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So Dianne Stillman, thank you again for giving us this time. The book is all about the relationship between Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother American Confidential, and it is a bizarre story, this kind of symbiosis between Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother, and it doesn't get a lot of publicity. I remember at one point thinking, well, this is sort
of a natural assumption that Lee Harvey Oswald's mother. Oh, she must have been so embarrassed by the actions of her son, and she must have gone into hiding virtually afterward, and so afraid that she was that you know, that reporters were going to hound her, and that she didn't want the limelight. She'd put her hand up in front of cameras. They just made all these assumptions, and then I went reading about it and it was exactly the opposite.
We should tell us a lot about Mark Oswald. But why don't you talk about what happened like starting the day of the accusation of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Okay, let me just backtrack for one second. When when Lee Harvey Oswald got back from Russia. He found out well, his mother told him that he that she was writing a book about his defection, and he was like, wait a second, I just I wrote my own book and I'm trying to get it published myself. So they were
like dueling mother and sons two book projects. And I guess he talked her out of trying to do anything with hers, and he went ahead and tried to have his own manuscript typed up, and nothing ever happened with it in any rate. So she was trying to, you know, attract attention to herself about her son's defection before he was killed. Not that she didn't have a right to tell her story, but I mean, these these are people who she see herself was not a big reader, you know.
I mean, it's not like she always wanted to be a writer at any rate. So when Lee was after Lee was killed, she really sought the limelight. She did go ahead and write another book called after Math of an Execution, a booklet. Actually, when she started selling a Deally plaza along with other memorabilia about Lee, she would sell like photos of him with her autograph. She I think she ended up selling or she included some letters that he had written from Russia in this book after
Math of an Execution. But she really uh sought fame and recognition herself, and she courted reporters. I mean even after before Lee was killed and after JFK was assassinated, she contacted One of the first things she did was contact Bob She for a reporter at CBS. He was stationed in Dallas at the time, and she called up and said, I need a ride to the jailhouse. He was like, who's this and she said, I'm Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, And you know, so it was kind of
like the scoop of the sanctuaries. So he went and picked her up and drove her there and and you know, he's often talked about how bizarre that was and how much he was how much that whole the whole encounter was all about Marguerite. He just you know, it was just kind of like her show, the Marguerite Oswald shows. Have said that, Yeah, she.
Wanted to pay day for every every time she spoke. And when we talk about selling off Lee Harvey Oswald memorabilia or selling photos of Lee Harvey Oswald with her signature on there, that would be pretty much whenever she would run out of money, she would go down to Dealey Plaza and just hawk her wares up and down the sidewalk until she could get enough money that she could, you know, get by for a while. But she wasn't She really wasn't interested in and then in any long
term thing. And she certainly wasn't interested in contributing to history. And this pamphlet is like so lame. It's funny about the Bob Sheefer story that maybe the last time she ever talked to a reporter without getting a checked first.
Well, yeah, that's true. I mean there might have been a you know, a couple of a couple of people here and there, but she generally asked for She would often ask for payment in advance of interviews, but nobody you know that most were reporters, did you know? She was of course besieged by reporters, right, you know, from legitimate publications and most of you know, these weren't people who would work over cash for an interview.
Right, Well, they did have it to give, you know, he wasn't so and then what was she do you I don't know if you know this. I was actually I was trying to find it what typically she would ask for. You know, I was assuming she was going to pro rate that, you know, from like a local reporter to a national story or something like that. But I couldn't find even a number. But I just know that everybody said the same thing, that she wanted money. Uh.
And then she said that and she you know, there was a woman named Gene Stafford, a very good writer who wrote a book called The Mother in History, who who went to see her a number of months uh after Lee was killed. And she was originally on assignment for I think it was for McCall's magazine, and then
it became her book, A Mother in History. But she said that when this was like in nineteen sixty four or something, and she said that when she went to Marguerite's house, Marguerite pointed out a new Buick sky Buick Skylark I think it was in the driveway and said, be that's the that's esquire money. Sure there was like a new car in the driveway.
And and this is this is her psychology. Is that Okay, Lee Harvey Osley her son did this horrible thing. But she never she never, I don't know of a time. Maybe you could tell me. I don't know of a time when she didn't continue to defend Lee Harvey Oswald as being some just following a previous pattern as sort of this helicopter mom. Uh, that she was, that she
was always defending him as being a victim. Uh, and that he was he was the victim of a conspiracy to kill him, and that he was completely innocent.
That's right. She just continued her pattern of you know, from whether it was LEAs you know, truancy at school or you know, getting in trouble on the playground or even like roughing up a neighbor's toddler whom he was babysitting. You know, my son can do no wrong. So it was that was that was the That was her presentation, you know, in the stage after JFK was killed, and she never once, I didn't I haven't come across anything.
And all my years of you know, looking into research and so on, she never went to express remorse for the death of JFK.
No.
Never, she would say things like, well, my son should be buried at Arlington too, because he did the country a favor. JFK had Addison's disease and she put him and he put him out of his misery. Things like that. She never even stopped to express remorse, regardless of saying she didn't have to say my son, as my son didn't do it. She could have just said, oh, this is a terrible thing, but she didn't appear to have been upset by it.
And I think in doing so too, that again she went out of her way to interact with the press, so just saying I'm so sorry it happened, and then kind of closing the doors on that chapter of her life and moving on. That would there was no money in that, you.
Know, she really tried to cash in on it. And I mean I get that she you know, because she had this series of menial jobs throughout her life that she didn't have any money, you know, even then after a Ruby had killed Otball. But so the only thing she had, the only thing that she could sell was her son's notoriety in her own, you know, by proxy, and she did try to do.
That and his shirts and like anything she had, you know, pre Etsy, pre Internet, she would still find a way to sell articles of clothing. They had nothing to do with the JFK assassination. It was just for the ghouls.
Yeah, it was, yeah, Varry macabre and she uh. I have a picture of her in my book, standing in front of her own her her library and her house which is filled with books about all the books about Oswald at that time. And you know, of course there were many even then, and you know, who can blame a mom for hat first acquiring those. But she's standing the pictures of her kind of standing. She's proud, She
looks kind of proud of it. He's not remorseal. I mean, once again, it's not like, oh, this terrible thing happened and my son's associated with it.
It's like my son the assassin. Yeah, yeah, you know. And I think this is anybody who's a parent, anybody who's spent any time raising children, no matter what you are, but anytime it's been around of children to a degree would feel slightly invested in their successes and their failures. And the fact that she didn't see this as a failure or she treated it just as much as a success as if he had won an oscar.
Uh. Yeah, I think it was more like that, like, well, that's.
What I mean. Is like, to me, there's no difference she's treating she treats his assassination of JFK no different than if Lee Harvey Oswald had won an Academy award, you know.
Yes, right, because he had become important at that point, he was important, and that importance, you know, extended to her. They became it was just like he always planned. In my view talking to me, Ma, you know, look look when I did.
And I think this fame thing that you're talking about is where it's like they were. He was trying to one up her desire for fame, and that she was always encouraging him to become increasingly more famous. In a way, his point is proven, I could shoot the President of the United States, and that's what If that's what I took to become famous, that would be okay with mom,
which is so twisted right in its own way. And yet when I see portrayals of Marguerite Oswald on television, I think she she comes off as kind of cranky or domineering or intrusive. She wasn't. She was, She was every bit. It seems like whatever the sociopathic tendency that Lee Harvey Oswald had, or that he weaponized by becoming a sociopathic narcissist, that whatever it was that he had. She was the one that gave it to him.
He was the one that what I didn't hear what you said that.
That he that she was the one who infected him eventually with this is to make your point that whatever he had and I didn't quite realize it, that whatever was that he had, as you know, narcissist narcissists are. You know, they have a million narcissists out there, and she was clearly a narcissist. She just hadn't weaponized it in the way that Lee Harvey Oswald did where he became a narcissist sociopath. And that's the difficult But it starts with her.
Oh, it all starts with her.
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