Nation: The Accused

Detectives and Secret Servicemen continued to question the suspect—but Lee Harvey Oswald defiantly denied any guilt. Nonetheless, the police charged him formally with the murder of the President. Then, on Sunday morning, as a huge phalanx of guards prepared to transfer Oswald from Police Headquarters to the Dallas County Jail, a man moved toward him, stabbed a revolver toward Oswald’s abdomen and fired. About two hours later, 1:07 p.m., the prisoner was dead. Thus the world might never learn what had gone on in that strange mind that had driven him to assassination. There was, however, enough evidence to portray something of the manner of man he was.

Dead-End Streets. Oswald was no raving maniac. Various neighbors, past and present, described him as seeming reasonably intelligent, although generally silent to the point of acting contemptuous. “We finally quit saying good morning to him,” said one, “because he would never answer.” Said another: “He treated us like we were garbage.” More than anything else, Oswald’s life was one of heading almost masochistically down dead-end streets.

His father had been dead several months when Lee Oswald was born in New Orleans on October 18, 1939. His mother and older brother Robert moved first to the tenements of Harlem and later to Fort Worth. There Mrs. Marguerite Oswald worked in a candy factory to support her sons. “I saw my mother as a worker,” Oswald once said, “always with less than we could use.” A below-average student, he nonetheless read alot and at 15 discovered Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. In his own words, it was like “a very religious man opening the Bible for the first time.” He was, he explained, “looking for a key to my environment.”

A sporadic student in Fort Worth high schools, he quit at 17 to join the Marine Corps. A marine who served with him at El Toro Air Station in California remembers him as “a lonely, introverted, aloof boy.” Oswald, he recalls, “always said he hated the outfit,” was bitter about “the tough time his mother had during the Depression.” In boot camp, Oswald qualified as a “sharpshooter,” on the rifle range, trained as an electronics-equipment operator.

“Getting Out of Prison.” Shipped out to Japan, Private First Class Oswald stayed steadily in trouble. First, he was court-martialed and busted to private on charges of failing to register a personal weapon—a pistol. Then he was court-martialed again for “using provocative words” to a noncommissioned officer. Oswald wanted out of the Corps. Claiming that his mother was ill and that her hospital insurance had lapsed, he applied for and got a hardship discharge in September of 1959. He was assigned to the Marine Corps inactive Reserve, but instead of going home he boarded a ship for the Soviet Union with the $1,600 he had somehow saved. Granted admittance to Russia, he told U.S. reporters in Moscow that he felt as if he were “getting out of prison.”

At the American embassy, Oswald announced that he meant to become a Soviet citizen, swore out an affidavit that said: “I affirm that my allegiance is to the Soviet Socialist Republic.” The Marine Corps got news of Oswald’s action, convened a special board and gave Oswald an “undesirable” discharge from the Marine Reserve. Enraged, Oswald wrote a letter to John Connally, who had just stepped down as Secretary of the Navy to run for Governor of Texas. Said the letter, which was found among Oswald’s Marine records last weekend:

“I shall employ all means to right this gross mistake or injustice to a bona-fide U.S. citizen and ex-serviceman.” Connally turned over the correspondence to his successor, Fred Korth, and Oswald’s demands went no farther.

An American correspondent who met Oswald in Moscow recalls that “he talked in terms of capitalists and exploiters, and said he was sure if he lived in the U.S. he wouldn’t get a job, that he’d be one of the exploited. But I didn’t perceive what the essential thing was—that this guy would be unhappy anywhere.” Maybe the Russians were more perceptive. At any rate, they turned down his application for citizenship, agreed only to let him stay on as a resident alien.

He was in the Soviet Union for almost three years, worked for a time at a factory in Minsk, married a blonde hospital employee named Marina Prusakova. But in January of 1962, Oswald wrote to Texas’ Republican Senator John Tower asking that the Senator help him and his Russian wife get out of Russia. Tower turned the request over to the State Department, which ruled that since Oswald had not succeeded in rejecting his U.S. citizenship he was worthy of a $435 loan to get home with his wife.

Back in Fort Worth, Oswald still headed down the dead-end street, allied himself with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a New York-headquartered pro-Castro outfit that holds a prominent place on the Communist front organization lists of both the State Department and the Department of Justice. In an erratic bit of derring-do, Oswald went to New Orleans last July. There he tried to infiltrate the Cuban Revolutionary Student Directorate, a militant crew of anti-Castro raiders, by offering his Marine experience to teach military tactics to members. Directorate leaders were leary of Oswald—and they were furious when, only a little later, they saw him passing out “Hands Off Cuba” pamphlets on a New Orleans street corner. Hot words and a scuffle followed. Oswald was fined $10 for disturbing the peace. Soon afterward he took his wife and two small children to Dallas, landed a job as a warehouse man in the same building from which President Kennedy and Governor Connally were shot.

As the overwhelming evidence piled up against Oswald, police decided to transfer him to a maximum security jail. At 11:20 a.m., Oswald was led into the basement garage of City Hall and toward a nearby armored car.

Just then another car drove up. A man got out and jumped over a three-foot-high rail. He broke through a cordon of Dallas cops—who were certainly not having one of their good weeks —and approached Oswald almost as though he were going to shake hands. He was Jack Ruby (born Rubinstein) a stocky, balding 50-year-old bachelor who owns a couple of Dallas strip joints, was known to cops as a publicity-seeking pest.

Now, Ruby was carrying a revolver. He fired just once, and Oswald, hit on the left side just beneath the heart, doubled over. In a chaotic scene, some cops grabbed Ruby, others carried Oswald to an ambulance. He was rushed to Parkland Hospital. For two hours, doctors labored to save his life. According to the medical announcement, he had suffered a “massive injury to the abdomen with major vessel injury.” Bleeding was finally controlled, but Oswald then suffered a “spontaneous stopping of the heart.” An incision was made, and the doctors began massaging Oswald’s heart with their hands—but the treatment did not work.