Lee Harvey Oswald

Biography

Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans in 1939, two months after his father's death, and had an unsettled childhood, moving more than twenty times and attending twelve schools in Louisiana, Texas and New York, where a court psychiatrist described him as emotionally disturbed. He left school at seventeen to join the Marine Corps, trained as a radar operator, served in Japan and was court-martialled twice.

Interested in Marxism since his teens, he left active duty in 1959 and defected to the Soviet Union, where he worked at an electronics factory in Minsk and married Marina Prusakova. Disillusioned, he returned to the United States with his family in 1962 and settled in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, moving between short-lived jobs. The Warren Commission concluded that in April 1963 he fired a rifle at the retired general Edwin Walker; that summer he lived in New Orleans and then travelled to Mexico City.

On 22 November 1963 he shot President John F. Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, then killed police officer J. D. Tippit and was arrested in a cinema. He denied the charges, calling himself a patsy. Two days later the nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot him dead in the basement of Dallas police headquarters on live television. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Oswald and Ruby each acted alone, a finding that many Americans still doubt.