Priscilla Johnson McMillan

Priscilla Johnson McMillan (born Priscilla Mary Post Johnson) (July 19, 1928 – July 7, 2021) was an American journalist, translator, author, and historian. She was a Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

At the beginning of her career, she worked for Senator John F. Kennedy and saw him informally for several years thereafter. During the late 1950s, she served as reporter in Moscow for the North American Newspaper Alliance, and interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald as he was defecting to the Soviet Union in 1959. Following the assassination of President Kennedy and Oswald's murder, she became friends with Oswald's widow, Marina Oswald, and published the acclaimed study Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1977). She also published Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964 (1965) with co-editor Leopold Labedz and The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (2005) about the Oppenheimer security hearing.

Johnson was the only individual who, to a significant extent, personally knew both President Kennedy and Lee Oswald. (Some sources describe Priscilla Johnson as the only person who knew both Kennedy and Oswald.) Like Priscilla Johnson, Joan Hallet is said to have recognized Oswald when news of his arrest for the assassination became known. the third of four children to Stuart H. Johnson, a financier who had inherited a company that made textiles, and Mary Eunice (Clapp) Johnson, a homemaker. She grew up in the affluent hamlet of Locust Valley, New York, Her family, which descended from the Pilgrims, was prominent and had an entry in the Social Register. She played competitive tennis, appearing in tournaments on Long Island. She was active in politics while at Brearley and thought that the nascent United Nations should have greater powers so as to be able to control nuclear weapons in the emerging Atomic Age. and majored in Russian language and literature. Johnson applied to join the CIA during this time but was rejected due to her membership of the UWF. She also spent time with Truman Capote, who captured some of their experiences in his 1956 non-fiction book The Muses Are Heard. Her observations on Soviet fashion and Soviet attitudes regarding Western fashion were profiled in The Boston Daily Globe. While there she also acted as a translator at the Embassy of the United States, Moscow.

Johnson transitioned to journalism, and from 1958 to 1960 she was stationed in Moscow, where she filed stories for the North American Newspaper Alliance. An executive with the Alliance described her performance there: "Priscilla was the kind of correspondent the Russians were wary of in those days. She knew too much about Soviet history, law, and politics to be bamboozled by propaganda handouts from the [Soviet government]. And with her expert knowledge of the language she could fine-comb the Russian press for story leads." She talked with him for five or six hours. The story she wrote that appeared in North American papers began with Oswald saying, "For two years now I have been waiting to do this one thing. To dissolve my American citizenship and become a citizen of the Soviet Union." The piece consisted of Johnson describing Oswald's past life and the difficulties of defecting, and quotes of Oswald's Marxist-derived explanations of why he wanted to move to a different politico-economic system.

On November 22, 1963, Johnson was first shocked by the news of Kennedy's death, and then a second time by the identification of the suspect arrested, exclaiming to a friend: "My God, I know that boy!" Because of her interview with Oswald, she was called to testify before the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination. Her work on the book ended up taking over a decade and consumed much of her life. They divorced in the early 1980s .

Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy, was ultimately published by Harper & Row in 1977. It received many positive reviews upon release. Some reviewers considered it the best work on the assassination, or superior to the Warren Commission Report, or akin to a Dostoevsky novel. She wrote an obituary of physicist Edward Teller in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that emphasized the contradictions in Teller's life. For a while she was an adjunct fellow at the Center for Science and International Affairs at Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

During the 1980s, members of a memorial committee dedicated to preserving the legacy of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer approached McMillan and asked her to write a new account of the much-discussed Oppenheimer security hearing of 1954. She also examined other people involved in the Oppenheimer matter, More than other biographies of Oppenheimer, hers attempted to draw parallels and significance to contemporary issues, especially regarding scientific-government relations.

McMillan was interviewed for the 1993 documentary Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? produced by PBS's Frontline and appeared as a witness at a public hearing conducted by the Assassination Records Review Board held in Boston on 24 March 1995. Marina and Lee was republished in 2013, in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy's death. McMillan participated in a number of media engagements, Subsequently declassified CIA files later confirmed McMillan's relationship to the CIA. In 1975 a CIA official reviewed McMillan's CIA file and determined she was a "witting collaborator". Priscilla was interviewed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. Interviewer Michael Goldsmith asked her if she had been interviewed by the CIA after her third visit to Russia. She affirmed it, but when Goldsmith showed her a letter from the CIA stating she was cooperating with them on reviews of Russian writers for American publication, she said she did not recall writing it.

Final years and death McMillan served on the national advisory board of the Council for a Livable World. She was a long-time resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her home there became a locus for intellectual conversations among friends, acquaintances, and family members along the lines of the European salon. She died in her Cambridge home on July 7, 2021, twelve days before her 93rd birthday. Priscilla is buried in Locust Valley Cemetery, Locust Valley, New York.

She appeared posthumously in the 2022 documentary The Assassination & Mrs. Paine. A biography of McMillan is being written by Holly-Katharine Johnson, a niece. The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (Viking, 2005; )