Background and career
Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) was a U.S. Marine veteran who assassinated John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, on November 22, 1963. Oswald was placed in juvenile detention at age twelve for truancy, during which he was assessed by a psychiatrist as "emotionally disturbed" because of the lack of normal family life. He attended twelve schools in his youth, quitting repeatedly, and at age seventeen he joined the Marines, where he was court-martialed twice and jailed. He also became interested in Marxism from a young age. In 1959, he was discharged from active duty into the Marine Corps Reserve, then flew to Europe and defected to the Soviet Union. He lived in Minsk, married a Russian woman named Marina, and had a daughter. In June 1962, he returned to the United States with his wife, and eventually settled in Dallas, Texas, where their second daughter was born. Oswald still continued to express support for the Soviet Union and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Oswald shot and killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository as Kennedy traveled by motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. About 45 minutes after shooting Kennedy, Oswald murdered a Dallas police officer, J. D. Tippit, on a suburban street. He then slipped into a movie theater, where he was arrested for Tippit's murder. Oswald was charged with the assassination of Kennedy, but he denied responsibility for the killing, claiming that he was a patsy. Two days later, Oswald himself was murdered by a local nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, on live television in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters. In September 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald and Ruby had each acted alone. This conclusion, though controversial, was supported by investigations from the Dallas Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Secret Service, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Despite forensic, ballistic, and eyewitness accounts supporting the official findings, public-opinion polls have shown that most Americans still do not believe that the official version tells the whole truth of the events, and the assassination has spawned numerous conspiracy theories.
Lee Harvey Oswald was born at the old French Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 18, 1939, to a MetLife worker Robert Edward Lee Oswald Sr. (1896–1939) and a legal clerk Marguerite Frances Claverie (1907–1981). Robert Oswald was a third cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army during World War I. Robert died of a heart attack two months before Lee was born. Lee's elder brother Robert Jr. (1934–2017) was a U.S. Marine during the Korean War. Through Marguerite's first marriage to Edward John Pic Jr., Lee and Robert Jr. were the half-brothers of U.S. Air Force veteran John Edward Pic (1932–2000). He spent much of his first three years living with his uncle and aunt Charles and Lillian Murret. Lee Oswald and his two brothers, Robert and John, were placed in the Evangelical Lutheran Bethlehem Orphan Asylum in 1942, ages 3, 7, and 9. Robert and John had been there throughout in 1942, while Lee was admitted in December. The applications for the children indicated that Marguerite was to pay $10 per child per month to the asylum, plus clothing and shoes. All of them had been baptized into the Lutheran Church at this time. In 1943, Marguerite met Edwin Eckdahl. They had decided to marry by January 1944, but these plans were delayed. Lee Oswald was released from the asylum in January 1944 upon the request of Marguerite. Marguerite moved from New Orleans to Dallas, Texas in early 1944, taking Lee with her but leaving the older boys in the asylum. The older boys joined them in June 1944. Marguerite married Edwin Eckdahl in May 1945, beginning a brief time that the couple and three boys were in the same home. Lee found Eckdahl to be the "father he never had." This time with all five together was short-lived. In the fall of 1945, the older boys were enrolled in a military academy in Mississippi, which they attended for the next three years. The Eckdahls moved to a suburb of Fort Worth. By lying about the boy's age, Marguerite enrolled Lee in the first grade in 1945. Over the next six years, Lee attended several different schools in the Fort Worth area through the sixth grade. In February 1946, Lee was admitted to a hospital in Fort Worth for a mastoidectomy on the left side of his head. After some marital difficulties between Marguerite and Eckdahl, Lee's mother and Lee moved to Covington, Louisiana for a brief time. Records indicate that Lee Oswald attended Covington Grammar School in Covington, Louisiana from September 1946 to January 1947, enrolled as a first grade student again. Edwin Eckdahl convinced Marguerite to continue their marriage. The Eckdahls, now reconciled, moved back to Fort Worth in 1947. That arrangement would only last until 1948 amidst a heated separation and divorce process. The Oswald family (Marguerite, Robert, and Lee Oswald; John Pic) was in the Fort Worth area following the divorce. Lee took an IQ test in the fourth grade and scored 103, and "on achievement tests in grades 4 to 6, he twice did best in reading and twice did worst in spelling." As a child Oswald was described as withdrawn and temperamental by several people who knew him. When Oswald was 12 in August 1952, his mother took him to New York City where they lived for a short time with Oswald's half-brother, John. Oswald and his mother were later asked to leave after an argument in which Oswald allegedly struck his mother and threatened John's wife with a pocket knife. Oswald attended seventh grade in the Bronx, New York City, but was often truant, which led to a psychiatric assessment at a juvenile reformatory. The reformatory psychiatrist, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, described Oswald as immersed in a "vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which [Oswald] tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations". Hartogs concluded:
Lee has to be diagnosed as "personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies". Lee has to be seen as an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self involved and conflicted mother. Hartogs recommended that Lee be placed on probation on condition that he seek help and guidance through a child guidance clinic, and that Oswald seek "psychotherapeutic guidance through contact with a family agency". Evelyn D. Siegel, a social worker who interviewed both Lee and Marguerite Oswald at Youth House, while describing "a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster which grows as one speaks to him", found that he had detached himself from the world around him because "no one in it ever met any of his needs for love". Hartogs and Siegel indicated that Marguerite gave him very little affection, with Siegel concluding that Lee "just felt that his mother never gave a damn for him. He always felt like a burden that she simply just had to tolerate." Furthermore, his mother did not apparently indicate an awareness of the relationship between her conduct and her son's psychological problems, with Siegel describing Marguerite as a "defensive, rigid, self-involved person who had real difficulty in accepting and relating to people" and who had "little understanding" of Lee's behavior and of the "protective shell he has drawn around himself". Hartogs reported that she did not understand that Lee's withdrawal was a form of "violent but silent protest against his neglect by her and represents his reaction to a complete absence of any real family life". When Oswald returned to school for the 1953 Fall semester, his disciplinary problems continued. When he failed to cooperate with school authorities, they sought a court order to remove him from his mother's care so he could be placed into a home for boys to complete his education. This was postponed, perhaps partially because his behavior abruptly improved. Before the New York family court system could address their case, the Oswalds left New York in January 1954, and returned to New Orleans. Oswald completed the eighth and ninth grades in New Orleans. He entered the tenth grade in 1955 but quit school after one month. After leaving school, Oswald worked for several months as an office clerk and messenger in New Orleans. In July 1956, Oswald's mother moved the family to Fort Worth, Texas, and Oswald re-enrolled in the tenth grade for the September session at Arlington Heights High School in Fort Worth. A few weeks later in October, Oswald quit school at age 17 to join the Marines; he never earned a high school diploma. By this point, he had moved 21 times and attended 12 different schools. Though Oswald had trouble spelling in his youth and may have had a "reading-spelling disability", he read voraciously. By age 15, he considered himself a socialist. According to 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." At 16, he wrote to the Socialist Party of America for information on their Young People's Socialist League, saying he had been studying socialist principles for "well over fifteen months". Edward Voebel, "whom the Warren Commission had established was Oswald's closest friend during his teenage years in New Orleans", said "reports that Oswald was already 'studying Communism' were a 'lot of baloney.'" Voebel said that "Oswald commonly read 'paperback trash'". As a teenager in 1955, Oswald became a cadet member of Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans. Fellow cadets variously recalled him attending CAP meetings "three or four" times, or "10 or 12 times", over a one- to three-month period.
Oswald enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on October 24, 1956, just a week after his seventeenth birthday; because of his age, his brother Robert Jr. was required to sign as his legal guardian. Oswald also named his mother and his half-brother John as beneficiaries. Oswald idolized his older brother Robert Jr., and wore his Marine Corps ring. John Pic (Oswald's half-brother) testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald's enlistment was motivated by wanting "to get from out and under ... the yoke of oppression from my mother". Oswald's enlistment papers recite that he was 5 feet 8 inches (1.73 meters) tall and weighed 135 pounds (61 kg), with hazel eyes and brown hair. His primary training was in radar operation, which required a security clearance. A May 1957 document stated that he was "granted final clearance to handle classified matter up to and including confidential after careful check of local records had disclosed no derogatory data". At Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, Oswald finished seventh in a class of thirty in the Aircraft Control and Warning Operator Course, which "included instruction in aircraft surveillance and the use of radar". He was given the military occupational specialty of Aviation Electronics Operator. On July 9, he reported to the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in California. There he met fellow Marine Kerry Thornley, who co-created Discordianism. Thornley wrote the 1962 fictional book The Idle Warriors based on Oswald. This was the only book written about Oswald before the Kennedy assassination. Oswald departed for Japan the following month, where he was assigned to Marine Air Control Squadron 1 at Naval Air Facility Atsugi near Tokyo. Like all Marines, Oswald was trained and tested in shooting, being ranked according to three tiers of passing grades: marksman, sharpshooter, and expert. In December 1956, he scored 212, which was slightly above the requirements for the designation of sharpshooter, although in May 1959, he scored 191, which reduced his rating to marksman, the lowest passing grade. Oswald was court-martialed after he accidentally shot himself in the elbow with an unauthorized .22 caliber handgun. He was court-martialed a second time for fighting with the sergeant he thought was responsible for his punishment in the shooting matter. He was demoted from private first class to private and briefly imprisoned. Oswald was later punished for a third incident: while he was on a night-time sentry duty in the Philippines, he inexplicably fired his rifle into the jungle. Slightly built, Oswald was nicknamed Ozzie Rabbit after the cartoon character; In November 1958, Oswald transferred back to El Toro where his unit's function "was to serveil [sic] for aircraft, but basically to train both enlisted men and officers for later assignment overseas". An officer there said that Oswald was a "very competent" crew chief and was "brighter than most people". While Oswald was in the Marines, he taught himself rudimentary Russian. Although this was an unusual endeavor, on February 25, 1959, he was invited to take a Marine proficiency exam in written and spoken Russian. His level at the time was rated "poor" in understanding spoken Russian, though he fared rather reasonably for a Marine private at the time in reading and writing. On September 11, 1959, he received a hardship discharge from active service, claiming his mother needed care. He was placed on the United States Marine Corps Reserve.
Oswald traveled to the Soviet Union just before he turned 20 in October 1959. He had taught himself Russian and saved $1,500 of his Marine Corps salary (equivalent to $13,200 in 2025). Oswald spent two days with his mother in Fort Worth, then embarked by ship on September 20 from New Orleans to Le Havre, France, and immediately traveled to the United Kingdom. Arriving in Southampton on October 9, he told officials he had $700 and planned to stay for one week before proceeding to a school in Switzerland. On the same day, he flew to Helsinki, where he checked in at Hotel Torni, room 309, then moved to Hotel Klaus Kurki, room 429. He was issued a Soviet visa on October 14. Oswald left Helsinki by train on the following day, crossed the Soviet border at Vainikkala, and arrived in Moscow on October 16. His visa, valid only for a week, was due to expire on October 21. During his stay in the Soviet Union his mail was intercepted and read by the CIA, with Reuben Efron being charged with this assignment. Almost immediately after arriving, Oswald informed his Intourist guide of his desire to become a Soviet citizen. When asked why by the various Soviet officials he encountered — all of whom, by Oswald's account, found his wish incomprehensible — he said that he was a communist, and gave what he described in his diary as "vauge [sic] answers about 'Great Soviet Union'". On October 21, the day his visa was due to expire, he was told that his citizenship application had been refused, and that he had to leave the Soviet Union that evening. Distraught, Oswald inflicted a minor but bloody wound to his left wrist in his hotel room bathtub soon before his Intourist guide was due to arrive to escort him from the country, according to his diary because he wished to kill himself in a way that would shock her. Delaying Oswald's departure because of his self-inflicted injury, the Soviets kept him in a Moscow hospital under psychiatric observation for a week, until October 28, 1959.
According to Oswald, he met with four more Soviet officials that day, who asked if he wanted to return to the United States. Oswald replied by insisting that he wanted to live in the Soviet Union as a Soviet national. When pressed for identification papers, he provided his Marine Corps discharge papers. On October 31, Oswald appeared at the United States embassy in Moscow and declared a desire to renounce his U.S. citizenship. He said: "I have made up my mind. I'm through." He told the U.S. embassy interviewing officer, Richard Edward Snyder, that "he had been a radar operator in the Marine Corps and that he had voluntarily stated to unnamed Soviet officials that as a Soviet citizen he would make known to them such information concerning the Marine Corps and his specialty as he possessed. He intimated that he might know something of special interest." Such statements led to Oswald's hardship/honorable military reserve discharge being changed to undesirable. The story of the defection of a former U.S. Marine to the Soviet Union was reported by both the Associated Press and United Press International. Though Oswald had wanted to attend Moscow State University, in January 1960 he was sent to Minsk, Byelorussia, to work as a lathe operator at the Gorizont Electronics Factory, which produced radios, televisions, and military and space electronics. Stanislau Shushkevich, who later became independent Belarus's first head of state, also worked at Gorizont at the time, and was assigned to help Oswald improve his Russian. Oswald received a government-subsidized, fully furnished studio apartment in a prestigious building and an additional supplement to his factory pay, which allowed him to have a comfortable standard of living by working-class Soviet standards, though he was kept under constant surveillance.
