Priscilla Johnson McMillan

Early life and education

Priscilla Mary Post Johnson was born in Glen Cove, New York, on July 19, 1928, 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, on the North Shore of Long Island. Her family, which descended from the Pilgrims, was prominent and had an entry in the Social Register.

She attended the private, all-girls Brearley School in New York City. 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.

Johnson attended Bryn Mawr College, graduating in 1950, and majored in Russian language and literature. She was an advocate of the World Federalist Movement, belonging to the large chapter of the United World Federalists at the school. She also played for the Bryn Mawr tennis team. Johnson applied to join the CIA during this time but was rejected due to her membership of the UWF.

She went on to earn a master's degree in Russian area studies at Radcliffe College (Harvard University) in 1953. She also became fluent in the Russian language.

Congressional aide and reporter

Following graduation in 1953, Johnson secured a brief position with the office of Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, where she worked on research regarding French Indochina. The recently married Kennedy indicated some amorous interest in her, but no affair between them took place; in a 2013 interview with News.com.au, Johnson reflected that "I didn't love him. He was mesmerising but he was just someone I knew." Johnson saw Kennedy on a number of occasions over the next four years, including visiting him in the hospital following back surgeries that he underwent. In one case, Johnson posed as one of Kennedy's sisters in order to get past nurses and bring newspapers to him. In a 2013 interview with The Atlantic, Johnson recalled that "the doctors didn't think he could survive major surgery" but that Kennedy was nonetheless constantly on the phone in political discussions or was "peppering me with questions – what I thought about politics, my personal life, anything."

She worked as an editor and translator at the Current Digest of Soviet Press in New York City from 1953 to 1956. She also did translations of the Soviet Union's briefings at the Geneva "Big Four" summit of 1955.

Her first stint in the Soviet Union consisted of 3½ months in 1955–56 when she had a student-tourist visa to study Soviet law. She spent time in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. She witnessed the Soviet courts in action and was more audacious in her approach to Soviet society than was expected of a single woman in the early Cold War era. Her experiences and thoughts regarding Soviet politics, fashion, and ordinary life got press attention when they were written up by Leonard Lyons, author of "The Lyons Den" syndicated column in American papers. She also spent time with Truman Capote, who captured some of their experiences in his 1956 non-fiction book The Muses Are Heard. While in the USSR she often asked people about fashion, finding it a good approach topic for asking personal questions. This included a visit to Leningrad Fashion House, one of the centers of Soviet style. 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. On her return to America she was interviewed by the head of the CIA's Soviet Russia division, Donald Jameson, who wrote in a memo she could "be encouraged to write the articles we want....but it’s important to avoid making her think she’s being used as a propaganda tool".

Author and scholar

In July 1964, she moved to the Dallas area and befriended Oswald's widow, Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova Oswald. Johnson's fluency in Russian was an important factor in the relationship, since Marina had limited English. The two spent several months together, with Johnson helping care for Marina's young children. Johnson signed a contract with Harper & Row for a book to be published about the Oswalds, with two-thirds of the advance going to Marina. The book project was disclosed in November 1964, with an expected publication date during 1965. Her work on the book ended up taking over a decade and consumed much of her life.

She took the name Priscilla Johnson McMillan when she married George McMillan in 1966. He was a freelance writer who covered the civil rights movement in the American South, and wrote a history of the 1st Marine Division, The Old Breed. They divorced in the early 1980s.

In 1967, McMillan translated the memoirs of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter, who had gained much attention that year by defecting to the United States. There was considerable competition among translators and publishers for the assignment, but a recommendation from former U.S. Ambassador and foreign policy legend George F. Kennan helped her get it. She had first encountered Svetlana twelve years earlier, during her first visit to the Soviet Union, when under the name Stalina, she had taught a class at Moscow State University. Svetlana spent her first weeks in America staying at McMillan's father's estate in Locust Valley.

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. The New York Times Book Review wrote of "what a miraculous book Priscilla Johnson McMillan has written, miraculous because McMillan had the wit, courage and perseverance to go back to the heart of the story, and the art to give it life." Some reviewers considered it the best work on the assassination, or superior to the Warren Commission Report, or akin to a Dostoevsky novel. However, it contained no conspiracy theories, only a very in-depth portrait of an unsuccessful, troubled, sometimes violent and ultimately small man, and sales of the book were modest. Marina would later say that she contributed little to the book: "It was up to Priscilla to fish out all the facts and everything and put them together some way".

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.

McMillan fell in spring 2021, which led to a decline in her health. The fall, which took place in her home, severely injured her spine and she was not able to regain her mobility. As a result, she was placed into hospice care. 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.

Works

Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964 (MIT Press, 1965) [author, co-editor with Leopold Labedz]

Twenty Letters to a Friend, by Svetlana Alliluyeva (Hutchison, 1967) [translator]

Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Harper & Row, 1977) (republished Steerforth Press, 2013; ISBN 978-1-58642-216-5)

The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (Viking, 2005; ISBN 978-0-14-200115-8)