daughters began the legal process of getting it back and selling it. The Porters, who live outside Dallas, are retired, she from a job she held for decades at an Army-Navy store on McKinney Avenue in North Dallas, where her employers praised her. Although Porter will receive a significant amount of the profit, June said in a statement to RR Auction: “I hate the implication that she is the one that is somehow greedy. Mom has really paid a high price all these years, but it is hard for people to understand that if you have not lived it.”
Meanwhile, Porter seems eager to part with another relic of her old life. “I’m remarried for many years now, raised my children and have been blessed with grandchildren.” She continues: “At this time of my life I don’t wish to have Lee’s ring in my possession because symbolicly [sic] I want to let go of my past that is connecting with November 22, 1963.”