Lee Harvey Oswald

His father died of a heart attack two months before he was born, and nothing after that steadied. Marguerite Oswald put her three sons in a New Orleans orphanage in 1942 and kept moving afterward: by the time Lee was 17 he had moved 21 times and attended 12 schools. A truancy case in the Bronx sent him to a juvenile reformatory, where a psychiatrist described a withdrawn boy living in a vivid fantasy of omnipotence and power. He quit the tenth grade in October 1956 and enlisted in the Marines a week after his 17th birthday. He trained on radar, taught himself Russian, was court-martialed twice, and shot well enough to qualify as a sharpshooter in 1956 and only as a marksman, the lowest passing grade, by 1959.

He had been filling orders at the Texas School Book Depository for five weeks, at 1.25 dollars an hour, when Kennedy's motorcade turned into Dealey Plaza below the building on November 22, 1963. At about 12:30 p.m. Oswald fired three shots from a sixth-floor window, killing the president and gravely wounding Texas governor John Connally. Forty-five minutes later he shot and killed Dallas patrolman J. D. Tippit, a 39-year-old father of three, on a residential street. Police took him out of the Texas Theatre at about 1:40 p.m. He told the reporters in the hallway, 'I'm just a patsy.'

Nothing he tried to join would have him. He asked the Soviets for citizenship within days of arriving in October 1959 and was refused inside a week. They kept him anyway and put him on a lathe at an electronics factory in Minsk, where he married Marina Prusakova six weeks after meeting her, then wrote that the work was drab and the money had nowhere to go. The State Department lent him 435 dollars and 71 cents to come home in 1962. On April 10, 1963, the Warren Commission later concluded, he fired a rifle at retired Major General Edwin Walker through a window of Walker's Dallas home, hitting the frame and wounding him only with fragments. That summer he ran a Fair Play for Cuba chapter with one member, himself, against the national office's advice.

He was never tried. In September 1964 the Warren Commission concluded that he and Jack Ruby each acted alone. In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations agreed that Oswald shot Kennedy but, on the strength of a disputed police recording, added that a second gunman probably fired too and that a conspiracy was likely. Four of its 12 members dissented, and in 1982 a National Academy of Sciences panel called the acoustic analysis seriously flawed. The record is thin in places. An FBI agent destroyed a note Oswald left him, and Mexico City is still argued over. Gallup found in 2013 that 61 percent of Americans believed in a conspiracy and 30 percent that Oswald acted alone.

Lee Harvey Oswald's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Historic Diary book
  The journal of his Soviet years, entered in evidence as Warren Commission Exhibit 24 1959
• Hands Off Cuba leaflets article
  Ordered from a New Orleans printer in a run of 1,000 1963
• Fair Play for Cuba Committee, New Orleans chapter company
  A branch of one, never chartered by the national organization 1963
• WDSU radio debate on Cuba other
  Taped in New Orleans that August and released by a right-wing group as Oswald: Self-Portrait in Red 1963
• The backyard photographs artwork
  Marina photographed him at his request. He sent a print to a friend inscribed Hunter of fascists 1963

• October 18, 1939 aged 0 Born at the old French Hospital in New Orleans His father had died of a heart attack two months earlier.
• October 24, 1956 aged 17 Enlists in the Marine Corps a week after turning 17 His older brother Robert had to sign as legal guardian. He trained as a radar operator.
• October 16, 1959 aged 19 Arrives in Moscow and asks to become a Soviet citizen He had left active duty five weeks earlier on a hardship discharge, claiming his mother needed care.
• April 30, 1961 aged 21 Marries Marina Prusakova in Minsk, six weeks after they met She was a 19-year-old pharmacology student. Their daughter June was born the following February.
• June 13, 1962 aged 22 Returns to the United States with Marina and their daughter They landed at Hoboken. The press paid far less attention than he expected.
• April 10, 1963 aged 23 Fires at retired Major General Edwin Walker in Dallas The Warren Commission concluded Oswald did it. The House Select Committee said the evidence strongly suggested he did.
• October 16, 1963 aged 23 Hired as an order filler at the Texas School Book Depository Minimum wage, 1.25 dollars an hour. His supervisor called him an above-average employee.
• November 22, 1963 aged 24 Kills President Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit, and is arrested at the Texas Theatre Governor John Connally was gravely wounded. Tippit was 39, an 11-year veteran of the Dallas force with three children.
• November 24, 1963 aged 24 Jack Ruby shoots him in the basement of Dallas police headquarters A live network camera was on him. He died at Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy had died two days earlier.

• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. assassinated
• Earl Warren 1891–1974
  Chief justice whose Court transformed civil rights, voting, representation, and criminal procedure. investigated by
• J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972
  Longtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses. investigated by
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 1929–1994
  First Lady who restored the White House as a museum and shaped the public memory of her husband's presidency. widow of the man he killed
• John Wilkes Booth 1838–1865
  Actor who assassinated President Lincoln in 1865 — altering the course of Reconstruction. earlier presidential assassin
• Leon Czolgosz 1873–1901
  Anarchist whose assassination of William McKinley put Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. earlier presidential assassin