Something tells me that this happy little niche blog is about to get swamped with comments by legions of JFK-assassination “experts”. Be that as it may, Economics in the Rear-view Mirror has a duty to share the good, bad, and the ugly artefacts and accounts of the lives of economists and the structures of their training. Besides which, Paul Gregory, the subject of this post, is an old friend and a senior colleague from my University of Houston years. He is a co-author of the leading undergraduate textbooks on the Soviet Economy and Comparative Economic Systems with Robert Stuart, and together, we once wrote an article on unemployment in the Soviet Union that was published in the American Economic Review. Paul Gregory is currently a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Before he went off to graduate school at Harvard, Paul Gregory happened to be tutored in conversational Russian by Marina Oswald, the wife of the, then, future assassin of John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald. Husband Lee was always present during those tutorials, to keep Marina under his watchful jealous eye. Because of this connection to the Oswald family, both Paul Gregory and his father became persons of great interest to investigators in the days and months following President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. They turn up in the Warren Commission Report. (Testimony of father Peter Paul Gregory and his son Paul Roderick Gregory.)
His book The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee has just been published. A (clutching my pearls) sensational summary of its content has been published in the Daily Mail. I haven’t read the book yet, but over the years Paul has shared with his colleagues the one or the other anecdote about Lee and Marina. Of course I’m going to read this book soon!
Addition July 8, 2023..Here is an interview with Paul Gregory about his book.
For my fellow veterans of the Cold War in or out of the academic trenches, here is a convenient link to a list of Paul Gregory’s many substantial publications.
I close with a colorized undergraduate yearbook photo of Paul Gregory in his scholar-athlete days, much as the Oswalds would have known him.
Image Sources: Mugshot of Lee Harvey Oswald from the Dallas Police; Senior Class portrait of Paul Gregory from the 1963 University of Oklahoma Yearbook, p. 291. Both images have been colorized by Economics in the Rear-view Mirror because there was color in 1963 America.