An ex-marine, withdrawn and deserter: who was Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of John Kennedy

Surely his whole life flashed through his mind in a few minutes. . At 1:14 p.m. on November 22, 1963, police J.D. Tippit patrolled the streets of Dallas when he saw a man in a suspicious attitude. In these tense minutes, a frantic search was underway to find the author of the shots against the President. John F. Kennedy . Tippit arrested the stranger, but he shot him three times with a revolver and finished him off with a fourth shot to the head while he was already on the ground. Then he ran away.

Maybe to not think about anything, Lee Harvey Oswald , 24, went to the cinema. By chance or not, the newspaper broadcast the film War is hell, about the Korean War. After a few minutes, the police arrived. As soon as he saw them, Oswald knew he was lost. “I am not resisting my arrest!” he shouted. And immediately the agents went to him. While they were handcuffing him, they told him about the accusations against him. “You killed the president.”

To this day, there is consensus that Oswald, armed with a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a telescope, was responsible for the three fatal shots that mortally wounded the President of the United States. -United. To do this, he allegedly took refuge in one of the windows of the building where he worked, the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, on the side of the path taken by the Lincoln X-100 convertible. At 12:30 p.m., he shot to kill. One of these bullets shattered “Jack’s” head.

Oswald hadn’t exactly had a brilliant life. A native of New Orleans, he was born on October 18, 1939, the same year Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II. In his childhood, according to various media, he was a withdrawn boy, but somehow he showed interest in the army. In fact, at the age of 15, he joined the Civil Air Patrol and at 17 he took a more serious step: he got involved in United States Marine Corps, that is, the Marine Corps.

In the Marines, he specialized primarily in radar operations, which required a security clearance. A May 1957 document stated that “final authorization to address classified matters, including confidentiality, was granted after a careful check of local records revealed no derogatory data.”

While not particularly noteworthy, Oswald was assigned to the Philippines, where he had a series of small incidents during his time in the Marines – including a fight with a sergeant – that caused him to lose his seniority. Of course, he started learning the basics of Russian on his own. All because I had a goal. On September 11, 1959, he received his discharge from the Marines for hardship on active duty, claiming his mother needed care. He was placed in the United States Marine Corps Reserve. He then packed his belongings and emigrated to the Soviet Union. This is no small decision considering the Cold War era.

According to writer Anthony Summers, author of the book Not of Your Life: The Definitive Book on the JFK AssassinationAs soon as he set foot in Moscow, Oswald headed straight at the American embassy , where he clearly expressed his support for the communist cause. “He put a paper on my desk and said, ‘I’ve come to revoke my American citizenship.’ I applied for Soviet citizenship,’” the American consul at the time, Richard E. Snyder, said much later, as quoted by Summers.

In the USSR, Oswald lived in the city of Minsk (now in Belarus) where he got a job in a radio factory, a good salary and a comfortable apartment in the city center. There, he meets the woman who will become his wife, Marina Prusakova . With her, he would start a family and they would have two children.

However, suddenly in 1962, Oswald told Marina that he wanted to return to the United States. Years later, Marina was asked in a BBC interview why, in 1962, Soviet authorities allowed the two men to leave. Obviously a strange decision given that Oswald had renounced his American citizenship.

“Well, apparently the Russians didn’t want him there. Because they thought he was a troublemaker. So they were probably happy to get rid of him. And he returned to his native country. Besides, I didn’t have much value in the eyes of the Russians,” she said. Marina too He denied working for the KGB .

Anthony Summers, speaking to the BBC, was also disappointed by Oswald’s return. “The eagerness with which they received it is very strange. It seems he was returning to his country, but apparently He was not even questioned by the intelligence services, as the CIA initially stated. We must not forget that when he defected, he declared that he would hand over everything he knew about the U-2 spy planes to the Soviets.”

The curious thing is that in the United States, Oswald continued to declare himself a Marxist and act accordingly. After spending time in his native New Orleans and even a few days in Mexico, Oswald settled in Dallas, where he was told there was a job at the Texas School Book Depository.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald maintains his innocence . Again and again. He pretended to be a sort of scapegoat. It remained that way, arriving on the morning of November 24, 1963. Just two days after the assassination, Oswald was scheduled to be transferred from Dallas police headquarters to the county jail. At 11:20 a.m., while photographers were taking pictures, an obscure owner of the city’s nightclubs known as Jack Ruby and with a .38 caliber revolver, he approached Oswald and shot him in the abdomen.

Oswald fell to the ground, writhing in pain, and was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same facility where Kennedy was being held. Despite medical efforts, he died shortly after 1 p.m. Ruby was tried and sentenced to death, but the trial was mistrial. While waiting for another, he fell ill with cancer and died on January 3, 1967 at the age of 55. Of course, He never fully explained why he murdered Oswald.