WASHINGTON, July 19 (By Maria Young for RIA Novosti) – The Russian woman once married to Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of US President John F. Kennedy, is putting his old wedding band on the auction block, saying she does not want to hold onto a fascinating but tragic part of US history that serves as a reminder of what she calls the worst day of her life.
“At this time of my life I don’t wish to have Lee’s ring in my possession because symbolically I want to let go of my past that is connecting with Nov 22, 1963,” Marina Oswald Porter wrote in a five-page letter to RR Auction of New Hampshire, referring to the the date that Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas.
Porter, who has remarried, requested that only a few excerpts from the letter be released.
The ring was handed over to the US Secret Service after Kennedy’s assassination but was later returned in a manila envelope to an attorney who had represented Oswald’s widow. The envelope was placed in a file and forgotten for years at the law firm where the lawyer worked.
Porter told the auction house the ring was discovered several years ago and handed over to her six months ago.
“When Mrs. Porter contacted us, we immediately knew the historical significance. It was a key piece of evidence in the Warren Commission and a key indicator of the mindset of Lee Harvey Oswald on the morning of Nov. 22, because he took it off as a farewell,” said Bobby Livingston, vice president of RR Auction, referring to the US presidential commission formed to investigate the assassination.
Marina Porter Oswald made it clear she doesn’t want the ring linked to the Kennedy assassination. (Photo credit: RR Auction)
Hours after removing the ring, Oswald shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository as the president’s motorcade passed by, according to the Warren Commission. He was arrested later that day and charged the next day with the assassination as well as the murder of a Dallas police officer.
Two days after the slaying, while being transferred from Dallas police headquarters to a county jail, Oswald was shot and killed by a man who claimed to be distraught over the murder.
The auction house plans to take live bids on the wedding band on October 24 in Boston.
The morning of the assassination, Oswald left the ring in “Marina’s grandmother’s cup on her dresser. Oswald knew he wasn’t coming back,” Livingston told RIA Novosti.
The ring – engraved with Soviet symbols – tells the story of Oswald’s time in the former Soviet Union, where he defected in 1959, Livingston said.
Oswald’s defection amid his disillusionment with the United States “reflects the very adolescent, fragmented mind of a very young man who was still 19 when he left the US and who was trying to find an identity for himself,” said journalist Peter Savodnik, author of “The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union,” due out in October.
“The Soviet Union had a draw, a certain power, for decades. What Oswald was oblivious to was that by 1959, when he went there, that interest had long subsided, that intense interest in the Soviet Union had really ended with the war. And then of course with all the revelations about Stalin, the Gulag [labor camps], the idea that the Soviet Union was this beacon of hope, this utopian experiment, had been abandoned,” Savodnik told RIA Novosti.
The Soviets were interested in defending themselves against the U-2 spy plane, an aircraft used by the US for covert surveillance during the Cold War, Savodnik said. Oswald, a former US Marine, had served at the Marine base in Japan where some of the U-2 spy planes were launched.
“He told the KGB handlers, ‘I have valuable information about the U-2,’ and that told the KGB he was utterly useless to them because they didn’t need any more information about the plane itself. What they needed was a missile that would go high enough to shoot it down,” Savodnik said.
With visions of being an important figure in the Soviet Union, Oswald was instead transferred unceremoniously to Minsk, a city that had been all but demolished by the Germans during World War II.
The next two-and-a-half years were “profoundly life-altering, and would bring out elements in Oswald’s personality and force challenges he never would have faced in the US,” Savodnik said.
“The Soviet period tells us a great deal very powerfully about who Oswald was and how he ultimately wound up murdering the president of the US,” Savodnik added.
The ring was purchased in Minsk, where Oswald was living when he married Marina Prusakova in 1961. They moved to the United States with their young daughter in 1962.
“We both wore our wedding rings at all times. (In Russian tradition it is bad omen to take it off),” Porter told the auction house in her letter.
“The ring can be clearly seen in a photo of Lee and me that was taken the day we left the USSR on the way to US. In Russian tradition, Lee wore this ring on his right hand. I can’t remember a time he did not wear it,” she added.
At the auction house, Livingston took the ring to a local jeweler for inspection, and was thrilled by an unexpected discovery.
“Quite to our excitement, under the microscope clearly, was a beautiful stamped Soviet star with a hammer and sickle in the middle of it, which for us it just brought the whole story of Lee’s journey to Russia and back to Texas to Dallas, to life,” said Livingston.
“Even the little simple marking inside that ring – the Soviet hammer, sickle and star – tells the whole story for me, of that moment on Nov 22, 1963, where Lee decides, takes off that ring,” he added.
The auction house set the estimated sales price at $30,000 to $50,000, but with the “intense interest” and “calls from some of the biggest collectors in the world,” it expects to get much more than that, Livingston said.
“The sky’s the limit on a piece like this,” he added.
