Priscilla J. McMillan: A Word About Lee Harvey Oswald
[Priscilla J. McMillan is the author of Marina and Lee (Harper & Row, 1977), and more recently, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (Viking, 2005).]
After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.
Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life. He had, by his account, become seriously interested in politics at fifteen or sixteen, when someone on a street corner in the Bronx handed him a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed two years earlier as spies for the Soviet Union. At eighteen, huddled in his Marine Corps barracks in Japan, he studied Russian from a Berlitz phrase book. And at nineteen, he wangled a hardship discharge from the Marines and made the arduous journey by steamship and train to the USSR.
Arriving there as a tourist, he immediately proclaimed to Russian authorities and officials of the US embassy in Moscow that he intended to relinquish his US citizenship and become a
citizen of the USSR. It was at that moment in his life, November, 1959, that I happened to meet and talk with him.
I was a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance in search of a human interest story and he had just marked his twentieth birthday. I had no way of knowing that this boy dressed in a dark gray suit, white shirt, and dark red tie—he looked like an American college student—had, two weeks earlier, slashed his wrists in his hotel bathtub in a gesture of desperation after being informed by Soviet officials that he could not remain in the Soviet Union. Throughout our conversation, which took place over several hours in my room at the Metropole Hotel, I asked Oswald why he was defecting to the USSR, while he tried to engage me in a discussion of Marxist economics.
When I asked what would become of him if he returned to the United States, he replied that his lot would be that of “workers everywhere.” He would be ground down by capitalism as his mother, a practical nurse, had been. He spoke bitterly of racial discrimination in the United States, but did not disclose that as a schoolboy he had taken action against it by riding in the black section of the segregated buses of New Orleans.
While I realized that Oswald was angry at the country he was hoping to leave behind, I also sensed that his desire to live in the Soviet Union had something theoretical about it. He had traveled thousands of miles to get there, but had ventured no more than two blocks on his own and preferred to sit by himself in his hotel room rather than go sight-seeing in Moscow. So far as I could see, his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was based on neither knowledge of, or curiosity about, everyday life there....
The possibility that Oswald’s political convictions may have played a decisive part in his shooting John Kennedy was downplayed in the early sixties because President Johnson and other officials did not want the assassination to become a casus belli with the Soviet Union. And to the public, this explanation, at a moment when capitalism was riding high, appeared ludicrous. Besides, for a Marxist, killing this president appeared wildly inconsistent. Kennedy was a liberal. Shooting at him, unlike the attempt on General Walker, appeared to conflict with Oswald’s beliefs about racial discrimination and better relations with the USSR.
But to Oswald the believing Marxist, it did not matter much whether the president was liberal or conservative. What mattered was that he was leader of the greatest capitalist nation on earth. Oswald wanted to decapitate capitalism as he, almost literally, decapitated the president of the United States. Seen in this light, an observation by Marina, the person closest to him at this period of his life, makes perfect sense. Had her husband survived to be tried for the president’s murder, Marina believed, not only would he have confessed—he would have boasted about what he had done and proclaimed that it was all for the Socialist cause.
Oswald did not succeed, of course, in bringing down American capitalism, any more than Timothy McVeigh succeeded in sparking a national uprising when he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. But Oswald’s act of violence indisputably ushered in an era of unease and suspicion in American life that was not there prior to the Kennedy assassination.
Oswald was not responsible for all of the damage that has befallen American society since 1963, much as he would have wished to be. Some of that damage is the result of events related only tangentially to the assassination of President Kennedy. But some of the injury can, with justice, be attributed to conspiracy theorists who have gone to superhuman lengths to avoid facing the truth.
They have constructed wildly-implausible scenarios, far-out, fictitious “conspirators,” and have scandalously maligned the motives of Kennedy’s successor, rather than take a hard look at the man who actually did it. They have, ironically, done more to poison American political life than Lee Oswald—with the most terrible of intentions—was able to do.
Read entire article at Washington Decoded
After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.
Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life. He had, by his account, become seriously interested in politics at fifteen or sixteen, when someone on a street corner in the Bronx handed him a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed two years earlier as spies for the Soviet Union. At eighteen, huddled in his Marine Corps barracks in Japan, he studied Russian from a Berlitz phrase book. And at nineteen, he wangled a hardship discharge from the Marines and made the arduous journey by steamship and train to the USSR.
Arriving there as a tourist, he immediately proclaimed to Russian authorities and officials of the US embassy in Moscow that he intended to relinquish his US citizenship and become a
citizen of the USSR. It was at that moment in his life, November, 1959, that I happened to meet and talk with him.
I was a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance in search of a human interest story and he had just marked his twentieth birthday. I had no way of knowing that this boy dressed in a dark gray suit, white shirt, and dark red tie—he looked like an American college student—had, two weeks earlier, slashed his wrists in his hotel bathtub in a gesture of desperation after being informed by Soviet officials that he could not remain in the Soviet Union. Throughout our conversation, which took place over several hours in my room at the Metropole Hotel, I asked Oswald why he was defecting to the USSR, while he tried to engage me in a discussion of Marxist economics.
When I asked what would become of him if he returned to the United States, he replied that his lot would be that of “workers everywhere.” He would be ground down by capitalism as his mother, a practical nurse, had been. He spoke bitterly of racial discrimination in the United States, but did not disclose that as a schoolboy he had taken action against it by riding in the black section of the segregated buses of New Orleans.
While I realized that Oswald was angry at the country he was hoping to leave behind, I also sensed that his desire to live in the Soviet Union had something theoretical about it. He had traveled thousands of miles to get there, but had ventured no more than two blocks on his own and preferred to sit by himself in his hotel room rather than go sight-seeing in Moscow. So far as I could see, his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was based on neither knowledge of, or curiosity about, everyday life there....
The possibility that Oswald’s political convictions may have played a decisive part in his shooting John Kennedy was downplayed in the early sixties because President Johnson and other officials did not want the assassination to become a casus belli with the Soviet Union. And to the public, this explanation, at a moment when capitalism was riding high, appeared ludicrous. Besides, for a Marxist, killing this president appeared wildly inconsistent. Kennedy was a liberal. Shooting at him, unlike the attempt on General Walker, appeared to conflict with Oswald’s beliefs about racial discrimination and better relations with the USSR.
But to Oswald the believing Marxist, it did not matter much whether the president was liberal or conservative. What mattered was that he was leader of the greatest capitalist nation on earth. Oswald wanted to decapitate capitalism as he, almost literally, decapitated the president of the United States. Seen in this light, an observation by Marina, the person closest to him at this period of his life, makes perfect sense. Had her husband survived to be tried for the president’s murder, Marina believed, not only would he have confessed—he would have boasted about what he had done and proclaimed that it was all for the Socialist cause.
Oswald did not succeed, of course, in bringing down American capitalism, any more than Timothy McVeigh succeeded in sparking a national uprising when he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. But Oswald’s act of violence indisputably ushered in an era of unease and suspicion in American life that was not there prior to the Kennedy assassination.
Oswald was not responsible for all of the damage that has befallen American society since 1963, much as he would have wished to be. Some of that damage is the result of events related only tangentially to the assassination of President Kennedy. But some of the injury can, with justice, be attributed to conspiracy theorists who have gone to superhuman lengths to avoid facing the truth.
They have constructed wildly-implausible scenarios, far-out, fictitious “conspirators,” and have scandalously maligned the motives of Kennedy’s successor, rather than take a hard look at the man who actually did it. They have, ironically, done more to poison American political life than Lee Oswald—with the most terrible of intentions—was able to do.