Lee Harvey Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) was, according to four United States government investigations, the assassin of US President John F. Kennedy. On November 22, 1963, Oswald was arrested on suspicion of killing President Kennedy and Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit earlier that day. Oswald claimed that he was a "patsy" and emphatically denied the charges. Two days later, Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby on live television while in police custody. Public opinion is still divided regarding the official version of Oswald's culpability in the assassination. According to an ABC News poll conducted in November 2003, 70 percent of American adults believe that the assassination was part of a larger plot.

Early life and Marine Corps service

Lee Harvey Oswald was born in Slidell, Louisiana. His father, Robert Edward Lee Oswald, died before he was born. His mother, Marguerite Claverie, raised Lee alone along with two older siblings, his brother Robert and his half-brother John Pic. The family was raised Lutheran. His mother is said to have doted on him to excess, but despite this has been characterized as domineering and quarrelsome. Lee's youth was plauged by extreme mobility; before the age of 18 Oswald had lived in 22 different residences. Because of the short-lived stay in each location, he had attended 12 different schools, mostly around New Orleans and Dallas.

As a child Oswald was withdrawn and temperamental. After they moved in with John Pic (who had joined the US Coast Guard and was stationed in New York City), Oswald once threatened his sister-in-law with a knife and frequently punched his mother in the face. His violent conduct spurred in visits to psychiatrist Renatus Hartogs, who diagnosed the fourteen-year-old Oswald as having a "personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies." Oswald's behavior at school appeared to improve in his last months in New York. Some time in February, 1954, his mother Marguerite decided to return to New Orleans with Lee. There was still an open question before a New York judge if he would be taken from the care of his mother to finish his schooling. In New Orleans, Oswald even attended some extracurricular clubs such as the school's marching band; however, he soon dropped out of school and joined the Civil Air Patrol.

Oswald never received a high school diploma before he enlisted in the US Marines. Throughout his life he had trouble with spelling and writing coherently. His letters, diary and other writings have led some to suggest he was dyslexic while others have contended his poor writing and spelling skills were the result of a sporadic education. Nonetheless he read voraciously and as a result sometimes asserted he was better educated than those around him. Around the age of fifteen, he became an ardent Marxist solely from reading about the topic. He wrote in his diary, "I was looking for a key to my environment, and then I discovered socialist literature. I had to dig for my books in the back dusty shelves of libraries."

Even as a Marxist, Oswald wished to join the US Marines. He idolized his older brother Robert and wore Robert's US Marine ring. This relationship seems to have transcended any ideological conflict for Oswald, and enlisting in the Marines may have also been a way to escape from his overbearing mother. He enlisted in the USMC in October 1956, a week after his 17th birthday.

Oswald was trained as a radar operator and assigned first to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in Irvine, California [1], then to Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan. Though Atsugi was a base for the U-2 spy planes that flew over the former USSR, there is no evidence Oswald was involved in that operation. Oswald's experience after joining with the Marine Corps was by all accounts unpleasant. Small and frail compared to the other Marines, he was nicknamed Ozzie Rabbit after a cartoon character. His shyness and Soviet sympathies alienated him to his fellow Marines. Ostracism only seemed to provoke him into being a more staunch and outspoken communist. For his steadfast beliefs his nickname ultimately became Oswaldskovich. The Marine had subscribed to The Worker and taught himself rudimentary Russian. Oswald was tried at a court-martial twice: intially because of accidentally shooting himself in the elbow with an unauthorized handgun and again later for starting a fight with a sergeant he thought responsible for his punishment received from his first court-martial. He was demoted from private first class to private and briefly served time in the brig. Luckily he was not punished for yet another incident, when on sentry duty one night while stationed in the Philippines, he inexplicably fired his rifle into the jungle. By the end of his Marine career Oswald was doing menial labor.

The Soviet Union

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Photo of Oswald taken in October 1959 shortly after his arrival in the Soviet Union. Oswald dedicated the photo on the back to his future wife's aunt and uncle in 1961. It was discovered in Minsk in 1992.

In October 1959 Oswald went to the Soviet Union. He was nineteen and the trip was well-planned in advance. Along with having taught himself rudimentary Russian he had saved his Marine Corps salary, got an early "hardship" discharge by (falsely) claiming he needed to care for his ailing mother in New Orleans and submitted several fictional applications to foreign universities in order to obtain a student visa (and possibly help avoid Marine Corps reserve duty).

After spending one day with his mother in New Orleans he departed by ship for the Soviet Union, first arriving in France, then England and eventually Finland as part of a package tour. When he arrived in the USSR and showed up unexpectedly at the US Embassy in Moscow he said he wanted to renounce his US citizenship. When the Navy Department learned of this it changed Oswald's Marine Corps discharge from "hardship/honorable" to "undesirable."

Oswald's wish to remain in the USSR was initially applauded by the Soviets and described by at least one western journalist as a "defection," but although he had some technical knowledge acquired in the Marines they soon discovered he had little of real value to offer the Soviet Union and his application for Soviet residency was rejected. In response, Oswald made a bloody but minor cut to his left wrist in his hotel room bathtub. After bandaging his superficial injury, the cautious Russians kept him under psychiatric observation at the Botkin Hospital. Although this attempt may have been no more than an attention-getting ruse, the Soviet government feared an international incident if he attempted something similar again.

Against the advice of the KGB, a high-level Presidium decision allowed Oswald to remain in the USSR. Although he had wanted to remain in Moscow and attend Moscow University, he was sent to Minsk, west of Moscow in Byelorussia. He was given a job as a metal lathe operator at the Gorizont (Horizon) Electronics Factory in Minsk, a huge facility which produced radios and televisions along with military and space electronic components. He was given a rent-subsidized, fully furnished studio apartment in a prestigious building under Gorizont's administration and in addition to his factory pay received monetary subsidies from the Red Cross (a Soviet organization entirely separate from the international medical aid organization). This represented an idyllic existence by Soviet-era working-class standards. Oswald was under constant surveillance by the KGB during his thirty-month stay in Minsk. Oswald gradually grew bored with the limited recreation available in Minsk. [2]

At a dance in early 1961 Oswald met Marina Prusakova, a troubled 19-year-old pharmacology student from a broken family in Leningrad now living with her aunt and uncle in Minsk. While later reports described her uncle as a colonel in the KGB or MVD, he was a lumber industry expert in the MVD (Ministry of Interior) with a bureaucratic rank equivalent to colonel. Oswald and Marina married less than a month and a half after they met.

File:Marina prusakova 1959.jpg

Marina Prusakova, Minsk 1959

After nearly a year of paperwork and waiting, on June 1, 1962 the young family left the Soviet Union for the United States.

Dallas

Back in the United States, the Oswalds settled in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and Lee attempted to write his memoir and commentary on Soviet life, a small manuscript called The Collective. He soon gave up the idea but his search for literary feedback put him in touch with the area's close-knit community of anti-Communist Russian émigrés. While merely tolerating the belligerent and arrogant Lee Oswald, they sympathized with Marina, partly because she was in a foreign country with no knowledge of English (which her husband refused to teach her) and because Oswald had begun to beat her. Although they eventually abandoned Marina when she made no sign of leaving him, Oswald had found an unlikely best friend in the well-educated and worldly petroleum geologist George de Mohrenschildt, who liked playing the provocateur and enjoyed putting people off with his disagreeable and sullen Marxist friend. Marina meanwhile befriended a married couple, Quaker Ruth Paine and her husband Michael.

In Dallas Oswald got a job with the Leslie Welding Company but disliked the work and quit after three months. He then found a position at the graphic arts firm of Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall as a photoprint trainee. The company has been cited as doing classified work for the US government but this was limited to typesetting for maps and produced in a section Oswald had no access to. He did use photographic and typesetting equipment in the unsecured area to create falsified identification documents, including some in the name of an alias he created, Alek James Hidell. His co-workers and supervisors eventually grew frustrated with his inefficiency, lack of precision, inattention, and rudeness to others (to the point where fist-fights had threatened to break out). On Monday, April 1, after six months of work, Oswald's supervisor terminated Oswald's employment at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, after seeing him reading a Russian satiric magazine (Krokodil or Crocodile, named for its political bite) in the cafeteria.

Attempted assassination of General Walker

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General Walker

Ten days after being fired, Oswald attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker with the rifle shown in his backyard pose photos of March 31.

General Edwin Walker was an outspoken anti-communist, segregationist and member of the John Birch Society who had been commanding officer of the Army's 24th Infantry Division based in West Germany under NATO supreme command until he was relieved of his command in 1961 by JFK for distributing right-wing literature to his troops. Walker resigned from the service and returned to his native Texas. He ran in the six-person Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1962 but lost to John Connally, who went on to win the race. In February, 1963 the general was making front-page news with an evangelist partner in an anti-Communist tour called Operation Midnight Ride.

Oswald surveilled Walker for some unknown time, probably including early April, taking pictures of the General's home and nearby railroad tracks which were later found in his residence when it was searched after the Kennedy assassination (these photos were later matched to the same camera Marina used to take the backyard poses).

In March, Oswald ordered the rifle by mail (see below) using his alias A. Hidell, having already ordered a revolver by mail in January. He attempted the assassination on April 10. Though he did not leave specifics of his plans in writing, Oswald did leave a note in Russian for Marina with instructions for her to follow - should he be jailed in Dallas, or otherwise disappear.

Walker was sitting at a desk in his dining room (working on his federal income tax returns) when Oswald fired at him from less than one hundred feet (30 m) away. Walker survived only because the bullet struck the wooden frame of the window, which deflected its path, but was injured in the forearm by bullet fragments.

The Dallas police had no suspects in the Walker shooting. [3] Oswald's involvement was not suspected until a note and some of the photos of Walker's house were found following the assassination of JFK, after which Marina Oswald told authorities about Oswald's attempt on Walker's life, which she said Oswald had told her about after the fact. The bullet was too badly damaged to run conclusive ballistics studies on it, though neutron activation tests later proved that the Walker bullet was from the same cartridge manufacturer that the two bullets which later struck Kennedy were from. [4]

New Orleans

By late April, Oswald was unemployed, had failed to kill General Walker, and his best friend de Mohrenschildt had moved away from Dallas. While Marina (who was pregnant for the second time) stayed with the Paines, he returned to the city of his birth, New Orleans, arriving on the morning of April 25 looking for work. Marina was driven there by family friend Ruth Paine after Oswald got a job with the Reilly Coffee Company in May. Oswald was fired for dereliction of duty in July.

Oswald had Marina write to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. about the possibility of their returning to the Soviet Union. His Marxist ideals became focused on Fidel Castro and Cuba and he soon became a vocal pro-Castro advocate. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee was a national organization and Oswald set out on his own initiative as a one-member New Orleans chapter, spending $22.73 on 1000 flyers, 500 membership applications and 300 membership cards. He told Marina to sign the name "A.J. Hidell" as chapter president on one card.

Oswald's New Orleans mug shot, August 9, 1963

Most of Oswald's activities consisted of passing out flyers to passers-by on the street. He made a clumsy attempt to infiltrate anti-Castro exile groups and briefly met with a skeptical Carlos Bringuier, New Orleans delegate for the anti-Castro Cuban Student Directorate. Several days later Bringuier and two friends confronted a man passing out pro-Castro handbills and realized that it was Oswald. During an ensuing scuffle all of them were arrested and Oswald spent the night in jail.

The trial got news media attention and Oswald was interviewed afterwards. He was also filmed passing out flyers in front of the International Trade Mart with two "volunteers" he had hired for $2 at the unemployment office. Oswald's political work in New Orleans came to an end after a WDSU radio debate between Bringuier and Oswald arranged by journalist Bill Stuckey. Instead of discussing Cuba as he had successfully done during a previous radio program, Oswald was publicly confronted with the lies and omissions he had made concerning his life and background and became audibly upset. Within a month he left New Orleans and returned to Dallas.

Oswald's four months in New Orleans were carefully scrutinized after the JFK assassination, most notably by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in his unsuccessful attempt to link Oswald to wealthy local businessman Clay Shaw, a former president of the International Trade Mart. Garrison's attempt to establish connections between the two included W. Guy Banister (a retired FBI agent and former New Orleans Police Assistant Superintendent turned private investigator and anti-communist) and Banister's friend David Ferrie (a pilot and anti-communist who had flown during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and who wore an ill-fitting red wig and false eyebrows because of allopecia).

Although Ferrie and Oswald had been simultaneously members of the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans during the 1950s and both appear in a C.A.P. group photo, there is no credible evidence they had any significant contact when Oswald was a teenager.

Mexico

While Ruth Paine drove Marina back to Dallas, Oswald lingered in New Orleans for two more days waiting to collect a $33 unemployment check. He boarded a bus for Houston but instead of heading north to Dallas he took a bus southwest towards Laredo and the U.S.-Mexico border. Once in Mexico he hoped to continue on to Cuba, a plan he openly shared with other passengers on the bus. Arriving in Mexico City, he completed a transit visa application at the Cuban Embassy, claiming he wanted to visit the country on his way back to the Soviet Union. The Cubans insisted the Soviet Union would have to to approve his journey to the USSR before he could get a Cuban visa, but he was unable to get speedy co-operation from the Soviet embassy.

After shuttling back and forth between consulates for five days, getting into a heated argument with the Cuban consul, making impassioned pleas to KGB agents, and coming under at least some CIA interest. However, less than three weeks later, on October 18 the Cuban embassy in Mexico City finally approved the visa and 11 days before the assassination Oswald wrote a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington DC, which said, "Had I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business."

The assassination of JFK

Main article: John F. Kennedy assassination

The 1964 Warren Commission report on the John F. Kennedy assassination concluded that at 12:30 p.m. on November 22 1963, Oswald shot Kennedy from a window on the sixth floor of the book depository warehouse as the President's motorcade passed through Dallas' Dealey Plaza (see lone gunman theory). Texas Governor John Connally was also seriously wounded along with assassination witness James Tague who received a minor facial injury while standing some 270 feet (82 m) in front of the presidential limousine.

Oswald's flight and the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit

According to the Warren Commission report, immediately after he shot President Kennedy, Oswald hid the rifle behind some boxes and descended via the Depository's rear stairwell. On the second floor he encountered Dallas police officer Marion Baker who had driven his motorcycle to the door of the Depository and sprinted up the stairs in search of the shooter. With him was Oswald's supervisor Roy Truly, who identified Oswald as an employee, which caused Baker, who had his pistol in hand, to let Oswald pass. Oswald bought a Coke from a vending machine in the second floor lunchroom, crossed the floor to the front staircase, descended and left the building through the front entrance on Elm Street, just before the police sealed the building off. He would be the only employee to leave early that day; a roll call later found only Oswald missing, and this resulted in a suspect-wanted order issued specifically for Oswald. [5]

At about 12:40 p.m. (CST), Oswald boarded a city bus by pounding on the door in the middle of a block - when heavy traffic had slowed the bus to a halt - and requested a bus transfer from the driver. He took a taxicab to a few blocks beyond his rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley Ave. He walked back to his rooming house to retrieve his revolver and beige jacket at about 1:00 p.m. This was witnessed by his house-keeper, Earlene Roberts, who testified that "He was walking fast - almost running", but Roberts had bad eyesight, and was "almost blind in one eye", as she admitted.[6]

Minutes later, Oswald left the house and lingered briefly at a bus stop across the street from his rooming house (also witnessed by Roberts). After a short wait at the bus stop - although he still had a bus transfer in his possession - he began walking. He then walked about 1 mile toward the next bus stop, but was stopped about four blocks from it by Tippit. [7]

Interior of the Texas Theater in 2005

Officer J. D. Tippit, who had heard the general description of the alleged shooter (based on the statement of witness Howard Brennan who had seen Oswald in the window of the Depository from across the street) encountered Oswald - near the corner of Patton Avenue and 10th Street - and pulled up to talk to him through his patrol car window. Tippit then got out of his car and Oswald fired at the police officer with his .38 caliber revolver. Four of the shots hit Tippit, killing him instantly, in view of several witnesses. At least a dozen people either witnessed the shooting or identified Oswald as fleeing the scene. [8]

Oswald's Seat In The Texas Theater

A few minutes later, Oswald ducked into the entrance alcove of a shoe store on Jefferson Street to avoid passing police cars, then slipped into the nearby Texas Theater without paying. (The films being shown were War Is Hell, narrated by Audie Murphy, and Cry of Battle). The shoe store's manager saw all of this, followed Oswald and alerted the theater's ticket clerk, who phoned the police.

The police quickly arrived and entered the theater as the lights were turned on. Officer M.N. McDonald approached Oswald sitting near the rear and ordered him to stand up. Oswald said, "This is it", or "Well, it's all over now." [9] A scuffle ensued where Officer McDonald reported that Oswald pulled the trigger on his revolver, but the hammer came down on the web of skin between the thumb and forefinger of the officer´s hand. Therefore, preventing the revolver from firing. Oswald was eventually subdued. As he was led past an angry group of people who had gathered outside the theater, Oswald shouted that he was a victim of police brutality.

Oswald was booked on suspicion first as a suspect in the shooting of Officer Tippit and shortly afterwards on suspicion of murdering President Kennedy. By the end of the evening he had been arraigned for both murders.

While in custody, Oswald had an impromptu, face-to-face brush with reporters and photographers in the hallway of the police station. A reporter asked him, "Did you shoot the President?" and Oswald answered, "I have not been accused of that." [The reporters answered that he had been] "In fact, I didn't even know about it until a reporter in the hall asked me that question." Later Oswald said to reporters, "I didn't shoot anyone," and "They're taking me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union. I'm just a patsy!"

Oswald's murder

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Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, to whom Dallas detective Jim Leavelle (to right of Ruby, wearing light hat) was handcuffed.

At 11:21 am CST, Oswald was shot and fatally wounded before live TV cameras in the basement of Dallas police headquarters by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner with many friends and acquaintances in the Dallas Police and the underworld. Millions watched the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, the first time a homicide was captured and shown publicly on live television; however, it was carried live only on NBC, via a live remote from their Dallas-Ft. Worth affiliate station WBAP-TV. Both networks replayed the incident from videotape many times over in the following days.

Leavelle stated that an Intern was there who "did some kind of respiratory work on him", before Oswald was put into an ambulance. Unconscious, Oswald was rushed to the same hospital where JFK died. Doctors did their best to save Oswald, but Ruby's single bullet had severed major abdominal blood vessels, and the doctors were unable to repair the massive trauma. At 48 hours and 7 minutes after the President's death, Oswald was pronounced dead.

After a full autopsy [10] Oswald's body was returned to his family.

Oswald's grave is in Rose Hill Memorial Burial Park in Fort Worth. The inexpensive coffin was provided at the expense of the state. The November 25th burial and funeral were paid for by Oswald's brother Robert. There was no religious service and reporters acted as pallbearers. When his mother died in 1981 she was buried next to Oswald with no headstone. Originally his headstone read Lee Harvey Oswald, but this marker was stolen and replaced with one which only reads Oswald. His wife Marina, who was sequestered by federal agents the day after the assassination and later released, married Kenneth Porter in 1965 and her two daughters June and Rachel took Porter's last name.

Investigations

• The Warren Commission created by President Lyndon B. Johnson on November 29, 1963 to investigate the assassination concluded that Oswald assassinated Kennedy and that he acted alone (also known as the Lone gunman theory). The proceedings of the commission were secret and about 3% of its files have yet to be released to the public which has continued to provoke speculation among skeptics.

• In 1966 and 1967 New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison conducted an investigation which culminated in the trial and acquittal of Clay Shaw. This failed prosecution was the only charge ever brought for conspiracy in the murder of JFK.

• In 1968 The Ramsey Clark Panel met in Washington, DC to examine various photographs, X-ray films documents and other evidence pertaining to the death of President Kennedy. It concluded that President Kennedy was struck by two bullets fired from above and behind him, one of which traversed the base of the neck on the right side without striking bone and the other of which entered the skull from behind and destroyed its right side.

• In 1979, an investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concluded that Oswald assassinated President Kennedy "probably...as the result of a conspiracy." This finding was based on studies of dictabelt recordings which were later called into question when communications known to have been made after the shooting were discovered on the tape.
  Further information: Dictabelt evidence relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy

• In 1992, Congress enacted legislation creating the Assassination Records Review Board ("ARRB") to collect and obtain declassification of government documents relating to the murder of President Kennedy. The purpose of this board would be to eventually make the evidence available to the Public so people can make up their own minds as to what occurred involving the murder of President Kennedy. The ARRB described this in the preface to its Final Report in 1998:

Previous assassination-related commissions and committees were established for the purpose of issuing final reports that would draw conclusions about the assassination. Congress did not, however, direct the Review Board to draw conclusions about the assassination, but to release assassination records so that the public could draw its own conclusions.

The 1981 exhumation

In October 1981 Oswald's body was exhumed at the behest of British writer Michael Eddowes, with Marina Oswald Porter's support. He sought to prove a thesis developed in a 1975 book, Khrushchev Killed Kennedy (re-published in 1976, in Britain as November 22: How They Killed Kennedy and in America a year later as The Oswald File).

Eddowes´ theory was that - during Oswald´s stay in the Soviet Union - he was swapped with a Soviet double named Alek, who was a member of a KGB assassination squad. He claimed that this Soviet-double killed Kennedy. Eddowes's support for his thesis was a claim that the corpse buried in 1963 in the Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Park cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas did not have a scar that resulted from surgery conducted on Oswald years before.

When Oswald's body was exhumed it was found that the coffin had ruptured and was filled with water; leaving the body in an advanced state of decomposition with partial skeletonization. The examination positively identified Oswald's corpse through dental records, and also detected a mastoid scar from a childhood operation. [11] Contrary to reports, the skull of Oswald had been autopsied and this was confirmed at the exhumation.[12]

Assassination Theories

Critics have not accepted the official government conclusions and have proposed a number of alternative theories which assert that Oswald conspired with others or Oswald was not involved at all and was framed. However, many of these theories contradict each other, and no single compelling alternative suspect or conspirator has emerged.

One government investigation, the HSCA, ruled out many of these theories but concluded that, while Oswald was the assassin, that Kennedy was "probably" killed as the result of a conspiracy. However, the HSCA report did not identify any probable co-conspirators and its conclusion has been criticised for its reliance upon acoustic evidence that has been called into question.

Further information: Kennedy assassination theories

The rifle

Main article: John F. Kennedy assassination rifle

Lee Harvey Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, in the US National Archives

In March 1963, Oswald used his alias "A. Hidell" (which he would later use for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and for which he was carrying an I.D. card when arrested after the Kennedy murder) to purchase the rifle later linked to the November 22, 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. The surplus Italian military rifle was purchased from Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago, with a coupon taken from an ad in the February issue of American Rifleman. FBI and Treasury Department experts later matched the handwriting on the coupon and the envelope, to Oswald. The rifle was purchased under "A. Hidell" but sent to a Dallas post office box rented by Oswald under his own name.

The backyard photos

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Oswald in the backyard

The "backyard photos," which were believed to have been taken on Sunday, March 31, by Marina, show Oswald dressed all in black and holding two marxist newsletters - The Militant and The Worker - in one hand, a rifle in the other, and carrying a pistol in its holster.

The backyard photos were shot using a camera belonging to Oswald, the camera was a not expensive model of reflex type: “Imperial Reflex Duo-Lens – 620.”

After being shown the two photos in the Dallas police station, Oswald said that they were fakes and that he could prove it. (These photos were labelled CE 133-A and CE 133-B). CE 133-A shows the rifle in Oswald's left hand and newletters in front of his chest in the other, while rifle is held with the right hand in CE 133-B).

The HSCA obtained another first generation print (from CE 133-A) on April 1, 1977 from the widow of George De Mohrenschildt. The words "Hunter of facists - hah ha ha!" (written in block Russian) were on the back. Also in in English were added in script, the further English inscription and signature: "To my friend George, Lee Oswald, 5/IV/63 [April 5, 63]" [13] (See pages 151, 156 for de Mohrenschild photo reverse). Handwriting experts consulted by the HSCA concluded the English inscription and signature were written by Lee Oswald. After two original photos, one negative and one first-generation copy had been found, the Senate Intelligence Committee located (in 1976) a third photograph of Oswald with a backyard pose that was different (CE 133-C, with newspapers held in his right hand away from his body). This photo was found by the widow of Dallas police officer Roscoe White, amongst his belongings.

All the photos have been subjected to rigorous analysis. For example see [14]. During the initial investigation, the FBI concluded the photos were genuine and there was no evidence to suggest that the photos were retouched or altered. A panel of twenty-two photographic experts consulted by the HSCA examined the photographs and answered twenty-one points of contention raised by critics. [15] The panel concluded the photographs were genuine. [16] However, despite the conclusions of these investigations, some critics, such as Jack D. White, contested the authenticity of the photographs in his testimony for the HSCA. [17]

According to Oswald´s mother, Marina showed her a fourth photo which had Oswald standing in the backyard with the rifle held in the air with both hands. She said that Marina later burned this photo and that she (Oswald´s mother) flushed it down the toilet. [18]

Oswald in fiction and pop culture

One of Oswald's Marine Corps comrades, Kerry Thornley, shortly after learning of Oswald's October 1959 departure for the USSR, began writing a novel titled The Idle Warriors; its protagonist of Johnny Shellburne (a disillusioned Marine stationed in Japan who defects to the Soviet Union) being significantly inspired by Oswald's character and actions. The Idle Warriors is currently the only known literary work about Lee Oswald completed before the JFK assassination. Although an unpublished copy of Thornley's completed manuscript had been given to the Warren Commission in 1964 and was later stored in the National Archives, The Idle Warriors was not formally published until 1991.

Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman present another interpretation of the events in their musical Assassins. In the play Oswald goes to work on November 22 with the intention of killing himself, but John Wilkes Booth (Abraham Lincoln's assassin) appears out of the bookcases. When Oswald declares that he has given up on mattering to anyone, Booth replies that in killing himself, Oswald honestly hopes for the pity of people, something to make him matter. But that's not enough. In killing the president of the United States he'll matter more than he ever has. People will hate him; but from starting as a person who is treated only with apathy, to becoming a figure whom people feel so passionately about, he can matter. Other assassins follow and convince Oswald that the way to gain his fame, appreciation and purpose is to shoot Kennedy instead of himself.

He has also been portrayed in various novels, such as Libra by Don DeLillo and The Two Faces of Lee Harvey Oswald by Glenn B. Fleming.

One of Bill Hicks' favourite routines in his stand-up sets was to talk at length about the Kennedy Assassination, one such riff detailing how he thought that the Assassination Museum set up to look exactly as it did on the day of the assassination was indeed incredibly accurate; "Because Oswald's not in it. Incredible...painstaking detail. I don't know who did the research, but I applaud them."

Another novel featuring Oswald and speculation on the Grassy Knoll theory is 1975's The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

Warren Adler's mystery novel, American Quartet, featured the antagonist mimicking Oswald's actions the day of the assassination exactly.

In Ken Grimwood's novel Replay, the protagonist, upon finding himself reliving the month of November 1963, travels to Dallas and sends death threats to Kennedy, signed with Oswald's name, from Oswald's local post office. Oswald is arrested soon after; to the protagonist's surprise, Kennedy is still assassinated on the 22nd.

In the 1973 movie Executive Action, actual archival footage of Oswald is used, while an Oswald "double" in the film is played by James Mac Coll.

In the 1977 movie The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald John Pleshette plays Oswald in a fictional dramatization of the trial that never happened.

In Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall, Woody's character of Alvy Singer obsesses over the JFK assassination, unable to believe the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone. His wife Allison (Carol Kane), accuses him of using his 'conspiracy theory' as "an excuse to avoid sex with me".

In Full Metal Jacket (1987) Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's dictated version of events allows room only for Oswald, who fires three rounds.

In Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK, which dramatizes the investigation of JFK's assassination, Oswald's character is played by Gary Oldman.

In the movie Zoolander, Oswald is referenced as NOT being the one to shoot JFK; a pair of models instead were the culprits.

In the movie The Rock, Oswald is again listed as not being the true assassin; the real assassin's identity is left ambiguous.

In the British comedy series Red Dwarf, Oswald is knocked out of the window by the arrival of the Red Dwarf crew before he can fire his third shot. Having seen the dystopic future their actions have caused, the crew attempt to set history back on course by sending Oswald up to the top floor so their past selves cannot interfere, but at this higher vantage, the trajectory is so steep that Oswald's shot goes wide and history is changed. With no other recourse, and with none of the crew willing to kill Kennedy, the crew recruit an alternative John F. Kennedy from the future (In the new timeline Kennedy was arrested in 1965 for sharing a mistress with a Mafia boss) to shoot "himself" from behind the Grassy Knoll. The character Lister claims that not only will these actions restore the original timeline, but they will also "drive the conspiracy theorists crazy".

In the 5th season of the show Quantum Leap, the character of Sam Beckett "leaps" into the body of Oswald, days before he's supposed to shoot Kennedy. He leaps into Oswald while posing for the photo of himself holding a rifle, taken by his wife. He leaped back out again just prior to the actual assassination shots and into Secret Service agent Clint Hill running alongside the limo. Had he not leaped, Oswald would have also killed Jacqueline Kennedy. In the episode, Oswald was played by Willie Garson who also played the part in the movie Ruby. The show's creator, Donald P. Bellisario, served in the US Marine Corps with Oswald and the episode recreated a meeting between the two.

Frank Whaley played Oswald in the 1993 TV movie Fatal Deception: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald, in which Helena Bonham Carter starred as Marina Oswald. Whaley had previously played the role of "Oswald Imposter" in Oliver Stone's JFK.

In a 4th season episode of the show The X-Files, it is revealed that the Cigarette Smoking Man, then an Army Captain, killed Kennedy by shooting him from a storm drain on Elm Street as the President's motorcade was passing by. CSM was secretly ordered to do so by a vindictive army General who felt Kennedy had bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion by withholding air support for the invading fleet. CSM also arranged the situation in such a way as to frame Oswald. Also in the series, three characters print a newsletter that they call The Lone Gunmen. And in their short lived spin off series, a fellow hacker named Lois Runtz goes by several aliases that are all anagrams of Lee Harvey Oswald (the most frequently used being Yves Adele Harlow.)

In the fourth season of the television series Angel, the goddess Jasmine says that there was no conspiracy and that Oswald acted alone. In the fifth season, Lorne says that Kennedy had a deal with the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart and tried to get out of it, and was killed as a result.

In the television series Family Guy, the JFK assassination was parodied having Oswald trying to warn Kennedy of the shooters in the grassy knoll. Then, revealing a rifle, he attempts to shoot them, not Kennedy, from the Depository building.

In episode 405 9F04 of the FOX cartoon "The Simpsons" (Treehouse of Horror III), Bart realizes that the spell book he needs to reverse the animation of Springfield's dead as zombies is still in the library. Surrounded by flesh-eating zombies, Homer racks a round into the chamber of his shotgun and declares: "To the Book Depository!".

After saving Abraham Lincoln from assasination in the "The Simpsons" episode "Today I am A Clown", Homer and Lincoln appear next to Oswald while he is loading his rifle. Homer states "You hit him high, I'll hit him low" and the pair attack Oswald, thus preventing JFK's assasination.

In the Simpsons the assassination of Oswald was re-enacted in an episode of Itchy & Scratchy, with Scratchy playing Oswald, and Itchy playing Ruby.

In Eight-Legged Freaks, Oswald's rifle appears in the hands of the sheriff.

Phil Bennison (Homer Henderson) wrote a song titled "Lee Harvey Was A Friend Of Mine," which has been covered by Laura Cantrell, T. Tex Edwards and Asylum Street Spankers, among others.

In The Postal Service song ‘Sleeping In’: “Last week I had the strangest dream/where everything was exactly how it seemed/where there was never any mystery/of who shot John F. Kennedy/ It was just a man with something to prove/Slightly bored and severely confused he steadied his rifle with his target in the center/and became famous on that day in November/”

Eric Church's song 'Before She Does' mentions Lee Harvey Oswald: "There's absolutely postively no doubt in my mind/ That O.J. did it, Lee Harvey didn't and she's really gone this time"

Further reading

• Michael Eddowes, Khrushchev Killed Kennedy, self-published, (1975), paperback (republished as Nov. 22, How They Killed Kennedy, Neville Spearman (1976), hardback, ISBN 0-85978-019-8 and as The Oswald File, Potter (1977), hardcover, ISBN 0-517-53055-4)
• Robert J. Groden, The Search of Lee Harvey Oswald: A Comprehensive Photographic Record, New York: Penguin Studio Books, 1995. ISBN 0-670-85867-6
• Patricial Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison's Investigation and Oliver Stone's Film JFK, New York: M. Evans & Company, 1998.
• David S. Lifton, Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the. Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Carroll & Graf Publishers, NYC, 1988, softcover, ISBN 0-88184-438-1
• Norman Mailer, Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery, New York: Ballantine Books, (1995) ISBN 0-345-40437-8
• Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, Carroll & Graf Publishers, NYC, 1990, ISBN 0-88184-648-1
• Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Marina And Lee, New York: Haper & Row, 1977.
• Dale K. Myers, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit, Oak Cliff Press, Inc., Milford, MI, 1998, ISBN 0-9662709-7-5
• John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers,1995. ISBN 0-7867-0131-5
• Oleg M. Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1993.
• Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, Random House (1993), hardcover, ISBN 0-679-41825-3
• Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, Who killed president Kennedy, Fontana (1980),
• Matthew Smith, JFK: Say Goodbye to America, Mainstream Publishing (2004)
• Philip H. Melanson, Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald And U. S. Intelligence, Praeger Publishing, (1990), ISBN 0-275-93571-X
• Don DeLillo, Libra, New York: Viking Penguin Inc, (1988) ISBN 0-670-82317-1

External links

• Frontline: Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?
• LHO in Doorway: Lee Harvey Oswald in doorway?
• The Unofficial JFK Assassination FAQ #19 by John Locke
• Lee Harvey Oswald: Lone Assassin or Patsy
• Lee Harvey Oswald Chronology
• Crime Library: Lee Harvey Oswald
• http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKindex.htm
• JFK Lancer Forum
• The President has been shot Website
• Lee Harvey Oswald In Russia
• Lee Harvey Oswald's Gravesite
• Lee Harvey Oswald's Camera - Imperial Reflex Duo-Lens - 620.